And don't feed the trolls! :-0)

well done. and we need to see MORE of this. but on a larger scale. and more often. If we want to change they state, they must be brought down. With force, otherwise how else do you think they will leave??
Look greece, take lessons.

I don't know much about Anarchism but isn't it a society where there are no police, no state, no military etc?

If so, I am interested in how Anarchy would work, because if there are no police then how are criminals supposed to be arrested? Also, would there be jails in an Anarchist society, if not, then what would be done to criminals?

These are honest questions so could Indymedia moderators please not delete this comment? Thanks.

""I don't know much about Anarchism but isn't it a society where there are no police, no state, no military etc?
If so, I am interested in how Anarchy would work, because if there are no police then how are criminals supposed to be arrested? Also, would there be jails in an Anarchist society, if not, then what would be done to criminals? ""

I will try to answer this, but it is quite difficult to explain in layman terms.

Basically, in an anarchist community, everyone would be nice to each other because there is no capitalism, ill feeling or war. People wouldn't rob because they wouldn't need to rob. The same with nutters committing pointless acts of violence, it would all stop due to everyone becoming an anarchist. If there were any criminals they would be dealt with in an individual way suited to their needs that would help them rather than being confined in a prison.

Hope that helps

SMELL THE COFFEE


SOCIAL CLASS WAR


2011!!!

In response to the question...

Check out  http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionI5#seci58

The answer above is fairly wishy washy but most anarchists I think would put forward a more in depth answer such as the one included at the above link. Sorry I cannot respond personally. Time is short.

Good to see you are asking questions. Keep thinking.

Yes, those policing and maintaining the capitalist state need to be removed from power over us, but I hope people don't see stone-chucking as 'their role', as in some division-of-labour communist society. Everyone needs to chuck the stones, just as everyone also needs to actively build alternative communities. I sometimes talk to people who think they can do the wrecking and leave the 'crappy social stuff' to others less hardcore than themselves. We can only create something sustainable and based on true equality if we all take control of every aspect of our lives. So everyone, throw a stone, plant some veg and share your skills.

2011, the year the demons of Capitalism were ground to dust!

To me anarchy is simply non arrangement. That could mean many different things in different contexts. In computer networking, it could mean that there is no central control hub, but there are still common protocols or agreed sets of rules.

Philosophical anarchists are critical of the inherent flaws and failing in many centre focused or centrally controlled arrangements, for example nation states, or world organisations.

Some anarchists, myself included, have observed that the whole of society functions as a single top down hierarchy, where it has become in everyones personal interest to serve those above them, without question of morality.

People tend to be acutely aware of criminals and murderers and the mortal threat that they pose to us. But the total number of crime victims pales into insignificance when compared to the number to victims of wars, carried out by governments and their societies.

Anarchy dose not provide the answers to every conceivable situation where immorality takes place but anarchists, simply see things without the dogma of sociarchy.

"Question about Anarchy
02.01.2011 23:32

I don't know much about Anarchism but isn't it a society where there are no police, no state, no military etc?

If so, I am interested in how Anarchy would work, because if there are no police then how are criminals supposed to be arrested? Also, would there be jails in an Anarchist society, if not, then what would be done to criminals?

These are honest questions so could Indymedia moderators please not delete this comment? Thanks.
Interested "

An anarchist response --------

Hi "interested"

I agree that the first answer you got is a very weak response.

You need to first look at what crime is. Crime is defined by the laws which parliament past. if you break these laws then you are a criminal. Crime under a capitalist system is based on crimes against property ( theft, damage, fraud ) and crime against the person ( rape, violence, pedophilia ). All these crimes are defined solely by the state. That is not to say that if society runs society in the interests of everyone that these acts will not exist but they will be substantially reduced.

For example, in a society whereby work is reduced to nothing ( in respect of the huge advances in production that already exist) and that poverty is eliminated through a mass redistribution of wealth ( abolishing capitalism means that exploitation is redundant ) the necessity for crimes against property because non-existent. There is a reason people steal, or commit fraud, or rob people - this is because wealth is seen as a security, this security can be provided by the redistribution of wealth. Secondly violence against people is often committed through factors like alcohol abuse or gang violence - these are due to that fact that those with little or no power or security use violence to gain power over people. If people are empowered by working and cooperating with each other to secure each others material interests ( real communism ) then this also is reduced. Violence also occurs when people rely on the police to sort out problems, if there is no specialised role as the police, then communities - which flourish when they organise their own affairs ( strong communities = low levels of violence ) - gain the ability to "police" themselves.

Rape is a crime that is based on power of men over women ( patriarchy ) - patriarchy has formed as a key part of capitalism whereby men and women are treated different from birth - women are viewed as the "weaker" sex. There is also rape by men on men ( and also women on men ) - this sexual politics is also an extreme reflection of authoritarian society whereby competition, status and power are echoed within our daily existence - rape is also a consequence of sexual repression which previously the church ( and Mosque ) sort to enforce. If this is challenged at an early age, and respect for people is also reflected within society as a whole - there will also be a sharp reduction in rape.

On how to deal with those that hurt or attack others - in most cases this can be handled with the peer group of those people. When it is serious enough to warrant wider action then removing the person from the community to a secure facility might be needed.

Ultimately it is about preventing these situations, our society produces criminals, it produces violence because of the inequalities and dominance of the pursuit for survival that we experience. Eliminate these and we will have a better way of living to bring up a new generation not tied with the bitterness and anxiety we have been brought up with.

Housing in the UK ranges from council flats on rough estates to listed buildings in exclusive neighbourhoods and an Anarchist society would inherit this inequality from capitalism. So, short of demolishing everything and starting again, who gets to live where?

If all the wealth in the world is redistributed equally, would that status-quo remain?

I think it wouldn't: One person would spend all their money in the pub, another might invest it in a business or education so that they could earn more.

If we "forcible" redistributed wealth every so often, then what would be the point of learning new skills and indeed working at all? Surely, it would just be better to sit in the pub. Sounds a bit boring and pointless to me.

Also, this "forcible" re-distributation of wealth. What if people don't agree to it. For instance, someone who has worked 12hr days and not had any holidays so they can pay off their mortgage early won't be particularly happy if their house was taken off them and given to people who sat in the pub all that time.

How are anarchists going to convince this person to give up their house
Will there be a gang of big burly gentlemen would come along and take his keys off him and kick him out of his big house?

ps. I'm not being sarcastic? Im genuinely interested because it just doesn't make any sense to me.

in an anarchist society there is no commodity or monetary value.therefore no property and if there is no property you cannot steal it, because it doesnt exits.
asides this,
there cannot be "criminals" as no-one shall judge and no-one shall be judged, there is no law or policing body there cannot be crime, therefore there cannot be criminals

There are only anarchists. We fight for human values against those of the state and capital.

>> in an anarchist society there is no commodity or monetary value.therefore no property and if there is no property you cannot steal it, because it doesnt exits.
asides this, there cannot be "criminals" as no-one shall judge and no-one shall be judged, there is no law or policing body there cannot be crime, therefore there cannot be criminals

If there is no property then does that mean i will lose my car, computer and furniture to the collective? Where am i going to live? What about my collection of rare books?

How will there be no crime and no criminals? What if i've got an MP3 player and someone takes it, but i want it back and they wont give it me? Do they just get away with it?

Isn't this like caveman times before any laws were made? We've kinda moved on from then.

Capitalism isn't about owning property per se, it is about owning people. The property is just what is used to control the people.

Rather than getting bogged down in dogma about who's got more that us, why not take a look at this vidio :)

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58A

I am ones slave and no ones master,
and my rights end where yours begin.

Another question
03.01.2011 16:38

Housing in the UK ranges from council flats on rough estates to listed buildings in exclusive neighbourhoods and an Anarchist society would inherit this inequality from capitalism. So, short of demolishing everything and starting again, who gets to live where?
Puzzled

-----------------------

Well there will be no need to "demolish everything". The question is not as simple as "who gets to live where?". Though this is a concern if you are living in high occupancy households or homeless or in a bed and breakfast.

A self-organised society which takes control away from a de-legitimised and increasingly unnecessary state structure, will need to answer these questions - and that means involving those that need housing first. In London there are over 90,000 empty houses and flats but a supposed housing shortage - this enforced scarcity only exists in capitalist economies ( I also include in that state socialist regimes which are a form of a capitalist economic structure ).

So an answer is that whatever form of organisation or popular community association which come into existence during the process of a revolutionary movement would need to inherit the task of ensuring housing is available for all those that need it. There will be many options and ways to achieve this depending on the demographic - young people may choose to live in smaller places that have been set-up as housing collectives, families may choose to live closer to extended family, some may choose to move cities or country. As this will be complete new to everyone, only through experience, making mistakes, learning can a system of housing allocation be progressed.

These aren't off the shelf solutions but continual improvements as the culture from competition to cooperation fully takes hold.

I've also got a question....
03.01.2011 16:53

If all the wealth in the world is redistributed equally, would that status-quo remain?

I think it wouldn't: One person would spend all their money in the pub, another might invest it in a business or education so that they could earn more.

If we "forcible" redistributed wealth every so often, then what would be the point of learning new skills and indeed working at all? Surely, it would just be better to sit in the pub. Sounds a bit boring and pointless to me.

Also, this "forcible" re-distributation of wealth. What if people don't agree to it. For instance, someone who has worked 12hr days and not had any holidays so they can pay off their mortgage early won't be particularly happy if their house was taken off them and given to people who sat in the pub all that time.

How are anarchists going to convince this person to give up their house
Will there be a gang of big burly gentlemen would come along and take his keys off him and kick him out of his big house?

ps. I'm not being sarcastic? Im genuinely interested because it just doesn't make any sense to me.
Dave

-------------------------------

What can be described as anarchist society by some can also be described by others as a society self-organised without the need of abstract institutions run by a minority. The reason I say that is because anarchists can only support and fight for such a society to come into existence, but can't make it happen, only millions of people can do it - only they can choose to do it. This is the difference with the Marxist approach which attempts to take control of the state and therefore create socialist programmes to bring about "revolutionary" change - the 20th Century is testament to the failure of this approach - in fact it was anarchists that had argued that it would lead to an even worst tyranny they already lived in under the domination of capitalism, this was 50 years before the russia revolution and stalinism - and the anarchists were right!

Your questions are just a reflection of what goes on now! They have nothing to do with living in or creating a society based on cooperation. Redistribution of wealth is about radically changing the purpose of production. Production under capitalism is for the purpose of creating a profit. An owner of capital invests into an industry for the purpose of gaining a return on investment. This process of expansion of their capital occurs because of the productive work done by people on it - from research and development of technologies, physical production, distribution to its realisation as a commodity. The expansion of capital occurs because of this, but the person working receives a wage which is solely reflective of a value set within a labour market and not based on the wealth they produce - its the owner of capital that controls the wealth not those that produce it.

In a proposed non-capitalist economy, after having inherited the vast technological and productive developments that capitalism has shaped, the need to produce so much useless shite is reduced. Most work in the west is non-productive work needed solely for the purpose of realising values of commodities - marketing,advertising, sales, account handling, financial controllers, call centres - these are useless and soulless forms of work that many millions work in that have no practical reason to exists if we base our economy on human interest rather than the interest of capitalism.

So its argued that a non-capitalist economy will produce an economy that demands less, it will be a liberation from the dominance of work in our lives. that is not to say we will be sitting in the pub all day ( maybe for the first few weeks after the revolution though :-0) - it will mean we can begin to do the things that are both necessary and enjoyable - organise essential services, socially useful activities, repairing the damage to our environment, participating in improving our lives.

This is no utopianism, its a real tension that exists within every society and every country, it makes sense because its based on practical, technical and social possibilities.

anarchism sounds crap
03.01.2011 18:13

>> in an anarchist society there is no commodity or monetary value.therefore no property and if there is no property you cannot steal it, because it doesnt exits.
asides this, there cannot be "criminals" as no-one shall judge and no-one shall be judged, there is no law or policing body there cannot be crime, therefore there cannot be criminals

If there is no property then does that mean i will lose my car, computer and furniture to the collective? Where am i going to live? What about my collection of rare books?

How will there be no crime and no criminals? What if i've got an MP3 player and someone takes it, but i want it back and they wont give it me? Do they just get away with it?

Isn't this like caveman times before any laws were made? We've kinda moved on from then.
tal

----------------------------------------

When anarchist say "All property is theft" it was said in relation to the things in society that we depend on - means of production, public buildings, housing, schools, roads, rail...etc
Its not about what is your personal property.

Like I have illustrated above, no one will take your collective of rare books, as your rare books won't have a value that can be usurped. The same goes for cars or your iPod or whatever. What gives its value under a market based economy, will loose its value in a non-market based economy.

You ask:

How will there be no crime and no criminals? What if i've got an MP3 player and someone takes it, but i want it back and they wont give it me? Do they just get away with it?

That happens already, regardless of laws or police - the issue is to understand why someone will take your MP3 - is because they can't afford it? With no capitalism items like MP3 will have no price as they will be part of a common ownership - why would someone steal your one when they can just obtain one from a self-organised distribution centre,or borrow one from a self-organised music store? This happens to some extent now anyhow - gumtree, freecycle, friends...etc.

You ask:

Isn't this like caveman times before any laws were made? We've kinda moved on from then.

The complete opposite. In 2009 a heavily pregnant mother through herself out of her 4 storey flat in Hackney and killed herself because she was threatened with eviction for unpaid rent - if we were to take your "caveman times" analogy - I think we live in a barbaric world when we have the ability to create something different - taking all the productive capacity of capitalism over the centuries and developing the social and human revolution to exist in a free and self-organised society. We have out grown the need ( if there ever was one ) of capitalism - capitalism is not about human progress - we are going backwards - its become a barrier that needs to be removed.

This is an interesting discussion.

I'm not an anarchist, in fact I'm quite ordinary middle class but from a professional sector working in a highly skilled field. My work has regularly brought me into contact with anarchists (mostly in London) and over the years I have come to understand what modern anarchism is as-well as what it means historically.

For me, anarchism is the preservation of the rights of the individual against the machinations of the state. All states, by the simple act of existing, will ordinarily impose severe injustice on the individual. This maybe because the state is politically wayward, maybe because it is weak or it maybe because the population size is too great for effective and responsible micro management of ALL the people. Whatever the reason, the state is in and of itself, generally threatening to the individual.

Anarchism is the safety default which, if operating freely and without interruption, can be used to capture the "abandoned by the state" free-falling individual preventing collapse into social oblivion. This is a fall which every one of us, irrespective of wealth or privilege, is likely to experience at least once in our lives. The state makes much of the safety net that it provides to prevent disgrace, poverty, misery and ostracism but these nets are only open if you have fallen through a cause that the state is not directly involved with. If you fall because you have had cause to challenge the state, the states safety net will, like a sabotaged parachute, simply not open. So anarchism is not only needed, but in many ways is of critical importance. In this age of "wayward excessive capitalism" in which even the operatives of the state have been engaged in fighting against its excesses, anarchism is a critical component because it taps into the British psyche in a very profound way.

Key to this is that anarchism is formed not from political ideology, or reactionary zeal, but from the very heart and structure of the nation itself.

If one removes oneself from the city environs, especially London, and trundles into the rural belt, it becomes immediately apparent where modern British anarchism originates from. In every town, village, estate, commune, one can see the beating heart of anarchism. In the village church, the local allotment, schools, colleges, community groups, village parish councils, farming groups, farmers markets and on and on, there you see the structural heart from whence all British anarchism originates. It is the very stuff from which our self-organising society is made and without it, every village, parish council, group and commune would fall under the weight of a mindless corporate logic under which we would lose everything.

Anarchism is not a politik that we are trying to prevent from erupting onto the scene, it is the very ancient stuff of this nations soul. Not only are we all "self organising" communes operating in the spirit of ordinary anarchism, but we have always been anarchists, every one of us. Heart body and soul. From selling our food to each other and swapping bartered goods, to organising great mobs to march on London to challenge the kings and queens of the past, our ability to self organise, delegate and trust in one another, is the metal from which we are made.

It is why our government cannot beat us, nor would want to, it is why corporations cannot directly challenge us and have to depend on the trickery of public relations to fool their way into our minds, rather than take us on in a straight fight, with all the appalling odds that that entails. It is why activism here is so fondly regarded elsewhere as the sacred mechanic of successful nation building.

Anarchism is the default position of the British people, and those who argue against it are not only arguing against what it is to be British, but are arguing against what it is to be free of the ever scheming idiocy of "mega-corp plc".

I am not an anarchist, but I bow down to the principle that is anarchism.

Without it, I am nothing.

With it, I am Titan...and cannot be beaten.

For those arguing the toss here on IMC, debating what a world it would be if we were all anarchists...look around you, where it is pitiful, belligerent and miserable, there you see the sate and the foreign corporation. Where you see the love and mutual respect organising with fairness and pefectly balanced sharing of labor...there you see anarchism both modern and historical.

There you see the beating heart of an ancient drumbeat.

You seem to be missing my point so let me put it to you again. How can Anarchism create an equal society from the resources of a capitalist heirarchy when those resources are not of equal value? In other words, come the revolution, who gets a smart townhouse in Hampstead and who gets a dump in Peckham? See the problem? No matter how we divide things up, it is still going to be unfair.

hiya Puzzled, hey obviously and hopefully ( I'm writing in a normal, non-intelectual, easy to grasp way) all the ponces in their fancy houses with their priv lifestyles will get a mighty shock as they will lose the majority of their stuff and have to go on a '' where did my self-centered lifestyle all go wrong'' learning curve. When re-constructing a new way of being, they will hopefully come to appreciate the distructive,oppressive way of life they'd become accustomed to. This process will be aided by the manual work they'll have to endure to survive, similar to the lives that millions of poor people endure everyday(producing all the luxuries) with out a second thought from the said 'privs'. The Peckham people will do a mighty stretch as the yoke is lifted off their shoulders and start to release and appreciate all the good shit that they're gonna be in control of (their lives), thus creating a top community that's fair and good. Self determination- nice
All the super powerful and elite will be rounded up and kept on an island until they die out, the same treatment they gave the worlds oppressed, so all's fair and square.
The only problem with the above is finding the big weakness in the oppressive system that will bring about the fall of the privilaged system, I feel we've disarmed ourselves too much by thinking change will come by just wishing for it and titting about on protests. All the best, start the change today x

Wow, I love your rant. Any chance you can write that up for the daily mail and/or telegraph? I reckon we could even mop up a few recruits from the ranks of middle england using that angle.
Nicely put....

You seem to be missing my point so let me put it to you again. How can Anarchism create an equal society from the resources of a capitalist heirarchy when those resources are not of equal value? In other words, come the revolution, who gets a smart townhouse in Hampstead and who gets a dump in Peckham? See the problem? No matter how we divide things up, it is still going to be unfair.

--------------------

No one "gets" anything apart from the ability to organise to put all the available resources to use for everyone. Sorry if I can answer specifics like who will live in peckham post revolution.

>> No one "gets" anything apart from the ability to organise to put all the available resources to use for everyone. Sorry if I can answer specifics like who will live in peckham post revolution.

Thats doesn't really agree with what Jenny says. Her outlook is that anyone with a bit of wealth if going to have it stripped off us and we are all going to have to work toiling in a field or something. I assume she means that armed groups of large men are going to come around and beat the shit out of me.

(btw, Yeah well Jenny, just try it you ponced up weakling academic trouble-stirring. I bet in 10 years you will have moved on from this anarchist shit once you've grown up like 99% of the other student revolutionaries do. Once you get a bit of money in your pocket you won't be so keen to redistribute it. I bet if you won the lottery, you'd change your views about wealth pretty sharpish - hypocrite!!)

If anarchists can't agree on how things are run then isn't the whole thing a load of shite?
Next thing your be saying is that we'll be "voting" on things and then we'll need someone in charge to enforce the outcome of the vote on those who don't like it.

For instance: its a really cold winter and there limits on coal. Do you really think everyone will be happy to go short. I don't - I think people will try to swindle as much as they can because thats human nature.

Lilke it or not, we are humans and we act like humans. I think anarchists are naive idealists to be honest. Assuming that everyone will conform. People don't conform - for instance, we only pay taxes in this country to be give to the "needy" because we are threatened with imprisonment. Without that threat, I think very few people would pay taxes and the unemployed would be suffering a lot worse than they are now.

As Noam Chomsky said, Anarchism will NEVER EVER work because any society is a compromise of conflicting desires. If one group of people don't like what another group of people are doing, then an authority needs to resolve it (ie. someone needs to be in charge and lay down the laws).

Listen, idiot.

Fuck your background, Fuck Noam Chomsky and Fuck You.

dont make up quotes to support yr non argument makes you seem even more of a retard


Chomsky sees himself as an anarchist  http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/rbr/noamrbr2.html

Notes on Anarchism Noam Chomsky

In Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, 1970

A French writer, sympathetic to anarchism, wrote in the 1890s that "anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything" -- including, he noted those whose acts are such that "a mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better."1 There have been many styles of thought and action that have been referred to as "anarchist." It would be hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory or ideology. And even if we proceed to extract from the history of libertarian thought a living, evolving tradition, as Daniel Guérin does in Anarchism, it remains difficult to formulate its doctrines as a specific and determinate theory of society and social change. The anarchist historian Rudolph Rocker, who presents a systematic conception of the development of anarchist thought towards anarchosyndicalism, along lines that bear comparison to Guérins work, puts the matter well when he writes that anarchism is not a fixed, self-enclosed social system but rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which it has grown.2

One might ask what value there is in studying a "definite trend in the historic development of mankind" that does not articulate a specific and detailed social theory. Indeed, many commentators dismiss anarchism as utopian, formless, primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the realities of a complex society. One might, however, argue rather differently: that at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to -- rather than alleviate -- material and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future, nor even, necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards which social change should tend. Surely our understanding of the nature of man or of the range of viable social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching doctrine must be treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in order when we hear that "human nature" or "the demands of efficiency" or "the complexity of modern life" requires this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule.

Nevertheless, at a particular time there is every reason to develop, insofar as our understanding permits, a specific realization of this definite trend in the historic development of mankind, appropriate to the tasks of the moment. For Rocker, "the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement"; and the method is not the conquest and exercise of state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but rather "to reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and build it up in the spirit of Socialism."

But only the producers themselves are fitted for this task, since they are the only value-creating element in society out of which a new future can arise. Theirs must be the task of freeing labor from all the fetters which economic exploitation has fastened on it, of freeing society from all the institutions and procedure of political power, and of opening the way to an alliance of free groups of men and women based on co-operative labor and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community. To prepare the toiling masses in the city and country for this great goal and to bind them together as a militant force is the objective of modern Anarcho-syndicalism, and in this its whole purpose is exhausted. [P. 108]

As a socialist, Rocker would take for granted "that the serious, final, complete liberation of the workers is possible only upon one condition: that of the appropriation of capital, that is, of raw material and all the tools of labor, including land, by the whole body of the workers."3 As an anarchosyndicalist, he insists, further, that the workers' organizations create "not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future itself" in the prerevolutionary period, that they embody in themselves the structure of the future society -- and he looks forward to a social revolution that will dismantle the state apparatus as well as expropriate the expropriators. "What we put in place of the government is industrial organization."

Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic order cannot be created by the decrees and statutes of a government, but only by the solidaric collaboration of the workers with hand and brain in each special branch of production; that is, through the taking over of the management of all plants by the producers themselves under such form that the separate groups, plants, and branches of industry are independent members of the general economic organism and systematically carry on production and the distribution of the products in the interest of the community on the basis of free mutual agreements. [p. 94]

Rocker was writing at a moment when such ideas had been put into practice in a dramatic way in the Spanish Revolution. Just prior to the outbreak of the revolution, the anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad de Santillan had written:

...in facing the problem of social transformation, the Revolution cannot consider the state as a medium, but must depend on the organization of producers.

We have followed this norm and we find no need for the hypothesis of a superior power to organized labor, in order to establish a new order of things. We would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the State can have in an economic organization, where private property has been abolished and in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the Revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the producers organize themselves for due collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the Revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the Revolution has been a lie and the State would continue.

Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an economic and administrative regulating power. It receives its orientation from below and operates in accordance with the resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a liaison corps and nothing else.4

Engels, in a letter of 1883, expressed his disagreement with this conception as follows:

The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state....But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.5

In contrast, the anarchists -- most eloquently Bakunin -- warned of the dangers of the "red bureaucracy," which would prove to be "the most vile and terrible lie that our century has created."6 The anarchosyndicalist Fernand Pelloutier asked: "Must even the transitory state to which we have to submit necessarily and fatally be a collectivist jail? Can't it consist in a free organization limited exclusively by the needs of production and consumption, all political institutions having disappeared?"7

I do not pretend to know the answers to this question. But it seems clear that unless there is, in some form, a positive answer, the chances for a truly democratic revolution that will achieve the humanistic ideals of the left are not great. Martin Buber put the problem succinctly when he wrote: "One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves."8 The question of conquest or destruction of state power is what Bakunin regarded as the primary issue dividing him from Marx.9 In one form or another, the problem has arisen repeatedly in the century since, dividing "libertarian" from "authoritarian" socialists.

Despite Bakunin's warnings about the red bureaucracy, and their fulfillment under Stalin's dictatorship, it would obviously be a gross error in interpreting the debates of a century ago to rely on the claims of contemporary social movements as to their historical origins. In particular, it is perverse to regard Bolshevism as "Marxism in practice." Rather, the left-wing critique of Bolshevism, taking account of the historical circumstances surrounding the Russian Revolution, is far more to the point.10

The anti-Bolshevik, left-wing labor movement opposed the Leninists because they did not go far enough in exploiting the Russian upheavals for strictly proletarian ends. They became prisoners of their environment and used the international radical movement to satisfy specifically Russian needs, which soon became synonymous with the needs of the Bolshevik Party-State. The "bourgeois" aspects of the Russian Revolution were now discovered in Bolshevism itself: Leninism was adjudged a part of international social-democracy, differing from the latter only on tactical issues.11

If one were to seek a single leading idea within the anarchist tradition, it should, I believe, be that expressed by Bakunin when, in writing on the Paris Commune, he identified himself as follows:

I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each -- an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being -- they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.12

These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt's Limits of State Action, Kant's insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable. This is clear, for example, from the classic work of Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, which anticipated and perhaps inspired Mill. This classic of liberal thought, completed in 1792, is in its essence profoundly, though prematurely, anticapitalist. Its ideas must be attenuated beyond recognition to be transmuted into an ideology of industrial capitalism.

Humboldt's vision of a society in which social fetters are replaced by social bonds and labor is freely undertaken suggests the early Marx., with his discussion of the "alienation of labor when work is external to the worker...not part of his nature...[so that] he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself...[and is] physically exhausted and mentally debased," alienated labor that "casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines," thus depriving man of his "species character" of "free conscious activity" and "productive life." Similarly, Marx conceives of "a new type of human being who needs his fellow men....[The workers' association becomes] the real constructive effort to create the social texture of future human relations."13 It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association. On the same assumptions, capitalist relations of production, wage labor, competitiveness, the ideology of "possessive individualism" -- all must be regarded as fundamentally antihuman. Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

Rudolf Rocker describes modern anarchism as "the confluence of the two great currents which during and since the French revolution have found such characteristic expression in the intellectual life of Europe: Socialism and Liberalism." The classical liberal ideals, he argues, were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economic forms. Anarchism is necessarily anticapitalist in that it "opposes the exploitation of man by man." But anarchism also opposes "the dominion of man over man." It insists that "socialism will be free or it will not be at all. In its recognition of this lies the genuine and profound justification for the existence of anarchism."14 From this point of view, anarchism may be regarded as the libertarian wing of socialism. It is in this spirit that Daniel Guérin has approached the study of anarchism in Anarchism and other works.15 Guérin quotes Adolph Fischer, who said that "every anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist." Similarly Bakunin, in his "anarchist manifesto" of 1865, the program of his projected international revolutionary fraternity, laid down the principle that each member must be, to begin with, a socialist.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer. As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society in which labor will "become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life,"16 an impossibility when the worker is driven by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: "no form of wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious that another, can do away with the misery of wage-labor itself."17 A consistent anarchist must oppose not only alienated labor but also the stupefying specialization of labor that takes place when the means for developing production mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him to become a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed; estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in very proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power...18

Marx saw this not as an inevitable concomitant of industrialization, but rather as a feature of capitalist relations of production. The society of the future must be concerned to "replace the detail-worker of today...reduced to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours...to whom the different social functions...are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural powers."19 The prerequisite is the abolition of capital and wage labor as social categories (not to speak of the industrial armies of the "labor state" or the various modern forms of totalitarianism since capitalism). The reduction of man to an appurtenance of the machine, a specialized tool of production, might in principle be overcome, rather than enhanced, with the proper development and use of technology, but not under the conditions of autocratic control of production by those who make man an instrument to serve their ends, overlooking his individual purposes, in Humboldt's phrase.

Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under capitalism, to create "free associations of free producers" that would engage in militant struggle and prepare to take over the organization of production on a democratic basis. These associations would serve as "a practical school of anarchism."20 If private ownership of the means of production is, in Proudhon's often quoted phrase, merely a form of "theft" -- "the exploitation of the weak by the strong"21 -- control of production by a state bureaucracy, no matter how benevolent its intentions, also does not create the conditions under which labor, manual and intellectual, can become the highest want in life. Both, then, must be overcome.

In his attack on the right of private or bureaucratic control over the means of production,, the anarchist takes his stand with those who struggle to bring about "the third and last emancipatory phase of history," the first having made serfs out of slaves, the second having made wage earners out of serfs, and the third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act of liberation that places control over the economy in the hands of free and voluntary associations of producers (Fourier, 1848).22 The imminent danger to "civilization" was noted by de Tocqueville, also in 1848:

As long as the right of property was the origin and groundwork of many other rights, it was easily defended -- or rather it was not attacked; it was then the citadel of society while all the other rights were its outworks; it did not bear the brunt of attack and, indeed, there was no serious attempt to assail it. but today, when the right of property is regarded as the last undestroyed remnant of the aristocratic world, when it alone is left standing, the sole privilege in an equalized society, it is a different matter. Consider what is happening in the hearts of the working-classes, although I admit they are quiet as yet. It is true that they are less inflamed than formerly by political passions properly speaking; but do you not see that their passions, far from being political, have become social? Do you not see that, little by little, ideas and opinions are spreading amongst them which aim not merely at removing such and such laws, such a ministry or such a government, but at breaking up the very foundations of society itself?23

The workers of Paris, in 1871, broke the silence, and proceeded to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor.24

The Commune, of course, was drowned in blood. The nature of the "civilization" that the workers of Paris sought to overcome in their attack on "the very foundations of society itself" was revealed, once again, when the troops of the Versailles government reconquered Paris from its population. As Marx wrote, bitterly but accurately:

The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge...the infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate spirit of that civilization of which they are the mercenary vindicators....The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the destruction of brick and mortar. [Ibid., pp. 74, 77]

Despite the violent destruction of the Commune, Bakunin wrote that Paris opens a new era, "that of the definitive and complete emancipation of the popular masses and their future true solidarity, across and despite state boundaries...the next revolution of man, international in solidarity, will be the resurrection of Paris" -- a revolution that the world still awaits.

The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. He will, in short, oppose the organization of production by the Government. It means State-socialism, the command of the State officials over production and the command of managers, scientists, shop-officials in the shop....The goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves being master over production.

These remarks are taken from "Five Theses on the Class Struggle" by the left-wing Marxist Anton Pannekoek, one of the outstanding left theorists of the council communist movement. And in fact, radical Marxism merges with anarchist currents.

As a further illustration, consider the following characterization of "revolutionary Socialism":

The revolutionary Socialist denies that State ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen why the State cannot democratically control industry. Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees. Socialism will be fundamentally an industrial system; its constituencies will be of an industrial character. Thus those carrying on the social activities and industries of society will be directly represented in the local and central councils of social administration. In this way the powers of such delegates will flow upwards from those carrying on the work and conversant with the needs of the community. When the central administrative industrial committee meets it will represent every phase of social activity. Hence the capitalist political or geographical state will be replaced by the industrial administrative committee of Socialism. The transition from the one social system to the other will be the social revolution. The political State throughout history has meant the government of men by ruling classes; the Republic of Socialism will be the government of industry administered on behalf of the whole community. The former meant the economic and political subjection of the many; the latter will mean the economic freedom of all -- it will be, therefore, a true democracy.

This programmatic statement appears in William Paul's The State, its Origins and Functions, written in early 1917 -- shortly before Lenin's State and Revolution, perhaps his most libertarian work (see note 9). Paul was a member of the Marxist-De Leonist Socialist Labor Party and later one of the founders of the British Communist Party.25 His critique of state socialism resembles the libertarian doctrine of the anarchists in its principle that since state ownership and management will lead to bureaucratic despotism, the social revolution must replace it by the industrial organization of society with direct workers' control. Many similar statements can be cited.

What is far more important is that these ideas have been realized in spontaneous revolutionary action, for example in Germany and Italy after World War I and in Spain (not only in the agricultural countryside, but also in industrial Barcelona) in 1936. One might argue that some form of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is severely limited when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers and technocrats, a "vanguard" party, or a state bureaucracy. Under these conditions of authoritarian domination the classical libertarian ideals developed further by Marx and Bakunin and all true revolutionaries cannot be realized; man will not be free to develop his own potentialities to their fullest, and the producer will remain "a fragment of a human being," degraded, a tool in the productive process directed from above.

The phrase "spontaneous revolutionary action" can be misleading. The anarchosyndicalists, at least, took very seriously Bakunin's remark that the workers' organizations must create "not only the ideas but also the facts of the future itself" in the prerevolutionary period. The accomplishments of the popular revolution in Spain, in particular, were based on the patient work of many years of organization and education, one component of a long tradition of commitment and militancy. The resolutions of the Madrid Congress of June 1931 and the Saragossa Congress in May 1936 foreshadowed in many ways the acts of the revolution, as did the somewhat different ideas sketched by Santillan (see note 4) in his fairly specific account of the social and economic organization to be instituted by the revolution. Guérin writes "The Spanish revolution was relatively mature in the minds of libertarian thinkers, as in the popular consciousness." And workers' organizations existed with the structure, the experience, and the understanding to undertake the task of social reconstruction when, with the Franco coup, the turmoil of early 1936 exploded into social revolution. In his introduction to a collection of documents on collectivization in Spain, the anarchist Augustin Souchy writes:

For many years, the anarchists and the syndicalists of Spain considered their supreme task to be the social transformation of the society. In their assemblies of Syndicates and groups, in their journals, their brochures and books, the problem of the social revolution was discussed incessantly and in a systematic fashion.26

All of this lies behind the spontaneous achievements, the constructive work of the Spanish Revolution.

The ideas of libertarian socialism, in the sense described, have been submerged in the industrial societies of the past half-century. The dominant ideologies have been those of state socialism or state capitalism (of increasingly militarized character in the United States, for reasons that are not obscure).27 But there has been a rekindling of interest in the past few years. The theses I quoted by Anton Pannekoek were taken from a recent pamphlet of a radical French workers' group (Informations Correspondance Ouvrière). The remarks by William Paul on revolutionary socialism are cited in a paper by Walter Kendall given at the National Conference on Workers' Control in Sheffield, England, in March 1969. The workers' control movement has become a significant force in England in the past few years. It has organized several conferences and has produced a substantial pamphlet literature, and counts among its active adherents representatives of some of the most important trade unions. The Amalgamated Engineering and Foundryworkers' Union, for example, has adopted, as official policy, the program of nationalization of basic industries under "workers' control at all levels."28 On the Continent, there are similar developments. May 1968 of course accelerated the growing interest in council communism and related ideas in France and Germany, as it did in England.

Given the highly conservative cast of our highly ideological society, it is not too surprising that the United States has been relatively untouched by these developments. But that too may change. The erosion of cold-war mythology at least makes it possible to raise these questions in fairly broad circles. If the present wave of repression can be beaten back, if the left can overcome its more suicidal tendencies and build upon what has been accomplished in the past decade, then the problem of how to organize industrial society on truly democratic lines, with democratic control in the workplace and in the community, should become a dominant intellectual issue for those who are alive to the problems of contemporary society, and, as a mass movement for libertarian socialism develops, speculation should proceed to action.

In his manifesto of 1865, Bakunin predicted that one element in the social revolution will be "that intelligent and truly noble part of youth which, though belonging by birth to the privileged classes, in its generous convictions and ardent aspirations, adopts the cause of the people." Perhaps in the rise of the student movement of the 1960s one sees steps towards a fulfillment of this prophecy.

Daniel Guérin has undertaken what he has described as a "process of rehabilitation" of anarchism. He argues, convincingly I believe, that "the constructive ideas of anarchism retain their vitality, that they may, when re-examined and sifted, assist contemporary socialist thought to undertake a new departure...[and] contribute to enriching Marxism."29 From the "broad back" of anarchism he has selected for more intensive scrutiny those ideas and actions that can be described as libertarian socialist. This is natural and proper. This framework accommodates the major anarchist spokesmen as well as the mass actions that have been animated by anarchist sentiments and ideals. Guérin is concerned not only with anarchist thought but also with the spontaneous actions of popular revolutionary struggle. He is concerned with social as well as intellectual creativity. Furthermore, he attempts to draw from the constructive achievements of the past lessons that will enrich the theory of social liberation. For those who wish not only to understand the world, but also to change it, this is the proper way to study the history of anarchism.

Guérin describes the anarchism of the nineteenth century as essentially doctrinal, while the twentieth century, for the anarchists, has been a time of "revolutionary practice."30 Anarchism reflects that judgment. His interpretation of anarchism consciously points toward the future. Arthur Rosenberg once pointed out that popular revolutions characteristically seek to replace "a feudal or centralized authority ruling by force" with some form of communal system which "implies the destruction and disappearance of the old form of State." Such a system will be either socialist or an "extreme form of democracy...[which is] the preliminary condition for Socialism inasmuch as Socialism can only be realized in a world enjoying the highest possible measure of individual freedom." This ideal, he notes, was common to Marx and the anarchists.31 This natural struggle for liberation runs counter to the prevailing tendency towards centralization in economic and political life.

A century ago Marx wrote that the workers of Paris "felt there was but one alternative -- the Commune, or the empire -- under whatever name it might reappear."

The empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered, by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to the frères Ignorantins, it had revolted their national feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made -- the disappearance of the empire.32

The miserable Second Empire "was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation."

It is not very difficult to rephrase these remarks so that they become appropriate to the imperial systems of 1970. The problem of "freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement" remains the problem of our time. As long as this is so, the doctrines and the revolutionary practice of libertarian socialism will serve as an inspiration and guide.


Notes

This essay is a revised version of the introduction to Daniel Guérin's Anarchism: From Theory to Practice. In a slightly different version, it appeared in the New York Review of Books, May 21, 1970.

1 Octave Mirbeau, quoted in James Joll, The Anarchists, pp. 145-6.

2 Rudolf Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 31.

3 Cited by Rocker, ibid., p. 77. This quotation and that in the next sentence are from Michael Bakunin, "The Program of the Alliance," in Sam Dolgoff, ed. and trans., Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 255.

4 Diego Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, p. 86. In the last chapter, written several months after the revolution had begun, he expresses his dissatisfaction with what had so far been achieved along these lines. On the accomplishments of the social revolution in Spain, see my American Power and the New Mandarins, chap. 1, and references cited there; the important study by Broué and Témime has since been translated into English. Several other important studies have appeared since, in particular: Frank Mintz, L'Autogestion dans l'Espagne révolutionaire (Paris: Editions Bélibaste, 1971); César M. Lorenzo, Les Anarchistes espagnols et le pouvoir, 1868-1969 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969); Gaston Leval, Espagne libertaire, 1936-1939: L'Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution espagnole (Paris: Editions du Cercle, 1971). See also Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, enlarged 1972 edition.

5 Cited by Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, in his discussion of Marxism and anarchism.

6 Bakunin, in a letter to Herzen and Ogareff, 1866. Cited by Daniel Guérin, Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire, p. 119.

7 Fernand Pelloutier, cited in Joll, Anarchists. The source is "L'Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers," Les Temps nouveaux, 1895. The full text appears in Daniel Guérin, ed., Ni Dieu, ni Maître, an excellent historical anthology of anarchism.

8 Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia, p. 127.

9 "No state, however democratic," Bakunin wrote, "not even the reddest republic -- can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People's State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, from a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves...." "But the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled `the people's stick' " (Statism and Anarchy [1873], in Dolgoff, Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 338) -- "the people's stick" being the democratic Republic.

Marx, of course, saw the matter differently.

For discussion of the impact of the Paris Commune on this dispute, see Daniel Guérin's comments in Ni Dieu, ni Maître; these also appear, slightly extended, in his Pour un marxisme libertaire. See also note 24.

10 On Lenin's "intellectual deviation" to the left during 1917, see Robert Vincent Daniels, "The State and Revolution: a Case Study in the Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology," American Slavic and East European Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).

11 Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 295.

12 Michael Bakunin, "La Commune de Paris et la notion de l'état," reprinted in Guérin, Ni Dieu, ni Maître. Bakunin's final remark on the laws of individual nature as the condition of freedom can be compared to the creative thought developed in the rationalist and romantic traditions. See my Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind.

13 Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, p. 142, referring to comments in The Holy Family. Avineri states that within the socialist movement only the Israeli kibbutzim "have perceived that the modes and forms of present social organization will determine the structure of future society." This, however, was a characteristic position of anarchosyndicalism, as noted earlier.

14 Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 28.

15 See Guérin's works cited earlier.

16 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme.

17 Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, cited by Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 306. In this connection, see also Mattick's essay "Workers' Control," in Priscilla Long, ed., The New Left; and Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Marx.

18 Karl Marx, Capital, quoted by Robert Tucker, who rightly emphasizes that Marx sees the revolutionary more as a "frustrated producer" than a "dissatisfied consumer" (The Marxian Revolutionary Idea). This more radical critique of capitalist relations of production is a direct outgrowth of the libertarian thought of the Enlightenment.

19 Marx, Capital, cited by Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Marx, p. 83.

20 Pelloutier, "L'Anarchisme."

21 "Qu'est-ce que la propriété?" The phrase "property is theft" displeased Marx, who saw in its use a logical problem, theft presupposing the legitimate existence of property. See Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Marx.

22 Cited in Buber's Paths in Utopia, p. 19.

23 Cited in J. Hampden Jackson, Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism, p. 60.

24 Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, p. 24. Avineri observes that this and other comments of Marx about the Commune refer pointedly to intentions and plans. As Marx made plain elsewhere, his considered assessment was more critical than in this address.

25 For some background, see Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain.

26 Collectivisations: L'Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution espagnole, p. 8.

27 For discussion, see Mattick, Marx and Keynes, and Michael Kidron, Western Capitalism Since the War. See also discussion and references cited in my At War With Asia, chap. 1, pp. 23-6.

28 See Hugh Scanlon, The Way Forward for Workers' Control. Scanlon is the president of the AEF, one of Britain's largest trade unions. The institute was established as a result of the sixth Conference on Workers' Control, March 1968, and serves as a center for disseminating information and encouraging research.

29 Guérin, Ni Dieu, ni Maître, introduction.

30 Ibid.

31 Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism, p. 88.

32 Marx, Civil War in France, pp. 62-3.



Bibliography

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Bakunin, Michael. Bakunin on Anarchy. Edited and translated by Sam Dolgoff. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Buber, Martin. Paths in Utopia. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.

Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

------. American Power and the New Mandarins. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969.

------. At War with Asia. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.

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Guérin, Daniel. Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire. Paris: Librairie Marcel Rivière, 1959.

------. Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, translated by Mary Klopper. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.

------. Pour un marxisme libertaire. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1969.

------, ed. Ni Dieu, ni Maître. Lausanne: La Cité Editeur, n.d.

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Listen you fucktard cretit cuntface, anarchism will never work in the UK unless everyone subscribes to it, which you know they won't

The majority of people won't follow the "values", won't pull their weight and will take advantage of your "allocating resources to the most needy" just like they do under labour.

The only way anarchism will work is if you all go to an island and start a commune society of your own and then exile any new member of the population who don't conform to your "state" by brute force.

pie in the sky idealists lol! And the sad thing is, you know it is true. We are so far away from anarchism its like watching a Mad Max movie and going "Oh, thats what anarchists look like."

"Listen you fucktard cretit cuntface"

You've sort of lost the argument right there, not being able to spell 'cretin'. You don't need to be anarchist to know that was a bad opener to any argument.

"anarchism will never work in the UK unless everyone subscribes to it, which you know they won't"

Anarchism does work within the UK, as it has worked in wider areas. It doesn't rely on everyone being anarchist, just you. It doesn't require you agreeing with everyone else's definition of anarchism, just getting along without force.

"The majority of people won't follow the "values", won't pull their weight and will take advantage of your "allocating resources to the most needy" just like they do under labour"

Good for them, let's see how that works out for them. The scientific truth is altruism is sensible, treating others like equals is in everyone's best interests. There are mathematical proofs for this you can read about in 'Game Theory'. It's the natural way of the social species, and if you doubt that then just ask yourself why altruism even exists.

"The only way anarchism will work is if you all go to an island and start a commune society of your own and then exile any new member of the population who don't conform to your "state" by brute force"

The mistake you are making is you are thinking of anarchism as a replacement state. Anarchism works for anarchists, if other people choose not to be anarchist then no anarchist will force them to be. It will work, it does work, with any number of people. We don't need to control the entire country, just the land we stand upon. We don't need to force you to do anyuthing, we just need to stop people forcing us to do things.

"pie in the sky idealists lol! And the sad thing is, you know it is true"

Actually, all the anarchists posting here are actually there, even if it seems an impossible leap for you just now. Try talking less aggressively and you may understand how they got there better, you may even want it for yourself.

"We are so far away from anarchism its like watching a Mad Max movie and going "Oh, thats what anarchists look like.""

No, that movie is a picture of capitalism today. The term 'anarchy' is commonly used by corporate media as a dirty word implying violence, disorder, lack of stability. The word democracy used to have the same connotations. In my opinion - and it doesn't bother me if this is just my opinion here - anarchy is pure democracy where everyone who is interested in a group decision has an equal say. It's participative democracy, where you get a vote in anything you are interested in rather than electing politicians who 'represent' you by doing what they want, or want they are bribed to do by the rich elite, rather than the platitudes they issue at elections.

Confused,
You used the phrase 'pie in the sky' to deride anarchists without any apparent irony. It's actually an anarchist phrase invented by Joe Hill in 1911. It started as a pastiche of the Salvation Army song 'In the Sweet Bye and Bye', which promised heavenly rewards for those who suffer on earth. Anarchists prefer their rewards on the earth, thank you very much, heaven is an invention of the rich used to control the poor. It implies that if you are not happy as an anarchist then you shouldn't be one, be a wage-slave whose reward is in some mythical afterlife.



Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

Chorus:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

The starvation army they play,
They sing and they clap and they pray
'Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they'll tell you when you're on the bum:

Holy Rollers and jumpers come out,
They holler, they jump and they shout.
Give your money to Jesus they say,
He will cure all diseases today.
If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good in this life
You're a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.

Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight;
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we'll sing this refrain:

You will eat, bye and bye,
When you've learned how to cook and to fry.
Chop some wood, 'twill do you good,
And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye.

Solidarity with those unafraid to use direct action!!

Ignore all negative comments, as that's all they are and all they'll ever be, comments

we can act, let the cowards write and talk about it!!

Solidarity from prison, the boys had a good laugh knowing there are comrades outside showing solidarity with prisoners in such a brazen way!!

"You used the phrase 'pie in the sky' to deride anarchists without any apparent irony. It's actually an anarchist phrase invented by Joe Hill in 1911. It started as a pastiche of the Salvation Army song 'In the Sweet Bye and Bye', which promised heavenly rewards for those who suffer on earth. Anarchists prefer their rewards on the earth, thank you very much, heaven is an invention of the rich used to control the poor. It implies that if you are not happy as an anarchist then you shouldn't be one, be a wage-slave whose reward is in some mythical afterlife."

Heaven and hell are here on earth.

Heaven be the glinting silver of a life well lived and hell be the wretched remorse of a life lived with shame. Be good to your brother and sister and you will live in heaven, be bad to your brother and sister and to hell you go.

Heaven and hell are here on earth.

The elite, are simply a collection of those already in hell. They have a psychological interest in swelling their numbers, how else is their pain to become normal? Leave it to them, and all the world will burn.

Peace & Justice.

Most shared houses are run along anarchist lines, the challenge is scaling it up to larger communities. not a trivial problem, but a worthwhile goal.

And if some people would rather live in a community run along authoritarian or other lines (maybe people in the BDSM scene?) I wouldn't have a problem with that as long as people are free to leave if they want, and as long as they leave other communities alone to do their thing.

And for all those criticising anarchism here - who would you like to boss you around and tell you what to do? David Cameron? Gordon Brown? someone else? get real! The idal for most people is to NOT be bossed around. It won't be easy but it is the ideal we should aim for.

What happens if the thing another community wants to do is immoral? For example, a community might decide that using animal products is acceptable. That would bring it into direct conflict with animal liberationists everywhere and be a recipe for war, just as it is under capitalism.

OK, let me amend that slightly to "...as long as people or animals are allowed to leave if they want..." ;-)