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.”What was the real problem facing Americans in 1970? It wasn't economic exploitation. On the one hand, it was discrimination and prejudice and addiction and the family and social problems these things caused. On the other hand, it was bad mechanism design which meant that Americans were getting a shit return on their tax dollar. Dealing with these problems meant taking on vested interests, rent-seeking opportunists, organized crime, corrupt officialdom and entrenched, incompetent, bureaucracies. Pretending that at the root of all these problems was Marxian exploitation was simply silly. But then, Chomsky was a deeply silly man. His 'Scientific' Research Program was dead in the water. His Political posture was purely paranoid. The future would show with increasing clarity that he was barking up the wrong tree. Thus he turned to the past in order to seek solace in the spectacle of a like stupidity.
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.
He wrote-
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.”But, by 1970, it was clear that Anarchism didn't have a broad back. It's spine had been stomped in long ago. Like toilet paper it could not endure more than one swipe of a shitty bum. The anarchist assassin who killed the Austrian Emperor's crazy wife had no effect on history. Some Serbian ultra-nationalist who shot his nephew ended Europe's domination of the World.
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 Guerin 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 Guerins 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.But reading Anarchosyndicalist shite did not help anybody to flower or sprout wings or, more importantly, lead a better life. The thing was a waste of time. By contrast Ana-kakaism, which aims to liberate mankind from the potty training carried out by our ecclesiastical, political, and Mummy-type-person Guardians, continues to have relevance in the battle against Socio-Economic injustice. This is because the ability to shit into your hands and fling your feces about is as useful a life-skill in the Academic Seminar or Corporate Boardroom as in confronting the Police on the street of Wall.
Rudolph Rocker was appalled by the poverty he saw, more especially among Jews, in London's East End. How come the descendants of those Jews are now doing very well? Was it Anarchism which raised them up? No. It was hard work, thrift, enterprise and great talent and application in STEM subjects and the useful arts and professions.
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.The same value as in studying Chomsky's useless shite.
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.What were these in 1970? The Teamsters which had become a branch of organized crime. But Chomsky wasn't brave enough to take on the Unions. What was the result? Black people, 50 years later get killed in the streets by cops whose powerful Union Chief believes in 'killology'.
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.Fuck having a doctrine. Screw having a 'specific and unchanging concept'. Tackle genuine injustice even if it means coming out against Organiz ed Labor which is in bed with the Mafia.
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.Yes! Chomsky has said something sensible! But only to argue that it isn't sensible at all.
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.In other words, a this particular time we must not be sensible. We must be off our fucking Rudolph's red nosed Rocker.
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, after the Second War, Rocker had sense enough to see that Anarchism was dead in Germany. There was no point trying to revive the thing. Germany had been through enough. He was a good man who arranged for food parcels to be sent to his anarchist brethren there after the War.
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.And the producers who create the most value are guys named Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Larry Page etc etc.
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.But co-operatives are either run as if they were businesses or they waste everybody's time and quickly go bankrupt. Even at their best- i.e. when they most benefit their members- they act in a monopolistic way creating a dead weight loss for society.
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. 108Anakakism has the same objective. Not till the toiling masses stop doing anything useful and shit into their hands and fling their feces about will Society be free of all the Institutions and Procedures of a Democracy under the Rule of Law.
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.”That isn't enough. You also have to stop workers from running away.
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.”But without Gulags for those who try to run away, the thing is bound to collapse. There are only so many times you can listen to gobshites before your Anakakaist tendencies manifest themselves in your shitting into your hands and flinging your feces around.
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.Anakakaists are convinced that so long as language exists, some people can lie and thus grab an unfair share of the pie. To do away with this possibility we must do away not just with potty training, but language itself. Shitting into your hands and flinging your feces about is the first step. Once language is abolished, all humanity will be perfectly coordinated. We won't need no price signals, or even Kantorovich's 'shadow prices', to solve Society's 'Transportation Problem' re. where to send resources and pick up finished products. Thus, when I wake up, I will know already exactly what I need to do. I walk into McDonalds. The staff have my Happy Meal ready for me. No money or words change hands. I go to a house in an area previously unknown to me. A lady opens the door before I can ring the bell. We exchange no words. I fix her blocked sink and leave. No money changes hands. Why? Because Magic has solved the economic problem of allocation. That's what Anarchosyndalism amounts to. A belief in Magic. If only Governments disappeared, then Economics, and Language, and Education and so forth all disappear. When you need to take a dump, the receptacle in which you shit is automatically conveyed and emptied on to the plant which most needs that type of fertilizer.
Rocker was writing at a moment when such ideas had been put into practice in a dramatic way in the Spanish Revolution.What was dramatic is how quickly and utterly the thing back-fired. Franco arrived and spent a lot of time getting his Moroccan troops to rape women in District after District. After Franco's death, a faction within POUM did contest elections. They got 0.22 percent of the Vote.
Just prior to the outbreak of the revolution, the anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad de Santillan had written:But 'producers' didn't want no steenkin organization. On the other hand, they did like raping nuns. But then Franco turned up and had their womenfolk punitively raped. La Passionara did not stick around to be raped. Thankfully, as a devout Stalinist, she lived a charmed life in the Soviet Union. She did return to Spain and was elected. But then she had cheered herself hoarse when her people slaughtered POUMists whom she described as 'the Fascist enemy within'.
…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.Cool! In 1970, in America, Organized labor meant Jimmy Hoffa!
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.So Engels- a successful businessman- was more sensible than the stupid 'economist' Chomsky quotes.
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.
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.”Bakunin died a little less than 50 years before this proved a true prophesy.
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?”A fair point for a Trade Union chief to make. Why endorse and financially support rainbow coalition Leftist politicians when everybody knows all politicians are lying scumbags?
I do not pretend to know the answers to this question.But everybody else does. Sure, it would be great if we could walk into shops and just take what we need without having to pay. But there is no cheap way to solve the coordination problem and the incentive compatibility problem and the information asymmetry problem and the concurrency problem etc, etc. without price signals and budget constraints.
Equally, it would be great if we didn't have to talk on a date. We'd know in advance whether or not we were getting laid.
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.There is always a 'positive answer' to the question 'what is the feasible Socio-Economic outcome regarding which there can be 'Overlapping Consensus' on the Left?
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.”A little tree can be used as a club and then transplanted into ground where it can flourish and put forth leaves. Buber was talking of Stalin's forcible collectivization of agriculture. This 'engineer of human souls' genuinely wanted people to turn into clubs which his Party could use to beat other people with.
The question of conquest or destruction of state power is what Bakunin regarded as the primary issue dividing him from Marx. In one form or another, the problem has arisen repeatedly in the century since, dividing “libertarian” from “authoritarian” socialists.But the real problem goes deeper. The State is crap at coordinating the Economy unless there are markets and price signals. This was not obvious in 1970 to pointy headed intellectuals who thought Samuelson or Kantorovich deserved Econ Nobel prizes. But it was obvious to everybody else. Allende's fucking up big time in Chile- though he had a computer and cool Star Trek type office furniture which was supposed to direct the economy using advanced cybernetics.
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.Rubbish! If a nutter says 'I got my nuttiness out of this long dead nutter's book' we should believe him for exactly the same reason that we should give him a wide berth.
In particular, it is perverse to regard Bolshevism as “Marxism in practice.”No it isn't. Prior to Lenin seizing power, there had been no 'Marxism in practice'. It is not perverse at all to say the first example of a Marxist Government anywhere was precisely what it claimed to be. This is not to say there might not be more than one type of '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.Back in 1970, the Evil Empire of the Soviets was expanding. Chomsky may be forgiven for taking the 'left wing critique' of evil madness as worthy of consideration though it too was utterly mad and thoroughly evil.
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.Very true! I recall reading of the 'Collectivization of women'. All unmarried women were declared to be available to the horny handed proletariat. But every girl above the age of 12 had the sense to hide. So the proletariat raped some little kids to death. Then the Babuskas came out and beat them. So 'Collectivization of women' was abandoned. Incidentally the word 'proletarian' means 'child bearing'. Raping small kids won't get them pregnant. They just die screaming horribly.
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.Quite right! The bourgeoisie take a dim view of little kids being raped to death. Shame on the Russian Revolution for not insisting on the continuation of this proletarian practice! On the other hand Beria did rape kids. Kruschev, that fucking bourgeois reactionary, had Beria executed. The one good thing about the Bolsheviks is that they killed a lot of their own. Dog, it seems, does eat dog, if sufficiently rabid.
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:Though, Bakunin could see that, all over the world, people who possessed liberty, like the Tasmanian aborigines, were being slaughtered or forced off their land.
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.Very true! Look at the plight of the White Men in the U.K! They have no liberty whatsoever. Queen Victoria beats and sodomizes them and condemns them to hereditary slavery! That is why John Stuart Mill is seeking political asylum from the Tasmanian aborigines.
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;I'm a person. Believe me, you don't want to see the 'full development' of all the powers latent in my person. Suffice it to say this would involve twerking and dancing Gangnam style.
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.And are best expressed by shitting into our hands and flinging feces about.
But few Europeans had heard of these guys while the majority of those that had thought they were silly.
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,Fuck off! The Labor Theory of Value- which Kantorovich claimed to have found a mathematical expression for- was pure baloney. No 'surplus value' was being extracted. Economic rent may have been- but only if illegal restraints on trade operated. This was something the Law could tackle on the basis of evidence, not moonshine.
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.But 'libertarian socialism' consists only of telling stupid lies- e.g. the guy who designed and produced and marketed my vacuum cleaner only got rich by stealing from those who worked in his factories.
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.But can be remedied by the Law. That's what matters.
This is clear, for example, from the classic work of Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, which anticipated and perhaps inspired Mill.It did. Mill discusses it. Humboldt's book was written in the early 1790's and was only published in its entirety long after he was safely dead.
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.But nobody gives a shit about 'ideology'.
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.”The Evangelical Christian Abolitionist, in similar vein, suggested that Black slaves would continue to work in the plantations for a starvation wage out of a sense of Christian Duty. But, as Sir Edward Cust noticed, Black peeps be smart. They got the fuck out of the countryside, learnt useful trades and did well in the Cities. Thus the Brits had to bring in Indian 'coolies'.
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.Adam Smith had a big impact on the Germans- Kant's successor spread Smith's Gospel- and this produced 'beamtenliberalismus'- the liberalism of the officials which was very different from 'classical liberalism'.
On the same assumptions, capitalist relations of production, wage labor, competitiveness, the ideology of “possessive individualism”—all must be regarded as fundamentally antihuman.Baby is fundamentally anti-human because it beats me if I try to grab its toys. On the other hand, rocks are fundamentally human because they don't object if you steal their stuff.
Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.In the same sense as a nutter who thinks he is Napoleon is properly regarded as the inheritor of Military Genius.
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.”Socialism was about making life, materially speaking, better for working people. Liberalism was about not burning people who said mean things about the Ecclesia or the Nobility or whatever. Opposing ignorance and prejudice and cruel and unusual punishment is a good thing. So is being generous to vulnerable sections of the population.
By contrast 'modern anarchism' helped nobody. It was stupid shit- like Chomsky's work on Linguistics.
The classical liberal ideals, he argues, were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economic forms.Nonsense! The 'Marginalist Revolution' explained 'market failure'. It permitted 'mechanism design' of an incentive compatible type which made everybody better off and more secure.
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.”Anakakaism- which opposes man lying to man- which could cause exploitation and dominion even absent any organized political or economic activity- has an even more profound justification for its existence than anarchism.
From this point of view, anarchism may be regarded as the libertarian wing of socialism.No! As Prof. Vaginat Dentate Choothopadhyaya has conslusively proved it is the LGBTQ wing of the Welsh Women's Institute circa 1954.
It is in this spirit that Daniel Guérin has approached the study of anarchism in Anarchism and other works.Good to know he didn't approach it in the spirit of wanting to bugger its brains out. Guerin was a founder of the Queer Anarchist movement.
Guérin quotes Adolph Fischer, who said that “every anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist.”With equal truth, we could say this about Anakakaism.
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.Thus Marx says we can't have 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' till Technology is so advanced that Scarcity does not exist. You spend a little time making chairs. Anyone who needs a chair walks into your house and takes away a chair. But it can't happen any time soon. Till then we must have 'from each according to his ability'- i.e. careers open to talent- and 'to each according to his contribution'. But this means Dyson will be a billionaire- because his contribution is unique in creating and marketing a high value added contraption- while those who work assembling his vacuum cleaners merely make a little more money than they can get working for someone else.
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,” 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.”
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…This is Gandhism. T. Prakasan, as C.M of Madras proposed tearing down all the Factories. The Commies revolted. He beat the shit out of them- but then Indian Communists are pusillanimous creatures. He is remembered as a hero of the movement for a separate Telugu State. But, after Prakasam, the idea of dismantling factories to free the workers was quietly dropped. Why? The workers will beat you if you try any such monkey tricks. They don't give a toss about Marx. But they do know how to kick your head in. So talk shite in the Seminar by all means but steer clear of genuine proles or 'subalterns' as the Academy has learned to call them.
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.”3-D printers powered by 'Fusion' reactors will bring about...nothing Utopian. Why? People who like making chairs will compete to get good looking people to sit on them. I may really need a chair but nobody wants their work of art to be obscured by big fat bum.
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).This is not enough. You also have to get rid of lying. This means getting rid of Language. We must learn to express our feelings by shitting into our hands and flinging our feces about. Anakakaism is our sole hope of freeing Man from his bondage.
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.But if liars gain control of production by telling lies, the problem remains. We must get rid of Language. All hail Anakakaism!
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.”Where nutters would bore each other shitless.
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”—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.By abolishing language. Shit into your hands. Fling your feces about. Do it now. Anakakaism is an idea whose time has come.
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,Both slavery and serfdom arose out of the profits of War or else the necessities of Armed Peace.
But more rapid economic progress could be made without either. That's why they disappeared.
the second having made wage earners out of serfs,but serfs had first been indoctrinated by the Church and been subject to conscription into the Army. Thus, they had learned to take orders and to perform different sorts of drudgery. The industrial proletariat does not appear fully formed out of the brain of Zeus. That's why, in traditional societies, like India, first there is the gang-master. Then, after a lag, there is an industrial proletariat. But paternalistic labor laws can fuck things up. So, lo!, the gang-master returns. Sadly, rural England now has plenty of gang-masters.
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]But that never happened. Moreover, Mathematical Economics was showing why it couldn't ever happen at precisely the time Chomsky wrote this.
The imminent danger to “civilization” was noted by de Tocqueville, also in 1848:But everybody could see the guy was wrong by 1970. The Soviets, with more arable land per capita than the US, was importing food. The Chinese had had a massive famine. Civilization was not in danger because its enemies quickly started to starve.
As long as the right of property was the origin and groundwork of many other rights, it was easily defendedNonsense! Property rights only exist where there is scarcity. Rights of Property have to be defended by ceaseless vigilance and expensive weaponry.
—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 itSheer fantasy! There were plenty of jacqueries any place such a thing had any chance of success.
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?But these guys voted for Napoleon III. Chomsky says-
The workers of Paris, in 1871, broke the silence, and proceededBecause Napoleon III lost a War.
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.Whatever its aim, it failed miserably. Why? Its goons killed a couple of Army Generals and persecuted the Church. But its troops were shit at fighting and were massacred by regular soldiers. The Communards then started killing Archbishops and other 'hostages'. Then, they were slaughtered. Flaubert got it right- the Paris Commune was the last manifestation of the Middle Ages. It portended nothing for the future.
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.and dosed them with their own medicine.
As Marx wrote, bitterly but accurately:Very true! If a waiter at a restaurant so much as chops off the pinky finger of a paying customer, so as to have a little raw meat to eat, he may be arrested and subjected to forcible incarceration in a Mental 'Hospital' ! Indeed, in some soi disant 'Civilized' countries, he may even lose his job! As for Child-minders who rape their little charges, don't even ask! The parents of those children have been known to use abusive language against the rapists! How can we call ourselves a Civilized people?
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.Complacently? No. Delightedly.
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.Chomsky was writing this 2 years after the '68 uprising in Paris. But what the students really wanted was to be able to have sex with each other same as the co-eds in America.
The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized laborSo, no market based trade based on the principle of comparative advantage
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.So, no markets, no Governments, no division of labor- what does this leave us with? Autarkic peasant communes cut off from each other. Cool! That won't result in a country full of in-bred nitwits who will easily be conquered and enslaved.
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.Pannekoek was an Astrophysicist. How would he have liked it if his janitor and the tea-lady demanded an equal voice in judging the distribution of stars in our Galaxy?
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”:Who either do what a smart manager would, or else immediately fuck up. Committees of laymen are a great way to waste everybody's time while mismanaging things in a catastrophic manner.
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.Thankfully, workers knew that they were ignorant of Engineering and Operations Research and Management Information Systems. They didn't want people as ignorant as themselves screwing up the source of their livelihood. They did want more money for less labor. They got it provided the opportunity cost of their time was going up. In other words, they thrived where there was more competition for their services.
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.Paul had run a market stall selling hosiery. He might have made a good Manager. Lots of Scottish people do.
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.Paul didn't get that whether workers control a factory does not matter. What matters is if there is another factory or place of business which can bid up their wage. Choice and Competition are key. Who owns what does not matter. This was Ronald Coase's great insight. But the British working man, and working woman, had understood this long ago. Oddly, Saki understood this as well. He points out that washer-women had no need to truckle to anybody. Why? They were well paid because there was intense competition for their services. The same could be said for Cooks- 'she was a good cook as cooks go and as good cooks go she went'.
Many similar statements can be cited.But every such 'realization' was a horrible failure. This is like saying, the idea that man can defy gravity has been realized by all those people who dropped acid and jumped out of tall buildings in the belief that they could fly.
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.Or one might jump off a tall building to prove man can defy the law of Gravity.
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.But where there is more and more Competition, 'control' just means doing smart things so as to deliver more utility using less scarce resources. This sort of control is eusocial. It is not sinister at all.
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.Very true! Under these conditions of the authoritarian domination of the Law of Gravity, the classical levitational ideals developed further by guys on acid trips cannot be realized. Man won't be able to fly around the place shitting on people's heads. If he jumps off a tall building, he will go splat on the ground.
The phrase “spontaneous revolutionary action” can be misleading.No it can't. It's like 'jumping off a tall building in the belief one can fly'. Either the thing happened, and the guy went splat, or it didn't happen. The fellow is lying.
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.But the thing went splat on the ground all the same.
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,Shame on them!
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:Why did Sorel type Anarchosyndicalism appeal to the Spanish? The answer is because their industrial bourgeoisie was crap. Even in Barcelona, the average industrial worker was employed by a small concern with less than 50 people on the payroll. The lack of big industrial concerns meant that workers could imagine themselves running things better than the guy who had inherited the business and who showed up there once in a blue-moon. But this concentrated the mind of the 'Syndicalists' on how to improve enterprises which they could already imagine the workers as being better able to manage. Santillan originally opposed 'Fordism' and 'Taylorism'. But as the Great Depression began to bite and Spanish factory workers returned home from abroad, Santillan saw the need for big, modern, worker controlled enterprises run on Scientific Principles. This is perfectly reasonable. Mondragon, started by a Catholic priest, thrived in the Fifties. The 'Fagor' brand was pretty successful. They are still around with around 70,000 worker/owners and over ten billion dollars in Revenue.
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.
Chomsky, however, is not interested in the Co-Operative movement. The question is what happened between 1936 and 1939 when workers controlled the means of production in Spain's most modern city- Barcelona? The answer is- the thing was a shit-show. Chomsky and his ilk see this as the fault of the Commies or other forces which contested the Anarchosyndicalist Union's economic power. But the converse is true. The Union fucked up Economically. It didn't generate wealth which could be used to gain military and political dominance. It lost 'hegemony' because it was shit at Economics and Management Science. This was by no means inevitable. The CNT sponsored horizontal integration and wished to raise the Capital to Labor ratio. Taylorism was in high favor. But, technicians had high attrition rates because of the problem of pay differentials and interference by blue collar workers. In many of the big factories, costs went through the roof but output fell. Absenteeism, theft, sabotage all increased. The workers it seems were quite prepared to 'steal from themselves'. This was a 'tragedy of the commons'. Rivalry between politicized Unions meant that cracking down on the workers you controlled might cause them to join the other side.
This is not to say that worker control had no advantages. Often it had led to the enterprise being modernized and rationalized. But this was because of the vision of the economists and the skills of the 'technicians'. Worker control had been a disaster because workers were lazy, stupid and greedy. Why? If they were fired they'd go over to the Opposition. In other words, Republican Spain provides economic evidence against only one type of Economic system- anarcho-syndicalism. Communism can thrive if you shoot people who don't work hard. Capitalism can thrive if you sack them for the same reason. Worker ownership can't thrive because of the free-rider problem. There is a workaround if Capitalism predominates. Here bad workers can be eased out. There is no danger they will go over to the Communists and then come burn your house down. But, in this case, you simply have a Cooperative enterprise like Mondragon or John Lewis. Nothing Revolutionary is involved.
All of this lies behind the spontaneous achievements, the constructive work of the Spanish Revolution.No. There were some achievements. But that had to do with economists and technicians. But those achievements were frittered away because there was neither the Gulag nor the Rule of Law. Ironically, it was Franco's technocrats, in the Fifties, who built on the legacy of people like Santillan.
Because they were obviously shite. It is not the case that 'consciousness raising' can overcome 'free-rider' problems. Shooting people can. Sacking them can. But pi-jaw won't cut it.
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).But that character changed as tax payers rebelled. So did kids who didn't want to be sent to Vietnam to get shot.
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).But even the French gave up on that shite. Cheese eating surrender monkeys have a sharp survival instinct.
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.Hilarious! This was the moment when the Labor Party gave up on reducing Income inequality. What followed was twenty five years of internecine conflict till finally Blair got rid of Clause 4- which demands 'common ownership of the means of production'.
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.”Then they understood that their taxes would pay their employer to employ them. Inflation would destroy the gains from their hard fought pay settlements. Pakis would move in next door and open shops and start sending their kids to Private Schools. You can't tell me they're all not claiming State Benefits while working two jobs and operating a market stall on Sundays- in blatant defiance of the Christian Sabbath. Sadly, the National Front refused to accept me as a member though I made these arguments back in 1977. Already a bigoted proponent of Hindutva, I wanted to join an organization which venerated the Swastika and which took a dim view of Pakistanis. I'll never understand why they didn't embrace me warmly.
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.What became of that hippie nonsense? Who knows? Who cares?
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 tendenciesby telling Chomsky to fuck off
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.Nothing stopped Americans from setting up Co-operatives. I believe there are 2 million people employed by this type of Enterprise in America today.
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.Actually, these guys voted for Reagan and Thatcher and Mitterand once they started paying taxes and had some money in the Bank.
On the other hand, the next leader of the Free World is going to be a guy who finished his formal Education in 1968. I don't know which of them it will be. But I am certain that they are as likely to endorse Anarcho-syndicalism as they are to espouse Socioproctological Anakakaism.
Shame but there it is. Chomsky took the wrong turn fifty years ago and contributed only to 'the Left's more suicidal tendencies'
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