Beyond an Ideal: Anarchism as a Political Movement - a Platf

Beyond an Ideal: Anarchism as a Political Movement - a Platform for 21st Century Anarchism

Andrew Fraser (mail@afraser.com), July 2005

"For anarchism, the focus on global capitalism couldn't be more ideal. Yet, when the WTO mobilised tens of thousands of people, anarchism's visible high point was in the form of broken windows. My general excitement about Seattle hasn't dissipated but I am left with the impression of the anarchist activity as either an empty moralism, a practice devoid of theory, and as unwittingly giving energy to reformist politics. Anarchists need to move beyond these traps to formulate a theory of anarchism that will sustain a political movement. Aside from moral outrage, all anarchists have are demonstrations. We protest injustice and move from issue to issue. It is not enough that we do it in a decentralised fashion. We will go from protest to protest until we are tired or other obligations draw us away. We can also fall prey to disappointment over the commonly non-revolutionary outcome of protests. As a result of Seattle, Ralph Nader is running for president, unions are looking to Al Gore to meet their demands, and the hot topic is whether or not China should be a member of the WTO. Furthermore, non-anarchist groups have shaped the anarchist debate. Due to some broken windows, anarchists are forced to debate the role of violence because non-anarchists groups dubbed anarchists as vandals and looters. This is not what we want to put our energy towards. Can we avoid being foot soldiers for more powerful mainstream organisations and shape the anarchist debate ourselves? Anarchists must develop a theory of a free society with the intention of guiding ourselves from the means to the end, otherwise we will not be able to make the necessary step from idea to political movement and will end up fighting for things we do not believe in."

[Rebecca DeWitt, An Anarchist Response to Seattle: What Shall We Do With Anarchism? in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Vol. 4 – No. 1, Spring 2000, online at http://perspectives.anarchist-studies.org/7seattle.htm .]

THE OUTLOOK for anarchism as a political movement could not be more ideal. State socialism is dead as a political movement: a death that is both long overdue and highly deserved. Social Democrats also have run out of ideas following the failure of there more radical rival deology. Nevertheless, people are desperate for an alternative to runaway global capitalism. Anti-capitalism has appeared as a rallying cry for movements across the world, from the Seattle demonstrations onwards. Anti capitalist is often understood to mean anarchism in some form. But what do we have left if our only idea is to be anti-capitalists? We all know what we are against: but, much more importantly, what are we actually for? It is all too easy to criticise rampant global capitalism; but, without advocating an alternative, criticism signifies nothing.

Corporate power is overwhelming today. Across the world, corporate executives decide who and what is employed to do what tasks and to whose ultimate benefit. People matter less than the extension of power to corporate executives and than the growth in owners profit. Social decisions are simply not made under the current economic and political system. That is an extraordinary and amazing reality, or would be if we were not so used to thinking that we have no right to decide for ourselves. It leads to AIDS victims dying in vast numbers across Africa, while the drugs that could save them are sold expensively and in tiny numbers because more revenue is generated for pharmaceutical corporations in that way (by patents). It leads even or especially in developed economies, to up to half of those able to work being left unemployed – on starvation level benefits – because wage bills can be kept down when a reserve army of labour is in place. It leads to children working as slaves for foreign firms, who gleefully export away their former, local, employees jobs. It leads to the hungry suffering malnutrition, while mountains of food is pulped to keep the price artificially high, and because the needy lack the money to make the sale worthwhile. You can only imagine the economic system of Dr. Albert Speer, had it continued undefeated, as being equivalent. In the same way as we express astonishment at the Nazis who carried on quite happily because they were just obeying orders, who in the future will be able to believe that such a system as ours was tolerated today?

All this is well known and, unless and until an alternative is offered, continually re-stating is tedious and pointless.

But alternatives are on offer:

1) Democratic State Socialism (strictly is not an anarchist alternative) – is the same system currently prevailing in Cuba and North Korea, formerly in the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, and Viet Nam; except it has the additional improvement of having democratic elections for each government. Like those embarking on a second marriage, followers of this idea have been afflicted by the triumph of hope over experience. The failure of State Socialism was as much economic as political in nature, and state run enterprises in democratic states were and are every bit as inefficient and internally undemocratic as those in the entirely state socialist dictatorships. Democratising a failed system produces a democratic failed system, leading quickly to a vote to move away from the failed system altogether. State Socialism was most successful precisely when it was at its most tyrannical and terrorising, and failed most when its state terror was most relaxed – the terror was required to oil the wheels of an otherwise hopeless system.

2) Primitivism – involves returning to an ancient rural past of tiny primitive communist hamlets harvesting their own food and making their own clothing and manufactures locally. This will, its supporters admit, involve a massive ‘die-off’ of almost all the present population due to the end of modern food production methods and medical practice. On the plus side, the survivors would eat more wild nuts and berries than at present.

If those were all the alternatives on offer, capitalists should sleep easy in their beds. But there is more:

3) Anarcho-Communism (Libertarian Communism/Municipalism, Social Ecology) – is a less severe Primitivism. Society is to be organised into small communist cities, producing most of their own goods locally. Within each small city, incomes are equal, with distribution made on the communist principal according to need, not effort – there would be no money. Decisions on production and consumption would be made by popular assemblies of all citizens. Exchange between cities would also be on the basis of need, organised by confederations of many cities.

This is the modern version of the Anarchist Communism of Malatesta and Kropotkin, first proposed in 1876.

The obvious drawback is that exchange between localities, which allows economies of scale and is essential for production of many high tech goods, must either be controlled by a distant confederal bureaucracy, as in Democratic State Socialism; or happen through inter-community market trading, which would not be communist. For that reason, global production would be discouraged, even at the cost of economic efficiency. The resulting drop in wealth in the form of consumer goods would be severe, and that, while somewhat mitigated by what would be a more pleasant way of life, presents an enormous handicap to acceptance of this alternative.

4) Parecon (Participatory Economics, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Anarchist Collectivism) – is socialist rather than communist in that incomes are not equal, but are based on work and effort. With this it raises economic units from the small cities of Libertarian Communism to become global in scale. That is the only concession Parecon makes away from Libertarian Communism – markets, in particular, are forbidden. Decisions on consumption and production are instead made by assemblies of consumers and workers, guided by plans drawn up by professional Facilitation Boards’.

If that sounds like Democratic State Socialism, it is because it is a lot like Democratic State Socialism. Consumers and workers councils voting directly on different plans would greatly enhance the democratic nature of the planning decisions, but the economic inefficiencies inherent in planning a complex economy would persist. The major new lesson from the decline of the state socialist economies is that in complex economies, planning is inferior to market mechanisms for allocating resources. A further drawback is that preventing market trading by law enforcement agencies requires restrictions on individual liberty.

This is a more detailed version of the Anarchist Collectivism of Bakunin and his followers (although they did envisage a long transitional phase leading eventually to communism), and of the later Anarcho-Syndicalism. Santillan’s 1936 proposals, for example, appear identical – he named his facilitation boards ‘federal economic councils’.

These are more serious alternatives than the first two – but still does anyone believe that in the near future they could be publicly accepted? It is more important to be right than to be popular, of course – but it is better still to be both, and otherwise capitalists will continue to rest easy. However, a final alternative is on offer:

5) Market Socialism (Economic Democracy, Mutualism) – permits market trading and so removes the two drawbacks under Parecon, but at the cost of fairness: incomes are not based on effort in a market system; some become richer than they deserve while others become poorer. That is only a drawback relative to the systems above, not compared to the current capitalist system, which has much greater unfairness than just those resulting from markets – such as that arising from profit, interest, rent, wage labour.

Those five alternatives are not necessarily entirely distinct categories, but tend to blur into one another with people often picking and choosing particular aspects of each – market socialism with some planning, for example, or local anarcho-communism with planning or markets at the global scale. They do, however, cover the entire spectrum of socialist alternatives to capitalism as far as I am aware. If I am right, and the first four alternatives are substantially flawed, we are left with Market Socialism, or something based around it, as the only theory of a free society that could sustain an anarchist political movement now.

What would a market socialist, libertarian market socialist, society look like?

There would be no capitalists, financiers, landlords, or bosses; and no profit, interest, rent, or wage labour. Instead: worker owned businesses, financed by public banks, and with work in such businesses guaranteed as a right. Individual people and individual businesses would be free to buy and sell from each other at whatever prices they determined, in a market setting or by using non-market (or semi-market) alternatives as they saw fit.

Any profit made by a business would be distributed entirely to its worker-owners, who would also wield exclusive control over how their business was structured and what activities it engaged in. They would not, however, have right of alienation over their business, nor would they be able to hire wage-labourers – every worker would have the right to become a full worker-owner.

The public banks would pay no (real) interest on deposits, and would issue loans without requiring collateral – especially when seeking to achieve full employment. They could, and often would, issue loans far greater than the amount of deposits (if any) that they had – simply by creating money.

Land would be ultimately owned by the local community, but possession-ownership rights would be held by the individual (or co-operative business) using that land. Occupation and use would be a condition of such ownership – absentee landlords and letting at rent would be forbidden. Gains in land value would be retained by the community – land rights would not be alienable, just as in Community Land Trusts today.

Political structures would be as in democratic states just now, except that elected ‘representatives’ would be replaced with instantly recallable mandated delegates. Decisions would be made as locally as possible, with all non-administrative decisions requiring direct approval by citizen assemblies or referenda. Courts would be composed of juries selected by lot, with no presiding judges, and with right of appeal to full citizen assemblies. Political functions would be shrunk to the minimum compatible with life and freedom. All this is standard anarchism, and requires only the implementation of a few short reforms (albeit far reaching reforms) to existing political structures in democratic countries.

One political function required for freedom is ensuring that everyone can work in a worker owned business, either entirely for themselves or as part of a collective, and a major function of public banks would be to issue loans to finance new start up businesses. People would have the right to such work, and public banks would have a duty to provide enough easy credit to fulfil that right, if necessary by creating and lending new money.

In a market system, taxation is required, and it would be fair to levy a land value (ground rent) tax on the users of land that was in demand; and a capital assets (interest) tax on the recipients of loans from public banks, also assumed to be in demand; and perhaps other taxes such as a (possibly progressive) income tax on individuals and businesses, all as decided by citizen assemblies or referenda.

Such a system is remarkably like the current set up today, requiring only a few sensible (but far reaching) reforms:

1) Remove the right of shareholders to elect corporate boards of management or receive dividends: instead transfer those rights to the workers in each corporation, one worker, one vote (and one share of profits).

2) Absolve borrowers of any requirement to repay loan principal or interest to private banks or other creditors: that is, write off all debt. Absolve tenants of any requirement to pay rent, and remove the right of landowners to evict.

3) Create public banks (possibly using some of the structure of the old private banks, which will have just been bankrupted by the above reforms) and give them a mandate to issue unsecured loans to worker owned businesses as required to ensure full employment.

4) Implement democratising/‘anarchist’ reforms to political structures: replace elected ‘representatives’ with instantly recallable mandated delegates, have jury run courts, and so on.

And that’s it – those reforms constitute the revolution. Actually, for completeness, a change to property law would also be required – occupier-owners of land would no longer have the right of alienation, and nor would worker-owners of businesses (any capital gains or land value increase would be retained by the community), and anyone hired as a wage-labourer could (and would) ask a court to grant him full worker-owner rights, and similarly anyone taken on as a tenant could demand full occupier-owner rights.

But not, you will notice, an unimaginable set of reforms, not a utopian system. Everything, economically as well as politically, goes on after the revolution much as it did before – the same corporations produce the same goods, market them through the same networks, in the same political jurisdictions – it is just that capitalist tyranny has vanished. There are no capitalists, financiers, landlords, or bosses; and no profit, interest, rent, or wage labour. People go about their daily business as free people, exploited by no one.

Also, notice all these reforms are potentially popular, right now. The wealthiest 1% of the population will be fanatically opposed to any hint of this, but the other 99% will be receptive. Later, if and when we ever see this platform implemented, some may wish to advance further, to experiment with primitivism or communism or non-market systems. I won’t be among them, but I would wish them the best of luck: after all, under the umbrella of the free society described above, there would be plenty of room for every locality to practice it’s own system, and to spread its ideas further if shown to succeed.

In the meantime, the above platform is hopefully something most anarchists could agree to work towards as, at the very least, an immense improvement on our present circumstances.

Andrew Fraser, Glasgow, July 2005.