Becoming anarchist through action?

I would not conclude the majority are incapable of achieving revolutionary consciousness through thought (rather than action), simply because a revolutionary majority has not happened yet.

Not exactly the same question but there is a good debate audio recording here
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/audio/can-majority-workers-develop-socialist-conciousness-under-capitalism/

I mean, there's not that many anarchists around at the moment, so it's not really ideal conditions for studying how people become anarchists, and I'm not too aware of any in-depth sociological studies that could help answer the question, so I'm kind of going off "I reckons" here, but I strongly suspect that if you looked at anarchists in the UK, there's probably like a cluster or cohort who got involved off the back of the 2010/11 student movement, then another bunch who came in through like Reclaim the Streets and summit protests, and then others who came in through the poll tax struggle before that. Similarly, it's my impression that if you did a survey of US anarchists, you might well find people who came in through anti-Trump and anti-fascist stuff from the last few years, then others who came in through BLM before that, and then probably a fairly sizeable number who first came in through Occupy, I think.

About strikes, I think if nothing else they have the virtue of clarifying what side people are on. Someone may start out thinking that Muslims or Mexicans or whoever are their enemy, but they're clearly not the main enemy in a strike situation, and may well be people who are important to keep on side; similarly, you might go into a strike thinking that Green politicians are good, or that Labour politicians are on the side of the workers, and then be forced to re-evaluate those ideas by the course of events. It might be something of a cliche, but I think the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and how attitudes to homosexuality changed over the course of the miners' strike is a really classic example of some of this stuff.

And none of that means that people will automatically become anarchists, and I'm sure that there's all sorts of things that can complicate the picture (immigrant workers being pressured into scabbing, for example). But I think that having experience of stuff like strikes can lead to having a general level of class consciousness in a basic "us vs them" way, understanding the importance of solidarity and mutual aid, and so on, and that if that's your starting point it's a lot easier to become an anarchist from there. Looking at really committed, long-term anarchist activists in the UK, like Stuart Christie or Colin Parker, I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of them came out of that culture.

Historically, I think Spain's probably the best place to study how people became anarchists, although there were also big movements in lots of other places. But in Spain especially, I think it's hard to separate out the popularity of anarchism as an idea from the role that the CNT played in action and struggle. There's probably all sorts of stuff you can read on this, although not much comes to mind off the top of my head - maybe Blood of Spain?

In terms of more contemporary examples, you could look at the Vaughn 17? Now, I don't know what kind of political backgrounds the Vaughn defendants had prior to taking part in the uprising - it seems fairly unlikely that any of them would have consciously described themselves as anarchists, but who knows? - and I don't know for sure whether any of them would specifically describe themselves as anarchists today, but if you look at their writings you can see that several of them have definitely come to a greater engagement with anarchism, for instance Kevin Berry or Robert Hernandez. Robert Hernandez' statement is actually quite relevant here, come to think of it:
"Some events in life can change a person dramatically and these experiences we can carry for a lifetime...Truth is, I believed the Delaware Department of Corrections is the most corrupt, but I’ve come to learn that all of America’s Department of Corrections are unstable and unjust... We should never forget those individuals who were crucified by society for hope in a better tomorrow, a better system for all and for truth.

The prison culture teaches us to be tough, cruel and selfish to survive. However, may we inspire a new culture not of color, race, status, etc, but one of brotherhood...

The moments I spent with my seventeen comrades I learned so much. I truly can say I was inspired to stand for something far greater by Zach and Fariha, the supporters and true soldiers on the front lines. Anonymous anarchists.

I was all about my own people, brown pride, my attitude was different, but through this experience, I am reborn, liberated. I truly can say I embrace my brothers not by color or set clique, no, no, no. I embrace my brothers, black, white, brown as one."

I think Martin Glaberman is probably also worth looking into on this point.

I just wrote a long response to this but deleted it because I wasn't happy with it, then R Totale said what I was trying to, but much better.

On a personal level, I had fairly light engagement with anarchism through punk records and Howard Zinn, but it wasn't until being tear gassed at a demo against the Iraq War that I started seriously engaging with radical theory and sussing out avenues to organize. I know a lot of people with similar stories.

At one time trade unions were perceived a "schools for socialism". That view has disappeared by experience. There will always be a class struggle to protect what little we have and to gain a little more but without a clear objective to end it class division, the class struggle is a never-ending treadmill, is it not?

Ideas still has to link up with practical struggle and the question is , does militancy lead to revolutionary ideas. As you all know, the SPGB answer is that there is no automaticity about it. The role of a political party such as ours or any anarchist group is to provide political education.

If action led to anarchist/socialist understanding, the question becomes why there is not more of us because various actions have been engaged in by many many millions. Socialist consciousness comes from life experience, but that being said, why are not more people achieving this consciousness?

Anton Pannekoek in his Workers Council pamphlet explains

“[class consciousness ] is not learned from books or through courses on theory and political formation, but through real life practice of the class struggle”

Paul Mattick with his understanding to his own political experiences wrote:

“There is no evidence that the last hundred years of labour strife have led to the revolutionizing of the working class in the sense of a growing willingness to do away with the capitalist system…In times of depression no less in than these of prosperity, the continuing confrontations of labor and capital have led not to an political radicalization of the working class , but to an intensified insistence upon better accommodations within the capitalist system…No matter how much he [the worker] may emancipate himself ideologically, for all practical purposes he must proceed as if he were still under the sway of bourgeois ideology. He may realize that his individual needs can only be assured by collective class actions, but he will still be forced to attend to his immediate needs as an individual. It is this situation, rather than some conditioned inability to transcend capitalism. He may realize that his individual needs can only be assured by collective class actions, but he will still be forced to attend to his immediate needs as an individual. It is this situation, rather than some conditioned inability to transcend capitalist ideology, that makes the workers reluctant to express and to act upon their anti-capitalist attitudes ” - Marxism, Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie

Wilhelm Reich in Sex-Pol describes class consciousness in these terms:
“Question: If two human beings, A and B, are starving, one of them may accept his fate, refuse to steal, and take to begging or die from hunger, while the other may take the law into his own hands in order to obtain food. A large part of the proletariat, often called the lumpenproletariat, live according to the principles of B. Which of the two types has more elements of class consciousness in him? Stealing is not yet a sign of class consciousness but a brief moment of reflection shows, despite our inner moral resistance, that the man who refuses to submit to law and steals when he is hungry, that’s to say, the man who manifests a will to live, has more energy and fight in him than the one who lies down unprotesting on the butchers slab...we have said that stealing is not yet class consciousness. A brick is not yet a house, but you use bricks to build a house”

On personal level, every one of us involved have individual separate and different motivations of why we developed our ideas and reached particular conclusions. But when it comes to social change, we have to wonder about what moves people collectively and towards a potential revolutionary consciousness because i have no clear definitive answer. I can only assist in laying down the foundations for the success (as i see it) of the future awakening of the working class. Others on this website hold differently and prepare in their own way. But we both wait, because we know we cannot impose a voluntary society on an unwilling or unenlightened majority of fellow-workers.

That Reich quote's quite a good way of looking at it - a brick isn't a house, but if you try and build a house with no bricks you're likely to run into trouble. I also think that consciousness alone is only one part of the issue. Some people have phrased it as being about the "three Cs" of consciousness, confidence, and competence, which is perhaps a bit too neat but I think is still a useful way of thinking about things. Or, just to check off one more square on my anarchist cliche bingo card, there's that Solidarity bit about "Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification." I think that using either of those formulations is a good starting point for evaluating the importance of action.

The word itself tends to be a bit of a joke nowadays, but I still think that praxis in the full sense - like, acting in a way that's informed by your understanding of the world, and then modifying that understanding based on your actions and their effects - is one of the most vital concepts for socialists.

"I mean, there's not that many anarchists around at the moment, so it's not really ideal conditions for studying how people become anarchists, and I'm not too aware of any in-depth sociological studies that could help answer the question, so I'm kind of going off "I reckons" here, but I strongly suspect that if you looked at anarchists in the UK, there's probably like a cluster or cohort who got involved off the back of the 2010/11 student movement, then another bunch who came in through like Reclaim the Streets and summit protests, and then others who came in through the poll tax struggle before that. Similarly, it's my impression that if you did a survey of US anarchists, you might well find people who came in through anti-Trump and anti-fascist stuff from the last few years, then others who came in through BLM before that, and then probably a fairly sizeable number who first came in through Occupy, I think."

But are many of them really 'anarchists'? Its more likely for most an identity - a label covering confusion - heavily informed by an ultra liberal conception of anarchism - about perfecting dimensions of bourgeois society - and informed by identity politics courtesy of the massive corporate media predominance and cultural/education apparatus impact and the middle class/student social base of many focusing on hierarchies of oppression rather than the class struggle and the legacy of deep state operations - the CIA's operation Chaos - which promoted identity politics such as the Women's movement to disrupt new left groups in the early 70's. In this period such groups particularly in the US were interwoven with the industrial insurgency and wildcat strike movement. There is an explosive new book about another facet of Operation Chaos - The CIA played key role in the promotion of LSD and engineering of the Manson Family as a sort of death squad to wipe out key figures in the Anti-Vietnam War and other movements.
When anarchist movements developed in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries - they were inter woven with the emergence of mass syndicalist union movements and major upsurge in the class struggle - key figures such as Malatesta, Rudolph Rocker, George Maximoff etc and their theoretical writings were connected with it. Today in the Anglo World - there is no mass syndicalist union movement and most books about Anarchism are often written by academics often presenting an ultra liberal conception of anarchism garnished with identity politics and oppression mongering connected with their middle class situation. An example is 'Unruly Equality: US Anarchism in the 20th Century' by Andrew Cornell See review in Rebel Worker Vol.34 No.2 (226) July-Aug 2016 on web site www.rebelworker.org These books just add to this confusion about Anarchism many of these people have. Also you have to take account of the Stalinist legacy upon the leftist milieu - in many so called anarchist groups which have sprung up in the Anglo World- aspects of identity politics are seen as beyond debate and discussion. You see this sort of thing with the BLM phenomena.

When you refer to an article in your organ, why not give the specific link for the issue in question (which in this case is http://www.rebelworker.org/archive/REBEL%20WORKER%20ARCHIVE/rw%20july-aug%202016.pdf )? Would that not make things easier for prospective readers of it?

explainthingstome

I think virtually every anti-communist I've talked to have said "you can't solve the free-rider problem".

We have plenty of free riders under capitlaism, that's why they invest so much in telling us how important and worthy they are.

A lot of people I've met seem to think that communists will take away what they have worked hard for. I keep trying to explain to them:, what do you think every employer you've ever had does?

Very belated reply: yeah, both what jef said (we've still got both landlords and royals, how's that for a free rider problem?), and yeah, I think what you say at the end about "Do you think that people who believe in the unfixable free-rider problem would abandon their idea in a similar way? I.e. that they would change their mind despite their "lesson" not actually relating to the issue?" is right - like, I'm not a communist because I believe I've found, or even that a communist society would necessarily find, a perfect solution to the free-rider problem, but my fundamental orientation is that the things wrong with capitalism are so bad, and the need for an alternative society is so great, that a communist society would be much better even if there were a great deal of unproductive people who consumed socially produced resources without contributing anything themselves. Like, that doesn't sound ideal to me, but we're living in a society that can't solve the "economically driven to re-open businesses in the middle of a pandemic" and "compelled to put short-term economic growth ahead of long-term considerations to the point of destroying the entire ecosystems" problems, which seem a bit more dire. I think if you basically don't like the idea of communism and are looking for objections, then that stuff sounds convincing, but if you can see the basic appeal then it isn't.

Anyway, was also meaning to return to this thread to say that Rosa Luxemburg might also be worth looking at for the inter-relation of action and consciousness - see for instance this: https://imhojournal.org/articles/luxemburgs-concept-of-freedom-by-sevgi-dogan/ Or even this, from a trot site but Michael Lowy's one of the more interesting trot writers imo: https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2153

explainthingstome

R Totale

we've still got both landlords and royals, how's that for a free rider problem?

Well the amount of free riders under capitalism is pretty low, as most people depend on wages. That wouldn't be the case under communism, with billions of potential "royals". I'm not aiming to start a debate about free access as I am in favour of free access, but I felt obliged to mention my problem with your argument.

Everyone who makes money from capital rather than wage labour is a free rider. Every landlord (even if it is a buy-to-let and it is their 'pension'), every boss and so on. If so many of us work in a system which gives us nothing why do you assume that no one would work when we had a nice system? People don't want to work poinbtless jobs making other people rich so they are forced to by the need for money. Why transplant that cynical view of human nature that a capiltaist needss to have onto a future human society?
I don't think you have really found a problem with RT's argument. We already have free riders, communism would mean that those free riders wouldn't be able to profit from it.

I can imagine old bosses won't want to work, I like to think we'll just have a few rooms full of gold bars and we can let them sit on little piles of them screaming "mine!" until they starve or come to their senses.

R Totale

I think if you basically don't like the idea of communism and are looking for objections, then that stuff sounds convincing, but if you can see the basic appeal then it isn't.

Do you think that general objections to communism are fueled not by scepticism towards something that "sounds too good to be true", but by a resentment towards the very idea of having a society without classes or wages etc?

One cliché that I've sometimes heard is "It's a nice idea and all but it would never work". That sounds like a sentiment that finds communism good but utopian rather than realistic and bad.[/quote]
I think RT is right here, I don't think many people would actually cite the free rider 'problem' and then accept the argument and beciome communists, but it is posisble.

It's a bit like people who uset 'the tragedy of the commons' as an argument for private ownership, it actually shows: capitalists cannot self-regulate; the market cannot be used to regulate the use of resources; most of allit proves nothing at all about communism because all these people were competing on a capitlaist market and were subject to its forces.

explainthingstome

jef costello

I don't think you have really found a problem with RT's argument. We already have free riders, communism would mean that those free riders wouldn't be able to profit from it.

While I agree that free access would work, free riders of a communist society do "profit" in a material sense. That's literally what free access means - you're free to consume but not forced to work.

Maybe in some ways, but I think it is worth pointing out that they would be unable to "profit" in the same way that landlords or monarchs or shareholders or whoever else "profits" in this society, so we're talking about very different things. If we have free access to goods, and someone decides that they're not going to work and that they're going to stockpile fifty peaches when everyone else only takes one or two, they don't thereby acquire the ability to order around other people who need to trade their labour power for peaches; all that they'd get in that scenario is a kitchen full of mouldy peaches.

jef costello

I think RT is right here, I don't think many people would actually cite the free rider 'problem' and then accept the argument

So you are saying that most people who bring up the free rider problem wouldn't be able to be convinced by a counter-argument?

I mean, I think part of it is that we don't tend to "have" one idea on its own, people tend to have whole worldviews that fit together. If you have a view of human nature that says people are naturally greedy, lazy and all the rest of it, then you're likely to be more bothered about ideas like the free rider problem; if you think that people tend to quite enjoy being creative and productive and taking care of each other and being appreciated, then it just doesn't seem like as much of a problem. So really you're not arguing this one particular issue as much as the whole worldviews that underlie it.

explainthingstome

R Totale

people tend to quite enjoy being creative and productive and taking care of each other and being appreciated

Creative/productive in what field (plumbing, art, sports)?

I mean, I never said any one field. Some people like gardening, some people like knitting, some people like playing football, some people like writing poetry, some people like tagging, some people like making videos about playing Minecraft or makeup tutorials. Obviously, some of these things are more immediately productive than others in a strict material sense, but I think taking enjoyment in doing or creating something that can be enjoyed and appreciated by others is a pretty common instinct or drive or whatever.