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Title: Workers’ Organisation Author: Pëtr Kropotkin Date: 10th and 24th December 1881 Language: en Topics: organization, labor organizing, workers Source: Le Revolté Notes: Translation by James Bar Bowen.
As bourgeois society becomes more and more chaotic, as States fall
apart, and as one can sense a coming revolution in Europe, we perceive
in the hearts of the workers of all countries an ever increasing desire
to unite, to stand shoulder to shoulder, to organise. In France
particularly, where all workers’ organisations were crushed, dismantled
and thrown to the four winds after the fall of the Commune, this desire
is ever more visible. In almost every industrial town there is a
movement to reach agreements and to unite; and even in the villages,
according to reports from the most trusted observers, the workers are
demanding nothing less than the development of institutions whose sole
purpose is the defence of workers’ rights.
The results that have been achieved in this area over the last three
years have certainly been significant. However, if we look at the
enormity of the task incumbent on the revolutionary socialist party, if
we compare our meagre resources with those available to our adversaries,
if we honestly face up to the work that we still have to do, in order
that, in four or five years’ time, on the day of the revolution, we can
offer a real force capable of marching resolutely towards the demolition
of the old social order—if we take that into account, we have to admit
that the amount of work left to do is still immense and that we have
scarcely begun the creation of a true workers’ movement: the great
working masses are still a long way removed from the workers’ movement
inaugurated three years ago. The collectivists, in spite of the fact
that they give themselves the pretentious name “Workers’ Party,” are
still not seeing the rush of workers to their organisation that they
envisaged when they first launched their electoral campaign; and, as
they lean more and more towards the Radical Party, they lose ground
instead of gaining it. As for the anarchist groups, most of them are not
yet in sustained daily contact with the majority of workers who, of
course, are the only ones who can give the impetus to and implement the
action necessary for any party, whether in the field of theoretical
propaganda and ideas or in the field of concrete political action.
Well, let us leave these people to their illusions, if that is what they
want. We prefer to face up to the task in all its enormity; and, instead
of prematurely announcing our victory, we prefer to propose the
following questions: what do we need to do to develop our organisations
much further than at present? What do we need to do to extend our sphere
of influence to the whole of the mass of workers, with the objective of
creating a conscious and invincible force on the day of the revolution,
in order to achieve the aspirations of the working class?
---
It appears to us that an essential point that has been ignored up till
now but which needs to be explored before we go any further is this: for
any organisation to be able to achieve wider development, to become a
force, it is important for those at the forefront of the movement to be
clear as to what is the final objective of the organisation they have
created; and that, once this objective has been agreed upon—specify a
proposed course of action in conformity with the ends. This prior
reasoning is clearly an indispensable precondition if the organisation
is going to have any chance of success, and essentially all of the
organisations have, up to now, never proceeded differently. Take the
Conservatives, the Bonapartists, the Opportunists, the Radicals, the
political conspirators of previous eras—each one of their parties has a
well-defined objective and their means of action are absolutely in
accordance with this objective.
It would take too long to analyse here the goals and methods of each of
the parties. Therefore, I will explore just one illustrative example
here and let it stand as an example for all. Let us take, by way of
example, the Radical or intransigent party.
Their goal is well defined: the Radicals tell us that they wish to
abolish personal government and to install in France a democratic
republic copied from the US model. Abolition of the Senate, a single
chamber, elected by the simple means of universal suffrage; separation
of Church and State; absolute freedom of the press, of speech and of
association; regional autonomy; a national army. These are the most
important features of their programme. “And will the worker be happier
under this regime or not? And as a result, will he cease to be a
wage-earner at the mercy of his boss?…” These questions do not really
interest them; these things can be sorted out at a later date, they
reply. The social question is reduced in importance to something that
can be settled some time in the future by the democratic State. It is
not a question for them of overturning existing institutions: it is
simply a matter of modifying them; and a legislative assembly could,
according to them, do this easily. All of their political programme can
be implemented by means of decrees, and all that needs to happen—they
say—is that power needs to be wrenched from the hands of those who
currently hold it and passed into the hands of the Radical Party.
This is their goal. Whether it is achievable or not is another question;
but what is important to us is to establish whether their means are in
accordance with their ends. As advocates of political reform, they have
constituted themselves as a political party and are working towards the
conquest of power. Envisaging the realignment of the centre of
governmental power towards a democratic future, with a view to getting
as many Members as possible elected to the Chamber, in local councils
and in all of the government institutions and to become the bigwigs in
these positions of power. Since their enemy is the current
administration, they organise against this administration, boldly
declaring war on it and preparing for it to fall.
Property, in their eyes, is sacrosanct, and they do not wish to oppose
it by any means: all their efforts are directed towards seizing power in
government. If they appeal to the people and promise them economic
reforms, it is only with the intention of overturning the current
government and putting in its place a more democratic one.
This political programme is very definitely not what we are working for.
What is clear to us is that it is not possible to implement real social
change without the regime of property undergoing a profound
transformation. However, while having strong criticisms of this
programme, we have to agree that the means of action proposed by this
party are in accordance with its proposed goals: these are the goals,
and that is the organisation proposing to achieve them!
---
What then is the objective of the workers’ organisation? And what means
of action and modes of organisation should they employ?
The objective for which the French workers wish to organise has only
ever been vaguely articulated up until now. However, there are two main
points about which there definitely remains no doubt. The workers’
Congresses have managed to articulate them, after long discussions, and
the resolutions of the Congresses on this subject repeatedly receive the
approval of the workers. The two points are as follows: the first is
common ownership as opposed to private property; and the second is
affirmation that this change of regime regarding property can only be
implemented by revolutionary means. The abolition of private property is
the goal, and the social revolution is the means. These are the two
agreed points, eloquently summed up, adopted by those at the forefront
of the workers’ movement. The communist-anarchists have honed these
points and have also developed a wider political programme: they believe
in a more complete abolition of private property than that proposed by
the collectivists, and they also include in their goals the abolition of
the State and the spread of revolutionary propaganda. However, there is
one thing upon which we all agree (or rather did agree before the
appearance of the minimum programme) and that is that the goal of the
workers’ organisation should be the economic revolution, the
socialrevolution.
A whole new world opens up in the light of these resolutions from the
workers’ Congresses. The French proletariat thus announces that it is
not against one government or another that it declares war. It takes the
question from a much wider and more rational perspective: it is against
the holders of capital, be they blue, red or white, that they wish to
declare war. It is not a political party that they seek to form either:
it is a party of economic struggle. It is no longer democratic reform
that they demand: it is a complete economic revolution, the social
revolution. The enemy is no longer M. Gambetta nor M. Clemenceau; the
enemy is capital, along with all the Gambettas and the Clemenceaus from
today or in the future who seek to uphold it or to serve it. The enemy
is the boss, the capitalist, the financier—all the parasites who live at
the expense of the rest of us and whose wealth is created from the sweat
and the blood of the worker. The enemy is the whole of bourgeois society
and the goal is to overthrow it. It is not enough to simply overthrow a
government. The problem is greater than that: it is necessary to seize
all of the wealth of society, if necessary doing so over the corpse of
the bourgeoisie, with the intention of returning all of society’s wealth
to those who produced it, the workers with their calloused hands, those
who have never had enough.
This is the goal. And now that the goal has been established, the means
of action are also obvious. The workers declaring war on capital? In
order to bring it down completely? Yes. From today onwards, they must
prepare themselves without wasting a single moment: they must engage in
the struggle against capital. Of course, the Radical Party, for example,
does not expect that the day of the revolution will simply fall from the
sky, so that they can then declare war on the government that they wish
to overthrow. They continue their struggle at all times, taking neither
respite nor repose: they do not miss a single opportunity to fight this
war, and if the opportunity to fight does not present itself, they
create it, and they are right to do so, because it is only through a
constant series of skirmishes, only by means of repeated acts of war,
undertaken daily and at every opportunity that one can prepare for the
decisive battle and the victory. We who have declared war on capital
must do the same with the bourgeoisie if our declarations are not to
constitute empty words. If we wish to prepare for the day of the battle
[and] our victory over capital, we must, from this day onward begin to
skirmish, to harass the enemy at every opportunity, to make them seethe
and rage, to exhaust them with the struggle, to demoralise them. We must
never lose sight of the main enemy: capitalism, exploitation. And we
must never become put off by the enemy’s distractions and diversions.
The State will, of necessity, play its part in this war because, if it
is in any way possible to declare war on the State without taking on
capital at the same time, it is absolutely impossible to declare war on
capital without striking out at the State at the same time.
What means of action should we employ in this war? If our goal is simply
to declare this war, then we can simply create conflict—we have the
means to do this: indeed, they are obvious. Each group of workers will
find them where they are, appropriate to local circumstance, rising from
the very conditions created in each locality. Striking will of course be
one of the means of agitation and action, and this will be discussed in
a later article, but a thousand other tactics, as yet unthought-of and
unexpressed in print, will also be available to us at the sites of
conflict. The main thing is to carry the following idea forward:
The enemy on whom we declare war is capital, and it is against capital
that we will direct all our efforts, taking care not to become
distracted from our goal by the phony campaigns and arguments of the
political parties. The great struggle that we are preparing for is
essentially economic, and so it is on the economic terrain that we
should focus our activities.
If we place ourselves on this terrain, we will see that the great mass
of workers will come and join our ranks, and that they will assemble
under the flag of the League of Workers. Thus we will become a powerful
force which will, on the day of the revolution, impose its will upon
exploiters of every sort.
In the last issue, Le Révolté showed that a party which proposes a
social revolution as its goal, and which seeks to seize capital from the
hands of its current holders must, of necessity, and from this day
onwards, position itself at the centre of the struggle against capital.
If it wishes that the next revolution should take place against the
regime of property and that the watchword of the next call to arms
should necessarily be one calling for the expropriation of society’s
wealth from the capitalists, the struggle must, on all fronts, be a
struggle against the capitalists.
Some object that the great majority of workers are not sufficiently
aware of the situation imposed upon them by the holders of capital: “The
workers have not yet understood,” they say, “that the true enemy of the
worker, of the whole of society, of progress, and of liberty is the
capitalist; and the workers allow themselves to be drawn too easily by
the bourgeoisie into fighting miserable battles whose focus is solely
upon bourgeois politics.” But if this is true—if it is true that the
worker all too often drops his prey in order to chase shadows; if it is
true that all too often he expends his energies against those who, of
course, are also his enemies, but he does not realise that he actually
needs to bring the capitalist to his knees—then we too are guilty of
chasing shadows, since we have failed to identify the workers’ true
enemies. The formation of a new politicalparty is not the way to bring
the economic question out into the open. If the great majority of
workers is not sufficiently aware of the importance of the economic
question (a fact about which we anarchists remain in no doubt), then
relegating this question itself to the background is definitely not
going to highlight its importance in the eyes of the workers. If this
misconception exists, we must work against it, not preserve and
perpetuate it.
---
Putting this objection to one side, we must now discuss the diverse
characteristics of the struggle against capitalism. Our readers of
course realise that such a discussion should not take place in a
newspaper. It is actually on the ground, among those groups themselves,
with full knowledge of local circumstances and spurred on by changing
conditions that the question of practical action should be discussed. In
The Spirit of Revolt, we showed how the peasants in the last century and
the revolutionary bourgeoisie managed to develop a current of ideas
directed against the nobility and the royals. In our articles on the
Agrarian League in Ireland, we showed how the Irish people have managed
to organise themselves to fight on a daily basis a relentless and
merciless war against the ruling class. Taking inspiration from this, we
must find the means to fight against the boss and the capitalist in ways
appropriate to each locality. What may work perfectly in Ireland may not
work in France, and what may give great results in one country may fail
in another. Moreover, it is not through following the advice of a
newspaper that groups of activists will manage to find the best ways to
fight. It is by posing questions in the light of local circumstances for
each group; it is by discussing in depth; it is by taking inspiration
from events which, at any given moment, may excite local interest, and
by looking closely at their own situation that they will find the
methods of action most appropriate for their own locality.
However, there remains one tactic in the revolutionary struggle about
which Le Révolté is willing to give its opinion. This is not because
this is a superior method, much less the only valid tactic. But it is a
weapon that workers wield in different contexts, wherever they may be,
and it is a weapon that can be drawn at any time, according to
circumstance. This weapon is the strike!
It is, however, even more necessary to speak of it today because, for
some time now, the ideologues and the false friends of the workers have
campaigned covertly against the use of the strike, with a view to
turning the working class away from this form of struggle and
railroading them down a more “political” path. The result of this has
been that recently strikes have broken out all over France, and those
who have inscribed upon their banners that the emancipation of the
workers must be achieved by the workers themselves are now maintaining a
healthy distance between themselves and the struggle being undertaken by
their brothers and sisters; they are also maintaining for themselves a
distance from the subsequent privations suffered by the workers, be
these in the form of the sabres of the gendarmes, the knives of the
foremen or the sentences of the judges.
It is fashionable these days to say that the strike is not a way to
emancipate the worker, so we should not bother with it. Well, let us
just have a closer look at this objection.
Of course, going on strike is not, in itself, a means of emancipation.
It is [only] by revolution, by expropriating society’s wealth and
putting it at the disposal of everyone, that the workers will break
their chains. But does it follow that they should wait with folded arms
until the day of the revolution? In order to be able to make revolution,
the mass of workers must organise themselves, and resistance and the
strike are excellent means by which workers can organise. Indeed, they
have a great advantage over the tactics that are being proposed at the
moment (workers’ representatives, constitution of a workers’ political
party, etc.) which do not actually derail the movement but serve to keep
it perpetually in thrall to its principal enemy, the capitalist. The
strike and resistance funds provide the means to organise not only the
socialist converts (these seek each other out and organise themselves
anyway) but especially those who are not yet converted, even though they
really should be.
Indeed, strikes break out all over the place. However, isolated and
abandoned to their own fate, they fail all too often. What the workers
who go on strike really need to do is to organise themselves, to
communicate among themselves, and they will welcome with open arms
anyone who comes and offers help to build the organisation that they
lack. The task is immense: there is so much work to do for every man and
woman devoted to the workers’ cause, and the results of this
organisational work will of course prove enormously satisfying to all
those who put their weight behind the movement. What is required is to
build resistance associations for each trade in each town, to create
resistance funds and fight against the exploiters, to unify
[solidariser] the workers’ organisations of each town and trade and to
put them in contact with those of other towns, to federate across
France, to federate across borders, internationally. The concept of
workers’ solidarity must become more than just a saying: it must become
a daily reality for all trades and all nations. In the beginning, the
International faced national and local prejudices, rivalry between
trades, and so on; and yes—and this is perhaps one of the greatest
services the International has done for us—these rivalries and these
prejudices were overcome, and we really did witness workers from distant
countries and trades, who had previously been in conflict, now working
together. The result of this, let us not forget, was achieved by
organisations emerging from and owing their very existence to the great
strikes of the time. It is through the organisation of resistance to the
boss that the International managed to gather together more than two
million workers and to create a powerful force before which both
bourgeoisie and governments trembled.
---
“But the strike,” the theoreticians tell us, “only addresses the selfish
interests of the worker.” In the first place, it is not egotism which
drives the worker to strike: he is driven by misery, by the overarching
necessity to raise wages in line with food prices. If he endures months
of privation during a strike, it is not with a view to becoming another
petty bourgeois: it is to avoid dying of starvation, himself, his wife,
his children. And then, far from developing egotistical instincts, the
strike serves to develop the sense of solidarity which emerges from the
very heart of the organisation. How often have we seen the starving
share their meagre earnings with their striking comrades! Just recently,
the building workers of Barcelona donated as much as half their scant
wages to strikers campaigning for a nine-and-a-half hour day (and we
should acknowledge in passing that they succeeded, whereas if they had
followed the parliamentary route, they would still be working eleven or
twelve hours a day). At no time in history has solidarity among the
working classes been practised at such a developed level as during
strikes called by the International.
Lastly, the best evidence against the accusation levelled at the strike
that it is purely a selfish tactic is of course the history of the
International. The International was born from strikes; at root, it was
a strikers’ organisation, right up until the bourgeoisie, aided by a few
ambitious types, managed to draw a part of the Association into
parliamentary struggles. And, at the same time, it is precisely this
organisation, by means of its local sections and its congresses, which
managed to elaborate the wider principles of modern socialism which
today gives us our strength; for—with all due respect to the so-called
scientific socialists—until the present there has not been a single idea
on socialism which has not been expressed in the Congresses of the
International. The practice of going on strike did not hinder different
sections within the International from addressing the social question in
all its complexity. On the contrary, it helped it as well as
simultaneously spreading the wider ideas among the masses.
---
Others have also often been heard to say that the strike does not awaken
the revolutionary spirit. In the current climate, we would have to say
that the opposite is true. There is hardly a strike called these days
which does not see the arrival of troops, the exchange of blows, and
numerous acts of revolt. Some fight the soldiers, others march on the
factories; in 1873 in Spain, the strikers at Alcoy declared the Commune
and fired on the bourgeoisie; [in 1877] at Pittsburgh in the USA, the
strikers found themselves masters of a territory as large as France, and
the strike became the catalyst for a general uprising; in Ireland, the
striking farm workers found themselves in open confrontation with the
State. Thanks to government intervention, the factory rebel becomes a
rebel against the State. Today, he finds ranged before him soldiers who
will tamely obey the orders of their officers to shoot. But the use of
troops to suppress strikes will only serve to “demoralise,” that is to
say, to moralise the soldier; as a result, the soldier will lay down his
arms and refuse to fight against his insurgent brothers.
In the end, the strike itself, the days without work or bread, spent in
these opulent streets of limitless luxury and the vices of the
bourgeoisie, will do more for the propagation of socialist ideas than
all manner of public meetings in times of relative social harmony. Such
is the power of these ideas that one fine day the strikers of Ostrau in
Austria will requisition all the food in the town’s shops and declare
their right to society’s wealth.
---
But the strike, we must be clear, is not the only engine of war in the
struggle against capital. In a strike, it is the workers as a whole who
are taking up the fight; but there is also a role for groups and even
individuals; and the ways in which they may act and be effective can
vary infinitely according to local circumstances and the needs of the
moment and the situation. It would be pointless to analyse these roles
here since each group will find new and original ways to further the
workers’ cause as it becomes active and effective in their own part of
the great labour movement. The most important thing for us to do here is
to agree upon the following principles:
The goal of the revolution is the expropriation of the holders of
society’s wealth, and it is against these holders that we must organise.
We must marshal all of our efforts with the aim of creating a vast
workers’ organisation to pursue this goal. The organisation of
resistance [to] and war on capital must be the principal objective of
the workers’ organisation, and its methods must be informed not by the
pointless struggles of bourgeois politics but the struggle, by all of
the means possible, against those who currently hold society’s
wealth—and the strike is an excellent means of organisation and one of
the most powerful weapons in the struggle.
If we manage, over the course of the next few years, to create such an
organisation, we can be sure that the next revolution will not fail: the
precious blood of the people will not be spilled in vain, and the
worker, currently a slave, will emerge victorious from the conflict and
will commence a new era in the development of human society based on
Equality, Solidarity and Labour.