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Title: Going Beyond Picking Rulers Author: Anarcho Date: April 5, 2011 Language: en Topics: government, democracy, Britain Source: Retrieved on 5th February 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=514
The ConDem’s are continuing the grand tradition of all governments in
proving anarchists right. Our so-called representatives are able to
ignore their manifestos, are free to break their solemn pre-election
pledges and vote as they like – all in the interests of capital.
The Lib-Dems are just the latest of a long line of politicians who say
one thing during elections and then turn round and do the exact opposite
once in office. The Tories, as expected, are imposing another top-down
reorganisation of the NHS in England in order to privatise it after
proclaiming the NHS was safe in their hands in the election. In America,
Republican governors are trying to strip unionised workers of their
rights – after failing to mention any of this in their election.
Anarchists are not surprised. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the father of
anarchism, was right – nothing resembles a monarchy more than
centralised democracy for “the Representatives, once elected, are the
masters; all the rest obey. They are subjects, to be governed and to be
taxed.”[1] A nation as one unit picking its rulers every few years is no
democracy. Every government confirms Proudhon’s dismissal of laws:
“Spider webs for the rich and powerful, steel chains for the weak and
poor, fishing nets in the hands of the Government.”[2] The ConDem’s
innovation is to do this with cries of “fairness” (in order to level
working class people down) and “we are all in it together” (while
cutting corporation tax and planning to reduce the top-rate of tax for
high earners).
Is there an alternative to a system which reduces liberty to the ability
“to pick rulers”[3] every four or five years?
First, we need to understand what the state is and why it is structured
as it.
For Proudhon the state “is the EXTERNAL constitution of the social
power” by which “the people does not govern itself.” It “rests then on
this hypothesis: that a people, that the collective being which we call
society, cannot govern itself, think, act, express itself, unaided.”[4]
“Any logical and straightforward theory of the State,” argued Michael
Bakunin, “is essentially founded upon the principle of authority, that
is the eminently theological, metaphysical, and political idea that the
masses, always incapable of governing themselves, must at all times
submit to the beneficent yoke of a wisdom and a justice imposed upon
them, in some way or other, from above.”[5]
The reason why the state is structured hierarchically is not hard to
understand given its role. “In a society based on the principle of
inequality of conditions,” Proudhon argued, government is “a system of
insurance for the class which exploits and owns against that which is
exploited and owns nothing.” It is “inevitably enchained to capital and
directed against the proletariat.”[6] For if the people did govern
themselves then it is unlikely they would tolerate economic rule by the
capitalist class:
“To attack the central power, to strip it of its prerogatives, to
decentralise, to dissolve authority, would have been to abandon to the
people the control of its affairs, to run the risk of a truly popular
revolution. That is why the bourgeoisie sought to reinforce the central
government even more.”[7]
Thus anarchists are against the state because it is an instrument of
class rule, a social structure organised to ensure centralised,
hierarchical top-down power and the exclusion of the people. We “deny
the State” because we “affirm, on the contrary, that the people, that
society, that the mass, can and ought to govern itself by itself” and
“we affirm that which the founders of States have never believed in, the
personality and autonomy of the masses.” So “no establishment of
authority, no organisation of the collective force from without, is
henceforth possible for us ... the only way to organise democratic
government is to abolish government.”[8]
So if the state is external rule, then anarchism stands for
self-government or self-management – every individual must make their
own decisions. From this logically follows group self-management. When
individuals form or join a group, community or workplace then they must
have a say in how that association functions – otherwise it would just
be voluntary servitude (as per wage-labour when workers sell their
liberty/labour to a boss).
So anarchy implies self-managed associations. Yet we cannot live
isolated lives nor can we all assemble to discuss large-scale issues and
problems. Anarchist theory has long had an answer to how we co-ordinate
joint activity – decentralisation requires federalism. Just as
individuals federate to form groups, so groups federate together to
manage joint interests and issues. We aim to replace representative
democracy with self-managed associations federated by means of mandated
and recallable delegates. Only in this way can we achieve anarchy by
governing ourselves.
In short, anarchists recognise that social organisation does not equal
the state. To be free, libertarians have always argued, we need to end
the state and the capitalist system it protects. We argue that social
and economic federalism is the means replace the state with a social
system based on, and protective of, liberty.
The argument that genuine democracy (self-government) necessitates
mandating and recalling delegates was first raised within the socialist
movement by Proudhon. In March 1848, in his second pamphlet of the 1848
revolution he argued that mandating and recalling elected people was
essential for genuine social self-government:
“In the end, we are all voters; we can choose the most worthy.
“We can do more; we can follow them step-by-step in their legislative
acts and their votes; we will make them transmit our arguments and our
documents; we will suggest our will to them, and when we are
discontented, we will recall and dismiss them.
“The choice of talents, the imperative mandate, and permanent
revocability are the most immediate and incontestable consequences of
the electoral principle. It is the inevitable program of all
democracy.”[9]
Proudhon noted that few democrats actually embraced this position,
something which has not changed. In November 1848 he returned to this
theme in an election manifesto: “Besides universal suffrage and as a
consequence of universal suffrage, we want implementation of the
imperative mandate. Politicians balk at it! Which means that in their
eyes, the people, in electing representatives, do not appoint
mandatories but rather abjure their sovereignty!… That is assuredly not
socialism: it is not even democracy.”[10] With tens of thousands of
working class people reading his articles, Proudhon popularised the
necessity of mandates and recall within the popular movement.
Proudhon was, for a time,[11] an elected representative and this
confirmed his critique of the state:
“Since I first set foot on this parliamentary Sinai, I ceased to be in
contact with the masses: by absorbing myself in my legislative work, I
had completely lost view of current affairs. I knew nothing about the
national workshop situation, government policy or the intrigues going on
within the assembly. One has to experience this isolation called a
national assembly to understand how the men who are the most completely
ignorant of the state of a country are nearly always those who represent
it ... Most of my colleagues on the left and the extreme left were in
the same state of mental perplexity and ignorance of daily reality. We
only talked about the national workshops with a kind of dread: because
the fear of the people is the evil of all those who belong to authority:
for power, the people are the enemy.”[12]
Proudhon’s collaborator Charles-François Chevé summarised the ideas in
this circle in his “Socialist Catechism.”[13] It is a remarkably
succinct discussion of the issue. Following Proudhon, Chevé argued that
“the imperative mandate” was “the fundamental condition of all elective
representation” and it by necessity meant the “permanent right of
revocation of the elected by the electors.” Without these sovereignty
could not exist for “it is the sovereign who obeys his delegates, the
leader his agents, the electors their representatives, the master his
employees; and sovereignty is no more than the puerile and derisory
faculty of writing, every three or four years, some names on a bit of
paper, and cast it in a box.”
The state, then, was “the negation of the sovereignty of the People, of
Liberty and of democracy” as “it places the sovereign People under the
authority of its delegates, because it imposes on all the will of a few
and renders the delegates of the nation masters of those who delegate to
them.” Society must “govern itself” via voluntary association:
“The coming of popular Sovereignty and Democracy, which has thus far
existed in name only. Indeed, to overthrow the state is to overthrow the
monarchy, not only in its form, but in that which forms its source and
essence, in the presidential, ministerial, bureaucratic and functionary
power that is only a royalty in disguise; to overthrow the state is to
render to each of the citizens all the attributions of sovereignty, it
is to establish the Republic and the Democracy, not just nominally, but
in practical reality, in fact and in customs.”
For Proudhon and Chevé, like all libertarians, this would apply
economically as well as politically. Associated-labour would replace
wage-labour as self-management of production by workers would complement
self-management of society by the people.
The revolutionary anarchist Michael Bakunin continued in the path
Proudhon forged. Like the French anarchist he argued for a
decentralised, federated communal socialism based on delegate rather
than representative democracy:
“the Alliance of all labour associations ... will constitute the Commune
... there will be a standing federation of the barricades and a
Revolutionary Communal Council ... [made up of] delegates ... invested
with binding mandates and accountable and revocable at all times. Thus
organised, the Communal Council will be able to choose separate
executive committees from among its membership for each branch of the
Commune’s revolutionary administration ... all provinces, communes and
associations ... [will] delegate deputies to an agreed place of assembly
(all of these deputies invested with binding mandated and accountable
and subject to recall), in order to found the federation of insurgent
associations, communes and provinces ... it is through the very act of
extrapolation and organisation of the Revolution with an eye to the
mutual defences of insurgent areas that the universality of the
Revolution ... will emerge triumphant ... Since it is the people which
must make the revolution everywhere, and since the ultimate direction of
it must at all times be vested in the people organised into a free
federation of agricultural and industrial organisations ... organised
from the bottom up through revolutionary delegation.”[14]
These ideas were not for some future revolution. They had to be applied
now, in the labour movement. The construction workers’ union, argued
Bakunin, “simply left all decision-making to their committees” and in
“this manner power gravitated to the committees, and by a species of
fiction characteristic of all governments the committees substituted
their own will and their own ideas for that of the membership.” To
combat this bureaucracy, the union “sections could only defend their
rights and their autonomy in only one way: the workers called general
membership meetings.” In “these popular assemblies” the issues were
“amply discussed and the most progressive opinion prevailed.” Elected
delegates would report “regularly to the membership” and be subject to
“instant recall.”[15]
Bakunin’s vision of a federation of workers’ councils based on mandated
and recallable delegates dates from 1868. It makes a mockery of Lenin’s
claims, trotted out to this day by his followers, that while Marxists
see the need for an “organisation of the armed workers, after the type
of the Commune” anarchists “have a very vague idea of what the
proletariat will put in its place”[16] In reality, anarchists had a very
firm idea of how a free socialist system would be organised – decades
before Lenin saw the importance soviets in 1917 and years before the
Paris Commune of 1871.
The Paris Commune’s “Declaration to the French People” proclaimed that
one of the “inherent rights of the Commune” was election of officials
under “the permanent right of control and revocation” and the “permanent
intervention of citizens in communal affairs.” Unity would be achieved
by “the voluntary association of all local initiatives” in a “delegation
of federated Communes” based on “the realisation and the practice of the
same principles” applied locally.[17]
Marx, for his part, wrote one of his best works on the revolt: The Civil
War in France. The Commune “was formed of the municipal councillors,
chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town,
responsible and revocable at short terms” and the “rough sketch of
national organisation” produced by the Communards specified a federation
of communes based on delegates “at any time revocable and bound by the
mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents.”[18] These
ideas obviously reflect the ideas Proudhon and his colleagues had raised
over 20 years previously. This is unsurprising, given that his followers
(the Mutualists) played a key part in the 1871 revolt (indeed, the
“rough sketch” was written by a Mutualist).
Yet even if we ignore, as Marx did, the Mutualists, the Commune’s
libertarian ideas can be seen if we compare Proudhon’s arguments from
1848 and Marx’s reporting 23 years later. Thus we find Marx proclaiming
the Commune “was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive
and legislative at the same time.” For Proudhon it was “not enough to
say that one is opposed to the presidency unless one also does away with
ministries, the eternal focus of political ambition. It is up to the
National Assembly, through organisation of its committees, to exercise
executive power, just the way it exercises legislative power through its
joint deliberations and votes.”[19]
So it is important when reading Marx’s The Civil War in France that much
of it is simply reporting. He may have been agreeing with the actions of
the Communards, but that does not change the awkward fact that he is not
presenting his notions of social organisation but rather summarising the
actions of people heavily influenced by his arch rival Proudhon. This
means that when Marxists point to that work as evidence for Marxism’s
“democratic essence” it misses the point – it is a libertarian-infused
work because it is describing a libertarian-infused revolt! Bakunin
quite rightly proclaimed that the Paris Commune was, in part, a
“practical demonstration” of libertarian socialist ideas, “a bold,
clearly formulated negation of the State.”[20] As one anarchist
summarised:
“comparison will show that the programme set out [by the Commune] is ...
the system of Federalism, which Bakunin had been advocating for years,
and which had first been enunciated by Proudhon. The Proudhonists ...
exercised considerable influence in the Commune. This ‘political form’
was therefore not ‘at last’ discovered; it had been discovered years
ago; and now it was proven to be correct by the very fact that in the
crisis the Paris workers adopted it almost automatically, under the
pressure of circumstance, rather than as the result of theory, as being
the form most suitable to express working class aspirations.”[21]
The Paris Commune, it must be noted, brought the contradictions of the
Marxist attacks on anarchism to the surface. Thus we find Engels
attacking anarchists for holding certain position yet praising the 1871
revolution when it implement exactly the same ideas. For example, in his
deeply inaccurate diatribe “The Bakuninists at Work”, he was keen to
distort the federalist ideas of anarchism, dismissing “the so-called
principles of anarchy, free federation of independent groups.”[22]
Compare this to his praise for the Paris Commune which, he gushed,
refuted Blanquist notions when it “appealed to [the provinces] to form a
free federation of all French Communes ... a national organisation which
for the first time was really created by the nation itself.”[23]
Both Marx praised the Commune for implementing binding mandates yet this
did not stop Engels attacking anarchist support for them as being part
of Bakunin’s plans to control the IWMA. For “a secret society,” he
argued, “there is nothing more convenient than the imperative mandate”
as all its members vote one way, while the others will “contradict one
another.” Without these mandates, “the common sense of the independent
delegates will swiftly unite them in a common party against the party of
the secret society.” Obviously the notion that delegates from a group
should reflect the wishes of that group was lost on Engels. He even
questioned the utility of this system for “if all electors gave their
delegates imperative mandates concerning all points in the agenda,
meetings and debates of the delegates would be superfluous.”[24]
Clearly a “free federation” of Communes and binding mandates are bad
when anarchists advocate them but excellent when workers in revolt
implement them! Why this was the case Engels failed to explain.
Trotskyists regularly pay lip-service to the Commune and the imperative
mandate. SWP’s Chris Harman argued that the “whole experience of the
workers’ movement internationally teaches that only by regular
elections, combined with the right of recall by shop-floor meetings can
rank-and-file delegates be made really responsible to those who elect
them.” (Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe, pp. 238–9)
Needless to say, Harman fails to note that it was Proudhon and Bakunin,
not Marx, who first recognised the importance of recall and argued for
it in the workers’ movement. He also does not square his words with
Bolshevik practice (such as packing, gerrymandering and disbanding
soviets with non-Bolshevik majorities) which rejected this experience
once they were in power.[25] Or, for that matter, Trotsky’s 1936 summary
that the “revolutionary dictatorship of a proletarian party” is “an
objective necessity” and that the “revolutionary party (vanguard) which
renounces its own dictatorship surrenders the masses to the
counter-revolution.”[26]
It is easy to work out why…
Lenin argued that what the proletariat will put in that state’s place
“is suggested by the highly instructive material furnished by the Paris
Commune.”[27] Anarchists would agree – adding that we had been
advocating these ideas before 1871 and our ideas had directly influenced
the revolt.[28] So it is fair to say that it was Marx, not the world,
who had “at last discovered” the political form “under which to work out
the economic emancipation of labour”[29] in 1871. The French working
class, however, had been aware of the necessity for a decentralised
federation of communes based on mandated and recallable delegates since
at least 1848.
It could be argued that while anarchists were the first to integrate
imperative mandates and recall into socialist theory and systematically
advocate it, it the likes of Proudhon and Bakunin were just repeating
ideas already current in radical working class circles. Perhaps but this
should not be used to diminish their contributions nor their early
recognition of the importance of these concepts. Particularly as
everyday statism confirms our critique and life confirms our
alternative:
“As to parliamentary rule and representative government ... It is
becoming evident that it is merely stupid to elect a few men and to
entrust them with the task of making laws on all possible subjects, of
which subjects most of them are utterly ignorant ... humanity searches
and finds new channels for resolving the pending questions ... They
proceeded by means of agreement. To agree together they resorted to
congresses; but, while sending delegates to their congresses they did
not say to them, ‘Vote about everything you like – we shall obey.’ They
put forward questions and discussed them first themselves; then they
sent delegates acquainted with the special question to be discussed at
the congress, and they sent delegates – not rulers. Their delegates
returned from the congress with no laws in their pockets, but with
proposals of agreements.”[30]
There is an alternative to the ritualistic picking of masters every few
years. We can organise ourselves to govern our own affairs and, by means
of mandating and recalling delegates, ensure that we create a social
organisation based on liberty. Until we do, we will be ruled by the few
in the interests of the few – that we get to pick the person who will
misrepresent us just adds insult to injury!
[1] Property is Theft! [AK Press: 2011], p. 573
[2] Property is Theft!, p. 571
[3] Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel [Black Rose: 1992], p. 122
[4] Property is Theft!, p. 482
[5] Bakunin on Anarchism [Black Rose: 1980], p. 142
[6] Property is Theft!, p. 18, p. 226
[7] Kropotkin, Op. Cit., p. 143
[8] Property is Theft!, pp. 483–5
[9] Property is Theft!, p. 273
[10] Property is Theft!, p. 379
[11] Proudhon’s life as a politician was ended when the National
Assembly changed the law to strip him of his Parliamentary immunity.
Arrested for (correctly, as it turned out) slandering President
Louis-Napoleon as seeking tyranny, he was sent to prison in 1849. This
did not stop him contributing to newspapers, writing books, getting
married or fathering a child!
[12] Property is Theft!, pp. 425–6. He added that the experiences in
1848 proved his comments from 1846: “The problem before the labouring
classes, then, consists, not in capturing, but in subduing both power
and monopoly, — that is, in generating from the bowels of the people,
from the depths of labour, a greater authority, a more potent fact,
which shall envelop capital and the State and subjugate them.” (Property
is Theft!, p. 226)
[13] “Socialist Catechism.”, La Voix du Peuple (October 29, 1849). This
was the successor to Le Peuple which, like all Proudhon’s papers, had
been suppressed.
[14] No Gods, No Masters [AK Press: 2005], pp. 181–2
[15] Bakunin on Anarchism, pp. 246–7
[16] The Lenin Anthology [W.W. Norton & Company: 1975], p. 392
[17] Property is Theft!, p. 790
[18] The Marx-Engels Reader [W.W. Norton & Co: 1978], pp. 632–3
[19] Property is Theft!, p. 378. This applies economically as well.
Marx: “the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes
the labour of the many the wealth of the few ... by transforming the
means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of
enslaving and exploiting labour, into mere instruments of free and
associated labour.” Proudhon: “the capitalist profits by his capital
without working ... poverty and proletariat are the inevitable
consequence of property ... under universal association, ownership of
the land and of the instruments of labour is social ownership ... We
want the mines, canals, railways handed over to democratically organised
workers’ associations ... want these associations to be models for
agriculture, industry and trade, the pioneering core of that vast
federation of companies and societies woven into the common cloth of the
democratic and social Republic.” (Property is Theft!, pp. 373–8)
[20] Bakunin on Anarchism, pp. 263–4
[21] K.J. Kenafick, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx [A. Maller: 1948], pp.
212–3
[22] Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 297
[23] The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 627
[24] Collected Works, vol. 22, p. 281, p. 277. It should be noted that
Trotsky shared Engels dislike of “representatives” being forced to
actually represent the views of their constituents within the party. (In
Defense of Marxism [Pathfinder: 1995], pp. 80–1)
[25] Section H.6 of An Anarchist FAQ
[26] Writings of Leon Trotsky 1936–37 [Pathfinder Press: 1978], pp.
513–4
[27] The Lenin Anthology, p. 333
[28] Suffice to say, space precludes a detailed discussion of the Paris
Commune. For those interested, see my review-article “The Paris Commune,
Marxism and Anarchism” (Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, no. 50)
[29] The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 635
[30] Anarchism and Anarchist-Communism [Freedom Press: 1987] p. 51