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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

Anarcho

Going Beyond Picking Rulers

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?

The Nature of the State

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.

Proudhon and the 1848 Revolution

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.

Bakunin and the Paris Commune

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]

A Marxist aside

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…

Conclusions

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