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Title: Introduction to Anarchist Communism Author: Anarchist Federation Date: April 2013 Language: en Topics: anarcho-communism, introductory Source: Retrieved on 4th October 2021 from http://afed.org.uk/introduction-to-anarchist-communism/ Notes: Second Edition.
Thereâs a lot to be angry about. The massacre of thousands every year in
wars around the world. The starvation of yet more thousands every day
while food rots in warehouses across the globe. The extinction of
species after species as our environment is slowly wrecked. The millions
of people abused in sweatshops until their bodies and spirits are broken
and theyâre thrown on the scrapheap. The countless women subjected to
emotional, physical and sexual violence as a result of their gender. The
vast numbers facing discrimination and oppression based purely on the
colour of their skin.
And these are just the shocking headlines. The main story is what
happens to each and every one of us day after day. If we work we give up
our time and our energy to the whims of some company and its managers.
We have no stake in what we produce, no control over what we do day in,
day out. If we donât work, we rely on inadequate benefits doled out by
people trained to hate us as work-shy and lazy. Our lives are controlled
by what we can and canât afford and by whatever pointless schemes the
government insists we go on to prove that weâre not âscroungingâ. As
housewives we get no credit for the hours of work we do. As unemployed
people weâre punished for something that is not our fault. As workers we
are ordered around, watched every second weâre on the job and left too
tired at the end of the day to really enjoy any time we have for
ourselves.
On the one hand, death and destruction on a grand scale. On the other,
the crushing boredom and alienation of everyday life. All of these
various horrors are tied together, different faces of a single system.
Itâs a system designed from the ground up to set us at each othersâ
throats. It exploits and exaggerates every tiny little difference
between us, making us compete for scraps and hate each other as we fight
while a tiny minority enjoy all the benefits. This system is global
capitalism, a pattern of economic and political exploitation that
reaches into every aspect of our lives. It uses sexism, racism,
homophobia and many other hatreds and prejudices around us to protect
itself. It creates hierarchies of power and wealth to divide all the
people it exploits and turn us on ourselves.
Capitalism is the problem. All of us that it exploits and degrades are
the solution. As we unite through our common exploitation we can become
a force that capitalism cannot control, cannot crush. We can create a
whole new society that serves the needs of all of us, not a minority.
In the Anarchist Federation we believe that we can be one part of this
fight. We see ourselves as part of a tradition that stretches back
throughout the history of resistance to capitalism, a tradition that can
be called anarchist communist although not everyone involved in it would
have seen themselves that way. We believe that this set of ideas and
ways of organising is our best hope of destroying capitalism and
creating something better.
As the first of our aims and principles says, we are âan organisation of
revolutionary class struggle anarchists. We aim for the abolition of all
hierarchy, and work for the creation of a world-wide classless society:
anarchist communism.â This pamphlet sets out to explain what all this
means and how we think we can do it.
Many influential people, from newspaper editors to economics professors,
will tell you that capitalism is ânaturalâ. Human beings are greedy,
selfish and competitive and so any economic system must be based on
greed, selfishness and competition. According to them, capitalism is a
system that uses our natural urge to compete and dominate to benefit
everyone, even the âlosersâ in the competition. The economy grows
because ruthless competition between firms forces them to innovate and
expand, creating wealth out of nothing which then âtrickles downâ
through society.
These propagandists, because thatâs what they are, disagree with each
other over whether this can happen completely ânaturallyâ or whether
governments should intervene to smooth the process. Some argue that
everything should be open to competition â hospitals, schools, the lot â
so that the benefits of growth can spread everywhere. Others, sometimes
even calling themselves socialists, argue that some things like health
care and education should be run by the government. This creates a
healthier and better educated workforce for the capitalist firms and so
makes them more competitive.
These arguments are sometimes fierce, but in the end the two sides agree
about everything that is important. Some people should own and control
the factories, services and land that are the basis of the economy.
These people should make all the decisions and should get most of the
wealth that these businesses create. Other people should work in these
places under the control of the managers. They should take orders, not
make decisions and should get a wage for what they do.
This is the essence of capitalism. One small group of people controls
the places that we work in, the land that produces our food, the
factories that make our clothes and everything that makes life possible.
These people are the ruling class and their power comes from their
control over the means of production, the resources and equipment that
are needed to produce the things we need to live. Everyone else must
work in the fields and the factories, the call centres and the office
blocks. We are the working class and in this system we operate the means
of production. We provide the labour that allows these fields and
factories, call centres and offices to produce goods and services,
commodities, for the ruling class to sell at a profit.
Capitalism, then, is a system of exploitation. It is a class system
where a majority, the working class, is exploited by a minority, the
ruling class. The ruling class are the people who own or control the
places where we work. They make the decisions about what kinds of
products the factories make or what kinds of services are provided, and
they make the decisions about how this work is organised. The working
class are all the people who are forced to work in these places in order
to get the money that they need to live. We, the working class, build
and provide everything society needs to function. They, the ruling
class, suck profit out of our work. We are the body of society; they are
parasites sucking us dry.
In the capitalist system the interests of the ruling class and the
working class are always opposed. The ruling class seek to tighten their
grip on us, to gain more control, to get more profit. The working class
seek to get out from under our bosses and our governments, to gain
control over our own lives. There will always be conflict between these
groups, whether on a small or a mass scale.
This conflict takes many forms. Most obviously it happens in the places
where we work. Strikes over wages and working practices clearly pit the
interests of a group of bosses against a group of workers. However,
class struggle is much more than this. Capitalism seeks to control and
profit from all aspects of life. Our homes are bought, sold and rented
for profit. The food we eat and the water we drink is privately owned
and controlled. Our environment becomes a vast dumping ground for
industry, valued only for profit not for the way it enables and enriches
our lives. Whenever we struggle for control over some aspect of our
lives, we are engaging in class struggle. When we fight for our
communities or our environment we are fighting the class struggle.
It follows from this that we donât use the idea of class in the same way
as many people, particularly in the press. Class is not about the fact
that some people earn more money than others or that some people go to
different kinds of schools. These basically sociological definitions of
class, definitions loved by advertisers, managers and other assorted
scum, are used to hide the real nature of class. We donât just see the
working class as being people with traditional manual or industrial jobs
â if someone is not currently working, but dependent on meagre state
benefits (and so under continual pressure to find work), in education
(training for work) or living on their pension (deferred wages), then
their situation is obviously very different from that of the âidle richâ
who are able to live a comfortable life off the backs of others, such as
landlords. Equally, many people in jobs that are traditionally seen as
âmiddle class,â such as teachers, have no real control over their lives
or the work they do and are forced to struggle against their employers
just like the rest of the working class.
This confusion about the idea of class is part of a wider set of tactics
that the ruling class use to disguise the reality of class from the
people that it exploits. Capitalism needs workers in a way workers
simply do not need capitalism. If the working class unites around its
common interests then it can do away with the ruling class and run
society itself. We donât need them, but they need us. Because of this,
the ruling class works hard to divide us against each other. It does
this in two ways â partly through trying to control ideas and the way we
think about ourselves, and partly through creating small differences in
power and wealth that set working class people against each other.
Things like nationalism, the idea that we should be loyal to the state
in one country simply because we were born there, or a âwork ethicâ, the
idea that we owe a âfair dayâs workâ to the boss thatâs exploiting us,
are used by the ruling class to divide the working class and make some
of us feel more loyal to the bosses than to the people around us.
Nationalism splits workers in one country off from workers in another
and lies at the root of racism that splits workers along lines of skin
colour. The work ethic ties us to the boss instead of each other and
makes people despise the âlazyâ unemployed rather than putting the blame
where it really belongs.
The use of these ideas to split the working class is reinforced by
creating differences in power and wealth to back them up. On a large
scale, workers in the West are made to compete with workers in the
global South for jobs as factories move in search of the cheapest labour
costs. On smaller scales, individual workers are given a little bit more
pay to become supervisors and end up screwing over those around them
just to keep that little bit extra. This kind of thing happens in many
different ways but the end result is always the same. Working class
people compete for scraps while the ruling class skims vast profits off
the top and throws us a few leftovers to keep us fighting each other
rather than them.
To fight the class struggle, then, is to try and overcome the false
differences that the ruling class creates and unite as one class against
the people that exploit us. This is a process that goes on all the time.
Sometimes we become strong and united as a class and are able to get
concessions like shorter working days, healthcare and so on. The ruling
class fights back and exploits our divisions to break this unity,
weakening the class and undoing what gains we have made, or even worse,
turning them against us. This push and pull between the ruling class and
the working class will go on until capitalism is overcome.
One of the things that makes exploitation possible, and one of the major
tools in keeping the working class divided, is the state. The state is
made up of all the institutions of government. Parliament, the civil
service, the courts, tax collectors and so on are all parts of the
state. These are institutions that regulate and control the lives of
âcitizensâ â that is you and me â for the benefit of capitalism. The
state is the organised face of capitalism. It is the political
representation of the economic power of the capitalist ruling class.
When the so-called free market canât achieve something that capital
needs to grow, the state steps in and makes it happen.
There are many ways it can do this. Parliament passes laws that protect
the property of the rich whilst restricting the ability of the poor to
fight back. It acts as umpire in disputes between different capitalist
firms, setting rules for trade so that different companies can trust
each other. Tax money is used to create the services that business
relies upon but canât build for itself â road and transport systems,
schools to train workers, electricity grids and sewage systems (which
can be sold off later for private profit) â all the things that make
business possible. It can destroy the economies of developing countries
using the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank so that
firms have a ready pool of new resources and workers to exploit. From
building the legal and physical infrastructure that capitalism needs to
directly attacking workers seeking to improve their position, the state
is an essential tool of the capitalist class.
Importantly, the state controls organisations that directly control and
coerce working class people. The army and the police most obviously use
direct force to keep people in line, with the police breaking strikes
and heads at home and the army enforcing capitalism abroad. Schools,
whilst providing an important service, also indoctrinate children and
prepare them for a life as workers rather than as human beings. Prisons,
immigration authorities, dole offices and on and on and on, all intrude
into our lives and control our actions. Some of these things, like
schools, hospitals and welfare benefits, we sometimes depend on for our
lives. It is often this very dependence that these organisations use to
control us. Benefits come with conditions that dictate what you can and
canât do. Schools give us the knowledge we need to understand the world
but also train us to accept discipline and being bored all day because
some authority figure tells us we have to be.
Some people argue that the state behaves in this way because it is under
the control of capitalists. They argue that if the state were under the
control of a group that represented the working class, usually a
revolutionary party of some kind, then it would behave differently. This
ignores one important aspect of the state that can be seen in all of the
organisations that it controls. The state is designed to govern from
above â it is, by its very nature, hierarchical. This means that it
always concentrates power in the hands of a minority. A small number of
people give orders and a large number obey. We can see this in the army
and in the police with the huge differences in power between ranks and
orders that must be obeyed absolutely and without question. But this is
also true in all the other arms of the state.
For this reason any group taking over the state will automatically find
itself ruling instead of freeing the people they claim to represent.
That is what states do. A state is a machine for controlling people and
can never be anything else. This is not just because of the repressive
and manipulative organisations it controls, although these are far more
important to the state than some would have us believe. It is because
the state is always hierarchical and as a result will end up furthering
rather than destroying all the other hierarchies in society.
Governing Ourselves: The Spanish Revolution
The revolution in Spain between 1936 and 1939 was contradictory, under
constant attack, and ultimately defeated, not just by the fascists but
also by the âanti-fascistsâ within its own ranks. Despite all of this,
however, for a short space of time the Spanish working class, under the
influence of anarchist communist ideas, was able to achieve the most
far-reaching revolution of the 20^(th) century.
In the face of an attempted fascist military coup the workers and
peasants of Spain went on strike and took up arms. In many working class
urban areas, such as Barcelona and Madrid, and in rural areas with an
anarchist-influenced peasantry, such as Aragon, Castille and the Levant,
the attempted coup was put down. The people controlled the streets and
the fields.
In the republican zone, the influence of anarchism through the
anarcho-syndicalist CNT, the largest Spanish union federation, led the
workersâ movement to spontaneously collectivise industry under workersâ
control, in many cases making it more efficient. The woodworking and
carpentry industry was completely socialised, as was the baking industry
in Barcelona. The same was true of the railways, while workersâ control
was won in telecommunications, utilities, cinemas, the buses and trams
and factories and workshops of all kinds. In the countryside the
revolution was even more wide-ranging, with rural collectives doing away
with private property and in many cases declaring libertarian communism.
Up to 7 million peasants were involved in the social upheaval. In both
the towns and cities a wide range of forms of collectivisation existed â
in some instances money was abolished, in others it was kept, in others
still labour tokens were introduced in exchange for work.
All this was too much for the more conservative elements in the
Republican government and certainly too much for their Soviet backers.
Laws were passed attacking collectivisation and the centralised
republican army was used against anarchist militias and more radical
sections of the working class. Many in the anarchist movement, seeing no
alternative, supported joining the government. This mistake was to no
avail, and many fine militants died in Stalinist prison cells. The
revolution in Spain was defeated before the fascists managed to
militarily defeat the republicans.
Hierarchy is one of the key tools that the state and capitalism use to
control people. It is implicated in both the repressive and the
manipulative arms of the state, but it is most destructive when it is
used to manipulate people. A hierarchy is any system where power over
others is concentrated in the hands of a minority. All capitalist
workplaces, for example, are hierarchies, with bosses at the top and
everyone else below. Often there are tiny differences in responsibility
that give some people just a tiny bit of power over others. Board
members control managers, who control more managers, who control
supervisors, who control more supervisors, who eventually end up
âmanagingâ six people for an extra 10p an hour.
This is one important way that capitalism creates and uses hierarchy to
divide working class people. We are given a small amount of power over
each other so that we end up fighting each other rather than fighting
the bosses.
However, there are hierarchies in society that were not created by
capitalism and which have their own separate existence and history. The
oppression of women is thousands of years old and has shown up in
different ways in hundreds of different societies. This is known as
patriarchy, a system of oppression and exploitation that sees women
placed under the control of men in a variety of different ways. The
oppression of LGBTQ people, indeed of anyone who doesnât fit a straight,
monogamous, gendered norm, is age old. Itâs often even more brutal than
patriarchy, seeking not just to control but to exterminate people who
donât fit. Racism and ideas of white supremacy are younger but no less
vicious, with a legacy of slavery and exploitation that has destroyed
the lives of millions.
All of these systems of oppression and exploitation, and the many others
that hang off them, must be fought on their own terms by the people that
suffer them. Just as only the working class can fight capitalism because
we are the ones being directly exploited, so only women, LGBTQ people
and those attacked by racism (which can change from place to place and
period to period) can destroy patriarchy, heterosexism and white
supremacy. We can all support each other in these different fights, but
it is vital that those directly attacked chose the form and structure of
their own response. Organisations of women, gay people and of black and
ethic minority people (who are often, in reality, majorities) are
absolutely vital in resisting and destroying various systems of
hierarchy.
However, we should also remember that all of these systems of oppression
work together to create the world as we know it. Capitalism is propped
up by patriarchy which divides the working class (men against women),
gives some workers power over others (men are more likely to get higher
paid and supervisory jobs), and forces people to do untold hours of
unpaid but essential work (housework and the raising of children are
essential to the economy but mostly done for free by women). Patriarchy
is propped up by capitalism as the media pump out stereotypes of women
to sell cosmetics and perfumes and businesses create the role of the
housewife to force unwanted women out of the workplace and create a new
market for consumer goods. Racism allows capitalist states to justify
invading and pillaging different countries for raw materials and new
markets and divides the working class at home between black and white,
immigrant and native. All these forms of exploitation and oppression,
all these hierarchies, reinforce and amplify each other, until they are
impossible to untangle from each other.
For this reason it is impossible to just fight capitalism or racism or
sexism and so on and so on. Gains made against one system will be eaten
up by another. For example, womenâs fight for equal rights at work has
often ended up with women working a âdouble dayâ, with housework at home
and long hours at work. The rebellion of black people in the 1960s won
political equality, but also created a new black leadership who became
part of the ruling class while everyone else was left to rot.
Capitalism, then, is more than just a class system. The power of the
ruling class comes from their control of the means of production, but
they keep that control by manipulating a whole series of different
systems of oppression and exploitation, different hierarchies. These
systems give some of the working class more power than others, they make
us complicit in our own exploitation. Back in the 19^(th) century there
was a slogan: âworkers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but
your chains.â The way that capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and
other systems of hierarchy work together means that this is not true.
These systems give large sections of the working class just a little bit
of privilege. This is enough to turn them against the people they should
be uniting with, enough to make them defend the ruling class against the
claims of women, LGBTQ people, black and ethnic minority/majority people
and on and on and on.
To get past this we need a revolutionary movement made up of many
different organisations. We need many different ways in which people can
take control of their own lives and fight the different oppressions that
push them down. We need to completely transform society and ourselves.
In the Anarchist Federation we believe that the ideas of anarchist
communism offer the best chance of doing this. The next section lays out
what these ideas are.
Revolutionaries believe that the societies we live in are basically
unjust and unfair. It is not just a matter of this injustice or that
unfairness â it is the whole way that society works that is unjust and
unfair. Poverty, war, racism, sexism and all the rest of the problems we
face are not exceptions to the rule â they are the rule. Capitalism
cannot exist without creating poverty, without fighting wars, without
oppressing people because of their race or gender.
We believe that capitalism must be destroyed and a new society â an
anarchist communist society â must be built. This is the revolution.
Both the destruction of what exists now and the construction of
something new are part of the revolution. As revolutionaries we work to
encourage both â supporting people who are opposing those in power as
well as supporting people who are trying to build alternatives.
Because capitalism is basically unfair and unjust, revolutionaries do
not believe in change through gradual reform. This is called reformism.
This is not to say that a minimum wage or a shorter working day or the
right to abortion on demand are not important. These reforms and many
others have made life better for ordinary people. Revolutionaries are
not trying to say that life has not improved since Victorian times â
that would be silly. What we do say are two things.
Firstly, no reform is permanent. Any reform can and will be undone by
politicians and bosses whenever they get the chance. The attacks on
civil liberties, on working conditions and on public services that we
see time and time again should be enough to prove this.
Secondly, reforms are only granted by governments when they are scared
of something worse â a mass movement of ordinary, working class people.
Time and time again it has taken the actions of millions of people
organising together to get even the most basic reforms. The ten hour
day, rights for women and children, even the welfare state were all
forced concessions from governments challenged by mass movements. There
is nothing governments are more scared of than people ignoring them and
simply doing things for themselves. This is direct action, when people
act for themselves without waiting for permission from any higher
authority. Governments will make almost any concession to stop such
movements.
Because of this, revolutionaries are often attacked as utopian, as
imagining unrealistic perfect worlds that can never be. âYou should be
practical,â these people tell us. âFocus on getting results here and
now, not on some imaginary cloud cuckoo land in the future.â When people
say things like this, when we are told to be âpracticalâ or ârealisticâ,
we are usually being told to abandon our principles. Successive
governments attack public services in the name of âpragmatismâ, the
unions sell out to management because itâs âpracticalâ, authoritarian
revolutionaries lie to their members and the public because theyâre
ârealisticâ.
If this is what being practical means then that would already be enough
to reject it. But thereâs more to it than this. Being âpracticalâ in
this way, making compromises and deals with bosses and politicians, is a
sure-fire way of making sure that you donât get what you want. Any deals
done with capitalism are bound backfire, as weâve seen time and time
again. You donât make progress by negotiating with the bosses. You make
progress by terrifying them. Anarchist communists believe that it is
better to fight for what we want, even if we donât get it straight away,
rather than fighting for something we donât want, and getting it.
Mass movements making demands based on their own needs are much more
scary to the ruling class than any number of snivelling bureaucrats
being ârealisticâ and asking nicely for a few scraps from the bossâs
table. We donât want the scraps â we want the whole meal, and the
kitchen that cooked it, and the house it was served in, and the fields
it was grown in, and the factories that made the plates and so on and so
on. Everything the ruling class has, it has because the working class
made it and they stole it. We refuse to ask nicely for things that are
already ours. This is not just a matter of principle, it is practical.
People that beg for scraps get nothing else, and often not even that. If
we work to take what is already ours, the ruling class will be forced to
concede far more than just scraps.
Anarchism is a set of revolutionary ideas that have been around in one
form or another for centuries. They are, at root, very simple.
Anarchists believe that people are quite capable of looking after
themselves. No leader can know what you need better than you do. No
government can represent the interests of a community better than the
community itself. We believe that everyone should take part in decisions
that affect them, whether at work, in the community or at home. Only in
this way can we have a fair and just society, in which everyone has the
chance to fulfil themselves. Everything in anarchist ways of thinking
follows from this basic principle.
Obviously, this is not how society works now. At work we do what weâre
told or we get the sack. At home, the police, the tax man and other arms
of the state snoop into our business and tell us what we can and canât
do. We do not take decisions about how we work, about how our taxes are
spent, what laws are passed and on and on and on.
For anarchists, taking back control over our own lives is the
revolution. We see two ways of working as being key to being able to do
this: direct action and self-organisation. Direct action is when those
directly affected by something take action to fix it themselves, rather
than asking someone else to do it for them. A strike that forces
management to make concessions or face losing money is direct action
where lobbying an MP or going through union negotiations is not.
Squatting derelict land and turning into a community garden is direct
action, whereas pressuring the council to clean up vacant lots is not.
When people act by themselves to achieve something that they need then
they are taking direct action â whether thatâs sharing food with others
or fighting the police in a riot.
For direct action to be possible then there also needs to be self
organisation. This is organising without leaders or phoney
ârepresentativesâ, and it allows ordinary people to take back the power
to make their own decisions. Self organisation allows us to break down
and overcome the hierarchies that separate us. In self-organised groups
everyone has an equal say and no one is given the right to represent
anyone else. This kind of group is capable of deciding its own needs and
taking direct action to meet them in a way that any hierarchical group
based on representatives â like a political party or a trade union â
cannot.
Because of this we reject the use of the state â that is government,
parliament, the courts, the police and so on â to bring about
revolution. No one can free anyone else. We all have to free ourselves
by acting together. No government, even a âsocialistâ or ârevolutionaryâ
government, can do this. Any group or party taking over the state simply
becomes a new set of leaders, exploiting us in the name of âsocialismâ
rather than âcapitalismâ. This is what happened in so-called âcommunistâ
Russia. Only by destroying the state, not taking it over, can we free
ourselves.
For anarchists, direct action and self organisation are essential tools
for freeing ourselves. They are the way that working class people can
confront the problems in their own lives in a collective way, the way in
which it is possible for us to work together against the whole system of
capitalism and the ways it tries to divide us.
These ideas have not just been plucked out of thin air. They have been
developed by millions of people throughout the last few hundred years as
they have fought back against the exploitation they have faced. This
tradition of resistance often, but not always, described itself as
communist. Anarchist communism is a living working class tradition that
has worked in ways large and small throughout the history of capitalism.
It does not come out of the abstract ideas of a few intellectuals but
from the concrete actions of millions of people.
For many, the word communism is associated only with the tyranny of
Soviet Russia or so-called Communist China. These societies were and are
some of the worst tyrannies the world has ever seen, killing millions of
people through famine, war and execution. As anarchists we donât forget
the prison camps, the slave labour, the unjust trials and executions â
indeed anarchists were often the first people to suffer these attacks.
However, unlike the press who use the example of âcommunistâ Russia to
claim that revolutionary change is impossible, anarchists also refuse to
forget the example of the millions of ordinary people who fought against
tyranny in Russia and all over the world in the name of true communism.
These people organised themselves, without leaders, into groups that
used direct democracy, meaning that everyone had an equal say in how
things were run. They used direct action against first the state and
capitalism, and then against the new Soviet tyranny.
The true communism that they fought for is the extension of these ways
of working into every aspect of life. The communist slogan âfrom each
according to their ability, to each according to their needâ sums up the
idea. Nobody should be short of anything that they need. Individuals
receive goods and services because of how much they need them, not
because of how much they can pay or how much they deserve them. People
give back to society, through the work they do, according to what they
want and are able to do. Everyone will have the chance to do interesting
and creative work, instead of just a minority while everyone else is
stuck with boring drudge work.
This society would be organised through local collectives and councils,
organising themselves to make the decisions that need making and to do
the work that needs doing. Everyone gets a say in decisions that concern
them. We believe that in fighting for this kind of future we are
fighting for the full freedom and equality of all. Only this will give
everyone the chance to be whatever they can be.
It is the many examples of people organising and resisting in this way
that we call the communist tradition. The workers councils of
revolutionary Spain, Germany, Russia, Hungary, France, Mexico and on and
on and on are the many examples that we look to when we think about how
we can free ourselves and fight capitalism. Time and time again the
world has seen ordinary people using direct action, self organisation
and direct democracy to build new societies and lives for themselves. It
is the ideas and successes of these people that we try to build on in
todayâs fight against exploitation.
Anarchist communism is more than an abstract vision of the future and it
is more than a nostalgia for the revolutionary movements of the past. It
is a living working class tradition that lays the foundations for the
future society in the here and now. Everything we will be after
capitalism we must learn under it and through the fight against it. The
revolution is not and never can be a blank slate â that way lies the
corpses piled up by ârevolutionaryâ terror in France and Russia and
China and on and on and on. Instead, revolution must be built out of the
materials to hand by people alive today.
Workersâ Councils: Organising the Revolution
One of the most important things we refer to when we talk about the
communist tradition are workersâ councils. Wherever there has been
revolutionary struggle there have been workersâ councils. Wherever
revolutions have been beaten, the crushing of the councils has been a
key defeat.
Workersâ councils are mass assemblies of workers in revolt that take
over the running of most aspects of daily life when the state and the
bosses have been defeated or are in retreat. The major 20^(th) century
examples occurred in Russia, Germany, Hungary, Spain and many, many
other more minor examples. However, the history of resistance to
exploitation is full of similar examples. The Paris Commune of 1871, the
Parisian sections during the revolution of 1789 and the years that
followed, even the âringsâ of German peasants during the peasant wars of
the 16^(th) century, all have a lot in common with 20^(th) century
workersâ councils.
These mass assemblies are the arenas in which revolutionary workers
debate their actions, come up with plans and proposals and decide how to
move forward. They involve everyone present in every stage of decision
making and have proved capable of running complex societies perfectly
well. They exist at many different levels which federate together in
order to cooperate. For example, the Kronstadt soviet was made up of
mandated delegates from each ship, crew and workplace who all help their
own smaller meetings before contributing to larger decisions. These
decisions were informed by less formal mass meetings held constantly in
public squares which debated key issues facing the revolutionaries.
Every single person could be involved in the decisions that affected
them. The military defeat of the Kronstadt soviet by the Bolsheviks was
one of the final nails in the coffin of any hope of a real revolution in
Russia.
The practice of hundreds of workersâ councils in dozens of struggles
show us that not only is it possible for everyone affected by a decision
to be involved in making it, but that millions of people will risk their
lives to live like that. When it has the chance, the working class
invents new social forms to meet its own needs and it is these forms
that should inspire us today.
The most important part of the working class tradition that we call
communism is the refusal to make a distinction between ends and means.
The organisations that we build while fighting capitalism will be the
basis of anything that comes after the revolution. If those
organisations do not embody the principles of the society that we want
to see then that society will not come about. If we want a future where
everyone contributes to the decisions that affect them, then we have to
build organisations now in which this happens. The Anarchist Federation
is one such organisation.
This is known as prefiguration and is one of the central ideas of
anarchism. The idea is summed up by one important slogan: âbuilding the
new society in the shell of the oldâ. What this means is that our
struggle is not simply against capitalism. We also fight, as far as is
possible, to live as we wish to right now, to build alternatives to
capitalism right under its nose.
In terms of organisation, this means that whatever we are involved in we
try to push that group in the direction of direct democracy and full
participation by all involved. Whether this is a residentsâ group or a
political campaign, a strike committee or a community allotment, we push
for organisation without leaders or hierarchy.
We believe that not only will this make these groups more effective in
achieving their immediate goals, but it will also increase the self
confidence of the people involved and give them the tools they need to
resist elsewhere in their lives. Over many different struggles and many
different organisations this will build up a broad culture of resistance
amongst ordinary people. It is from people steeped in this culture that
revolutionary struggles will arise.
However, prefiguration has its limits. For many people building
alternatives to capitalism in the here and now means one of two things:
either a lifestyle or individualist response, or an attempt to create a
dual power situation. Whilst the AF is often sympathetic to these
approaches and doesnât reject them completely, we do not believe that
they can lead to revolution on their own. We also have some serious
criticisms of both of them.
The labels âlifestylistâ and âindividualistâ are often used, frequently
unfairly, as insults and so we have to be very careful when we use them.
When we talk about âlifestyleâ politics weâre talking about a kind of
politics that focuses in some way on âdropping outâ of capitalism, on
getting âoff the gridâ and living without relying on capitalist
exploitation. This can mean many things. It can be something small-scale
like living in squats and surviving by stealing from supermarkets or
taking the perfectly good food that they throw out (âskippingâ or
âdumpster divingâ). Or it can be something much larger like a project to
communally farm a piece of land or establish a new community.
The reasons that people have for doing this kind of thing are very good
ones. They see the harm that capitalism does every day and want no part
of it. By stealing or taking what is thrown away they try to stop giving
support back to the bosses that exploit us and people all over the
world. By going back to the land and trying to be self sufficient in
food and power they try to live with as few links to global capitalism
as possible. More than this, often these kind of political lifestyle
choices involve building and living in communities based on solidarity
and mutual respect. Many involved in this kind of activity would argue
that this is âbuilding the new society in the shell of the oldâ.
Whilst we respect many people who make these personal lifestyle choices,
we reject this as a useful form of political action. The main reason for
this is that it is not something that the majority of people can easily
involve themselves in. Those with significant debts, dependants, health
problems or any number of other things that limit their freedom of
action find it very difficult, if not impossible, to âdrop outâ. There
is no possibility for building a lifestylist mass movement. Indeed,
lifestylism does not attempt to overthrow or destroy capitalism; it only
attempts to wash its own hands clean of the blood.
This is, in fact, a huge political problem with lifestyle responses to
capitalism. Often this form of politics leads to a kind of elitism and
snobbery on the part of people living âpoliticalâ lifestyles. Ordinary
people become âsheepleâ, hopelessly brainwashed by their jobs and the
media and as much part of the problem as the people that own and run the
economy. In its most extreme forms, such as primitivism, this leads
people to openly call for the extermination of the majority of the human
race and a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
This kind of attitude is not an inevitable consequence of dropping out,
but it is very common, and it is the result of an individualist way of
looking at capitalism. Capitalism does not exploit us as individuals: it
exploits us as classes or groups. We are exploited as workers, as women,
as non-white minorities or even majorities. We are oppressed as queer or
transgender, as professionals with some perks, or temporary workers with
none, as âconsumersâ in the West and as disposable labourers in the
global South.
If we respond to the damage that capitalism does to us as individuals
then the only logical answer is to abstain. You live without a job,
without shopping, without relying on the systems of exploitation that
surround us. If this is impossible, then you minimise your impact. You
get an âethicalâ job, buy âethicalâ products and reduce your
contribution to exploitation that way. From here itâs only a short step
to despising the people who arenât as âenlightenedâ as you, who keep
capitalism going by ârefusingâ to abstain.
However, if you respond to capitalism as a member of a broader exploited
class, then the logical response is collective. You show solidarity with
people in the same situation as you, you fight where you are for better
conditions, and for more control over the conditions of life. A
collective response like this is always oppositional. It always has to
fight capitalism rather than trying to go round it. It is, in potential,
the beginning of a mass movement and the basis of a new society based on
the recognition of our common interests.
In the end, it is this that the ruling class are afraid of, not people
dropping out, and it is this that we should be looking to try and build.
The other typical approach to prefigurative politics is trying to build
dual power. This means trying to build organisations in the here and now
that will eventually replace capitalism. These can be anything from
cooperatives of various kinds that organise to produce or to sell some
product in a non-hierarchical way, to mass revolutionary unions that aim
to take over the running of industry.
The idea is that by building organisations through which people run
their own lives now, a point of âdual powerâ can be reached. This is a
situation where both capitalism and potential alternatives exist side by
side, where there are two systems of economic, social and political
organisation in direct competition with each other. For people who argue
this way, this is how revolution happens. People build an alternative
which increasing numbers of people join until it is strong enough to
confront capitalism directly and replace it.
There are a number of different approaches to dual power strategies.
Some see themselves as providing examples that can be taken up by other
people and perhaps eventually become state policy. Things like the
Transition Towns movement at the moment, or various alternative
education movements work in this way. These are rarely very
confrontational about their ideas and see themselves as reformist rather
than revolutionary. They do, however, see the need to build an
alternative base of power outside the state and capitalism.
Others seek to build entire alternative economies through cooperatives,
credit unions, local trading systems (LETS schemes as they are often
called) and the like. These, they argue, could eventually reach the
point where many people are in effect living outside the capitalist
economy. People in this tradition often, but not always, describe
themselves as mutualist.
A variation on this idea sees building alternative centres of political
rather than economic power as the key. There are two main traditions
here. Some focus on building community assemblies to take local
decisions and sometimes seek to take over local town halls and council
chambers through elections. These people often, but again not always,
describe themselves as municipalist. Others focus on building
revolutionary trade unions which will confront management in the
workplace to get immediate gains. They will also just as importantly be
run by direct democracy, giving workers experience of taking decisions
and organising. These unions are then seen as able to take over industry
in its entirety replacing capitalism as they do so. This is usually
described as syndicalism.
All these approaches, and they often work in combination, see themselves
as building a political and economic alternative to capitalism right
under its nose. They argue that these alternatives are able to grow to
the point where either capitalism withers away or there is a
confrontation between the two systems which leads to revolution and the
destruction of capitalism.
There are many positive things about these approaches. They encourage
self organisation and direct action by ordinary people. They provide
important lessons in collective working and experience of direct
democracy for those involved. The AF does not reject any of these
approaches out of hand and members often involve themselves in this kind
of project.
However, there are important weaknesses in these approaches that limit
their usefulness. These kinds of projects are highly vulnerable to
attacks by the state. Laws can be passed that make most cooperatives
illegal or at least very difficult to set up. Community assemblies can
be denied resources, or even attacked directly by the police and the
army. People who pursue dual power strategies are often very
over-optimistic about their ability to avoid repression. Capitalism and
the state tend to attack any threat sooner rather than later.
It is not, however, direct attacks by the state that are the biggest
problem with dual power strategies. The biggest problem is the risk of
co-option. What this means is that movements and organisations which
start out trying to provide an alternative are often âcapturedâ by
capitalism. They become part of it rather than an alternative, helping
capitalism to manage peopleâs exploitation rather than challenging it.
For example, cooperatives often become employers in their own right,
with full cooperative members becoming managers and their new employees
exploited workers like any others. Community groups are approached by
local councils, given funding and access to some power and end up
administering the council policies they set out to oppose. Housing
co-ops become landlords, credit unions become banks (building societies
in the UK started out as community schemes), syndicalist unions
negotiate with management and crack down on wildcat strikes. Ordinary
people who start out trying to build alternatives end up becoming the
thing they hate.
Any potential alternative to capitalism in the here and now will have to
interact with the things that it is trying to replace. A co-operative
store will have to buy stock from capitalist suppliers. A community
assembly will have to negotiate with the local council if it is to
secure resources. Even syndicalist unions, a highly confrontational way
of working, find themselves having to negotiate with managers.
This does not mean that we should reject completely all these ways of
doing things. What it does mean, however, is that none of these is a
road to revolution on its own. Instead of seeing these ways of working
as a way of creating replacements for capitalism, we should see them as
one way amongst others of creating a culture of resistance. It is this
culture and not any particular organisation that it is important for us
to build.
Anarchist communists believe that people are perfectly capable of
looking after themselves. We believe that everyone should be involved in
the decisions that affect them, that everyone is capable of making the
most complex choices that are needed to run a society. We believe that
these decisions will be better than those made by elites as they will be
decisions which take into account the needs of the whole community not
just those of a small minority of exploiters.
More than this, we believe that the only people capable of destroying
capitalism and creating a world in which everyone has control over their
own life are those directly exploited by capital today. As weâve pointed
out, the ruling class know this and they work very hard to keep the
working class divided and lacking in the skills that it needs to make
this change. This is something that has to be overcome before revolution
is possible. We have to âbuild the new society in the shell of the oldâ.
However, history shows that organisations built by working class people
for their own benefit are often co-opted and turned against them. Trade
unions, credit unions, cooperative traders and manufacturers â all of
these and more have been used to defend rather than destroy capitalism.
Authoritarian revolutionaries use this problem as an excuse to take
over. According to them, the working class is only capable of a âtrade
union consciousnessâ, of haggling over wages and perks instead of
toppling capitalism and building something new. What is needed, they
claim, is leadership. They will be the cause of the revolution, leading
the poor stupid masses into the light kicking and screaming. History
shows us that this leads only into new tyrannies.
The alternative is more difficult to imagine, because it is something
that is deliberately discouraged and hidden in a capitalist world. The
alternative is a culture of resistance, a set of bonds of solidarity and
understanding between many different people in many different places.
These new relationships give people the confidence and the resources
that they need to fight back wherever they are. This culture becomes a
mass of tinder which is able to turn the spark from one struggle or
another into a flame which can spread. From this culture revolutionary
situations will seem to come from nowhere, surprising governments and
professional revolutionaries alike. This culture is not a particular
organisation or set of principles or anything like that. It is composed
of many different organisations and more than this of ideas, practices
and attitudes that reveal to us our power as exploited but necessary
parts of the capitalist system. This culture is as much about the self
image and self belief of ordinary people as it is about any particular
set of ideas or organisations.
Defending the Revolution: The Kronstadt Uprising
The Kronstadt Soviet was one of the most radical organisations of the
Russian revolution. A naval base connected to Petrograd, it very quickly
kicked out its officers and became a hotbed of revolutionary action and
debate. The Soviet, a council made up of delegates from all over the
base, cheerfully participated militarily and politically in the early
days of the revolution, both in February 1917 when the Tsar was
overthrown and in October 1917 when a revolutionary rather than moderate
government was installed.
As time went on, however, the Kronstadt Soviet became a problem for the
ruling Bolsheviks. In the years immediately following the revolution the
Bolsheviks deliberately set out to centralise power in their own hands.
They arrested and killed opponents, unleashed the secret police on the
population and suppressed many of the revolutionary organs that they had
supported in order to get into power. The factory committees that ran
workplaces on directly democratic lines were dissolved, the Soviets were
reduced to rubber stamps and the peasantry were attacked and brutalised
in order to secure grain. All of this provoked resistance and strikes
and disorder became common, all of which were met with brutal force.
On March 21^(st) 1921, while workersâ unrest was threatening to turn to
a general strike in Petrograd, the Kronstadt sailors issued a
proclamation demanding an end to the political repression against
workers and peasants, anarchists and member of other left parties, to
return the control of the army and the press to the workers and the
release of all political prisoners from the workersâ movement. The
Bolsheviks responded in the only way they knew how, sending hand-picked
regiments of party loyalists (even the brutally disciplined Red Army
could not be trusted to crush the popular Kronstadt sailors) to attack
the base. After brutal fighting the Kronstadt Soviet was crushed.
To this day, Leninist parties spread lies about what happened. They know
that the facts show how bankrupt their way of doing things is, how often
parties and representatives, however revolutionary they may claim to be,
betray the working class to seek their own power.
This all sounds very nice, and it can be the stuff of stirring speeches
and articles, but it can also be vague and woolly. It is a fact that the
revolutions of the past have surprised those that took part in them,
often seeming to come from nowhere. Women rioting over the price of
bread in Russia never expected to overthrow the Tsar a few months later.
Students protesting over the way their universities were run in 1960s
France never expected to be part of a movement of millions. And yet all
this and much more in countless different examples is exactly what
happened.
It is tempting to define a culture of resistance in a vague way in order
to deal with this fact. We can see it as a kind of seed bed for
revolutions, with the remains of smaller struggles falling as fertiliser
on the soil until it is rich and black enough for the riotous shoots of
an uprising to spring forth. This, however, is not enough. It makes us
think in abstractions and metaphors and so hides the real activities of
the real people who build a culture of resistance. We need to be more
concrete to do real justice to the struggle of millions of ordinary
people.
A culture of resistance is in some way the sum of all the things that
people do to survive and resist under capitalism. It is the big things
like strikes and riots, occupations of factories and public buildings
and huge organisations that fight for something in particular. Just as
importantly, it is the small things as well. The little scams at work
and the community and residentsâ groups that make life a little bit more
bearable at home. Itâs hatred of the police and the bosses and pride in
who you are and the community you live in.
What all of these things have in common is that they create connections
between people. They make spaces where people can meet and talk together
without being in competition with each other. They create bonds of
trust. The scam at work relies on your workmates keeping quiet, the huge
strike relies on each person sacrificing their pay for the benefit of
everyone.
These connections of trust and common purpose between people work
against the everyday logic of capitalism. Capitalism splits us off from
one another. We are given orders instead of taking part in decisions.
When we buy something, whatever it is, all we know is its price not who
made it and why. The media tells us to fear immigrants and outsiders who
they claim are trying to take what little we have. We are forced at
every turn to cut ourselves off from the world, to be blind to the
connections that we have with other people.
A culture of resistance restores those connections, making visible what
capitalism tries to hide from us. Every object we use in our lives is
made by other human beings. Every piece of food we eat, every bit of
power we use, every cup of water we drink is there because other people
made it possible. Capitalism hides this behind prices and company names.
It takes the credit for making life possible by hiding the very things
that connect us to everyone else in the world. A culture of resistance
shows us how connected we are to other working class people. It rolls
back the deceptions of capitalism and shows us how powerful we really
are. It is not some abstract ideal, but instead it reveals the concrete
reality that connects us all and blows away the abstractions and lies
that capitalism uses to isolate us.
A culture of resistance grows in the belly of capitalism and uses the
connections between workers that capitalism in some cases creates to
build the beginnings of an alternative. A culture of resistance builds
structures and ideas of cooperation and solidarity that prefigure the
world to come. A culture of resistance is the school in which we learn
how to be free, how we become through the fight against capitalism
everything that we will be after it.
Through organising ourselves without leaders, through taking direct
action against our enemies, through making decisions in which everyone
involved gets a say we learn how to live as free human beings. An
anarchist communist world in which we control our own lives and the
things that make them possible can only be built by people who have
taught themselves how to be free. A culture of resistance composed of
many different kinds of organisation is how we do that.
A culture of resistance operates in many different ways and in many
different areas of life. It is created by the actions of millions and
will always be surprising and exciting in the new ideas and the new ways
of fighting back that it creates. However, it is possible to give a
broad outline of the kinds of things that are possible and of the sorts
of struggle that can take place. The next section lays out some of these
ideas and explains why we think the Anarchist Federation can be part of
this.
As weâve said, a culture of resistance is built of many different
organisations working in many different ways. When people organise
themselves without leaders or representatives to take direct action
against the things that exploit and oppress them then they are taking
part in creating a culture of resistance which in the end is what will
overthrow capitalism and create a new, free society. It is impossible to
tell in advance what forms this culture of resistance will take. The
needs and the imaginations of the people involved will dictate what
happens and how.
However, it is possible to lay out the very broadest outline of how
people can organise themselves and fight back. We can look at what has
worked in the past and what people are doing now and point out how
direct action and self organisation can be applied to a number of areas
of everyday life. There can be no complete list, but in this section
weâre going to look at how people can fight at work and, in different
ways, in their communities. We will also look at what role minority
revolutionary organisations like the AF can play in this.
At work the confrontation between workers and bosses is at its most
obvious. Workers want to work as little as possible for as much money as
they can get, whereas bosses want as much work for as little pay. This
is the nature of capitalism. Bosses exploit workers and workers resist
exploitation. It is for this reason that when we are at work, we are
watched and controlled more closely than anywhere else. The amount of
work we do is measured, the kind of work we do is strictly defined. We
are told when we can eat and when we can go to the toilet. We are
watched every minute of every day by bosses and managers whose job it is
to make sure that every minute we are being paid we are working for the
company.
However, the amount of effort management makes to control people at work
points to something else. At work we are incredibly powerful. When we
work for a wage we create the profits that the ruling class needs to
exist. They need us to do what we are told in order to exist at all. We
donât need them. When workers disrupt the smooth running of a workplace
through strike action or sabotage and so on, we directly disrupt the
ability of the ruling class to make the profits it depends on. For this
reason, resistance at work always has revolutionary potential, however
small-scale it is. When we refuse to make profits for our bosses we
threaten their very existence.
There is a constant conflict between the interests of management and the
interests of workers which is shown in many different ways. On a
small-scale, individual level are theft and slacking off where workers
find ways round the control mechanisms that management uses. On a
larger, more collective level are strikes and sabotage where workers
seek to force concessions from management. In these kinds of struggles
there are two things at stake. Firstly, workers seek to get a bigger
slice of the profits management make by exploiting them, either through
theft or through wage claims. Secondly, workers seek to resist the
control of management, to get more freedom on the job. Both sets of
demands are important, but it is the second set that leads in directions
that are very dangerous to the ruling class.
When management are faced with a militant workforce that is disrupting
their ability to make profits, they will try and negotiate. However,
they will always negotiate over wages, working hours or something
similar. That is, they will negotiate the level of exploitation, never
the fact of it. They will never negotiate away control of the workplace.
Indeed, they will pay a great deal of money to retain and expand that
control.
This is the difference between revolutionary and reformist struggle at
work. Reformist struggles tackle the level of exploitation, seeking a
âfairerâ deal between workers and management. Revolutionary struggles
challenge exploitation altogether and seek to take control away from
management. Whenever we fight at work, both kinds of struggle are there
as potential. It is the way that we fight and the kinds of organisations
that exist that determine whether a struggle will take a reformist or
revolutionary direction.
The Ungovernable Factory: British Industrial Struggle in the 1970s
For a brief time in the 1970s the bosses were very close to losing
control of the factories that made them their fortunes. Thatcherâs 1980s
rhetoric about the threat to âmanagementâs right to manageâ was not just
the usual politicianâs guff. From the late 1960s right through to the
defeat of the minersâ strike in 1984, a mass movement of militant
workers challenged management not just for better pay but over how the
workplace would be run.
Workers in the car industry were particularly militant, but âthe English
diseaseâ â as widespread strike action was known â spread throughout the
economy. At its peak in 1979, 29.4 million working days were âlostâ to
strikes and disputes frequently escalated into occupations and open
confrontation. To take just one example, workers at the Halewood Ford
plant on Merseyside struck repeatedly throughout the 1970s. They fought
for pay rises and against attacks on their working conditions. Speed up
on the line and other attacks were repeatedly defeated. More than this,
workers eventually started rejecting work altogether. Friday night was
strike night as the late shift downed tools every week to go out
drinking instead.
Importantly, much of this activity was run by the workers themselves,
with militant shop stewards based on the factory floor rather than
distant union bureaucrats taking on many tasks. At Halewood, the mass
meetings held regularly throughout disputes are still remembered today
and were often addressed by people from outside as well as inside the
workplace. These struggles were antagonistic not just to management but
to the unions as well.
Throughout Britain militant workers such as those at Halewood confronted
management and the trade unions for greater control of their lives. It
took a major assault by the state and a complete transformation in the
global economy to defeat them.
The most common kind of working class organisation in the workplace is
the trade union. As discussed above, this is one kind of organisation
that is more often than not completely co-opted by the ruling class. As
a result of past struggles which threatened managementâs power, the
trade union is invited to the negotiating table. In return for ensuring
that workers donât behave unpredictably â taking wildcat strike action
or sabotaging equipment for example â the union is given a place in the
management of capitalism, a little slice of the power that management
has. The way that most unions are organised as hierarchies with leaders
and so called ârepresentativesâ means that this power is concentrated in
the hands of a small number of people who become as much part of the
ruling class as the managers that they supposedly oppose. It is the form
of trade union organisation â based on negotiationand representatives
rather than direct action and full involvement by the membership,
hierarchical rather than participatory â that leads to the various âsell
outsâ and âbetrayalsâ that are such a common feature of modern workplace
struggles. The problem is not any one particular leadership, but the
fact that there is a leadership in the first place.
The alternative to the trade union is, ironically, the very thing that
gives the trade unions what little power they have. Militant workers
organising independently to take direct action on the job are the thing
that management is most afraid of. It is trade unionismâs promise to
control these militants that management demands as a condition of giving
them a place at the negotiating table. When workers are militant and
self organised â as they were in the 1970s, for example â the trade
unions are more powerful because management needs their ability to
control and channel struggles so much more. When workers are divided,
disorganised and passive, then unions lose their power and management
stops working with them, as has happened in recent years for example.
It follows from this that the priority for people fighting in the
workplace should be not a strong union branch, but strong bonds of
solidarity between workers on the job. These bonds mean that direct
action to defend conditions and make gains is much more likely to
succeed. Ultimately, we see these bonds of solidarity as forming an
important part of a culture of resistance and as the basis for moving
beyond reformist and defensive struggles â those to protect and improve
pay and conditions â into revolutionary struggles.
These revolutionary struggles involve not just fighting management, but
getting rid of them altogether. In periods of heightened struggle when a
majority of the working class is mobilised against the ruling class,
workers can move from fighting management to managing themselves.
Workers take over the factories and the workshops, the fields and the
haulage yards to start producing the goods and services that society
needs for their own sake rather than for the profit of the bosses.
For many workers this will mean simply walking away from from the
unproductive and pointless jobs that they do. Most call centres and
offices, insurance, advertising, banking and other pointless parasitic
jobs that just move money around for the rich should just be abandoned.
For those in more useful jobs, the way work is organised should be
completely transformed. Workplaces should be run by meetings of all
workers or, where this is impractical, by meetings of mandated delegates
from different work groups and sections. The exchange of raw materials
and finished products across the world would be worked out by
federations of these self-managed workplaces and the communities they
are part of rather than driven by the profit motive.
In the beginning, we would simply have to keep these places running to
produce the things we needed, but as the revolution became more secure,
the very nature of work itself would need to be completely transformed.
Some work would be decentralised and carried out on a smaller scale so
that communities had more control over the things they needed. Other
jobs â transport, for example â would still have to be run on a large
scale and so would be run by federations accountable in every way to the
communities they served. The amount of work needed would be greatly
reduced as the profit motive is removed and the alienation of each
individual from the tasks they carry out would disappear. All of us
would be involved in decisions about what kind of work needed to be done
and all of us would have free choice about what kind of work we wanted
to do. Relationships in the marketplace between depersonalised
commodities would be replaced by relationships between people doing work
that interested them. What happens now only to a limited extent in small
privileged sections of the professional elite â some scientists and
academics, for example â would be the norm for everyone. We would work
because we wanted to for the sake of all those around us.
Unlike work, where it is more easy to see the lines of struggle,
âcommunityâ is much harder to define. In the past, many people lived in
close knit working class communities centred on a particular workplace â
mining villages or factory towns, for example â where work and home all
served to bind a particular group of people together. These kinds of
communities are much rarer now, but even when they were common not
everyone who lived in the same area could feel part of them. These
communities were often divided by race with ghettos for particular
groups of immigrants and a great deal of hostility between what were
effectively different communities. In the US in particular, the division
between white and black workers could be every bit as violent and
exploitative as the division between the working and the ruling classes.
They were also divided by gender. Men and women could have vastly
different experiences of life in these âunitedâ communities, with men
enjoying such power over âtheirâ women that it was their violence that
was the biggest problem in womenâs lives, not exploitation by the ruling
class.
While it can be argued that these divisions serve the interests of the
ruling class, that does not mean that they automatically disappear if we
assert a common âworking classâ identity. We cannot assume that just
because working class people live in a particular area that there is a
âcommunityâ there that is ready to fight back. We should also refuse to
be nostalgic for working class communities of the past. The unity that
they had was often marred by, and even sometimes based on, racism,
sexism, homophobia and so on.
This does not mean, however, that we should reject the community as a
site of working class struggle. There are many important battles to be
fought outside of the workplace which are just as important in building
a culture of resistance. What it means is that we have to think
carefully about the kinds of struggles that take place and the different
kinds of engagement that they require.
Fighting for the Social Wage: Poll Tax Rebellion
In 1989 the then Tory government tried to introduce a new local tax, the
Community Charge or Poll Tax, first into Scotland and then, in 1990,
into the rest of Britain. This new tax levelled a fixed charge on all
tax payers meaning that poorer people paid a much higher percentage of
their income than the better off. For the very poorest the new tax would
be a real burden whereas the rich would see their taxes fall.
Through much debate and disagreement a movement grew to resist the new
tax by refusing to pay it. This movement organised itself into local
Anti Poll Tax Unions, or APTUs, which organised to spread the idea of
non-payment and to help people resist any attempts to force them to pay.
The APTUs organised mass meetings, physical resistance to bailiffs
trying to collect the tax and protests at and occupations of town halls
and council buildings. These tactics were so successful that bailiff
companies went bust, unable to operate when confronted with entire
communities determined to stop them. Council revenues collapsed as up to
17 million people refused to pay and the cost of chasing non-payers
through the courts rocketed.
Protests at town halls often turned into confrontations with the police,
with small scale riots and disorder all over the country. A national
demonstration went the same way when police attacked in Trafalgar Square
and fighting went on for hours. The grass roots of the movement rallied
round to defend those arrested, but some of the left political parties
involved disowned the rioters (although they soon soon denied having
done this when the riot proved to be popular) and even cooperated with
the police, proving that in the end theyâre more concerned with their
own power than the needs of working class people.
In the end, the Poll Tax was defeated by widespread self organisation
and direct action. The APTUs allowed people to meet and make their own
decisions and the non-payment campaign created a direct confrontation
with the state, a confrontation that we won.
There are broadly speaking two kinds of struggle that working class
people face in the places that they live. The first is thesocial
wagestruggle, that is struggles against cuts in essential services and
against attacks on living standards through increases in the cost of
living. The second is what might be called the âidentityâ struggle,
although it is about far more than this. In this category are struggles
by women against patriarchy, ethnic minority/majority people against
racism and white supremacy, LGBTQ people against homophobia and
transphobia and so on. These kinds of struggles take place at home, in
the workplace, inside and outside of working class organisations. They
are, however, community struggles in the sense that the people who fight
them often find themselves bound together through that fight. These two
forms of struggle are ideal types and often get mixed up â in the
struggles of asylum seekers, for example, who must confront racism as
well as attacks on their living standards â but keeping in mind the
different ways they work can often help us understand what is going on.
When we talk about a social wage weâre talking about all the different
ways that working class people receive services from the state and the
ruling class that are in effect part of their share of the profits of
industry. Healthcare, subsidised and social housing, transport and
utilities like water and electricity, libraries and social services,
benefits and many other things can be seen as part of the social wage.
Like wage increases and shorter working days these services are often
the result of previous rounds of struggle, victories won by the working
class in the past. They are also, just like the benefits we receive at
work, often used to control us.
Community struggles over the social wage take many forms but they
usually involve a fairly straightforward confrontation between some arm
of the state â the local council, for example â and a relatively clearly
defined group of people who depend on a particular service. Cuts in
local medical services are resisted by those who use them â patients of
a particular clinic or those living in an area served by a particular
hospital. Rent increases are resisted by the tenants of a particular
landlord or housing authority. School closures are resisted by the
parents and children directly affected. There are many different tactics
available to people fighting these kind of struggles. Petitions and
appeals to representatives are often used, and more often than not fail,
but there are also forms of direct action that people can use.
Occupations of threatened buildings and services, mass protests outside,
and inside, government buildings, blockades and disruptions to the
normal running of services, street riots and disorder. Social wage
struggles are often the most imaginative of all struggles in terms of
the tactics they use, and this is in part because of the difficulties
they face.
The difference between social wage struggles and struggles in the
workplace is that it is not always possible for people fighting over the
social wage to hurt the profits of the people they oppose. Rent strikes
and the refusal to pay taxes can work in this way, but protests and
occupations donât always have this effect. This is one of the biggest
difficulties that social wage struggles face â it is much harder for
them to hurt the people in charge. Many of the tactics communities use
are aimed at disrupting the smooth running of local government in the
same way that industrial disputes disrupt the smooth running of the
workplace. However, another set of tactics is also aimed at the
legitimacy of the institutions of government, at questioning whether the
council or the NHS trust and so on even have the right to run the
services that are being attacked.
It is here that social wage struggles often move in the direction of
self organisation and self management â running occupied buildings and
services themselves, squatting land and simply building the things that
are needed without waiting for permission. It is also here, however,
that social wage struggles are often co-opted. Sometimes, political
parties move in and claim to speak for the people involved in resistance
to cuts and so on. They claim that the problem is the result of who is
in charge, not because of the system as a whole. They use the discontent
and resistance of ordinary people as a basis for their own power, as a
way of governing rather than freeing people. These parties come from
across the political spectrum, whether from the mainstream, from the
left or even the far right â this is a tactic the BNP used, for example.
At other times, the organisations that the community has set up for
itself to defend the services it relies on are invited to negotiate with
the state, even invited to run some things themselves. Very quickly they
find themselves managing peopleâs dissatisfaction on the stateâs behalf,
just like a trade union in the workplace.
If this co-option can be avoided and resisted by self-organised groups
working without representatives and taking direct action to fulfil their
own needs, then these kind of social wage struggles can move in amazing
directions. Millions of people can be organised to resist the
degradation of their own lives, as happened during the struggle against
the Poll Tax for example. They can also take over the running of
important aspects of their day to day lives which at the moment are in
the hands of the state.
At times of heightened struggle â for example during long lasting
general strikes â this dynamic leads to people taking over the running
of their own communities, providing for themselves the services they
rely on. During and after the revolution this will expand to break down
the division between work and the community so that people decide
amongst themselves what services they need and how they will provide
them for themselves. Neighbourhood assemblies will work in cooperation
with councils in the factories and workshops to provide everything
needed for life, with everyone affected by a decision involved in making
it.
The word âidentityâ is really not up to the job of describing the kind
of struggles weâre talking about here, but it is better than any of the
other terms that we have. Most liberal, and even most radical, ways of
talking about the struggles of women, of LGBTQ people, ethnic
minority/majority people and so on do not recognise the relationship
between these kinds of struggle and working class struggle. Sometimes
they are seen as distractions and sometimes as âseparate but equalâ, but
rarely as an integral part of the struggle against capitalism as a
whole. For anarchist communists capitalism is more than just as class
system, it is a system that uses a whole range of hierarchies to
maintain the power of a minority. Resistance to all of these hierarchies
should be seen as resistance to capitalism.
This does not mean, however, that separate organisations are not needed
by people fighting patriarchy, white supremacy and so on. Just because
the struggles of women or LGBTQ people are important in the struggle
against capitalism does not mean that those struggles can simply be
folded into some âwiderâ fight against capitalism. The nature of these
forms of exploitation and oppression mean that not only do ethnic
minority/majority people or LGBTQ people and so on face attacks from the
state in the form of discriminatory laws or police harassment, they also
face attacks from other working class people.
Because of this it is necessary for these people to form their own
communities not only in order to organise together but also to talk
together without having to justify what they say to people who do not
share their oppression. It is essential that people form groups which
are all women or all ethnic minority/majority or all LGBTQ or all
disabled and so on and so on. These groups provide a space in which
people can understand what is unique about their own oppressions and in
which they can be free of the prejudices â conscious or unconscious â of
people who do not share their experiences. These groups can be the basis
of communities of resistance, where a shared understanding becomes a set
of shared tactics and actions to take on both the state and the everyday
prejudice and violence that can make life hell for anyone defined
outside the norm.
These unique understandings and tactics become an important part of a
culture of resistance. They strengthen the challenge that all exploited
groups make to capitalism by broadening and deepening the range of
resistance that the ruling class faces. The power differences and
hierarchies that the ruling class uses to keep us divided from one
another are not overcome by some false âunityâ that ignores the
differences in our experiences of exploitation and oppression. They are
overcome when different people use their own experiences to come up with
unique forms of resistance that meet their own needs. This is the
foundation of alliances between different groups, between men and women,
black and white, immigrant and native, queer and straight and so on, not
a unity built on ignoring these differences.
These communities of resistance are as vulnerable to co-option as any
other kind of resistance. Feminist groups find themselves taking
government funding and becoming part of the administration of capitalism
rather than resisting it, ethic minority/majority activists become
âcommunity leadersâ and end up as part of the problem. It should be
stressed, however, that this is not a special feature of this kind of
group. Workersâ organisations are just as vulnerable to being co-opted
as womenâs or queer organisations for example. Indeed, it is often the
divisions caused by different hierarchies that are used to do this.
Early trade unions were bought off by the expulsion of women and
immigrant workers from the workplace, giving male workers a little slice
of power as a bribe. Queer groups have often seen gay men take positions
of leadership and power in exchange for downplaying, indeed sometimes
even opposing, the needs of lesbian women or transgender people,
breaking the unity brought by a common oppression with the privileges of
male power in a patriarchal society. As always, it is direct action and
self-organisation that can avoid this kind of co-option.
The ultimate goal of revolutionary âidentityâ struggles is the same as
any other kind of revolutionary struggle. It is not for equal rights or
a place at the capitalist table. It is instead the complete
transformation of the way society is organised. The struggle is for a
world in which everyone has the chance to be a full human being and do
whatever it is that they need to grow and fulfil themselves. In the end,
âidentityâ struggles seek to destroy the need for that identity, just as
workers in struggle want to stop being workers and start being people.
The future weâre fighting for is one in which there are only people, and
the colour of their skin, who they chose to sleep with or what kind of
genitals they happen to have are their business and no one elseâs.
If people are capable of running their own struggles and of fighting for
themselves to meet their own needs then what is the point of an
organisation like the Anarchist Federation? We are an organisation of
conscious revolutionaries who see ourselves as working towards an
anarchist communist revolution but, as weâve made clear in this
pamphlet, we donât think that any revolution will be down to us. It will
be the self activity of millions of working class people that makes the
revolution, not the work of a handful of people with some nice ideas. We
are not a revolutionary party that will lead the working class out of
its âtrade union consciousnessâ, out of reformism and into revolution.
We are not the embryo of a workersâ council or a revolutionary union
that will grow and grow until we eventually take over. We do not lead
anyone, we do not act on behalf of anyone but ourselves.
The Environment and the Social Wage: The German Anti-Nuclear Movement
In 1975 the West German government began building a nuclear reactor in
the tiny hamlet of Wyhl. Since 1971 a grassroots movement had been
building to oppose the new reactor, but had been ignored at every stage
of the planning process. On the 18^(th) February, one day after
construction had begun, local people occupied the site and were dragged
away and beaten by the police. A few days later on the 23^(rd) February,
30,000 people came back and reoccupied the site, forcing the police to
back down. Within a month the construction license had been withdrawn
and the reactor was never built.
This was the first major victory for the German anti-nuclear movement
which had been growing since the 1960s in the belly of the peace
movement and through local citizensâ initiatives. Through the late 1970s
hundreds of thousands of people were involved in occupations and direct
action aimed at stopping the governmentâs nuclear power programme.
Projects in Wackersdorf and Gorleben were defeated and in 1981 100,000
people faced off 10,000 police with sticks, stones, molotovs and
slingshots in protest at a proposed plant in Brockdorf.
The German anti-nuclear movement is the single most successful
environmental direct action movement in recent history. It started with
local communities organising themselves to resist building projects
through legal channels (lobbying, protests and so on). It grew into a
major alliance between anarchists, the libertarian left, local groups
and national campaigns that was able to fight and win against some of
the biggest police mobilisations ever seen in Germany. In the end, some
parts of this movement were co-opted into the German Green Party and
other parts faded away as the government backed down, but its influence
still lives. Even in 2008, it was possible for 15,000 to blockade
nuclear waste shipments and any German government can guarantee that
moves towards a new nuclear programme will be met with resistance.
There are, however, some things that a revolutionary organisation can do
that would be far less likely to happen without it. Anarchist communism
is a living working class tradition, but there are times when that life
hangs by a very thin thread. In periods of defeat and division, when the
working class has few organisations of its own and there is very little
struggle, something has to keep the lessons that have been learned
alive. The revolutionary organisation is an important store of knowledge
and skills. It is a kind of memory that keeps alive a vision of the
working class as united and defiant even when the class has been kicked
in the head so many times itâs starting to forget its own name, let
alone its past.
This means producing leaflets and pamphlets, organising meetings and
education to keep ideas and history alive. This is not just an academic
exercise, playing with ideas for the sake of it, it is intensely
practical. Accounts from the early days of the Poll Tax struggle make
clear that people were drawing inspiration from the stories of previous
fights against taxation, going back to the 14^(th) century peasantâs
revolt! Knowing that something has happened before can make people feel
that it is more realistic to fight back now. And this need not just be
some vague âinspirationâ, however important this is. A revolutionary
organisation with national and international contacts can be an
important channel for information which bypasses hierarchical structures
like the unions or the media and puts workers in different, isolated,
struggles in direct contact with one another.
There is much to it than this of course. Members of a revolutionary
organisation are also militants in their own right and intensely
involved in struggles where they live and work. The ideas of anarchist
communism spread not just through the words of our organisations but
also through things that we do. Whatever we are involved in, we push for
direct action and self organisation and resist takeover and co-option by
authoritarian groups. Our membership of a broader organisation of
revolutionaries gives us access to the experiences of our comrades and
allows us to discuss and debate the issues and tactics of any particular
struggle without having to worry about the basics. The high level of
political agreement within a revolutionary organisation allows us to
worry about the crucial details rather than having to make the same
arguments against the unions and for direct action again and again and
again.
It is in these two main ways â preserving and spreading the memory and
lessons of previous struggles, and supporting committed but potentially
isolated militants in day to day struggles â that a revolutionary
organisation contributes towards a culture of resistance. The ideas of
anarchist communism work. When we use them to fight, our chances of
winning increase because these ideas empower us and show us our own
strength rather than telling us to rely on some set of leaders or
representatives. The revolutionary organisation is one important way of
spreading those ideas, of putting them into action and using them to
build a culture of resistance.
Anarchist communism is a living, breathing working class tradition that
grows out of the actions and experiences of millions of people over the
centuries of struggle against capitalism. The one lesson that we learn
again and again is that people fight back. Wherever they are and
whatever is happening to them, people fight back. Sometimes we win, more
often we donât, but whenever we make progress the principles of direct
action and self organisation are usually at the heart of it. Our defeats
are never total: thereâs always something left to move forward and carry
on fighting. Our victory will never be final: human beings will always
seek to change and experiment, to experience new things and new ideas.
We believe that as long as capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and
all the rest of it still exist there will always be people who resist.
We believe that they have the best chance of winning when they organise
using anarchist communist principles. As long as that resistance goes
on, the Anarchist Federation and the many groups like us all over the
world will do whatever we can to bring those ideas to the people that
need them. Whether at work, at home or in the community people will
always fight back, and anarchist communists will always be there to
support them as best we can.