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Title: Workplace Occupations and Anarchism Author: Anarcho Date: March 25, 2011 Language: en Topics: occupations Source: Retrieved on 1st February 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=507
As part of our agitation in the student protests, anarchists have raised
the necessity of direct action such as occupations. This has a wider
application than students and anarchists have long argued that as part
of any social revolution workers would need to occupy their workplaces.
In this, we are part of a long and glorious tradition of militant
workers struggle. This can be seen from a recent SWP book on this
subject imaginatively entitled Occupy! The book starts with the
September 1920 Italian Occupations and, unsurprisingly, it forgets to
mention that it was the Italian anarcho-syndicalists and anarchists
(like Armando Borghi and Errico Malatesta) who suggested the tactic to
begin with in March of that year (see section A.5.5 of An Anarchist
FAQ). This is not surprising, as the SWP regularly write libertarians
out of history, particularly when they do not fit their “anarchists are
petit-bourgeois individualist elitists” nonsense.
Significantly, an anarchist book on workplace occupations would start
long before 1920. Ten years before, leading Voltairine de Cleyre argued
in Mother Earth that “the weapon of the future will be the general
strike” and that is it not clear that “it must be the strike which will
stay in the factory, not go out?” One “which will guard the machines and
allow no scab to touch them? which will organise, not to inflict
deprivation on itself, but on the enemy? which will take over industry
and operate it for the workers, not for franchise holder, stockholders,
and officeholders?” Five years before de Cleyre, Lucy Parsons pronounced
at the IWW’s founding convention that the “conception of the strike of
the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and
remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production.”
These ideas can be traced back further. Kropotkin repeated stressed the
importance of expropriation during a social revolution (see Words of a
Rebel, The Conquest of Bread or Act for Yourselves). Bakunin’s comments
from 1868 also suggest the occupation of workplaces: “All productive
capital and instruments of labour [will] be confiscated for the benefit
of toilers associations, which will have to put them to use in
collective production.”
While these are not an explicit call for occupations as part of a
strike, that flows naturally from such a vision of social revolution.
Parsons, de Cleyre, Borghi and Malatesta were building upon and applying
these ideas. We can, and must, do the same today. After all, turning a
strike committee and assembly in an occupied workplace into the decision
making bodies of a self-managed workplace is a logical progression:
“The struggle against hierarchy teaches us not only how to be anarchists
but also gives us a glimpse of what an anarchist society would be like,
what its initial framework could be and the experience of managing our
own activities which is required for such a society to function
successfully ...
“Thus, for all anarchists, the structural framework of an anarchist
society was created by the class struggle, by the needs of working class
people to resist oppression, exploitation and hierarchy ... The
necessity of practising mutual aid and solidarity to survive under
capitalism (as in any other hostile environment) makes working people
and other oppressed groups organise together to fight their oppressors
and exploiters. Thus the co-operation necessary for a libertarian
socialist society, like its organisational framework, would be generated
by the need to resist oppression and exploitation under capitalism. The
process of resistance produces organisation on a wider and wider scale
which, in turn, can become the framework of a free society as the needs
of the struggle promote libertarian forms of organisation such as
decision making from the bottom up, autonomy, federalism, mandated
delegates subject to instant recall and so on.
“For example, a strikers’ assembly would be the basic decision-making
forum in a struggle for improved wages and working conditions. It would
create a strike committee to implement its decisions and send delegates
to spread the strike. These delegates inspire other strikes, requiring a
new organisation to co-ordinate the struggle. This results in delegates
from all the strikes meeting and forming a federation (a workers’
council). The strikers decide to occupy the workplace and the strike
assemblies take over the means of production. The strike committees
become the basis for factory committees which could administer the
workplaces, based on workers’ self-management via workplace assemblies
(the former strikers’ assemblies). The federation of strikers’ delegates
becomes the local communal council, replacing the existing state with a
self-managed federation of workers’ associations. In this way, the class
struggle creates the framework of a free society.” (section I.2.3, An
Anarchist FAQ)
Strangely, the SWP book fails to mention the workplace takeovers during
the Russian Revolution. This is probably because the Bolsheviks opposed
workers seizing their workplaces (because it was a petit-bourgeois
anarchist tactic, needless to say). Rather the correct Marxist position
was that the so-called workers’ state should expropriate all capital and
the workers should wait until that is done (presumably in the cold
shut-down workplaces).
Unsurprisingly, as discussed in section H.6.2 of An Anarchist FAQ, when
the Bolsheviks finally got round to doing that the central body charged
with doing it had no idea no many factories were under its jurisdiction,
whether the workers already had taken them over nor what to do with them
in terms of input or output. In short, it was a complete mess, produced
by ideology and terrible conditions (conditions, it must be stressed,
which Bolshevik ideology helped make worse).
The anarchist arguments for local action and federalism to co-ordinate
such self-activity really is the only way to change society was
confirmed – centralised bodies, as Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin
continually argued, were not up to the task.
The idea of workplace occupations can be added to the long list of
anarchist positions which have proven valid by working class struggle.
It joins workers councils, the general strike, mandated and recallable
delegates, federations of communes, and a host of other ideas which are
accepted by the likes of the SWP but were first advocated by anarchists
– and usually dismissed and mocked by Marxists before workers apply them
in struggle!