Le Guin & Killjoy on Anarchist Fiction

Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Killjoy - Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers On Fiction from pdxjustice Media Productions on Vimeo.

I Don't Want to Change My Lifestyle - I Want to Change My Life

[An 'ancient' piece that, in spite of references that only the greybeards among us may readily recall, still contains many nutritious bites worth chewing over - a.]

by Peggy Hopper and Steve Foldz
Published by New England Free Press and Root and Branch c. 1972

Note: I originally published this (in Hysteria, a woman's newspaper in Boston) only under my name, but when people asked to reprint it I had a crisis of conscience. I felt that Steve had contributed so many of the ideas that he should be the co-author. Besides, to do such would break the rules. Three other women also helped - Liz Fenton, Meryl Nass, and Lillian Robinson. (They really did.) The "I's" and "me's" refer to me, however. -- P.H.

It seems clear to me that the women's movement in Boston hasn't really been doing much this year as compared to last year. I think that the reason behind this is that people have tried very hard not to think about what they were doing, and have therefore become encased in dogma. I also feel that people have settled for reforming their lives instead of changing them.

These things work together -- the dogma, the jargon, the elitism: they entrap us and prevent us from seeing our real enemy.

First I'm going to talk about the problems that women who work for wages confront and then I'm going to describe the myths in the movement that have been taking up our energies.

When one considers the perennially popular question of What am I going to do with my life?, one realizes that the difficulty of finding an answer has a lot to do with this society. Although there's clearly a lot of work to be done, it's very hard to find a job, particularly one that you can stand. Even the better-paying jobs, the ones that require a college degree, are ones in which one takes orders and carries them out or sometimes passes them on to underlings. One does what one is told. (As my mother's favorite saying goes, Snap to it.) And if one's suggestions are not ignored, they are incorporated into your orders.

(Of course, one can't do exactly and only what one is told or else the job won't get done. Machines break down and emergencies occur. But there is always a limit to how much initiative you're allowed to take.)

A waitress's job is not to serve food, it's to make profits. This becomes abundantly clear when the waitress gives some food away.

You may think your work is creative but just try challenging your job definition. You never get to choose what you want to do -- much less choose your wages.

We are what we do with our time. If one is a waitress eight hours a day, and spends those eight hours hoping for oblivion, then one is a person who spends half of her waking life wishing that she weren't there at all. If that is what on'e job is like, then it is, practically speaking, futile to consider oneself a secret girl revolutionary, or a sensuous woman, or a loving mother or a hip chick. In the reality of those eight hours, one is stepped on. But, although most people find it less painful to deny this reality, we are interested in doing away with the pain altogether.

Many middle-aged people will tell you how hard they have worked (which is true) and say I did it all for the kids. In other words, they were hardly even alive at all.

One's labor disappears before one has even finished, into other people's profits and other people's fame. One is always either a screwer or a screwee or both. And that's how we spend most of the hours of our lives. (And this account doesn't even deal with those natural catastrophes of capitalism: depressions, recessions and repression and a major war for every generation in this century.) The work that we do keeps the whole system going. If it weren't for the rest of us, the Rockefellers would starve.

It is when we do away with the bosses that we will be able to be somebody -- to have our lives.

A revolution will only happen in this country when the mass of people become so disgusted with things and cause so much trouble (like strikes) that the line between the owning classes and these would-be expropriators becomes very clear. The revolution is when the workers actually take over their factories and offices and restaurants and department stores and hospitals, etc. and kick their managers and administrators out and start running them again.

The liberation of the working class is the job of the workers alone.--Marx

To my mind the two essential points that the above makes are:

1. People have to organize themselves into groups, e.g. all the nurses and aides on the hospital floor who are willing to talk back to the doctors, or a group of friends who are willing to talk back to the doctors, or a group of friends who are willing to talk about personal problems and help each other out.
2. The important thing is seizing power, and the most important power to be seized is control over production. This process ranges from No, you are not going to talk to me like that to No, I'm not going to work that hard to No, it's not yours anymore, it's our factory now.

(A book which elaborates on some of these ideas in much greater detail is Workers Councils by Anton Pannekoek. [...] A pamphlet which describes what happened during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 is Hungary '56 by Andy Anderson [...].)

It seems to me that the women's movement in Boston has been backing away from this idea of groups of people seizing power. Of course, this idea does undercut some popular day-dreams. One woman I know has said that becoming a radical made her a better worker. At lunchtime, the other women in the office would read glamour magazines, while she read the Old Mole (a Boston underground paper). Nothing bothered her anymore, because although nobody knew it, she was a secret girl revolutionary.

Besides cutting out a lot of exciting fantasies of being a guerrilla fighter in the Rockies, the idea of groups of people personally taking power is also scary. It's hard to talk back to the boss. I'm afraid of people I don't know, and have an extremely hard time talking back to piggy types, like managers. It's easier not to deal with them. This scheme of revolution does not leave radicals out, because radicals can and should be instigators. But real action will come only when the masses of unpolitical people start to move, to organize their anger in a major way.
MYTHS IN THE MOVEMENT

I think that the women in the movement have spent a good deal of time this year chasing after myths. The myths have gradually calcified into dogma, and opposing ideas have not been dealt with kindly in meetings.

I'm going to talk about those myths which I find most objectionable, and then I'm going to propose some types of activities which I think would lead people in a better direction.
THE MYTH OF SISTERHOOD

Now, a lot of us are very lonely. That's endemic to American society. In fact, it's not just us, often our parents are lonely too, but they have TV. So changing the thrust of our rhetoric from all women are oppressed to all women are sisters made us feel reassured. However, it didn't work for long.

I, not unlike other women I've spoken to, know about 200 Bread & Roses women by sight and about eight well, only one of whom could be called a heavy.

When I went to the dance held in October to raise money for the women's center, I freaked out. There were all these women whom I recognized (but who didn't seem to recognize me) and they were dancing together, talking together. I desperately wanted them to talk to me, wanted them to dance with me because I really believed all the rhetoric about how these women were all my sisters, how when the chips were down, they were the one group who really had my interests at heart. But now I realize that that just isn't true. (Incidentally, I've talked to several other women who have had similar crises of anonymity.)

I'm not trying to say now that we should all go out and try and make it real: I am not saying that we should put our whole hearts and souls and guilty consciences into finding women who are lonely, and forcing ourselves to be their friends. I am not saying that we should guiltily try to make ourselves match up with the ridiculous rhetoric.

What I am saying is that the qualities of trust, support, and free conversation which so many of us miss in our lives will only start appearing in groups of people who are tied together by specific bonds, like ordinary groups of friends of long standing, or a group of salesgirls who have started talking back to the boss, or for that matter, a group of executives trying to break an industry-wide strike. Our common oppression as women just isn't enough. I think that 90% of the people in this country are oppressed and exploited by the ruling class; yet when I walk down the street they don't feel like my sisters and brothers.

We shouldn't promise people answers to all their personal problems as if we had these answers, because it just ain't so.
GAYNESS

Another myth in the movement is that being a lesbian is the only revolutionary way to order one's sex life. The phrase woman-identified woman makes me very uptight. It is frequently used to imply that because a woman has a relationship with a guy, she can't possibly be as much in earnest as a woman-identified woman. Furthermore, she is supposedly condemned to be under his thumb and can be expected to go around selling out and shitting on her sisters.

Gay liberation is certainly a good thing in that it is useful for the people involved; it wreaks psychological havoc in America; it can teach everyone a lot about sexuality; and it is of course good for women to feel that they don't have to be absolutely dependent on men as sexual partners. However, I think that a lot of women have been misled into thinking that one isn't really committed to the women's movement unless one is gay, or that a gay relationship is going to be so much more ultimately groovy than any other sexual relationship they've ever had. A few of them may turn out that way, but good sexual relationships just aren't enough. One still is caught in daily life: going to work, or enduring school, or raising a kid.

I think that we're all oppressed by this society in ways that we can't stand, and I think that if lesbians didn't lay so many trips on straight women about how being gay is so much better (and being more oppressed=better, in movement jargon), those women might feel less defensive and spend more time fighting their real enemies.
LIFESTYLE

Another popular idea around town is that the essence of liberation is a liberated lifestyle. (I think the essence of liberation is power over one's life.) A lot of women have been taking karate courses, for instance. Now while I certainly think that having a healthy body and knowing how to fight (if only against a single unarmed opponent) is good, it's not as great as is often claimed. The same goes for car mechanics courses. Since women have long been denied access to a certain type of knowledge, like mechanical skills, they decide that it will make a real difference if they start to learn these things. However, these courses start becoming a substitute for political action. If the only activities engaged in are skill classes, art courses, and exercise groups, the women's movement starts to look like a less refined version of the YWCA. It is not that these activities are bad; it's that they don't add up to power.

In other words, stomping through the streets in your workboots, knowing that you can kick some guy's balls in, is a very good first step. But actually doing something is what's really important. And even more than that, getting together with others in your situation and taking over that power is what counts.

As for communes, even if you can get them to work (which isn't easy) you are still stuck with the original problem of what to do with your life.
PORNOGRAPHY, CENSORSHIP AND PURITANISM

I don't find it strange that young boys and girls want to know what their own and others' bodies are like, and what sex is like, nor do I find it repulsive that both women and men often like to talk about and engage in sexual activity.

While it is true that most pornography is degrading to women, it does not immediately follow that we should try to ban smut from the newsstands. I think that any left-wing censorship campaign encourages the right wing in this country, and doesn't help to derigidify our own thinking either. (Maybe what we need is more female pornographers.) We also need greater acknowledgment that the way people's minds work is not always nice, wholesome and pure.

Maybe what we need is more women writing about, doing photography about, drawing pictures about, sexual desires and fantasies towards men and other women.

Another kind of puritanism in the movement that is also common is the way that it is fine to talk about gay sex or about being fucked over sexually, but just plain enjoying sex with a guy isn't as permissible.

I'm not the only woman who's been made to feel ashamed of being genitally oriented.
N.O.W.

Some women who've had disillusioning experiences in the women's movement have started saying the NOW is much more on the right track - After all, at least they're actually doing something instead of bullshitting all the time. That is true, but the same thing can also be said for the Democratic Party.

NOW's members are mainly well educated and relatively privileged. They see themselves as being prevented from making it the way they deserve to. The difference between them and many other women is that most women either realize that they're never going to make it or that they don't want to. Congresswomen, advertising executives, businesswomen and college professors are not the kind of slots that are open to most women. So while I don't think that there is anything wrong with an oppressed group trying to get a bigger piece of the pie, I don't think that we're talking about the same pie. They want to get rid of some of the more neanderthal notions which are keeping them out of the executive suite -- I would much rather blow it up.

There is also the question of tactics. This system has a lot of leeway in it for making reforms -- but not for making real changes. If one female academe who's three times as well qualified as any men around wants a professorship, she can fight it in the courts. (Among other things, she can afford a lawyer and afford to wait as many years as it takes.) The system can give way to avoid a scandal. But if large numbers of women in a city decide that they want pay equality with men, either their employers will pay off the judges -- or the judges will deliberate and decide in all good conscience that the law just doesn't apply because of some technicality. You can certainly win little battles pleading in the courts -- but you can't win the big ones.

What we need is activities which tend to get lots of women together in groups that can take some action: like women in a hospital kitchen who tell the manager that if he wants them to work faster, he can do it himself. What we don't need is an organization that will say, Stop that! If you don't behave, Congress won't pass the law we've been lobbying for.
THIRD WORLDISM

Another strange thing about the movement is that here we all are living in one of the all-time Pig States, where thousands of people have been involved in all sorts of spontaneous expressions of disgust (like anyone who thinks that last year's Harvard Square riot had very much to do with Bobby Seale -- which was the organizers' intention -- just wasn't there), yet politics usually means talking about the NLF or the Panthers and very rarely just about us. A lot of the reason for this is historical: five or more years ago most of the white New Left was centered around elite schools, and a natural upper class disdain of the masses (plus disdain of those who fancied themselves upper class) combined well with the empirical evidence that the masses of Americans were well indoctrinated with racist and anti-communist ideology. Naturally, leftists felt very isolated and many looked to countries like Vietnam, Cuba and China for inspiration. That seemed to be where things were happening. However, a lot of things have changed since then, and you'd think that we would have learned by now that what a Communist Party does in an agricultural country is not exactly the best model for activity in the United States.

The women's movement, the GI movement, the increase of wildcat strikes, strikes in high schools, have all involved a lot of people who had different backgrounds from the original new leftists. It should be clear that large numbers of people in this country are dissatisfied with the present situation. Also the events in May 1968 in France, the widespread strikes in Turin, Italy for the past several years, the recent uprising in Poland would give us an indication as to want a revolution in an industrialized country would be like. But instead of finding out about these European events, the underground papers, including the women's papers, hang on Madame Binh's every word.

I think that the direction the student movement took has a lot to do with why as soon as we move away from the immediate issues of husbands and boyfriends we generally are supporting and mimicking other people's battles -- not fighting our own.

Most of the issues the student movement picked to fight about -- war research, complicity, expansion, ROTC -- important issues, to be sure -- didn't deal with the university as a school -- classes and professors, except for a few exceptions like the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. It wasn't as if we thought that students liked school -- the social phenomena of many students dropping out and wanting to drop out, cutting most of their classes, attempting suicide, and spending a whole year of their university carer stoned, are familiar to us. We even knew that a major factor in the big and prominent actions like Columbia and Harvard was that students were so disgusted with school that they would go along with most any issue in order to express their anger. We knew that students were treated like subhumans, relegated to the lecture hall, brainwashed and machined to fit into their slots. However, we rarely faced those issues directly (nor did we try to understand what the nature of those slots was) -- we were afraid of being liberal. We passed up the opportunity to encourage students in intransigence to the system in their personal lives in order that we could enlist their bodies in our campaign to kick ROTC or the CIA or some other such thing off campus. (I would suspect that black student struggles had a tendency to a different character. They at least were usually fighting their own battles, not somebody else's.)

We never sufficiently realized that this is a capitalist system -- that we and the other students were going to get out of school and go to work for wages (if we could get jobs); we didn't directly fight the purpose of school, which is to make sure that we would have all the requisite technical skills and no more, that we would follow orders, that we would never refuse an assignment, even if it involved murder, and to throw enough academic fog in our minds so that we could never understand what was going on. The point of our classes was to make us believe in the Keynesian reformed version of capitalist exploitation, the B.F. Skinner updated version of psychology, the new relevant version of religion, the inviolability of ART, the Walt Rostow humanist version of imperialism and our own innate superiority over all those beneath us and our innate inferiority with regard to all those above us. The university made sure that we would carry those ideas around in our heads and never trust our own feelings.
CHANGING OUR LIVES

The United States is a very industrialized capitalist country in which the overwhelming majority of people work for wages and are therefore exploited by the owning and ruling class -- i.e. they are part of the proletariat even if they're engineers and look middle-class. The radical movement is not necessarily a collection of the fiercest fighters. People in this society are always fighting back. At the very least, they continually gripe among themselves. Usually, they also talk back to their bosses and call in sick when they're not. Most people try not to work as fast as possible and discourage others from doing so. Sometimes they go out on union called strikes or, better yet, on wildcats.

Women have been talking back to and fighting with and walking out on their men since time immemorial. We all know that students hate school, cut up in class and daydream. There is a lot of generalized opposition in this country. The movement is that group of people who say, Your (our) discontent has a more general cause than just that particular boss, husband, school. The movement is also a group of people who think that the anger should be organized, that targets chosen and who sometimes feel that they have a personal stake in upping the ante. So, given that, who are we, and what should we do?

The Proletariat is Revolutionary, or it is Nothing -- Marx

Those of us who work should deal with that situation. We should object to the ways that we are being screwed and get together with the other employees: I talked back to my boss and wasn't fired; I stopped worrying about not being an efficient waitress; All the women on the line learned to embarrass the hell out of the foreman by discussing their menstrual periods.

If talk doesn't work, we can take part in action -- sabotage: my boss was a bastard and his account books will never be the same; erase your company's computer with a handy home magnet; and wildcats: we all got sick of the job - on the same day; the customers were pouring into the restaurant for lunch, when all of us waitresses told the manager we had been working too hard and were all going to take a break.

This whole article has been talking about mistakes we have been making and directions we should be taking. Since it was written in the midst of things it is neither perfect nor complete (notice the omission of any extended discussion of the family). However, I think that the major points are correct. What we need is a lot more debate and a lot more thoughtful activity.

Fight dirty -- Life is REAL.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050421040749/www.labor.iu.edu/LaborHistory/rab/Pamphlets/hopper_lifestyle.html

Democracia Comunista Internacional - Organización Marxista Luxemburguista

[English Google translation below...]

Tras varios meses de debate, hemos acordado constituir una nueva Organización Marxista Luxemburguista, DEMOCRACIA COMUNISTA INTERNACIONAL.


¿Quiénes somos?


Somos un grupo de militantes que nos reivindicamos del pensamiento y la praxis de la revolucionaria Rosa Luxemburgo. Provenimos de numerosas experiencias, de numerosas luchas sociales en las que llevamos participando muchos años. En los últimos tiempos hemos participado en varios intentos de reagrupamiento: Democracia Comunista (Luxemburguista), la Red Luxemburguista Internacional, Alternativa Proletaria. Ahora hemos decidido dar este paso: queremos organizarnos juntos, construir una verdadera organización política internacional que agrupe a militantes de tendencia luxemburguista. Y que contribuya al proceso de lucha contra la explotación capitalista, que también nosotros mismos padecemos.


Somos simples proletarios, trabajadores. No caben aquí profesionales de la política. Actuamos horizontalmente, sin ningún tipo de privilegios ni líderes. Y queremos que nuestra base sea la auto-actividad y la auto-organización de cada militante, que habrá de evaluar y decidir, considerando los planteamientos básicos que entre todos decidimos, cómo puede actuar en las situaciones concretas en las que vive. Porque apoyamos y participamos en las luchas existentes contra el capitalismo, impulsando su desarrollo democrático y unitario. E intentando que tengan la perspectiva más global y radical posible. Así, entre todos, desarrollaremos esa herramienta abierta, libre y en continua evolución que es el marxismo luxemburguista.


Puedes conocer los apartados de nuestro documento de bases políticas y organizativas (¿Qué defendemos? ¿Por qué luxemburguistas? ¿Cómo intervenimos socialmente? ¿Cómo nos organizamos) en nuestra página principal:

http://luxemburguistas.wordpress.com/

Y desde ella puedes acceder a los documentos, análisis e informaciones que publicamos (a los que iremos añadiendo los procedentes de nuestras experiencias previas).

Nuestro correo electrónico es: mailto:dci.rosalux@gmail.com

SALUD

DCI-OML

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All,

A google translation (unchecked and unedited) of the above for those of us with
no facility in Spanish.

For freesocialism,
arminius

......................................................................

After several months of debate, we agreed to establish a new Marxist Luxemburgu
Organization, DEMOCRACY COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL.


About us


We are a group of militants that we claim we thought and praxis of the
revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. We come from many experiences, many social
struggles in which we participated for many years. In recent times we have
participated in several attempts at reunification: Democracia Comunista
(Luxemburgu) Luxemburgu Network International Proletarian Alternative. Now we
have decided to take this step: we organize together, build a true international
political organization that brings together activists Luxemburgist trend. And to
facilitate the process of struggle against capitalist exploitation, which we
ourselves suffer.


We simple proletarian workers. There can be no political professionals here. We
act horizontally, without any privileges or leaders. And we want our base is the
self-activity and self-organization of every activist, who will assess and
decide, considering the basic approach that we all decided, how it can act in
concrete situations in which they live. Because we support and participate in
existing struggles against capitalism, promoting democratic development unit. E
trying to have the global perspective and radical way possible. So, together,
develop this tool free, open and evolving Luxemburgist that is Marxism.


You know the paper away from our political and organizational bases (What stand
for? Luxemburgu Why? How intervene socially? How do we organize ourselves) in
our home:

http://luxemburguistas.wordpress.com/

And from there you can access the documents, analyze and publish information
(which we will be adding those from our previous experiences).

Our email is: mailto: dci.rosalux @ gmail.com

HEALTH

DCI-OML

FYI: Manchester (uk) Class Struggle Forum - 22.09.10

Manchester Class Struggle Forum #7 - The Significance of the 1984/85 British Coalminers Strike

The next meeting of the Manchester Class Struggle Forum will take place on the subject of The Great Miners' Strike of 1984-85, 'Spikeymike' shall be providing a lead-off.

The miners' strike of 84-85 was the last great example of open class warfare in the United Kingdom, some parts of Yorkshire were turned into a police state, solidarity was sent to the miners from across the world, yet the experience was still a bitter defeat for the working class.

A short introduction shall be given, followed by plenty of time for discussion.

Suggested reading
NB - the reading below is not essential for the discussion, but is suggested for background

Outside and Against the Unions - Wildcat
Argues that far from helping workers, the NUM actually acted as a barrier to the miners' struggle.

The Miners Strike - Communist Bulletin Group/Wildcat
Pamphlet produced during the strike.

After the Miners Strike - CBG/Wildcat
A 'balance sheet' of the strike.

Pit Sense – or No Sense?
Mike's review of Dave Douglass' book.

1926-1985: So Near - So Far - a selective history of the British miners
Long, collaborative text.

For those who tire of reading, watch Dave Douglass discuss the strike at the CPGB's summer school.

The forum will take place at 7.00pm, on Wednesday 22nd September at the Friends Meeting House, Mount Street, Manchester

http://libcom.org/blog/manchester-class-struggle-forum-7-significance-198485-british-coalminers-strike-15092010

Fighting in the New Terrain

Overture: The More Things Change…

Once, the basic building block of patriarchy was the nuclear family, and calling for its abolition was a radical demand. Now families are increasingly fragmented—yet has this fundamentally expanded women’s power or children’s autonomy?

Once, the mainstream media consisted of only a few television and radio channels. These have not only multiplied into infinity but are being supplanted by forms of media such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. But has this done away with passive consumption? And how much more control over these formats do users really have, structurally speaking?

Once, movies represented the epitome of a society based on spectatorship; today, video games let us star in our own shoot-'em-up epics, and the video game industry does as much business as Hollywood. In an audience watching a movie, everyone is alone; the most you can do is boo if the storyline outrages you. In the new video games, on the other hand, you can interact with virtual versions of other players in real time. But is this greater freedom? Is it more togetherness?

Once, one could speak of a social and cultural mainstream, and subculture itself seemed subversive. Now “diversity” is at a premium for our rulers, and subculture is an essential motor of consumer society: the more identities, the more markets.

Once, people grew up in the same community as their parents and grandparents, and travel could be considered a destabilizing force interrupting static social and cultural configurations. Today life is characterized by constant movement as people struggle to keep up with the demands of the market; in place of repressive configurations, we have permanent transience, universal atomization.

Once, laborers stayed at one workplace for years or decades, developing the social ties and common reference points that made old-fashioned unions possible. Today, employment is increasingly temporary and precarious, as more and more workers shift from factories and unions to service industry and compulsory flexibility.

Once, wage labor was a distinct sphere of life, and it was easy to recognize and rebel against the ways our productive potential was exploited. Now every aspect of existence is becoming “work,” in the sense of activity that produces value in the capitalist economy: glancing at one’s email account, one increases the capital of those who sell advertisements. In place of distinct specialized roles in the capitalist economy, we increasingly see flexible, collective production of capital, much of which goes unpaid.

Once, the world was full of dictatorships in which power was clearly wielded from above and could be contested as such. Now these are giving way to democracies that seem to include more people in the political process, thus legitimizing the repressive powers of the state.

Once, the essential unit of state power was the nation, and nations competed among themselves to assert their individual interests. In the era of capitalist globalization, the interests of state power transcend national boundaries, and the dominant mode of conflict is not war but policing. This is occasionally employed against rogue nations, but continuously implemented against people.

Once, one could draw lines, however arbitrary, between the so-called First World and Third World. Today the First World and the Third World coexist in every metropolis, and white supremacy is administered in the United States by an African-American president.




Fighting in the New Terrain
At the turn of the century, we could only
imagine anarchism as a desertion from
an all-powerful social order.

[Read on, here... http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/terrain.php ]

Amongst the rubble: a look at the Christchurch earthquake from the bottom up

by beyondresistance - September 16, 2010

While the dust settles and Christchurch recovers from the 7.1 earthquake, people have begun to pick up the pieces and get on with their lives. But for many working class people this is not so easy. Those most affected by ‘natural disasters’ — whether by the tsunami in the Pacific, earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and now Christchurch, NZ — are those already on the margins of despair.

As the impact of the quake became known we saw the authorities rush to ‘lock down’ the CBD, and after a short time brought in the military in a quasi ‘martial law’ scenario. With the aid of the corporate media and using the odd collapsed and damaged building as a backdrop, a sensational picture was painted of a city in ruins. Their reports were far from helpful — heavily recycling dramatic images while providing little concrete advice and information for those of us on the ground. It was hard to not to get the feeling that it was little more than a ratings seeking adventure at our expense.

Out in the worst affected suburbs people waited for days to receive help from the authorities. While the state hurried to safeguard inner city property, people in the outer limits were left to fend for themselves. Many acts of mutual aid were carried out, with friends and neighbours ‘mucking in’ — firstly to make sure everyone was safe and then supporting each other with what they could to survive. Some shopkeepers offered free milk, people offered water from private wells, and with the University closed students organised themselves into solidarity teams (numbering over 1000 in total) and went about helping those in an inspiring display of mutual aid.

However reports are coming to light of a number of abusive and oppressive scenarios. Workers have been forced to work in unsafe conditions or told to stay home without being paid. First Security, Subway and the Readings Cinema have all put profits before people in a blatant disregard of the interests of their staff. Equally concerning is the example of a Welfare Centre that in a blatant act of racism evicted a large Maori whanau who were seeking comfort, support and refuge in a facility set up for this purpose (‘freeloaders’ was the term used).

Many people have lost everything and many stories are now being told of residents of rental properties having to stay in dangerous and substandard housing with nowhere to go, as greedy landlords refuse to subsidise rent, make repairs or break fixed-term lease agreements. There was also one case where the City Council evicted residents from council flats without any notice and refusing to allow occupants to access their belongings, leaving them homeless, penniless and with only the clothes on their backs. All this is ongoing, as are the aftershocks.

Women have once again copped the worst of it. Cases of domestic violence have skyrocketed while earthquake tremours continue, adding to the already heavy trauma.

We should not be so hasty to lump praise on the State just because it showed a helping hand in a time of need, a hand in the service of the biggest disaster of all — capitalism. Nor should we ignore the draconian measures the state has recently passed. The Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Bill gives a single Minister (Brownlee) the power to repeal or modify practically any law on our statute book, without even having to refer to Cabinet, let alone Parliament. This Act was voted in by all Parties in the House, which shows more than ever the true motives of our supposedly neutral state: increased power for the few, a privileging of property and an emphasis on order (ie business as usual).

While Civil Defence volunteers and Emergency Services did a good job with the organisational structures they had to work with, questions should be asked as to whether a more co-ordinated but decentralised approach could have brought more relief to those out in the suburbs. One alternative could be a model of community resource facilities run the people themselves, acting as a hub — not only for disaster relief and mutual aid — but as a genuine decision making space that truly enables people in their neighbourhoods to organise collectively to best meet their needs. There are plenty of examples worldwide of such resources being directly controlled and self-managed by those involved via regular assemblies, and these models could equally apply to such national networks such as Civil Defence.

As time goes by many more stories will be told, and we hope they will add to the positive examples already around us. The most spectacular thing that always comes out of these situations — more than damaged buildings or ‘live on the scene’ reports — is the ability of people to help one another. Solidarity and mutual aid has largely formed the foundation of people’s distrupted lives over the last week or so, and shows us that these principles are in fact evident in human nature, however suppressed they currently are by the competition and consumption of our modern environment (an environment in which the State plays a major role).

For those of us in Christchurch who have lived through this experience, who huddled in doorways, shoveled silt, and witnessed first hand the real beneficiary of the state’s response (inner city property), life goes on. For most, it will never be the same again.

http://beyondresistance.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/amongst-the-rubble-a-look-at-the-christchurch-earthquake-from-the-bottom-up/

Publishing Noted...

(Spotted on Larry Gambone's blog - http://porkupineblog.blogspot.com/)

The View From Anarchist Mountain


It has been a busy year for me, publishing wise. First The Impossibilists, with my own Red Lion Press, then Nature of Human Brainwork was brought out by PM Press. Now I have two more to offer.

The View From Anarchist Mountain, 199 pages, $16.00 is a collection of my writings over the past 20 years on anarchism, society and history. It is available from AK Press. (For Canadians, order from me at redlionpress@hotmail.com )


Bill Pritchard – Revolutionary Socialist is a 36 page pamphlet that goes for $4.00. Pritchard is best known for being jailed under a bogus conspiracy charge in the aftermath of the Winnipeg General Strike. He was also a militant of the Socialist Party of Canada, the editor of its newspaper, The Western Clarion, and a founder of the OBU. After the demise of the SPC, he was an early member of the CCF and was Reeve of Burnaby for a number of years. Later in life, he returned to the “Impossibilist” socialism of his roots.

“Bill Pritchard – Revolutionary Socialist” - was taken from a talk he gave in 1973. It describes his adventures - and often hilarious misadventures – as a pioneer Socialist on speaking tours of Western Canada more than 90 years ago. He reminisces about a host of fascinating characters and also gives crucial eye-witness evidence about the murder of Ginger Goodwin. It is available so far, only from me.

The Flaw of Western Economies

by Marcin Gerwin, Sopot, Poland. [Marcin graduated with a Ph.D. in political
studies, from the University of Gdansk, Poland, with his thesis: "The idea and
practice of sustainable development in the context of global challenges".]

Let's imagine a green and responsible consumer. Let's call him George. George
lives in a sleepy town, near the center and the park where he often goes for a
walk with his dog. George built his house with his friends two years ago. It is
a very small house, only 320 square feet and it was made with cob – clay mixed
with straw and aggregate. The clay for construction was extracted from George's
land behind the house – now you can see a nice pond there with water lilies.
George was fortunate enough to find some recycled timber for the roof from the
old garage that his neighbors were demolishing. He considered making a turf roof
with wild flowers and herbs, but eventually he decided that a slate roof will be
more practical because he will be able to collect rainwater from it and use it
for watering his garden during warm summer days.

George buys his food at a local farmers' market. All food that is sold there is
organic and comes from farms within a 50 mile radius and George is happy to know
that very little fuel is used to transport the food he purchases. Furthermore,
he buys only raw, unpackaged food, which he brings home in his own bag. He
doesn't eat meat or fish. He knows that it takes a lot of land to feed the
animals, and "after all" he tells his mom smiling "a cow is a human being too".
He drinks milk, however, and enjoys scrambled eggs on a Sunday morning. Well,
not exactly all his food comes from the market. He buys bread and rolls in the
nearby bakery. He tried baking bread on his own, but eventually he concluded
that it takes too much energy to bake a single loaf of bread for him alone and
that it would be more energy-efficient to buy it from the bakery. Nevertheless,
it was his New Year's resolution to buy local produce only. George is concerned
about the amount of fuel that is used for transporting food and he decided to go
radical on this one. It was tough at the beginning as he likes to drink tea and
coffee, and he loves bananas. He substituted regular coffee with a barley and
rye "coffee" and instead of tea he drinks mint or chamomile infusions.
Unfortunately, bananas are gone from his table for good, but he discovered new
vegetables such as yacon and salsify, so he doesn't miss them that much.

George doesn't have a car. He goes to work on a bicycle and if it's too far for
a bicycle he takes a bus or a train. Even when he is going abroad, which was
three times in his life, he prefers to take a train rather than an airplane. His
electric energy consumption is very low. In his home he installed a solar PV
module for 140 Watts and batteries. That's not much, but sufficient to power 3
lamps, a radio and a small fridge. George doesn't have a TV, dishwasher or a
computer. Some of his friends say that his lifestyle is a bit primitive, but he
doesn't mind.

George has many books on his shelves, but when he discovered that many of them
were available in a public library he stopped buying them. Once a month he buys
his favorite magazine, but recently he even began reading newspapers in the
library. His house contains very little furniture, just a simple, wooden table
with chairs and a wardrobe. His sleeping mattress is laid directly on the clay
floor. Inside his wardrobe there are only a few worn out shirts and new pair of
trousers he got for Christmas. George has only two pairs of shoes and some
rubber boots for working in a garden.

George doesn't have a bath tub, only a shower. He has a smart shower head that
reduces the usage of water by almost 60%. But George is most proud of his
compost toilet that he designed himself. It fits nicely in the corner of his
bathroom and is not smelly at all! The compost is used to fertilize a small
elephant grass plantation that he shares with his friends. The elephant grass is
cut every year and is used to heat their homes in winter.

George works in a small shop that makes artisan cheese. They make cheddar, gouda
and valdeon cheese wrapped in Sycamore leaves. All their produce is sold in two
local shops. George doesn't earn a lot of money, but it is enough for his modest
needs. He pays his medical and dental care insurance and he can easily afford
going to the movies every Saturday. He meets with his friends after work (he
works only 6 hours a day), they play guitar and sing. He goes hiking in the
summer and rides a bicycle along the river. George lives a happy and stress-free
life.

What if We All Lived Like George?

Now, let's take this a step further. Let's imagine that all people in North
America, Europe and Japan decided to reduce their levels of consumption and
consume only as much as George. What happens?

The massive destruction of the Amazon rainforest stopped. The market for soya
and timber shrunk so much that it was no longer profitable to cut down vast
areas of the forest. The existing soya farms were forced to compete for the
remaining customers in China and India. In Canada and Scandinavia the number of
trees cut down within a year has decreased significantly. In Democratic Republic
of Congo, however, the rainforest is still cut down to make way for roads to
mines sponsored by China which had no intention of abandoning its consumer
lifestyle. Nevertheless, in many parts of the world the pressure on the natural
forest was reduced enough to remove some birds and mammals from the red list of
endangered species.

Positive change was quickly noted in the oceans. The population of fish species
started to grow. Cod numbers increased in Baltic Sea and at the coasts of
Canada. Also, with adoption of organic farming methods, water in the rivers
became less polluted and more fish were able to live there. Life even came back
to the Louisiana coast were agricultural runoff borne by the Mississippi River
had created a 7000 square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

The levels of air pollution in the cities has changed so much that the air is
almost as clean as in the countryside. The level of carbon dioxide has decreased
for the first time since the 19th century and scientist began to be more
optimistic about human impact on climate change. Oil consumption was reduced so
much that one barrel costs only 18 USD.

Now let's go back to George. How is he?

George lost his job. The artisan cheese turned out to be too expensive for the
new consumers and his boss decided to cut personnel. Everyday George cues in a
long line waiting for warm soup and 2 slices of bread distributed by the
government aid agency. He sold his bike, guitar and solar panels to buy food. He
eats the soup and shares the bread with his dog. George's friends lost their
jobs too. His parents don't have a job, his aunt lost her job. Actually almost
everyone that George knows lost their jobs. He meets them all waiting in the
long, long line to get warm soup.

How did it happen?

People stopped buying cars and decided to use public transport, so within one
year all car factories were closed. Hundreds of thousands of workers were fired
in Europe, USA and Japan. All car repair shops, tire making companies, car
washing facilities and almost all gas stations were closed. Bicycle making
companies recorded record profits but they couldn't offer new jobs for the
workers from the car factories, because they invested in new technologies and
now all bicycle parts are made by machines.

Book publishers declared bankruptcy. With people reading books mostly in
libraries they were not able to make enough profit. The quantity of books they
were able to sell was too low. Along with publishers, bookstores were also
forced to close their businesses. Ethical consumers understood that a million
daily copies of a newspaper had a tremendous impact on forests. So, people quit
buying them as well. As a consequence, journalists and editors lost their jobs.
Printers lost their jobs. Producers of ink and printing equipment also lost
their jobs. Producers of paper lost their jobs.

Hard times came for the construction industry. People are building small homes,
which means that the producers of concrete, paints, windows, doors and roof
tiles sell less products. With lower sales they were forced to cut down jobs.
Millions of jobs for unqualified workers were no longer available.

The same happened in the clothes industry. Cotton farmers lost their jobs,
factory workers in China, Bangladesh and India lost their jobs as well. Small
farmers growing coffee, tea and cocoa in the tropics were shocked when the
importers told them that they cannot afford to buy their produce. Millions of
them lost their source of income.

The stock markets experienced a crisis that was never seen in their history.
"The Great Depression Was a Joke" read the headlines. "Record Losses on Wall
Street", "Another Bank Goes Down", "Sustainability is Killing Us". But that was
only in the first few weeks. Later on the newspapers went bankrupt. The
repercussions were felt around the whole world. From Brazil and Argentina to
Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka. The credit crunch was now a pleasant memory of the
past – a `crisis' the bankers only wished to experience.

At a government level the situation was equally dramatic. The national budget's
revenue decreased by more than a half! There was not enough money for salaries
for school teachers, for doctors, for nurses, for policemen, for the
administration and for the army. Not only was construction of new roads stopped,
but there was also not enough funds to maintain the existing roads.

At first workers went on strike and protested loudly in front of the president's
office. They burned tires and waved flags of their unions. But soon they
understood. There was not enough money in the budget to pay them. The protests
were in vain.

The heads of all EU countries, the president of USA and the prime minister of
Japan appeared everyday on TV and in the radio. They begged their citizens to
consume more. "Please" they said "please, you must go shopping or our countries
will perish."

Our Economic System Relies on Consumption

The point is that the economic model of Western societies relies on consumption.
Excessive consumption provides economic development, it provides jobs. The more
people consume, the more jobs are created. When people consume less, jobs are
lost. There is a famous quote from the retail analyst Victor Lebow who helped to
create a vision for the economic reform in the US after World War II:

Our enormously productive economy (…) demands that we make consumption our
way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we
seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption (…) we
need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating
rate.

Think about disposable Gillette razors. Would it be such a good business if you
could sharpen the blade once a while, rather than buy the whole new product over
and over again?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't reduce our levels on consumption. We must. The
natural resources on our planet are used at an unsustainable rate. Too many
forests are cut down, too many fish caught, too many soils are degraded, too
many species are endangered with extinction – and too many people are appearing
on our planet every year. My point is that if we wish to provide a livelihood
for every person on this planet, it won't be enough to promote sustainable
levels of consumption. Our current economic model was designed for excessive
consumption. Consumption is its engine. Honestly speaking, greed is its engine.
If we wish to have a sustainable future we must change the whole economic model,
culture and introduce true democratic political systems – or else we will be
waiting with George for food handouts.

So, what can we do?

Certainly, it is completely unrealistic that all citizens change their
consumption patterns at once in the way that George did. But with a predicted
population of 9.2 billion people in 2050 we cannot expect that it will be
possible for everyone to have a car, a two-storey house in the suburbs and a
large piece of meat for breakfast and lunch. Solutions like zero-waste
production, recycling, renewable energy, water and energy efficiency, organic
agriculture, preventive medicine and many others are the foundations of
sustainability. But where will the jobs come from?

To answer this, let's look into a something different for a while. Have you ever
wondered if there is a country where people enjoy a good life and they keep
their consumption within the limits of their local environment? According to the
"Happy Planet Index", published by the New Economics Foundation, the no. 1 place
like this is Vanuatu – an archipelago of islands on the western Pacific. What
makes life so good there? People live in traditional communities with close
social ties. They fish, and grow food in their gardens. Some of the food is also
gathered from the wild. The land is fertile and a close spiritual contact with
the land is a vital part of local culture. The life is slow-paced and people are
content with what they have. Andrew Harding, a BBC reporter, came to the remote
Pentecost Island to investigate their lives. "There is no hunger here, no
unemployment, no tax, no police, no crime or conflict to speak of," he says. "It
may not be a paradise, but you can see why people here want to keep the outside
world at arm's length."

Norman Shackley, chair of the British Friends of Vanuatu and a former resident
of the islands, recalls meeting a young man who had just returned to his home
island after studying at Nottingham University. "I asked him what he was going
to do with his life now" says Norman Shackley, "He just pointed at his fishing
rod and said `this'. He could have been one of the top earners in Vanuatu if he
wanted, but he was contented with his simple life and didn't want anything
else."

Happiness is not dependent on geography, however. We can live a happy life in
Poland, USA, Japan or Ukraine. We can live a happy life – and one that doesn't
destroy the natural environment that supports us. What we need for this are:
good community relations, secure livelihoods and close contact with nature. As
David Korten points out "We (all) want tasty nutritious food uncontaminated with
toxins. We want healthy, happy children, loving families, and a caring community
with a beautiful healthy natural environment. We want meaningful work, a living
wage, and security in our old age." Since we know all this then are our
governments working hard to achieve this aim? No. They are working hard to
increase the gross domestic product (GDP). And what that has got to do with
anything? According to the International Monetary Fund Vanuatu is on their list
of countries sorted by GDP – and is ranked at 170. That's below Zimbabwe….

Money is a practical thing. It can be used to facilitate exchange of goods. On
the Vanuatu islands people use pig tusks for this purpose. There are even 14
banks storing pig tusks in their vaults. However, their livelihoods are not
dependent on money. As Jean Pierre John from the Metoma island in the north of
Vanuatu answered when asked what is the secret of their happiness: "Not having
to worry about money."

People tend to forget that money is not a real good. You cannot satisfy hunger
eating a 100 USD bill or even a pound of coins. The true value is in the goods
for which it can be exchanged: in vegetables, fruits, clothes, building
materials, tools etc. We can have these things without the use of money. We can
grow food, gather wood in the forest, dig clay and make pots, weave fabrics and
sow clothes. We can even make our own ketchup.

In traditional local economies people can be independent and self-sufficient.
Their livelihoods are not dependent on distant stock exchange markets, on
unaccountable governments, on the European Commission in Brussels (an
undemocratically elected institution, superior to member countries, often
imposing policies that do not have social approval). These local economies
existed also in Europe, not that long ago. We can still create local economies
where people will be able to live off the land with a very little or no need for
money.

Let's go back to George. He has just finished eating his bean soup and now he is
able to think more clearly. "Why wait for someone to give us job?" he says to
his friend Lucy. "We will grow our own food!"

"Where?" asks Lucy. "In your backyard? There is not enough space. Maybe enough
for basil and thyme, but forget maize or wheat."
"There is plenty of land near the river." George replies. "There are hundreds of
acres of grasslands, I was riding there on my bicycle."
"Possibly, but do you have money to buy it?"

"We don't need to own it. We will use it and care for it. Come on Lucy," George
gets up. "We need seeds and tools, and a wheelbarrow. Let's go and find some."

A year later the grasslands by the river were transformed into rich vegetable
gardens and vast fields of wheat, barley, rye, maize and oats. George has a
right to use 2 acres of land were he planted pumpkins, squash, eggplants,
tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers, potatoes, lettuce, broad beans, sunflower,
currants, strawberries as well as fruit trees and nuts. He hopes to have a small
forest garden there too. The project that he started was not about owning the
land, but about land stewardship. They were very fortunate that the grasslands
belonged to the county, or, in other words, to them. So, George organized a
meeting in the city hall where people of his community decided how to provide
access to this land in a just way. They set up a composting co-operative and a
seeds exchange network. To extend the growing season they needed materials to
build the greenhouses, so they decided to sell an old warehouse that belonged to
the county. The city mayor was hesitant at first about the new way of arranging
things, but he checked the constitution and it was expressed clearly, that
people govern the state either directly or by their representatives. "So now
they are governing it directly," he concluded.

The food crisis it the city was over. People were able to satisfy their basic
needs on their own and in autumn they were celebrating a bumper harvest. George
still doesn't have enough money to buy the solar panels he had before, but he
has got an olive oil lamp. With his friends he built an oil press and they don't
need to worry about the lighting. George is also back in cheese manufacturing.
He is back working in the shop part-time. People cannot afford to buy a lot of
cheese, so the owner decided to accept vegetables and herbs in exchange for the
cheddars they make. In winter they plan to launch a local currency to facilitate
exchange of locally produced goods and services.

It may seem backward to suggest that people should farm instead of working in a
space station. Nevertheless, in the world where resources are scarce and
populations climb fast it is a time-tested solution (thousands of years of
practice in all parts of the world) which will enable them to become
economically independent and to have a meaningful life.



In the Western culture progress is defined as going from vinyl records to CDs,
then to DVDs and finally to Blue-ray Discs. We used to have black and white
TV-sets, now we've got High Definition television. That's called progress.
People get used to new technologies so fast that they think about them as
indispensable parts of their lives. Can you believe that people could actually
live without the internet? But that was only 20 years ago! Life must have been
so hard back then… Oh no! 20 years ago? There were no cell phones either! To get
out of this technological race is considered backward. Or perhaps… this is
progress?

When governments try to tackle unemployment they encourage new investments,
construction of new factories and generally they do their best to maximize the
growth of GDP. More roads, more cars, more consumer goods, more services. In the
Western economy, to create new jobs you must increase consumption. New
technologies must be constantly invented, fashion changed, cars replaced, office
equipment broken down and new needs created. But if the consumption slows down,
this will no longer be the option. People will be out of a job for good, with
very little hope for change.

The global economy can be more green, use less water and use much less energy.
There is no doubt about it, the technologies are ready to be implemented.
However, if we consume less then for some people there will be no jobs within
the global economic system. Yet, there are opportunities waiting for them in the
locally self-sufficient economies.

To create sustainable local economies we should start with ethics. Bad values
got us into this mess in the first place. It is not a lack of technology that
caused pollution of the rivers. Chevron Texaco used to dump 163 millions liters
of toxic wastewater per day directly into the streams of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
There was technology available to re-inject the wastewater deep underground. But
they wanted to save 3 USD per barrel. Now the whole area of Lago Agrio is
poisoned and people are suffering from contamination related diseases. It would
have never happened if the values of corporate executives were those of caring
for nature, helping one another and interconnectedness with the land.

The ethics for an environmentally-friendly lifestyle are simply exemplified in
permaculture. They are: care of the earth, care of people and setting limits to
consumption. Permaculture gives emphasis to working with nature, rather than
against it, cooperation, caring for soil, water, plants and animals. Based upon
these values we can use principles and techniques of permaculture to design
gardens, villages or urban communities.

However, even the most appropriate ecological techniques will not do much help
if we don't have the land to start with. Access to land can be provided by land
trusts, by local communities directly or in other ways that people find
practical. In the land stewardship project that George started the right to use
the land was granted in exchange for the care for soil and environment. No
pesticides usage was allowed, neither use of industrial farming systems. His
community is like the administrator of the land rather than the owner. It grants
its members the right to use a certain piece of land, on the condition that it
will not become eroded or poisoned. The right to use this land can be passed to
the next generation, but if the farmer degrades the land, he or she can lose the
right to use it.

In Madagascar the government introduced an innovative program of reforestation
where a community that plants trees and cares for them for 3 years can become
the owner of reforested land. In Madagascar there are hundreds of thousands of
hectares of abandoned lands which can be restored and used by the growing
population. The restored lands can be used as a sustainable source of food,
fuelwood and timber. Even the most severely degraded lands can be restored, as
Geoff Lawton proved by establishing a garden in a desert in Jordan.

Then, if we really think about creating sustainable livelihoods for all people
on our planet, not just for our closest relatives or people who happen to live
within the borders of the same country, we should allow migration to the places
where the land is available. There are countries which are already overpopulated
to the extent that they can no longer feed themselves and must rely on imported
food. A prime example of this is Japan, which now imports 70 percent of its
grain. There are also countries where land in unequally distributed. In
Paraguay, for example, 1 percent of the population owns around 70 percent of the
agricultural land. In this case farmlands should be re-allocated, in a
democratic way.

Our political systems need some improvements as well. True democracy means that
people can make decisions regarding their own lives. However, in most cases
decisions are made by people's representatives and too often they don't keep
their promises, lack skills, vision, they represent interests of their parties
or business elites rather than the people and they are not accountable. We can
organize the political system in a different way. It all starts on the local
level, in the municipality. Citizens meet to discuss the daily issues affecting
their lives and take decision regarding the budget, local taxation, land use
permits etc. The mayor and local administration are employed to put their
decisions into practice. In other words, people are like stakeholders of a
company and the mayor is like a CEO. When the CEO of a private company doesn't
perform his duties well, he gets fired. In the same way citizens should be able
to change the mayor or any other member of local administration. It is the
citizens who pay their salaries. Administration must be accountable! Their job
is to serve people, not the other way around.

One of the pioneers of the modern participatory democracy is the city of Porto
Alegre in Brazil. Since 1989 the citizenry hold meetings where they decide on
the priorities that decide how the public money is spent. Gianpaolo Baiocchi
writes: "Citizens took over many functions usually reserved for bureaucrats:
setting city-wide spending priorities, planning investments, and reviewing
payrolls, not to mention setting the rules for the participatory budgeting
process itself and monitoring its outcomes. Because since the 1990s Brazilian
cities have assumed responsibility for most social-service provision and
infrastructure investments, citizens are able to exert significant control over
transportation, education, public health, and public works." Among the benefits
of direct participation in decision making are improved community ties and
stronger involvement in the city life. Citizens are often able to choose
projects to be funded better than officials as they know what they need, be it
sanitation, water supply or a new housing. Research shows that participatory
budgeting leads to lower poverty rates and improved education. And above all –
community empowerment.

Don't you think it's a little odd that people cannot decide on what their tax
money is spent on? The concept of taxation in democratic countries is to collect
money that will be used to improve the quality of life of the communities. Yet,
taxpayers have almost no say in the allocation of their money. True, they can
choose the representative who will spend the money for them, and, if he or she
turns out to be irresponsible, they can wait 4 years for another election and
choose someone different. Well, it doesn't seem very effective. Imagine a
company where a manager must wait 4 years to dismiss an employee. It's even
worse – the manger must pay salary and benefits for all these years and do what
his employee tells him to do. Isn't it strange?

Consequently, people at the local level should be able to decide on nationwide
issues. Why not? They meet, discuss, consult with experts, then vote in their
own municipalities. Then votes in the whole country are counted and a decision
is made. It's called democracy.

The Transition initiatives that are spreading across the UK and other parts of
the world is democracy in action. Participatory democracy doesn't need a special
law to be enforced. Formal regulations may be useful, but they are not
obligatory. All it takes is that the mayor of the city accepts the
recommendations decided upon by the local community. And when the mayor doesn't
want to listen? Than the local community can dismiss him or her and choose
somebody else. The important benefit of the Transition initiatives is that
thanks to regular meetings they provide a rich social life and stronger social
ties. People living in one city can get to know each other better and work
together in many ways.

Our current global economy was not designed to enhance community life. Its aim
is to maximize profits. It depends on excessive consumption to provide jobs. We
can make it greener, we can improve resource efficiency, energy efficiency,
water productivity, we can recycle materials, use biodegradable plastics etc.
But still, we need the consumer lifestyle to power it. Yet, the consumer
lifestyle is not the way of the human being.… We don't need all that stuff to be
happy. Life can be simple, fun and meaningful with less gadgets, less cars, less
stuff. To achieve that we need to create locally self-sufficient economies and
to renew democracy.

http://www.permacultureusa.org/2008/11/03/the-flaw-of-western-economies/

Karl Marx & the State

[As near as I can tell, the 'Marxist-Humanist Initiative', a successor to Raya Dunayevskaya's News and Letters publication/organisation, shares the same Leninist/Trot origins as its predecessor, even if both might be qualified with the adjective 'Lite'. That being said, and despite my penchant for never giving a Leninist,et al, organisation an even break - or certainly no more of one than they have shown to any of my sector comrades and class siblings - I have to say that this is a very interesting and informative article from their blog (link below):]


By David Adam.

In April 1917, the Russian anarchist Voline met Leon Trotsky in a New York print works. Not surprisingly, both were producing revolutionary propaganda. Discussing the Russian situation, Voline told Trotsky that he considered it certain that the Bolsheviks would come to power. He went on to say he was equally certain that the Bolsheviks would persecute the anarchists once their power had been consolidated. Trotsky, taken aback by Voline’s conviction, emphasized that the Marxists and the anarchists were both revolutionary socialists fighting the same battle. While it is true that they had their differences, these differences, according to Trotsky, were secondary, merely methodological differences-principally a disagreement regarding a revolutionary “transitional stage.” Trotsky went on to dismiss Voline’s prediction of persecution against the anarchists as nonsense, assuring him that the Bolsheviks were not enemies of the anarchists. Voline relates that in December 1919, less than three years later, he was arrested by Bolshevik military authorities in the Makhnovist region. Since he was a well-known militant, the authorities notified Trotsky of his arrest and asked how he should be handled. Trotsky’s reply was terse: “Shoot out of hand.-Trotsky.” Luckily, Voline lived to tell his tale.1

It is on the basis of the Russian experience that anarchists generally affirm that their ideas have been vindicated. Bakunin’s predictions about Marxist authoritarianism came true, or so it seems. Voline’s story is the perfect snapshot of the anarchist’s historical vindication. Years later, another prominent anarcho-syndicalist emphasized the main lesson of the Russian experience:

In Russia… where the so-called “proletarian dictatorship” has ripened into reality, the aspirations of a particular party for political power have prevented any truly socialistic reconstruction of economy and have forced the country into the slavery of a grinding state-capitalism. The “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in which naïve souls wish to see merely a passing, but inevitable, transition stage to real Socialism, has today grown into a frightful despotism and a new imperialism, which lags behind the tyranny of the Fascist states in nothing. The assertion that the state must continue to exist until class conflicts, and classes with them, disappear, sounds, in the light of all historical experience, almost like a bad joke.2

Here, in brief, is the historical verdict passed on Marxism by anarchism. But does this verdict discredit the theories of the supposed originator of Marxism, Karl Marx himself? This essay will begin with a look at Marx’s basic understanding of the bourgeois state and move on to consider his conception of the transition to socialism in order to demystify Marx’s political ideas.

The Bourgeois State

Marx’s critique of the bourgeois state, or his “critique of politics,”3 first developed out of a critical confrontation with Hegel. The best place to start is thus his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which Marx challenges Hegel’s dialectical justification for the status quo. There are two main lines of argument that we should pay close attention to: (1) Marx’s conception of the political state as a separate sphere and (2) his radical conception of direct democracy as opposed to the democracy of the bourgeois state.

According to bourgeois theory, in “civil society” individual citizens pursue their own particular interests in competition with and at the expense of other citizens.4 In the state, on the other hand, only the general interest is pursued. The state stands above civil society both to act as a limiting force on competition (by declaring certain forms of competition to be illegal), and to provide the basic framework in which competition is to take place (through legal contract, property laws, and so forth). In this way, the state is supposed to guarantee the equal rights of all citizens.

Marx vehemently attacked this theory as it was found in Hegel. Far from seeing the state as a neutral arbiter that served to realize individual freedom, Marx considered the state to be a sphere of social life not only separate from, but also opposed to civil society. For Marx, this contradiction between the state and civil society is characteristic of a society divided against itself, in which the functions of government are administered against society. Marx writes, “The ‘police’, the ‘judiciary’, and the ‘administration’ are not the representatives of a civil society which administers its own universal interests in them and through them; they are the representatives of the state and their task is to administer the state against civil society.”5 Furthermore, the idea of the general interest of all citizens being realized within the bourgeois state was a fiction to begin with. Firstly, the “bureaucrats,” who perform state activities, use the general powers of the state to pursue their own particular interests within the state hierarchy. Marx writes, “As for the individual bureaucrat, the purpose of the state becomes his private purpose, a hunt for promotion, careerism.”6 Secondly, the participation of private individuals in state activities does not in fact shield those individuals from the class distinctions that constitute civil society. Instead, the individuals enter into political life with those class distinctions: “The class distinctions of civil society thus become established as political distinctions.”7

In elaborating the contradictory position of the state bureaucrats, Marx is simultaneously denouncing the competitive, hierarchical relations of the political sphere, which, while supposedly realizing the general interest of the citizenry, in fact disposes of the very social equality and transparency necessary for a democratic, general interest to emerge. Here, Marx’s basic conception of democracy, a social form in which society “administers its own universal interests,” is given in outline. This radical conception of democracy must be differentiated from a representative democracy in which it is the representatives who, although elected, hold the real power. The contradictions of modern, bourgeois government are briefly drawn out by Marx:

The separation of the political state from civil society takes the form of a separation of the deputies from their electors. Society simply deputes elements of itself to become its political existence. There is a twofold contradiction: (1) A formal contradiction. The deputies of civil society are a society which is not connected to its electors by any ‘instruction’ or commission. They have a formal authorization but as soon as this becomes real they cease to be authorized. They should be deputies but they are not. (2) A material contradiction. In respect to actual interests . . . Here we find the converse. They have authority as representatives of public affairs, whereas in reality they represent particular interests.8

To reiterate Marx’s point, there is a material contradiction in commissioning members of a divided and atomized civil society to somehow represent the general interest of that society. Even from a formal point of view, the deputies recognized as deriving their mandate solely from the popular masses, become, once elected, independent of their electors, and are free to make political decisions on their behalf. This is distinct from Marx’s vision of a society that “administers its own universal interests.” As Marx put it, “The efforts of civil society to transform itself into a political society, or to make the political society into the real one, manifest themselves in the attempt to achieve as general a participation as possible in the legislature . . . . The political state leads an existence divorced from civil society. For its part, civil society would cease to exist if everyone became a legislator.”9 There is an important point here: the separation of the state from civil society depends on limiting popular participation in government.

Marx’s analysis of the bourgeois state and civil society is presented even more clearly in his 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question.” His analysis is worth quoting at length:

Where the political state has attained its full degree of development man leads a double life, a life in heaven and a life on earth, not only in his mind, in his consciousness, but in reality. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society, where he is active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers. The relationship of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relationship of heaven to earth. The state stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it in the same way as religion overcomes the restrictions of the profane world, i.e. it has to acknowledge it again, reinstate it and allow itself to be dominated by it. Man in his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where he is considered to be a species-being, he is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, he is divested of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality.10

The “political state” that Marx refers to here is a modern product: it is only on the basis of bourgeois relations that the state clearly separates itself from civil society. Marx’s contrasting description of feudal relations in this essay is helpful in this regard: “The old civil society [of feudalism] had a directly political character, i.e. the elements of civil life such as property, family and the mode and manner of work were elevated in the form of seigniory, estate and guild to the level of elements of political life.”11

There is a connection emerging between Marx’s understanding of bourgeois society as a society of competing private producers, and the alien character of this society’s general interest, which can only be “unreal.” The state is alien and detached from civil society precisely because bourgeois civil society is inherently divided. As Marx would put it in The German Ideology, “the practical struggle of these particular interests, which actually constantly run counter to the common and illusory common interests, necessitates practical intervention and restraint by the illusory ‘general’ interest in the form of the state.”12 The most important application of this analysis is Marx’s vision of social emancipation: “Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres [own forces] as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed.”13

Marx speaks of man as a species-being in the sense that human consciousness and social intercourse differentiate humans from animals. Humans engage in purposive, conscious social production, transforming themselves and their environment. But when the social links between people, through which they express their species-character, become a mere means of individual existence, man is estranged, or alienated from this social essence.14 The analysis Marx develops in the 1840’s is a unified critique of human alienation, of the freeing of social production from the control of the producers and the separation of political power from the body politic. In his “Introduction” to Marx’s Early Writings, Lucio Colletti emphasizes the significance of Marx’s critique of alienation for his analysis of capitalist society: “When real individuals are fragmented from one another and become estranged then their mediating function must in turn become independent of them: that is, their social relationships, the nexus of reciprocity which binds them together. Thus, there is an evident parallelism between the hypostasis of the state, of God, and of money.”15

The essentials of Marx’s critique of politics are all elaborated in the 1840’s. This is the inescapable foundation of Marx’s understanding of proletarian revolution, which is given vivid expression in The German Ideology: “For the proletarians . . . the condition of their life, labour, and with it all the conditions of existence of modern society, have become something extraneous, something over which they, as separate individuals, have no control . . . they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the state; in order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the state.”16

What is clear from the above is that Marx did not hold an instrumental view of the state as a mere apparatus that can be administered by different social classes. It was the bourgeois expression of the illusory general interest in a divided society: the interests of private property given general force. Yet, the reader may be wondering where Marx’s theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a transitional state characterized by the “conquest of political power for this class,” comes in.17 In fact, in The German Ideology itself, the theory of proletarian dictatorship (not yet given this name) is presented rather clearly: ” . . . every class which is aiming at domination, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, leads to the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination in general, must first conquer political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which in the first moment it is forced to do.”18 The proletariat must represent its interest as the general interest because it must overthrow the old society in its entirety, transforming not only its own conditions of life, but those of other classes as well. It is not a question simply of equalizing social conditions, but of overthrowing a social class relationship that has spread over the entire globe: that of wage-labor and capital.

Though his early writings focused on the bourgeois state as a specific historical form, Marx’s transhistorical definition of “the state” in general is also presented in The German Ideology, when Marx describes the state as “the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests.”19 This definition of course does not describe the specific features of any real state or historical class of states. Any state nonetheless requires some organization of armed force, legislation, justice, etc., and a “worker’s state” would be no exception. What is significant about the above definition, however, is that it makes the concepts of “state” and “class rule” coterminous.20 On the same page we find also an excellent description of the bourgeois state: “By the mere fact that it is a class and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organize itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its average interests. Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the state has become a separate entity, alongside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois are compelled to adopt, both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.”21

For Marx, popular working class participation in governance is the necessary route to a rationally planned economy, or the abolition of bourgeois civil society. When the workers-the vast majority-reclaim the political power alienated to bureaucratic hierarchies, they subordinate the state power to their economic needs, or elevate civil society to the realm of politics. We will now look at Marx’s views on the transition to socialism.

Proletarian Dictatorship

To understand Marx’s views on the transition to socialism, it is useful to go back to his 1844 “Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform,’” where social emancipation is identified as the soul of the proletarian revolution. Marx writes, “All revolution-the overthrow of the existing ruling power and the dissolution of the old order-is a political act. But without revolution socialism cannot be made possible. It stands in need of this political act just as it stands in need of destruction and dissolution. But as soon as its organizing functions begin and its goal, its soul emerges, socialism throws its political mask aside.”22 Here we can see the emergence of a distinct conception of transition to socialism. This is developed somewhat as a distinct understanding of political power in Marx’s critique of Proudhon:

The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society. . . . Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social. It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions.23

Here we see the development of the concept of proletarian political power (or “state power,” as Marx sometimes referred to it): it has a social soul unlike any previous form of political power, but this class power necessarily takes a political (state) form because during the process of transition to socialism the antagonisms of civil society have not yet been completely abolished. Later Marx would label this transitional phase the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This quite simply meant the political rule of the working class. This transitional period, as Marx conceived it, did not entail the existence of a transitional form of society intervening between, and distinct from, capitalism and communism. The transitional period is essentially a period of revolutionary change. “Between capitalist and communist society,” wrote Marx, “lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other.”24 The raison d’être of the proletarian state power is to bring the means of production into common ownership, to bring about the “expropriation of the expropriators,” as Marx described the aim of the Paris Commune.25

A little-known text by Marx, his 1874 “Notes on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy,” explains the concept of proletarian dictatorship more clearly than any other. In his book Bakunin ridicules Marx’s concept of the transitional state power of the proletarian dictatorship, and Marx critically responds in his “Notes.” Bakunin writes, “If there is a state, then there is domination and consequent slavery. A state without slavery, open or camouflaged, is inconceivable-that is why we are enemies of the state. What does it mean, ‘the proletariat raised to a governing class?’”26 Marx responds, “It means that the proletariat, instead of fighting in individual instances against the economically privileged classes, has gained sufficient strength and organisation to use general means of coercion in its struggle against them; but it can only make use of such economic means as abolish its own character as wage labourer and hence as a class; when its victory is complete, its rule too is therefore at an end, since its class character will have disappeared.”27 The claim that through revolution the proletariat will be “raised to a governing class” thus has nothing to do with creating a dictatorship of a political sect, but is rather a claim that the proletariat will use “general means of coercion” to undercut the bourgeoisie’s power (by abolishing the private ownership of the means of production, disbanding the standing army, and so forth). It is the entire proletariat that is to exercise this power. Bakunin asks, “Will all 40 million [German workers] be members of the government?”28 Marx responds, “Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities.”29 This statement is certainly striking, but there are other places in the text where Marx more subtly conveys his radical conception of proletarian democracy. When writing about proletarian power and the peasantry, Marx writes that “the proletariat . . . must, as the government, take the measures needed . . . “30, identifying the transitional government with the proletariat as a class. Another example: when quoting Bakunin’s critique, Marx inserts a revealing parenthetical comment: “The dilemma in the theory of the Marxists is easily resolved. By people’s government they (i.e. Bakunin) understand the government of the people by a small number of representatives chosen (elected) by the people.”31 Here Marx is very clearly implying that he does not understand “people’s government” or workers’ government, as the government of the people by a small number of representatives elected by the people. This is a rather clear indication that Marx is still faithful to his 1843 critique of bourgeois democracy.

Clearly, this conception of “proletarian” government is distinct from the bourgeois state, or from any previous form of state power. As Marx makes clear in the above statements, he is referring to a proletarian “government” only in the sense that the working class uses general means of coercion to enforce its aims. Proletarian government is not used by Marx to mean that some elite group (assumedly the intellectuals, as Bakunin argued) would use general means of coercion over the whole proletariat, for that would rule out working class “self-government.” Rather, the proletariat as a whole would assert its class interests over an alien class (by abolishing private property, expropriating the capitalists and socializing the means of production, disbanding the standing army, etc.). For anarchists, who often define these terms somewhat differently, much of the confusion about Marx’s claim that the proletariat must wield political power seems to be based on Marx’s frequent use of the words “state” and “government.” But as we have seen, there is nothing anti-democratic about the meaning Marx attached to these words. Most anarchists, unlike Marx, define the state in terms of minority rule. It is easy for someone who uses this sort of definition to read Marx’s mention of a proletarian “state” and immediately associate it with oppression and detachment from effective popular control. The problem is that interpreting Marx in this way creates a number of contradictions in his writings that vanish when his basic theoretical framework is better understood.32

Another example of Marx’s use of the idea of proletarian dictatorship comes in an essay on “Political Indifferentism” that criticizes both the Proudhonists and the Bakuninists. Marx recognizes that the workers must struggle against the bourgeois state, but also that a revolutionary form of state is needed before social classes as such disappear. Marx pretends to speak for his opponents:

If in the political struggle against the bourgeois state the workers succeed only in extracting concessions, then they are guilty of compromise; and this is contrary to eternal principles. . . . If the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form.33

This passage illustrates fairly clearly that proletarian dictatorship is simply the political power of an armed working class. The essence of a “workers’ state,” for Marx, was workers’ power, not any particular leadership at the helm of the state.34

Furthermore, as Hal Draper has pointed out, it is a mistake to assume that the word “dictatorship” in the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” is supposed to refer to dictatorial (as distinguished from democratic) policies or forms of government. In fact, it was not until the latter part of the 19th century and more definitively after the Russian revolution that the term “dictatorship” came to have a specifically anti-democratic connotation.35 The origin of the term is the Roman dictatura, which referred to an emergency management of power. After 1848, around the time that Marx began using the term, it became relatively common for journalists to bemoan the “dictatorship” or “despotism” of the people, which posed a threat to the status quo. In 1849, a Spanish politician even made a speech in parliament declaring: “It is a question of choosing between the dictatorship from below and the dictatorship from above: I choose the dictatorship from above, since it comes from a purer and loftier realm.”36 Revolutionaries had even used the word “dictatorship” before Marx to refer to a transition to socialism. Blanqui, for example, advocated an educative dictatorship of a small group of revolutionaries. Marx’s use of the word “dictatorship” in the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat,” however, is original and deliberately distinct from Blanqui’s usage. Engels emphasizes this point in a passage on Blanqui: “From the fact that Blanqui conceives of every revolution as the coup de main of a small revolutionary minority, what follows of itself is the necessity of dictatorship after its success-the dictatorship, please note, not of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who made the coup de main and who themselves are organized beforehand under the dictatorship of one person or a few. One can see that Blanqui is a revolutionary of the previous generation.”37 It is clear that the Leninist model of a particular sect or political party exercising political power is much closer to the Blanquist conception of “dictatorship” than to Marx’s, and Engels explicitly criticized this conception of how political power should be exercised. It is also clear that Blanqui’s model of rule by a small group of revolutionaries shares more in common with popular fantasies about Marx than with Marx’s dictatorship of the whole proletarian class.

Storming Heaven

We have seen that Marx’s radical democracy formed a major part of his political perspective. Though not as explicit in his economic studies, to which Marx devoted so much of his life, his basic political perspective comes to the fore once again in his analysis of the Paris Commune of 1871, a landmark event in the history of the workers’ movement. It is in his analysis of the Paris Commune that Marx’s understanding of the transition to socialism is most clearly developed. We will look closely at Marx’s famous essay on the Commune, as well as his drafts for this text.

In The Civil War in France, Marx lauds the Commune as “a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.”38 In his First Draft, Marx also characterized the Commune as “a Revolution against the State itself.” Here he was referring specifically to the French centralized executive power, which had not been broken by previous revolutions. Marx focuses on the Commune’s break with this state machinery, and the resumption of power by the masses: “It was a Revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life. It was not a revolution to transfer it from one fraction of the ruling classes to the other, but a Revolution to break down this horrid machinery of Class domination itself.”39

Although Marx’s terminology is somewhat different from other parts of his writings (where he referred to the proletariat’s exercise of state power), the main points of his vision of proletarian emancipation remained constant: the proletariat exercises political power through general means of coercion over the capitalist class, and it does this as a class rather than through an elite group of individuals raised above the rest of the ruling class, using democratic methods that would be appropriate to the future communist society. The frequent claim that Marx simply adopted the anarchist view of the state after the Paris Commune could not be further from the truth. The parasitic French state of the bourgeoisie was to be destroyed, but in 1871 Marx did not cease to call for working class state power.40

The method of political organization adopted by the Paris Commune is also described as “the reabsorption of the State power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it.”41 This “reabsorption” was accomplished when the Commune did away with “the state hierarchy altogether” and replaced “the haughteous masters of the people” by “always removable servants” acting “continuously under public supervision.”42 The Commune challenged “The delusion as if administration and political governing were mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste.”43 In Marx’s writing on the Paris Commune, we can see again Marx’s support, expressed as early as 1843, for a public able to “deliberate and decide on public affairs for themselves.”44 We see a reappearance of the themes of his Critique of Hegel: direct democracy through responsible delegates, the elimination of bureaucracy and its attendant mysteries. Marx even called the Parisians of the Commune “heaven-stormers” and contrasted them with “the slaves to heaven of the German-Prussian Holy Roman Empire.”45 It is possible that Marx was using his 1843 identification of the bourgeois state as the “heaven” of civil society. The Parisians stormed heaven in that they conquered the political power that had previously been sharply separated from their profane existences. The Commune easily became Marx’s model for the transitional proletarian state.46 Marx praised the workers of Paris for having “taken the actual management of their Revolution into their own hands and [having] found at the same time, in the case of success, the means to hold it in the hands of the People itself, displacing the State machinery, the governmental machinery of the ruling classes by a governmental machinery of their own.”47 Here we see that the process of transition itself must be self-managed by the workers. The opposition to Blanquist conceptions could not be more self-evident.

In his Second Draft, Marx makes an even clearer statement of the prefigurative nature of the proletarian dictatorship: “the working class cannot simply lay hold on the ready made State machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.”48 Derek Sayer has emphasized this aspect of proletarian dictatorship. He writes that breaking down the separation between the state and civil society is “not for Marx one of communism’s remote objectives, but an indispensable part of any conceivable means for its attainment. What needs to be understood is that Marx is being every bit as materialist here as in his critique of the Anarchists. If the objective is labor’s self-emancipation the means have to be ‘prefigurative’, because they are the only ones which will work.”49 For Marx, this form of power can be a “state” from the perspective of its political, coercive function of uprooting the foundations of the rule of capital. It cannot be a “state” in the sense of a “parasitic excrescence” usurping power from the mass of workers.50

A passage from the Final Draft focusing on the organization of the Commune is worth examining closely:

In a rough sketch of national organization which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat impératif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few but important functions which still would remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal, and therefore strictly responsible agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organised by the Communal Constitution and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence. While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic investiture.51

Marx saw the mandated and revocable delegates of the Commune as an example of working class state power in action. Recall Marx’s 1843 description of the bourgeois state: “The separation of the political state from civil society takes the form of a separation of the deputies from their electors.”52 Marx clearly thought that the Commune exhibited the opposite tendency. Here we see a vivid contrast between the bureaucratic French state machinery and the “governmental machinery” of the workers. Richard N. Hunt, in writing about the Commune, highlights what he called Marx and Engels’ “double usage” of the word “state,” which can function as a stand-in for a parasitic bourgeois state machinery, or as a general description of organized class rule: “The full-time army as parasite disappeared, but the part-time National Guard remained as the coercive instrument of the workers’ state. Here in sharpest focus one can perceive Marx and Engels’ double usage: the parasite state is to be smashed immediately; the state as instrument of class coercion is to remain until the need for it fades away.”53

Marx makes another important distinction between the Commune and normal bourgeois government: “The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time.”54 The delegates were generally to be responsible for carrying out legislative decisions, instead of simply voting on them. As Marx put it in his Second Draft of The Civil War in France, “The modern bourgeois state is embodied in two great organs, parliament and the government [the executive].”55 Parliamentarism is not identified with effective control from below, but rather with professional politicians who are not truly responsible to the public. In an 1888 letter to Laura Lafargue, Engels spoke of French political illusions: “Why, if the French see no other issue than either personal government, or parliamentary government, they may as well give up.”56 Clearly the solution is not greater power for one of the two “great organs” of the bourgeois state, but rather an integration of their functions under the control of the revolutionary workers. In the Commune Marx saw the destruction of a bourgeois state and the democratization of executive power. Hal Draper writes on this theme:

It was Marx’s view that the abolition of the separation of powers, far from being a temporary or provisional expedient, was a basic necessity for a truly democratic government. He reiterated this view in his 1851 article on the French constitution, after quoting its statement that “the division of powers is the primary condition of a free government.” [Marx:] “Here we have the old constitutional folly. The condition of a ‘free government’ is not the division but the unity of power. The machinery of government cannot be too simple. It is always the craft of knaves to make it complicated and mysterious.”57

Notice Marx’s desire for the simplification of government, which goes hand in hand with his lifelong disdain for the mysterious realm of bureaucracy. The workers must understand their government if they are to govern.

We have seen how, in the 1840’s, Marx described the bourgeois state as “a separate entity, alongside and outside civil society.”58 We have also seen how the Commune represented the “reabsorption” by the people of a “parasitic” state power. In a remarkable 1891 passage, Engels draws together some of these different ideas to make a valuable contrast between proletarian state power and previous forms of state power. It is worth quoting at length:

From the very outset the Commune was compelled to recognise that the working class, once come to power, could not go on managing with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment. What had been the characteristic attribute of the former state? Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally through simple division of labor. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society.59 This can be seen, for example, not only in the hereditary monarchy, but equally so in the democratic republic. Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate and powerful section of the nation than precisely in North America. . . . It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. And nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends-and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it. Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society-an inevitable transformation in all previous states-the Commune made use of two infallible means. In this first place, it filled all posts-administrative, judicial and educational-by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers.60

This passage emphasizes very strongly the special character of proletarian state power. Richard N. Hunt ably describes a “central thread” of Marx and Engels’ analysis of the Paris Commune as “the desire to debureaucratize or, more broadly, deprofessionalize public life, to create a democracy without professionals. This is the really crucial and distinguishing characteristic of the workers’ state as conceived by Marx and Engels . . . . Deprofessionalization is the remedy to the parasitic tendency which has existed in all previous states. It is exactly what is involved in ’smashing’ the state machinery and ‘reabsorbing’ state power.”61 The payment of workers’ wages to officials, mentioned by Engels, is a clear example of this deprofessionalization.

Some critics may look at a focus on the Paris Commune as bound to make Marx and Engels look very hostile to the bourgeois state, when in fact their politics were much more ambiguous. Did they not advocate participation in bourgeois elections, and the election of workers’ candidates into parliament? In fact, in certain countries, they even thought that a working class parliamentary majority could be used for a peaceful transition to socialism.62 For many anarchists, this is the defining aspect of Marx’s political thought, and his supposed authoritarianism is considered proven on this evidence. Leaving aside the question of the relative value of electoral politics, it is worth asking whether there is necessarily any contradiction in advocating the use of bourgeois parliaments while hoping for their eventual replacement by Communal-type organization, in other words whether one can insist on the fullest possible democratization while participating in governmental forms that are less than ideal. The anarchist assumption, of course, is that participation in bourgeois governmental forms can only help sustain such institutions. But the error comes when it is assumed that since Marx advocated such participation, he also believed in keeping the governmental forms of the bourgeois state for the period of proletarian rule.

As we have seen, Marx in fact foresaw a fundamental change occurring when the workers reabsorb their alienated political powers, and the state becomes servant instead of master of society. Unsurprisingly, this change entails certain formal changes such as the extension of the principle of democratic control to more areas of public life, the maximization of popular control over elected delegates, a deprofessionalization of public life and an end to bureaucratism, a simplification of governmental functions and the end to the division between executive and legislative power. As Richard N. Hunt has put it, “. . . Marx and Engels never imagined that the leaders of the workers’ movement would simply step into the high offices of the state and govern as a professional cadre in much the same manner as their bourgeois predecessors.”63

Marx always believed that some democracy was better than none at all, and even that a limited bourgeois democracy can point beyond itself just by allowing some degree of popular participation in politics. As he put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “The struggle of the parliamentary orators calls forth the struggle of the scribblers of the press; the parliamentary debating club is necessarily supplemented by debating clubs in the salons and alehouses; the deputies, by constantly appealing to the opinion of the people, give the people the right to express their real opinion in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities, why then should the great majority outside parliament not want to make the decisions?”64 With regard to the use of parliament, Marx was clear that the problem of social transformation is not solved in parliament, and that the workers cannot simply rely on the wisdom of their leaders. Hal Draper relates one instance in which Marx criticized Lassalle on these issues:

In 1863 Lassalle sent Marx a pamphlet of his in which he made his bid for leadership of the German workers’ movement. Marx commented in a letter to Engels: “He behaves-with an air of great importance bandying about phrases borrowed from us-altogether as if he were the future workers’ dictator. The problem of wage-labor versus capital he solves like ‘child’s play’ (literally). To wit, the workers must agitate for universal suffrage and then send people like him ‘armed with the unsheathed sword of science [Wissenschaft]‘ into the Chamber of Deputies.” Here is how Lassalle had put it in the pamphlet, addressing himself to the workers: “When that [universal suffrage] comes, you can depend upon it, there will be at your side men who understand your position and are devoted to your cause-men, armed with the shining sword of science, who know how to defend your interests. And then you, the unpropertied classes, will only have yourselves and your bad voting to blame if the representatives of your cause remain in a minority. . . .”65

Marx’s critique of Lassalle is especially valuable, as it was a critique of a simplistic notion of revolution-from-above in a contemporary of Marx. Marx also criticized the harmful influence of Lassalle’s perspective on the Gotha Programme: “Instead of the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the ’socialist organization of the total labour’ ‘arises’ from the ’state aid’ that the state gives to the producers’ co-operative societies and which the state, not the worker, ‘calls into being.’ This is worthy of Lassalle’s imagination that one can build a new society by state loans just as well as a new railway!”66 Building a new society is for Marx a process of self-emancipation. The wielding of political power is an important part of this: the workers must take charge, re-organize society, and exercise the social power previously denied them. This is why Lassalle’s socialism-from-above is totally inadequate.

Many people think of Marx as an advocate of socialism-from-above because they hear the word “centralization” and assume that Marx advocated some sort of authoritarian arrangement.67 Marx did not view the functions of a central government as a pure limitation on autonomy, but rather saw the “unity of the nation” as being realized (not destroyed) by uprooting those who administer the state as a sphere separate from civil society.68 Bakunin’s approach, for example, lacks this critique, as he praised the Parisian workers for proclaiming “the complete abolition of the French state, the dissolution of France’s state unity as incompatible with the autonomy of France’s communes.”69 Here we can see Bakunin’s debt to the Proudhonian socialism with which Marx so vehemently disagreed. While Bakunin was a sworn enemy of all political and economic centralization, Marx had a very different perspective, but one that was in no way more “authoritarian”: “National centralization of the means of production will become the natural basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan.”70 Marx thought that both centralism (a common plan) and democratic control from below were necessary for building socialism.

Conclusion

Marx’s political theory is indeed widely misunderstood. Yet anyone who has studied Marx’s writing on the Paris Commune is led to agree with Hal Draper when he observes, “. . . the Commune state, any genuine workers’ state, is not merely a state with a different class rule but a new type of state altogether.”71 This assessment is entirely consistent with Marx’s emphasis on the proletariat as the bearer of a revolution with a social soul, a unique historical class in this regard. Its political rule is likewise unique as far as political rule goes. As Marx put it in the Manifesto, “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.”72

The myth of Marx’s authoritarian statism flourished in the 20th century. The Soviet state, for example, wished to clothe itself in Marx’s theoretical mantle-in particular, the shibboleth of proletarian dictatorship. Furthermore, Bakunin’s conception of Marx’s political theory came to life, so to speak, with Stalinism. It is unsurprising, then, that Marxism and anarchism have developed strikingly similar erroneous ideas about Marx’s theory of the state. The mythical version of Marx’s theory is indeed discredited. Marx’s actual political theory, however, still deserves serious consideration.

__________________________________________
1. Voline, “The Unknown Revolution,” in No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism, ed. Daniel Guerin (Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 476-477.
2. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Oakland: AK Press, 2004), 12-13.
3. In 1845 Marx signed a contract (which he failed to fulfill) with the publisher Leske for the publication of a two-volume work entitled “Critique of Politics and Political Economy.” Maximilien Rubel, “A History of Marx’s Economics,” in Rubel on Karl Marx: Five Essays, ed. Joseph O’Mally and Keith Algozin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 123.
4. “Civil society” was the term that Hegel used to describe the social relations independent of the family and the state - the “free” realm of commerce.
5. Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of State,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage, 1975), 111.
6. Ibid., 108.
7. Ibid., 136.
8. Ibid., 193-194.
9. Ibid., 188-189.
10. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, 220.
11. Ibid., 232.
12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, (Amherst: Prometheus, 1998), 53. As Derek Sayer put it, “It is this civil society, in which atomized individuals confront their own social products-above all their economic relations-as an alien objectivity over which they have no control, that for Marx underpins the modern state. Where individual labour is not spontaneously divided, but directly part of the labour of the wider community, ‘economic’ relations and activities are subject to direct social control and a separate mediating force seeking to impose the communal interest is superfluous.” Derek Sayer, “The Critique of Politics and Political Economy: Capitalism, Communism, and the State in Marx’s Writings of the Mid-1840s,” The Sociological Review 33, no. 2 (1985), 239.
13. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 234.
14. See Marx’s “Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy” and the chapter on “Estranged Labour” in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, both in Karl Marx: Early Writings.
15. Lucio Colletti, introduction to Karl Marx: Early Writings, 54.
16. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 88.
17. Karl Marx, “Marx to Bolte, 23 Nov. 1871,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 589.
18. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 52-53.
19. Ibid., 99.
20. For example: “The abolition of the state has meaning with the Communists, only as the necessary consequence of the abolition of classes, with which the need for the organised might of one class to keep the others down automatically disappears.” Karl Marx, “Review: Le socialisme et l’impôt, par Emile de Girardin,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 333.
21. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 99. Marx made a similar statement some years later: “The bourgeois state is nothing else than a mutual insurance for the bourgeois class against its own individual members as well as against the exploited class, an insurance which must become more and more expensive and apparently more and more autonomous with respect to bourgeois society, since the suppression of the exploited class becomes more and more difficult.” Marx, “Review: Le socialisme et l’impôt,” 330.
22. Karl Marx, “Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian,’” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, 420.
23. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 126.
24. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 18.
25. Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune, ed. Hal Draper (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 76.
26. Michael Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 178.
27. Karl Marx, “Notes on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 519.
28. Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 178.
29. Marx, “Notes,” 519.
30. Ibid., 517. (emphasis added)
31. Ibid., 519. (emphasis added)
32. Bakunin, for example: “They [the Marxists] say that this state yoke, this dictatorship, is a necessary transitional device for achieving the total liberation of the people: anarchy, or freedom, is the goal, and the state, or dictatorship, the means. Thus, for the masses to be liberated they must first be enslaved. For the moment we have concentrated our polemic on this contradiction.” Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 179.
33. Karl Marx, “Political Indifferentism,” in Political Writings, Volume III: The First International & After, ed. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1974), 327-328.
34. An interesting passage from Marx’s Class Struggles in France discusses the outlawing of the workers’ clubs in France: “And what were these clubs other than a union of the whole working class against the whole bourgeois class-the formation of a workers’ state against the bourgeois state?” Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850,” in Political Writings, Volume II: Surveys From Exile, ed. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1977), 84.
35. Hal Draper, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat From Marx to Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 7. For a thorough treatment of the political career of the word “dictatorship,” see Part I of Hal Draper’s Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume III: The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (New York: Monthly Review, 1986).
36. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume III, 71.
37. Ibid., 302.
38. Marx, “The Civil War in France,” 76.
39. Karl Marx, “The First Draft,” in Marx and Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune, 150.
40. See Karl Marx, “The Second Draft,” in Marx and Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune, 195-196: Quoting approvingly a proclamation of the Central Committee of the National Guard, Marx adds a parenthetical comment: “‘They [the proletarians of the capital] have understood that it was their imperious duty and their absolute right to take into their own hands their own destiny by seizing upon the political power’ (state power).”
41. Marx, “The First Draft,” 152.
42. Ibid., 153.
43. Ibid., 153. Marx had written, in his 1843 critique of Hegel: “The universal spirit of bureaucracy is secrecy, it is mystery preserved within itself by means of the hierarchical structure and appearing to the outside world as a self-contained corporation ….” Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of State,” 108.
44. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of State,” 193.
45. Karl Marx, “Letter by Marx of April 12, 1871 (to Dr. Kugelmann),” in Marx and Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune, 221-222.
46. On this theme, see Monty Johnstone, “The Paris Commune and Marx’s Conception of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” The Massachusetts Review 12, no. 3 (1971).
47. Marx, “The First Draft,” 162.
48. Marx, “The Second Draft,” 196.
49. Derek Sayer, “Revolution Against the State: The Context and Significance of Marx’s Later Writings,” Dialectical Anthropology 12, no. 1 (1987), 76.
50. See note 51 below.
51. Marx, “The Civil War in France,” 74.
52. See note 8 above.
53. Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Volume II: Classical Marxism, 1850-1895 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), 128.
54. Marx, “The Civil War in France,” 73.
55. Marx, “The Second Draft,” 196.
56. Friedrich Engels, “Engels to Laura Lafargue,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 48 (New York: International Publishers, 2001), 190.
57. Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume I: The State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 316.
58. See note 21 above.
59. Compare the following passage from Marx’s First Draft of The Civil War in France: “The peasants were the passive economical basis of the Second Empire, of that last triumph of a State separate of and independent from society. Only the proletarians, fired by a new social task to accomplish by them for all society, to do away with all classes and class rule, were the men to break the instrument of that class rule - the State, the centralized and organized governmental power usurping to be the master instead of the servant of society.” Marx, “The First Draft,” 151.
60. Friedrich Engels, “Introduction,” in Marx and Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune, 32-33.
61. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Volume II, 160-161.
62. The following passage from 1878, which emphasizes that such a transition may not stay peaceful, is a good example of Marx mentioning the winning of a parliamentary majority: “An historical development can remain ‘peaceful’ only so long as no forcible hindrances are put in its way by the existing rulers of a society. If, for example, in England or the United States, the working class were to win a majority in Parliament or Congress, it could legally put an end to laws and institutions standing in the way of its development, although even here only so far as societal development permitted. For the ‘peaceful’ movement could still be turned into a ‘violent’ one by the revolt of those whose interests were bound up with the old order. If such people were then put down by force (as in the American Civil War and the French Revolution), it would be rebels against the ‘lawful’ power.” Ibid., 337. Notice that the role of the parliamentary majority is not to legislate socialism into existence, but to help clear away obstacles for the working class movement as a whole.
63. Ibid., 364.
64. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Political Writings, Volume II, 190.
65. Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume II: The Politics of Social Classes (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 527-528.
66. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 16.
67. With the Bakuninists in mind, Engels once observed, “It seems to me that the phrases ‘authority’ and centralization are much abused.” Friedrich Engels, “Engels to Terzaghi,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 44 (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 295.
68. See note 51 above.
69. Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 19.
70. Karl Marx, “The Nationalization of the Land,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 23 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 136.
71. Hal Draper, “The Death of the State in Marx and Engels,” The Socialist Register, 1970, 301.
72. Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 230.

http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/alternatives-to-capital/karl-marx-the-state.html