We review a new book by an anarchist on what anarchists in Britain think and do today.

There are anarchists and anarchists. Bomb-throwers and pacifists, syndicalists and communists, primitivists and egoists, even anarcho-capitalists. Knowing to our cost that the same can be said of “socialists”, we must be careful not to use what one group who call themselves anarchists think as typical of what anyone who calls themself one does.

Benjamin Franks’s book, Rebel Alliances: The means and ends of contemporary British anarchists (AK Press, £15), deals with anarchist groups today who he calls “class struggle anarchists”. Which means we can ignore here the individualists and the anarcho-capitalists, but even so the groups left still have different approaches, especially as, for some reason, Franks includes “council communists” and “autonomist Marxists” among them.

He lists four criteria for being considered a “class struggle anarchist”.

1. “A complete rejection of capitalism and the market economy”.

2. “An egalitarian concern for the interests and freedoms of others as part of creating non-hierarchical social relations.”

3. “A complete rejection of state power and other quasi-state mediating forces”.

4. “A recognition that means have to prefigure ends”.

Franks places emphasis on the fourth and uses it to judge the principles, organisational forms and activities of “contemporary British anarchists”, in particular Class War, the Anarchist (formerly Anarchist Communist) Federation and the Solidarity Federation (direct descendant of the old Syndicalist Workers Federation). The people around the best known anarchist publication, Freedom, are excluded as “liberal anarchists”.

Prefiguring future society

We, too, hold that the means have to prefigure the end but reached this conclusion from a quite different starting point: that of democracy in the proper sense. Democracy means, literally, the rule or power of the people, i.e. popular participation in decision-making. It allows various ways of reaching a decision but, in the end, if consensus cannot be obtained, it has to come to a vote; in which case the majority view prevails. Democracy does not mean that all decisions have to made at general assemblies of all concerned or by referendum; it is compatible with certain decisions being delegated to committees and councils as long as the members of these bodies are responsible to those who (s)elected them.

Socialism is a society based on the common ownership of the means of life but, since something cannot be said to be commonly owned if some have a privileged or exclusive say in how it is used, common ownership means that every member of society has to have an equal say. If there wasn’t such democratic control there wouldn’t be common ownership, so there wouldn’t be socialism.

Democratic control is not an optional extra of socialism. It is its very essence. This being so, socialism cannot be imposed against the will or without the consent and participation of the (vast) majority. It simply cannot be established for the majority by some vanguard or enlightened minority. That is our case against all forms of Leninism. The socialist revolution can only be democratic, in the sense of both being what the majority of people want and of being carried out by democratic methods of organisation and action. No minority revolution can lead to socialism, not even one that destroys the state (our case against certain anarchists) – and of course socialism will involve the disappearance of the state as a coercive institution serving the interests of a minority. Hence our conclusion that the movement to establish socialism, and the methods it employs, must “prefigure” the democratic nature of socialism.

Traditionally, anarchists have rejected democracy as an organising principle (not just the democratic state but any form of democratic organisation). The early British anarchists that William Morris met in the Socialist League in the 1880s denounced democracy as “the tyranny of the majority” (which Morris regarded as an absurd position). The anarchists who controlled the pre-WWI CGT union federation in France favoured the activities of an “active minority”. Emma Goldman in Anarchism and Other Essays declared, in an essay entitled “Minorities versus Majorities”, that “the living, vital truth of social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass” (see http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Anarchism/minorities.html). As the Socialist Standard commented on this in September 1924: “such views mean that the great body of the people will depend upon the kindness and wisdom of the Anarchist intellectuals to guide and mother us”.

It is only in recent years that some anarchists have come to embrace democracy as an organising principle, mainly under the influence of industrial unionists and council communists (who claimed rather to be Marxists). Still, better late than never. But even now most anarchists have difficulty in justifying why someone should conform to a majority decision that he or she doesn’t agree with; they still seem to think that no external decision can bind the “sovereign individual” of individualist anarchism (and bourgeois ideology). One group which did accept binding majority decisions – the now defunct Anarchist Workers Group in the late 80s – was denounced by the others, and again by Franks in this book, as crypto-Leninists.

This same ideology is reflected in the difficulty anarchist groups have with the concept of “representation”. What they call “representative democracy” (whether in the state or generally) is rejected on the grounds that no group can be “represented” by anyone and that any “representative” inevitably stands in a hierarchical relationship with the group they claim to represent. But why can’t a group (s)elect some of their number to represent them – unless you think that the supposed “sovereign individuals” who make up the group cannot sign away their right to speak and act for themselves?