ALB
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The late Jack Bradley used to say that getting into the Socialist Party would be good training for police spies because they’d have to convince us that they really were socialists, which is not easy if you don’t really understand our case. Not like joining other groups where you only have to show enthusiasm and mouth a few slogans to pass as one. One mention of “our” country or of Cuba being socialist and your cover is blown. In other words, infiltrating us could only be for training purposes, not to get information as that’s readily available since all our meetings and the minutes of them are public.
Don’t know that it’s ever happened, though. Wouldn’t matter if it had since that would mean one more campaigner for socialism for a period.
That’s interesting but apparently it’s been going for some months now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_convention_for_ecological_transition
It has already made some reports which can be seen on their official website (in French of course). Something to follow as its mandate is to find ways of cutting carbon emissions from France by 40% by 2030 implicitly within the context of capitalism. Their final report is due in April. Be interesting, and maybe revealing, as this is XR’s key demand here in Britain.
The police have now backed down and said this was a mistake:
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-51071959
Seems it was some over-zealous plod.
Doesn’t mean they won’t be keeping an eye on them or infiltrating them as they always do with groups that set out to break the law, even if it’s some other section of the force.
But you are missing the point that Matt made that any alternative structure that the anarchists might set up would also have rules that its delegates might break and so be faced with the same problem of how to stop or deal with this — and would have to rely in the end on the same as we say, ie the consciousness of those who do the delegating.
Also, the constitutional rules are different in different countries. On paper some are more difficult for a socialist majority than in Britain. Others are less difficult. In some States of the USA the right of recall not only exists on paper but is routinely invoked as is the right to call a referendum; and legislative assemblies like the House of Representatives are elected every two years making deselection quicker.
Anyway we are not talking about the end — the participatory democracy that will apply in socialism — but only about a means to achieve the power to implement this. These means don’t need to be perfect democratically, and certainly aren’t, but only sufficiently democratic to be useable to win political control. There is a certain irony in anarchists becoming constitutional lawyers to criticise us.
Finally, there’s the point you yourself frequently make that when there’s a socialist majority nobody will be able to stop the workers using the ballot box, even if “the rules” are not perfectly democratic. That will be one of the things they will do.
While we are campaigning for a worldwide society of common ownership, democratic control, production directly for use, and free access according to need, this is what KAZ’s organisation is up to:
“The discussion document “Potential Activities Of A New Organisation” was discussed and adopted. Initial emphasis would be on agitational literature and activity around Land Justice, housing and the NHS. In addition, there was a commitment to street agitation-stickers and posters. It was decided that the ACG should focus on the campaign against Universal Credit using the Disabled People Against Cuts slogan “Stop It and Scrap It”. Leicester ACG agreed to make and circulate leaflets and stickers in regards to Universal Credit, capable of being locally adapted.”
They are nice blokes (as most of them are, as might be guessed from KAZ’s “jokes”) but are into quite different things from us.
Land Justice, what the fuck’s that? Scrap Universal Credit? But replace it with what? Universal Basic Income perhaps? Or is this just a trotskyoid “transitional demand” to “teach workers by experience”?
A couple of us who were around at the time (he is selling the July 1968 Socialist Standard) remember him as Dave but can’t recall his second name. He was employed by Remploy, which used to employ disabled people under shitty conditions its own factories (now it directs them to similar jobs with ordinary employers).
You are right. Most anarchists are all over the place. The ones that are nearest to us refuse to call themselves anarchists and prefer the term “libertarian communist”. They don’t claim Bakunin let alone Proudhon and take their economics from Marx. And they didn’t emerge from the anarchist movement but rather from “vanguardist” groups. In fact what makes them nearest to us is their explicit rejection of vanguardism and of course their view that abolishing capitalism involves abolishing commodity production, wage labour and “value” (in its meaning in Marxian economics). What separates them from us, and what they share with classical anarchists, is their opposition to using elections and parliament in the course of establishing socialism (or communism as they prefer to call it).
Classical anarchists do not repudiate minority action and do not accept that a post-capitalist society has to be moneyless. Only those who invoke Kropotkin, who was a communist in the proper sense, do. The rest are quite confused on this issue, basically “market anarchists”, and all of them are more concerned with getting “something now” by so-called direct rather than electoral action and they share the mistaken belief with vanguardists that an anti-capitalist consciousness will somehow spontaneously emerge from the “day-to-day” struggle for all sorts of things. Not on our wavelength at all.
“Makhno the monster? Durutti the dictator? Mmm…”
That was my point. If you are prepared to trust such charismatic leaders not to abuse their position, why are you not prepared to trust democratically-elected and accountable socialist MPs not to? Much anarchist thinking on this fails to take into account “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”. And if you concede that structured democratic accountability is necessary, why set up an alternative structure from scratch when a useable one already exists (and which can be made better once we’ve got socialism)? Anyway, what would it be?
“Or whoever else is giving you gyp.”
Can’t let this pass unchallenged as it suggests that it will be the party that will be controlling political power whereas in fact it will be the working class but KAZ knows this or did until he went funny and became an anarchist.
But again the same objection can be thrown back at him. Would you trust the leader of some anarchist insurrectionary band — a Zapata, a Makhno, a Durutti — that had somehow smashed the capitalist state to surrender their power and submit to democratic control? I wouldn’t. Much better to rely on formal democratic accountability procedures and popular consciousness.
Yes precisely but he called us in a tag he attached to this thread “nice tankies in soft slippers”. That’s why I challenged him about his attitude to tanks etc. If he disagrees with winning control of political power as a means of at least neutralising the armed forces, how does he propose to deal with them?
As a non-Tolstoyan anarchist he is committed to confronting them on the streets which would require having tanks. So he too is a “tankie”. QED.
His alternative to winning political control is the other anarchist nonsense of “the mine to the miners”, “the railways to the railway workers”, etc — “workers control” ie “the tanks etc to the armed forces “ which is on a par with “the prisons to the prisoners” and “the lunatic asylums to the lunatics”.
What he and anarchist-syndicalists in general ignore is that the only way the working class as a whole can control anything is as a class ie at the level of society and that therefore the only practical way in which the working class can control the armed forces is through winning control of political power.
Of course we are only talking here about the short period of the establishment of a society of common ownership and democratic control of the means of life. Once this has been firmly established and any threat of suicidal attempts by supporters of capitalism to stop this removed, then the armed forces can be disbanded and the state becomes a mere administrative centre without any coercive powers. The swords are transformed into ploughshares and tanks painted pink.
List of book reviews that he did:
Added to the Jack Fitzgerald Internet Archive:
Review of James Connolly Labour in Irish History, June 1914
Review of Croce Historical Materialism and the Economics of Marx, August 1915
Review of William Paul The State: Its Origin and Function, February 1918
The Centenary of Marx, May 1918
Some Errors of A Syndicalist (Robert Dell), March 1920
A Gloomy Professor (Stephen Leacock), May 1920
Lenin and Kautsky on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, July 1920
A trio of “intellectuals” (Achille Loria), July 1920
Review of Rudolf Steiner,The Threefold State), December 1920
Review of Max Beer The Life and Teaching of Karl Marx, November 1921
Old Anarchy Writ New (Robert Dell), March 1922
Review of Marx The Class Struggles in France, October 1924
Review of Kautsky Foundations of Christianity, November 1925
Review of Bukharin The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, January 1928
Review of Eden and Cedar Paul translation of Capital , March 1929That’s a surprisingly balanced assessment of Proudhon’s views giving the anarchist-communist criticism of them. I say surprising because when we make the same criticism Ian McKay goes spare:
Critics of capitalism today seem to face the same strategic choices as in Proudhon and Marx’s day in the 1840s: (1) opt out and set up isolated communistic communities, Owen; (2) organise into workers-run market-producing cooperatives with the aim of outcompeting conventional capitalist enterprises, Proudhon; (3) organise politically to try to gradually reform capitalism into socialism,Louis Blanc; (4) organise politically to win control of political power to establish society-wide common ownership of the means of life, Marx.
I still say we have more in common with utopian socialists like Owen than with so-called “market socialists” like Proudhon. In fact we have nothing in common with him. Proudhon is the exact opposite of Marx and vice versa.
You can’t compare Owen with Proudhon. Owen was a communist, ie wanted common ownership, while Proudhon was an anarcho-capitalist albeit a petty one who stood for a society of small scale producers producing for the market. Two quite different and incompatible traditions. We are in one. If anarchists want to claim him as the “father of anarchism” they are welcome to him, though it does say something about them. “Libertarian communists” sort of ok; pure and simple anarchists not.
That’s a protest of the small independent commodity producer to being regulated by the capitalist state. Which is what Proudhon was and whose class interests he expressed and representated. It’s easy to see from this the affinity between his anarchism and that of modern anarcho-capitalists. He’s in their tradition not ours. Personally I have never understood why some members like this literally “petty bourgeois” I was going to crap will leave at nonsense.
What sort of anarchist are you? I thought they believed in a violent insurrection to smash the state but how can you do this if you have a conscientious objection to tanks and guns and armoured cars?
Or are you a namby pamby Tolstoy pacifist anarchist who thinks that the capitalist class will just give up their power and property if you disobediently sit in the middle of some road bridge?
Makes more sense to take the control of the means of political coercion out of their hands, so they can’t use it against us and that we can use it against them if they are so stupid as to attempt to resist the democratically expressed will of the majority to establish socialism.
