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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.
Our christian friend is moving too fast when he goes from positing the possible existence of some mysterious “underlying non-material entity” to concluding that, if it did exist, this would mean that christianity is true.
Assuming for a moment that the existence of such an entity could be shown then there would be two further stages to go through. First, showing that this entity has intervened and still intervenes in the course of human history. Second, and even more implausibly, that it intervened and intervenes in the way that christianity teaches (had a son with a human, etc).
How the solar system evolved and how life did on one of its planets, the course of human social evolution and history and what happens today, can be adequately explained without recourse to the intervention of some non-material entity. So if it did exist it wouldn’t exist in any meaningful sense since it would have no effects. It would be the same position as the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius put the gods of his day — existing somewhere but having no effect on the world and humans.
The claims christianity makes for it are patent nonsense and don’t need to be taken seriously and aren’t by most people, not even our friend it seems.
The best human approach is to realise that this is the only life we are going to have and so work to make it the best we can. This does not rule out accepting that there is more than just you as an individual. We are part of a larger whole — other humans and life-forms — but there is no need to give this the form of a non-material entity and regard it as our “Lord” before whom we must bow down and subjugate ourselves.
Ah, I see now. They are saying that “imminent” is the same as “immanent”. Perhaps it is in their warped minds.
We know that the various UN climate conferences always fail and for the same reason — the inability of the various capitalist states to agree on what needs to be done as some would suffer economically more than others, especially countries with fossil fuel resources which they use either for export or for domestic use as the cheapest energy source available.
Australia is one of these as a coal exporting country. Here is their prime minister Scott Morrison explaining the other day why Australia is not going to agree to coal burning being reduced:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-50888786
Here’s the killer quote:
”What we won’t do is engage in reckless and job-destroying and economy-crunching targets which are being sought.”
Actually, he needn’t worry as the International Energy Agency is estimating that coal burning in Asia is going to go up over the next five years, precisely the markets Australia exports its coal to:
The argument advanced by the US regime for the assassination, of an immediate danger to American lives is quite specious. If there was an immediate danger that would mean that it was about to happen, so how would killing the top person in the plan stop it? Presumably the plan was so advanced that it did not depend just on one person being alive. If he died or was killed his deputy could just step in and press the button as it were. The fact he didn’t shows that there was no immediate plan.
No doubt there was a plan and still is as the US (and Israel) and Iran are already at undeclared war with each other over who should control the oil resources of the Middle East and the trade routes and pipelines to move it out to other parts of the world.
It is just that to respect the letter of the piece of paper that is the part of the UN charter making war illegal the state engaging in acts of war has to justify its action by invoking one of its let-out clauses such as immediate danger to life or vital interest at stake.
But then we know that truth is the first casualty of war.
“they have not done their homework yet, and continue hitting the Piñata in the wrong area.“
I take it this is a reference to the MHI not us !
Here’s the US Marxist-Humanist Initiative on the result.
The first part where they discuss the Labour leadership’s apparent misjudgement that Brexit not Social Reform was going to be the issue is not bad. There is also an interesting discussion of Labour as no longer the party of “the working man” but as a coalition of different identity groups.
It goes off towards the end when they give their view of what “progressives” should have done. Not their general position that workers should not follow parties or leaders but should act for themselves (nothing wrong with that of course), but their view that the way forward is to directly confront xenophobia and racism rather than try to unite workers around an “economic populist” programme. Sadly perhaps, if Labour had done that they would have lost even more heavily.
Incidentally, their man in London, Ravi Bali, discloses that he was once a member of an unnamed vanguardist party that used to stand against the Labour Party in elections, Which can only be SPEW, can’t it? Good on him for abandoning all that. Actually, on this podcast he’s better than Kliman but, then, he is here on the ground. His 2016 article on their site on the EU referendum, in which he takes an abstentionist position, is quite good.
