Written by Felipe Corrêa and Rafael Viana da Silva

We are going to take up the contributions of Bakunin and Malatesta to establish a dialogue between them and the Platform, trace the similarities and differences between the proposals of anarchists who advocate an organizational dualism and those of the Bolsheviks, and we will see the proximity of Malatesta with the Synthesis, as well as the historical impact of the Platform, which will make it possible to elucidate the positions that have been disseminated about this debate.

Anarchism is a political-doctrinal ideology that emerged in the nineteenth century, with a hegemony of mass oriented strategies, especially syndicalism (revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism). Among the fundamental positions of “mass anarchism” are the defense of organization, of reforms as a possible path to revolution (provided they are properly conquered through class struggle) and of violence when associated with previously organized popular movements. Such positions are distinguished from other minority positions characterized by their anti-organizationism, their opposition to the struggle for reforms and their defense of violence as a trigger for popular mobilization (“propaganda by the deed”).

Those who have taken part in mass anarchism and defend organizational dualism—concomitant organization on two levels, one political/anarchist and the other mass/social—are not the majority, but among them there are relevant authors with significant positions and, above all, a solid historical experience, supported by the theoretical and practical construction of anarchist organizations.[2]

Contributions from Bakunin

Despite the fact that, after important attempts to compile them, Bakunin’s complete works have finally been published in French[3], his writings on the so-called “Fraternity” of 1864 and “Alliance” of 1868 —to use the terminology proposed by Max Nettlau— are very little known.

Bakunin’s mass strategy has been thoroughly discussed in relevant texts such as Bakunin: Founder of Revolutionary Syndicalism, by Gaston Leval,[4] and several others by René Berthier.[5] Not so much his theory of political organization—which he addresses extensively in different documents—which is his attempt to base the political-organizational proposals he had in terms of principles, program, strategy and organization.

There seems to be some shame around these writings, especially among French anarchists. It is as if they belonged to an authoritarian heritage, perhaps of Blanquist and Jacobin inspiration, which remains in the author and should not be brought to light.[6]

We believe that Bakunin’s positions on anarchist political organization, from 1868 onwards, are fully reconciled with his mass strategy, which he proposed to the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), and should be recognized as a relevant part of his anarchism. Today, such positions seem to carry weight as a pillar for fruitful reflections on the most suitable organizational model for anarchist intervention.

Bakunin argued that the Alliance should have a dual objective: on the one hand, to stimulate the growth of and strengthen the IWA; on the other, to bring together all those who had political-ideological affinities with anarchism—or, as it was generically called in that period, revolutionary socialism or collectivism— around principles, a program and a common strategy.[7] In sum, create and strengthen both political organization and a mass movement, which has been called organizational dualism:

They [Alliance militants] will form the inspiring and vivifying soul of that immense body that we call the International Workers’ Association […]; then they will deal with issues that are impossible to discuss publicly; they will form the necessary bridge between the propaganda of socialist theories and revolutionary practice.[8]

For Bakunin, it was not necessary for the Alliance to have a large number of militants: “The number of these individuals should not, therefore, be immense.” The Alliance had to constitute a political organization, public and secret, with an active minority and collective responsibility among the members, to bring together “the most safe, the most committed, the smartest and the most energetic, in a word the most intimate,” with groups in various countries and the ability to decisively influence the working masses.[9] The organization had to be based on internal regulations and a strategic program to establish, respectively, its organic functioning and its political-ideological and programmatic-strategic bases, forging a common axis for anarchist action.

Only “he who [has] frankly accepted the entire program with all its theoretical and practical consequences and who, along with intelligence, energy, honesty and discretion, [has] also a revolutionary passion” could be a member of the organization. Internally, there should be no hierarchy among the members of the Bakuninist political organization and decisions had to be made from the bottom up, generally by majority (varying from consensus to simple majority depending on the relevance of the issue), and all had to abide by decisions taken collectively. This meant applying federalism—advocated as a form of social organization that must decentralize power and create “a revolutionary organization from the bottom up and from the periphery to the center”—in the internal bodies of the anarchist organization.[10]

The Alliance should not exercise a relationship of domination and / or hierarchy over the IWA, rather it should complement it; and vice versa. Together, these two organizational bodies had to complement and enhance the revolutionary project of the workers, without the submission of either party.

The Alliance is the necessary complement to the International ... But the International and the Alliance, tending towards the same end goal, pursue different goals at the same time. One’s mission is to bring together the working masses, the millions of workers, with their different professions and countries, across the borders of all States, in a single huge and compact body; the other, the Alliance, has the mission of giving the masses a truly revolutionary leadership. The programs of one and the other, without being in any way opposite, are different by the very degree of their respective development. That of the International, if taken seriously, contains in germ, but only in germ, the whole program of the Alliance. The program of the Alliance is the ultimate expression of the [program] of the International. [11]

The union of these two organizations—one political, of minorities (cadres), another social, of majorities (masses)—and their horizontal and permanent organization enhance the strength of workers and increase the opportunities of the anarchist transformation process. Within the mass movement, the political organization makes anarchists more effective in disputes over positions. This formation, organized and in favor of its program, is opposed to forces that are oriented in the opposite direction and that may seek: to raise to the status of principle any of the different political-ideological and/or religious positions; to minimize its eminently class-based character; to strengthen reformist positions (viewing reform as an end) and the loss of combativeness of the movement; to establish internal hierarchies and/or relations of domination; to direct the force of workers toward elections and/or toward strategies of change that imply the takeover of the State; to submit the movement to parties, states or other organizations that eliminate, in the process, the protagonism of the oppressed classes and their institutions.

Contributions from Malatesta

Various ideas from Malatesta resemble those described previously, especially the set of organizational proposals on the “anarchist party,” the name by which he referred to the specific anarchist organization. “Parties” of this type took shape historically and had considerable involvement, as were the cases of the Anarchist Socialist Revolutionary Party, of 1891, the Anarchist Party of Ancona, of 1913, and the Italian Anarchist Union, of 1919–1920.[12]

Malatesta conceptualized the anarchist party as “the ensemble of those who are out to help make anarchy a reality and who therefore need to set themselves a target to achieve and a path to follow.” For him, “staying isolated, with each individual acting or seeking to act on his own without entering into agreement with others, without making preparations, without marshalling the flabby strength of singletons into a mighty coalition, is tantamount to condemning oneself to impotence, to squandering one’s own energies on trivial, ineffective acts and, very quickly, losing belief in one’s purpose and lapsing into utter inaction.”[13].

In order for anarchists to be effective in their action, they had to establish a common strategy and program and overcome the form of affinity groups that have no contact with social struggles. The goal of the party was stated as follows: “We want to act on it [the mass] and propel it along the path that we believe to be best, but as our objective is to liberate and not dominate, we want to accustom it to free initiative and freedom of action”[14]. Obviously that path was that of the social revolution.

The Malatestian party is founded on revolutionary discipline and in the principle of unity. “Without understanding, without coordination of each other’s efforts for common and simultaneous action, victory is not materially possible.” But “discipline must not be slavish discipline, blind devotion to bosses, an obedience to the one who always speaks so as not to have to move.” This is about revolutionary discipline, which means “consistency with accepted norms and fidelity to assumed commitments, […] feeling obliged to share the work and the risks with comrades in struggle”[15]. The principle of unity establishes that it is not enough to have a platform of association that calls itself anarchist. Although anarchists may seem united, Malatesta affirms that he does not believe “in the soundness of organizations built upon concessions and subterfuge and where there is no real agreement and sympathy between the members.” He continues, “Better dis-united than mis-united”[16].

Propaganda and education were fundamental activities to be carried out by the anarchists. We “carry on our propaganda to raise the moral level of the masses and induce them to win their emancipation by their own efforts.” Of course, propaganda should be organized and planned: “Isolated, sporadic propaganda which is often a way of easing a troubled conscience or is simply an outlet for someone who has a passion for argument, serves little or no purpose.” For Malatesta, “seeds sown haphazardly” had great difficulty germinating and taking root. Rather, what is needed “is continuity of effort, patience, coordination, and adaptability to different surroundings and circumstances.” Anarchists should occupy themselves with education, “education for freedom,” “making people who are accustomed to obedience and passivity consciously aware of their real power and capabilities”[17]. However, he believed that propaganda and education alone were not enough. “We would be deluding ourselves in thinking that propaganda is enough to raise them [the people] to that level of intellectual development which is needed to put our ideas into effect.”[18] In relation to education, Malatesta criticizes the “educationists […] who assert that through propaganda and instruction, the defense of free thought and positive science, with the establishment of popular universities and modern schools, it is possible to destroy in the masses religious prejudice, moral subjection to state rule and belief in sacrosanct property rights”[19].

In reality, for him these initiatives were very limited: “Educationists should see how powerless their generous efforts are.” The consciousness of the masses could not be sensibly elevated and the environment transformed “as long as the economic and political conditions [of the moment] [lasted]”[20].

Malatesta proposed organizational base building work, to be carried out daily by anarchists:

In normal times [it is necessary] to carry out the long and patient work of preparation and popular organization and not to fall into the illusion of short-term revolution, achievable only by the initiative of a few, without the effective participation of the masses. Since this preparation is carried out in an adverse environment, do not neglect propaganda, agitation or organization of the masses, among other things.[21]

The activities of organized anarchists would therefore be “the propagation of our ideas; unceasing struggle, violent or non-violent depending on the circumstances, against government and against the boss class to conquer as much freedom and well-being as we can for the benefit of everybody”[22].

Bakunin, Malatesta and the Platform: “Anarcho-Bolshevism”?

First of all, it must be said that when Bakunin developed his praxis—and his theory and practice of political organization—which would directly influence Malatesta, Lenin had just been born and Bolshevism would still take many years to emerge. Therefore, to accuse Bakuninist organizational dualism of being “Leninist” is an anachronism.[23]

At the same time, it also seems problematic to assume that by defending organizational dualism Bakunin, Malatesta and Lenin should be considered part of the same current or political-ideological tradition, resembling each other to some extent. As is known, this dualism was understood and practiced in a very distinct way in the anarchist tradition and in the Leninist tradition, including its Trotskyist and other variations. Any canonical text of Marxism-Leninism on the question—for example, Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?[24]—shows this clearly. Apart from parallel work on two different levels, one of the cadre party and the other of the mass movement, there are no major similarities.

To be concise, there are two fundamental differences that can be marked between the organizational praxis of Bakunin and Malatesta and that of Lenin: the internal structure of the organization and the relationship between organization and mass movements.

In the first instance, in the anarchist political organization there is internal democracy and decisions are made from the bottom up. It is the grassroots organizations and the militants themselves who discuss and resolve all the organization’s issues. There is no hierarchy between the members so there is no leadership-base division. Leninist political organization, on the contrary, is based on “democratic centralism,” which envisioned a hierarchical organizational model, with a leadership-base division, so that although the base is consulted for decision-making, who in fact deliberates is the leadership, including against the positions of the base. In other words, there is no internal democracy and decisions are made from top to bottom.

Unity of action, defended by a sector of anarchism, is often confused with democratic centralism. What makes the difference between the two positions is not the obligation regarding the decisions made, common in both cases, but who makes the decisions and the way they are made. In anarchist organizations everyone effectively participates and deliberates on all issues (sometimes through majority mechanisms); in Leninist organizations, on the other hand, even though the rank and file are consulted, the leadership is the one who decides and hierarchically imposes decisions.

Secondly, the anarchist political organization functions in a complementary way to mass movements and does not attempt to impose a relationship of hierarchy and/or domination. Its function is to strengthen the leadership of these movements, since in the anarchist project the masses must be responsible for revolutionary social transformation. The organization is part of the masses and brings together an ideologically related sector that seeks to strengthen its position in political disputes. The Leninist organization differs in that it believes that popular movements are only able to fight in the short term, in the struggles for demands. Leninists believe that it is the party that must provide movements with transformative capacity and that the party itself must lead in the process of revolutionary social transformation. The party is conceived as a separate sector of the masses that exerts a relation of hierarchy and domination over them, withdrawing their class independence and protagonism.

That is why we are not in agreement with the assertion that the positions of Bakunin and Malatesta—according to our point of view, as we will argue later, rescued in several respects by the Platform and by various anarchist political organizations—constitute some kind of “anarcho-Bolshevism” or carry Leninist traits. Both Bakunin and Malatesta—and later Makhno, Archinov, Ida Mett and others—had the anarchist political organization as one of their important topics for reflection and established its framework within anarchist principles. The link between anarchist organizational dualism and Leninism, which has been established with some frequency in the past and continues to establish itself in the present, has no historiographical foundation, not even theoretical-logical. It seems to relate more to the self-serving motives of those who make these claims than to a historical phenomenon.

Anyone who takes on this topic with a minimum of seriousness and intellectual honesty will verify the erroneousness of the alleged relationship of Bakunin, Malatesta and the Platform with Bolshevism. In the case of the Platform, its main aspects are based on the long anarchist political tradition and its authors lived through the experience of a concrete social revolution, dulled by the authoritarian politics of the Bolsheviks, which makes the characterization of its authors as anarcho-Bolsheviks more absurd.[25]
The Platform and the debate between anarchists

The Platform and the debate between anarchists

The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists, written in 1926 by a group of Russians and Ukrainians exiled in France, constitutes a frame of reference in the discussion on anarchist organization. In our view, the debate on this document has been relatively truncated and, for certain reasons, misunderstood by a significant part of those interested in the subject.

The result of a process of self-criticism by anarchists in the wake of developments of the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions, the Platform was published as a program proposal for anarchists. Divided into three major sections —general, constructive and organizational—the Platform upholds, among other things: the critique of capitalist society, the State and representative democracy and the centrality of class struggle; the need for leadership of the masses for the revolution, through class and federalist intervention; criticism of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a period of transition; the defense of syndicalism as a relevant means for anarchist action; the establishment of a post-revolutionary society in which production and land have been socialized; the creation of organs for the defense of the revolution; the formation of an anarchist political organization programmatically based on theoretical and tactical unity, on responsibility and federalism.[26]

Two reasons mark the misunderstanding of the Platform, especially if the recently discussed contributions of Bakunin and Malatesta are taken into account.

Regarding Bakunin, ignorance of his texts on the Alliance has prevented appreciating the similarities between his conception of political organization and that of the Platform. With respect to Malatesta, it must be said that the partial dissemination and excessive focus on part of his mail exchange with Makhno about the Platform—specifically the first letter sent by the Italian—has impeded a clearer understanding of his positions.

There is a third reason, in addition, which has to do with sectors that have set the standard for debate in the world, establishing a version that many researchers and militants hold: A significant part of the discussion about the Platform has been monopolized by an interpretation that is dominant in European anarchism in general, particularly French, and which is mostly critical of the Platform.

Next we present elements for the discussion on these three relevant questions, in order to contribute to solidifying our position.
Bakunin and the fundamentals of the Platform

We agree with researchers such as Frank Mintz when they argue that the Platform, rather than introduce a new organizational debate among anarchists, takes up fundamental elements of the Bakuninist strategy.[27] In this sense, Van der Walt correctly states that “Makhno and Archinov explicitly related the Platform to the Bakunin heritage.” Quoting Colin Darch on the makhnovitchina, he states:

Bakunin’s “aspirations concerning organizations, as well as his activity in the First International give us every right” to view him as an “active partisan” of the idea that anarchism “must gather its forces in one organization, constantly agitating, as demanded by reality and the strategy of class struggle.”[28]

Fundamental elements found in the Platform are certainly tributaries of Bakunin, among them the social critique of capitalist and statist domination and the centrality of class struggle, the need for the simultaneous intervention of anarchists at both levels, anarchist organization and mass movements (organizational dualism), the need for a violent social revolution, and in general libertarian socialism as a proposal for a future society.

In a more detailed analysis, as much as we can find differences, there are similarities in the main lines. The federalist functioning of the anarchist organization, without hierarchy or domination among the members, and its complementary relationship with mass movements, are also characteristic elements that allow Bakunin to be related to the Platform. This is not the time to do so, but it would not be very difficult to establish with substance and detail this whole series of parallels.

According to this analysis and what we have mentioned above, far from innovating, the Platform simply proposed a “return”—adapted to a concrete historical context—to the Bakuninist organizational strategy of the post-1867 period. We should recall that this model took shape, in theoretical and practical terms, in other circumstances, in the most diverse times and locations, the Platform being only one of them. For this reason, we understand that the qualifier platformist —beyond having the merit of differentiating, among anarchists, a particular organizational strategy—can be easily substituted by others that refer to other authors and experiences, some of which occurred during the first great wave of anarchism in the world.

Malatesta, the Platform and Synthesis

Analyzing the controversy around the Platform,[29] in which the debate between Makhno and Malatesta stands out, the proximity between Malatesta and the Platform is not as obvious as it is with Bakunin. According to what we have indicated, if we take into account the more than six decades of Malatesta’s anarchist militancy, we can understand that at certain times his positions are closer to those of the Platform and in others to the Anarchist Synthesis.[30]

Texts such as those published in 1897 in L’Agitazione, especially “Organization I” and “Organization II”[31], and compilations such as Anarchist Ideology,[32] allow us to identify positions quite similar to that of the Platform. However, texts such as “Communism and Individualism”[33] and “Individualism and Communism in Anarchism”[34], as well as Malatesta’s interventions at the Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907,[35] show positions much closer to Synthesis.

In his texts closest to Synthesis, Malatesta criticizes the fact that “anarchists of various tendencies, despite wanting basically the same thing, find themselves in their daily lives and in their propaganda in fierce opposition to each other.” Based on this criticism, Malatesta defends the need to “reach some understanding” and that “when agreement is not possible [it is necessary] to know how to tolerate each other. Work together when there is consensus and when there is not, allow others to do what they consider best, without interference”[36]. This should be the case, since “individualist and communist anarchism is one and the same thing — or almost,” “there are no fundamental differences”[37].

At the Amsterdam congress, trying to mediate between the positions of syndicalist anarchists and others with individualist influences, Malatesta affirms that “cooperation is indispensable, today more than ever. Without doubt, the association must allow individual members complete autonomy and the federation must respect this same autonomy for its groups.” If on the one hand, he says, it is understood that it is “wrong to present the ‘organizationists’, the federalists, as authoritarians, [on the other hand] it is equally wrong to imagine that the ‘anti-organizationists’, the individualists, have to be deliberately condemned to isolation.” In short, Malatesta believed that the dispute between individualists and organizationists was a “simple dispute of words”[38].

These and other positions allow authors to correctly claim that Malatesta “flirted with the synthesist position on some occasions”[39]. But it is necessary to acknowledge that there are also times when he defends quite different positions.

The debate between Makhno and Malatesta: necessary clarification

With regard to the debate between Makhno and Malatesta on the Platform,[40] Malatesta’s positions are also modified throughout the debate, hampered by issues of text comprehension and mutual comprehension. There are some aspects relative to context that should be pointed out: the fact that Malatesta was on house arrest and quite removed from anarchist discussions; the problem of translation of the Platform, done by Volin, one of its greatest opponents, who “adjusted” it to his point of view through a series of terminological choices;[41] ​​a certain difference of evaluation of anarchism at that moment, which the Russians considered much more critically than Malatesta and, consequently, they saw more need for a significant change in their organizational patterns. Their critical position is related to the historical experience of Russian-Ukrainian anarchism, since their progress and defeats contributed to reinforcing their conviction on the importance of the specific anarchist organization and of its fundamental axes.[42] We will discuss some questions on this debate that we consider necessary to address in more depth.

First of all, it makes sense to clear any doubts about our position: for us, Malatesta as well as Makhno and other Russians who wrote the Platform are anarchists, considering a historical and global approach to anarchism. Both positions can be more or less historically identified in various anarchist authors and episodes. Mainly in his first letter, Malatesta exaggerates and commits misunderstandings when criticizing the Platform. There is no justification for a statement like the one in which he says that the Platform is “typically authoritarian” and does not constitute a document of anarchism, but rather “a Government, a Church,” which Makhno simply refused to comment on due to its degree of absurdity. Malatesta also hints that the Platform admits that “to organize means to submit to leaders and belong to an authoritarian, centralizing body that suffocates any attempt at free initiative.”[43] For us, there is no doubt that the Platform is anarchist, it does not bear any relation with governments, churches or any other type of authoritarianism, fits without difficulty into the historical tradition of anarchism and does not assume, as its detractors said from the beginning, a Bolshevik detour.

Second, there are unquestionable similarities between the positions of Makhno and Malatesta. They both agree, for example, in the need for anarchists to organize themselves in a revolutionary political organization (a “General Union” for the first, an “Anarchist Party” for the second). They are also in agreement —despite terminological divergences[44]— on their conception of organization as a promoter of their ideas and practices among the masses (that’s why they use terms like “influence,” “orientation,” “suggestion,” even “direction”) and as guiding the direction of struggles and workers’ movements towards social revolution and socialism or communism libertarian. Malatesta says:

I believe that we, anarchists, convinced of the validity of our programme, must strive to acquire overwhelming influence in order to draw the movement towards the realization of our ideals. But such influence must be won by doing more and better than others, and will only be useful if won in that way.[45]

In this same sense, Makhno asserts that “anarchism is a revolutionary social doctrine that must inspire the exploited and oppressed”[46] in the struggles for social transformation, and as the Platform proposes, it must make “revolutionary anarchist positions” penetrate into the movements of “workers and peasants,” to become a “pioneer” and “theoretical guide” of popular organizations in the city and countryside.[47] The Supplement to the Platform affirms that the tools to influence the masses should be “propaganda, force of argument, and spoken and written persuasion”[48].

Third, it should be noted that two of Malatesta’s criticisms of the Platform are completely misplaced: the idea that the Russians were proposing a hierarchical organization and that the Executive Committee (despite its name, which indicates that it executes and not that it deliberates) should control the decisions of the organization.

It was not for nothing that Makhno was surprised by Malatesta’s first text and told him: “My impression is that… you have misunderstood the project for the ‘Platform’.”[49] Let us agree that it is true to some extent.

The Platform is clear about the functions of the Executive Committee:

The execution of decisions taken by the Union with which it is entrusted; the theoretical and organisational orientation of the activity of isolated organisations consistent with the theoretical positions and the general tactical line of the Union; the monitoring of the general state of the movement; the maintenance of working and organisational links between all the organisations in the Union; and with other organisations.[50]

It is, according to our point of view, a type of secretariat that guides the decisions made by the base of the organization.

The proposed organizational form is federalist, built by the base, from the bottom up, so that it reconciles “the independence and initiative of individuals and the organisation with service to the common cause.” However, so that “shared decisions”—that is, socialized among the whole membership and established collectively—can be carried out, federalism demands that members “undertake fixed organisation duties, and demands execution of communal decisions”[51].

There is nothing in the Platform or in documents related to it that allows for linking it with an organizational model based on hierarchy and domination (internal or with respect to the masses) or that allows for conceiving the Executive Committee as a type of central committee that would decide the direction of the General Union.

The debate between Makhno and Malatesta: real divergences

At this point we will identify issues that, taking into account the entire debate, constitute real disagreements between the two militants. The question that undoubtedly occupied most of the debate was the question of collective responsibility. At first, for Malatesta the idea that there was mutual responsibility between militant and organization (“the entire Union will be responsible for the political and revolutionary activity of each member; in the same way, each member will be responsible for the political and revolutionary activity of the Union as a whole”[52]) constituted an “absolute denial of all individual independence, all freedom, all freedom of initiative and action”[53]. In this text, for Malatesta responsibility means autonomy and independence of individuals and groups: “Full autonomy, full independence and, therefore, full responsibility of individuals and groups”[54].

In his first reply, Makhno claims that Malatesta always accepted the individual responsibility of anarchist militants: “You yourself, dear Malatesta, recognize the individual responsibility of the anarchist revolutionary.”[55] His rejection of collective responsibility would be, according to Makhno, “without basis” and would be “dangerous for the social revolution”[56]. Makhno further relates collective responsibility to the question of anarchist ideological influence on the masses:

The collective spirit of its militants and their collective responsibility will allow modern anarchism to eliminate from its circles the idea, historically false, that anarchism cannot be a guide—either ideologically or in practice—for the mass of workers in a revolutionary period and therefore could not have overall responsibility.[57]

Archinov, for his part, supporting Makhno’s positions and criticizing Malatesta, reinforces the sense of collective responsibility in the following way:

The practical activity of a member of the organization is found in full harmony with general activity and, inversely, the activity of the whole organization cannot be in contradiction with the conscience and activity of anyone of its members, provided that you have accepted the program on which the organization is based.[58]

The idea is that an anarchist organization cannot be founded if not on this principle, in the sense that the member “could not carry out his political and revolutionary work if not in the political spirit of the Union […] his activity could not be contrary to that which was developed by all its members”[59].

In the following response, Malatesta is still standing his ground, going so far as to relate collective responsibility with governments, the military that kill rebel soldiers or the armies that decimate populations in invasions—another completely out of place comparison, from our point of view—noting:

I accept and support the view that anyone who associates and cooperates with others for a common purpose must feel the need to coordinate his actions with those of his fellow members and do nothing that harms the work of others and, thus, the common cause; and respect the agreements that have been made, except when wishing sincerely to leave the association when emerging differences of opinion or changed circumstances or conflict over preferred methods make cooperation impossible or inappropriate. Just as I maintain that those who do not feel and do not practice that duty should be thrown out of the association.[60]

Malatesta complements his criticism by saying that “perhaps, speaking of collective responsibility, you mean precisely that accord and solidarity that must exist among the members of an association” and emphasizing that, if this were the case, “agreement would soon be reached”[61].

In the following response, Makhno once again affirms that “anarchist action on a wide scale will only achieve its goals if it possesses a well-defined organizational base, inspired and guided by the principle of the collective responsibility of its militants”[62].

Some time later, Malatesta would go on to affirm that responsibility is essentially individual: “Moral responsibility (and in our case we can talk of nothing but moral responsibility) is individual by its very nature.” Adding: “If a number of men agree to do something and one of them allows the initiative to fail through not carrying out what he had promised, everyone will say that it was his fault and that therefore it is he who is responsible, not those who did what they were supposed to right up to the last.”[63]

In sum, it can be said that there are points of agreement and others of divergence in this controversy between Malatesta and the editors of Dielo Trudá. Malatesta does not relent when it comes to the idea that responsibility is essentially individual, although he understands the need for coordinated actions and agreement and respect for these actions and pacts on the part of the members of an anarchist organization. For Makhno and Archinov, responsibility is individual and collective at the same time, it necessarily binds the militant and the organization, making them responsible to each other, and it has to do with the guiding role of anarchism in the revolutionary process. As Malatesta himself notes, the notion of collective responsibility and the position of full independence and autonomy that he himself defends are incompatible.[64]

Another divergence has to do with the greater or lesser need for unification (homogeneity) of anarchists. While the Russians advocate that the anarchist organization must bring together the majority, if not the entire organized and revolutionary sector of anarchists—emphasizing “the great need for an organization that [brings together] most of the participants in the anarchist movement”[65]—, Malatesta affirms: “Let us therefore abandon the idea of ​​bringing together all [the anarchists] in a single organization.” For the Russians fragmentation was the central problem, something that doesn’t seem to be that essential for Malatesta.

There are also very important differences in terms of organization—that is, to the organic functioning of the anarchist grouping—which includes the level of commitment and autonomy of the members and groups that belong to the organization in relation to collective decisions and the decision-making method of deliberation. For Makhno and the Russians, action with a clear strategy and program was fundamental, which, in addition to anarchist principles, established a common and unitary path for the organization as a whole: “such a role [of anarchists in a revolution] can only be played successfully when our Party is ideologically homogeneous and unified from the point of view of tactics”[66]. He further states that “our Party must […] make clear its political unity and organizational character”[67], in a position similar to what Archinov called “homogeneous theoretical and practical program”[68], a form of collective deliberation with binding decision for all its members.

For Malatesta, members and groups of the organization had to have the most complete autonomy and decisions should not be mandatory, but only recommendations that may or may not be followed: “full autonomy, full independence and, therefore, full responsibility of individuals and groups,” so that the decisions of the organization’s congresses “are not mandatory rules but suggestions, recommendations, proposals.” Malatesta even goes so far as to elevate this position—according to our point of view related to organizational strategy—to a principle of anarchism, when he emphasizes the “principles of autonomy and free initiative which the anarchists profess,” certainly a doubtful conclusion from a historical point of view.[69]

Archinov asks: “What would be the value of a congress that only issued ‘opinions’ and did not take charge of making them come true? None. In a vast movement [like anarchism], a solely moral and non-organizational responsibility loses all its value”[70]. Indirectly, the previously discussed issue of collective responsibility comes up again.

When it comes to matters related to the program of anarchist organization, Malatesta relates them more to anarchist principles than to a well-defined strategy. Unlike what he does in the texts of 1897, he goes so far as to affirm that the anarchist party is “the group of those who are on the same side, who have the same general aspirations, who in one way or another fight for the same end against common adversaries and enemies”[71]. Which is to say that the party would be formed by the “partisans” of anarchism, almost automatically, by the simple fact of existing.

Makhno and the Russians advocate that for the formation of a coherent strategy and program for the anarchist organization, in case of divergence in positions, majority voting would be adopted and the result of the deliberations would be binding for the entire organization, which consequently must apply them. This applies provided members decide to remain in the organization, since the right to a split is given.

Malatesta criticizes decision-making by majority and proposes that differences are voluntarily readjusted, by means of some type of consensus-dissent, and says that the good sense of militancy should lead it to contribute positively to the dynamics of organizational activities: “an adaptation [that] must be reciprocal, voluntary and derive from the awareness of the need to not paralyze social life by mere stubbornness.”[72] For him, this means working with a broad program, around anarchist principles, that allows each member and group of the organization to carry out any action that in practice they judge will contribute to that program.

Malatesta, closer to the Synthesis or the Platform?

As the complete works of Malatesta are not yet published, not even in Italian, we will have to wait until that happens to be able to deepen the discussion on the positions of Malatesta and be able to decide which were in the majority, which were in the minority, to what extent the positions adopted are related to certain periods of his life, etc. For the moment, we can conclude that, according to what has been said, his positions are varied and allow different interpretations: particularly in reference to the Platform-Synthesis debate, we have already demonstrated that it is possible to link his positions without great difficulty to one or the other camp depending on the texts and extracts taken into consideration.
Debate: historical impact of the Platform and the dominance of the Synthesis interpretation

The distrust of a large part of anarchists in relation to the elements that culminated in the formalization of the Platform began in 1923, shortly after the publication of Archinov’s book, History of the Makhnovist movement.[73] Distrust spread rapidly in anarchist networks.

Marc Mrachny, a former member of the Nabat organization who spent a few days with the Makhnovists, in June 1923 published a series of criticisms of them in the newspaper Via Obrera, an organ of the Russian anarcho-syndicalists published in Berlin. Mrachny said that the role of Makhno had been overrated by some anarchists to the detriment of the working class and that the makhnovitchina had constituted a kind of “military anarchism.” In the same issue of the magazine, he himself wrote a review of Archinov’s book, which had caused some discomfort due to his criticism of certain “intellectual” sectors of the anarchist movement.[74] The last chapter of Archinov’s book, entitled “The makhnovitchina and anarchism,” develops some questions that will later be deepened by members of Dielo Trudá and laid out in the Platform. Perhaps it can be said that this contribution is at the origin of what years later would become the Platform.[75]

In March 1924 the anarchist Judoley pejoratively compared the Russian anarchists for the first time with left-wing socialists, who act through a hierarchical political organization. In another critical article, written by Eugène Dolinin (Moravsky), Ukraine’s free soviets are considered a form of state, which “should be fine for ‘the most honest Bolshevik Marxists, but not for anarchists.” To Archinov’s criticism that a considerable part of the anarchists did not participate in the uprising in Ukraine, Moravsky replied that “anarchism cannot rely on bayonets but on the spiritual product of humanity.”[76] As we can see, criticisms of the makhnovitchina, a phenomenon that arose out of the Ukrainian popular struggle and of the anarchists of that region, are generally the result of a misinterpretation and reflect an ignorance not only of the historical episode in question, but even of anarchism itself. These critics were wrong when they tried to disassociate the Makhnovists from the anarchist tradition, by virtue of the use of revolutionary violence, since that has been used by practically all anarchists who have been involved in revolutionary episodes in history. This has to do with violence that has been at the same time a tool of resistance against attacks from its multiple enemies and to promote the anarchist revolutionary program. To these and other criticisms of the Makhnovist movement Archinov and Makhno responded in long articles. They were responsible for causing unpleasant polemics within international anarchism, especially European anarchism.

Criticisms of anarchist intellectual sectors were not exclusive to Archinov. Anatol Gorelik—a Russian anarchist who went into exile in Argentina in 1922 and contributed from Buenos Aires to Dielo Trudá—published in June of the same year, Anarchists in the Russian Revolution. Beyond an overview of events in Russia, Gorelik criticized the anarchist intellectuals who had isolated themselves from the workers’ movement.[77]

With the publication of the Platform in 1926 it was possible to deepen the debate that had been taking place in relation to the Russian and Ukrainian revolutionary process and the written contributions of its members, and above all its defenders were able to concretize their own organizational project in better conditions.

A deep debate about anarchist organization, possibly the largest in history, took place until the early thirties of the twentieth century. Not only did Makhno and Malatesta participate, so did Archinov, Volin, Luigi Fabbri, Camilo Berneri, Sébastien Faure, Maria Isidin, Gregori Maximoff, among others. While the members of Dielo Trudá explained and deepened the lines of the Platform, other anarchists tended to criticize it. As in the Makhno-Malatesta debate, some of these criticisms denoted real differences and others were due to misunderstandings or outright gross nonsense.[78]

Among the absurdities were the positions of Volin and other synthesists, who in 1927 claimed that the Platform constituted a “revisionism in the direction of Bolshevism, which the authors hide”[79]. Despite being unfounded, several anarchists and scholars of anarchism followed them and adopted this position.

In their attempt to concretize the organizational project, in 1927 the anarchists of Dielo Trudá launched a call for the constitution of an international federation following the bases of the Platform. With the aim of organizing an international conference that same year, on February 5, 1927, they held a preliminary meeting in Paris in which militants from Bulgaria, China, Spain, France, Italy, Poland and Russia participated. From that meeting came a provisional commission made up of the Chinese anarchist Chen, the Ukrainian Makhno and the Polish Ranko, and various circulars were sent to various anarchist groups.

From the international conference, which also took place in Paris on April 20, 1927, some agreements emerged: the recognition of the class struggle as the most important aspect of the anarchist idea, anarcho-communism as the basis of the movement and syndicalism as the main method of struggle; the recognition of the need for a general organization of anarchists based on tactical and ideological unity and collective responsibility; and the need for a program for social revolution.

The conference suffered a major setback: the police assaulted and arrested everyone present, and only thanks to a campaign by French anarchists, Makhno was not deported. Also, many groups, even the conference participants, did not try to or failed to carry out the resolutions that had been adopted.[80]

Still, the conference yielded some practical results. In France, platformists were responsible for the transformation of the Anarchist Communist Union into the Anarchist Communist Revolutionary Union in 1927 and managed to make their positions the majority in the organization, which lasted three years. They also created the Libertarian Communist Federation, which existed between 1934 and 1936.[81] Of shorter existence was the Italian Anarchist Communist Union, also created by platformists. Apart from these, the most relevant experience of the period took place in Bulgaria, when the Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB), founded in 1919, adopted the Platform after it was published and used it ever since to guide their political practice. The Bulgarian platformist experience can be considered one of the great episodes of anarchism between the 1920s and 1940s; in fact, it contributed to a considerable mass movement with rural and urban syndicalism, cooperatives, guerrillas and great youth mobilization.[82] The Platform of the Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria, published in 1945, reflects the direct influence of the Platform and addresses “crucial questions in terms of tactics and organization and reflects the form of organization in political party,” orienting a movement that “had significant clarity to defend against the Bolsheviks” but it was decimated by Stalinism and by fascism.[83]

This debate resurfaced strongly among anarchists after World War II, most significantly in France and Italy. The Platform influenced both the French Libertarian Communist Federation Fédération Communiste Libertaire and the Italian Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action Gruppi Anarchici d’Azione Proletaria, groups of the 1950s that coordinated in a libertarian communist international of platform inspiration.[84]

Regarding the consequences of the organizational debate, the case of the French-Francophone Anarchist Federation Fédération Anarchiste was the most emblematic. Founded in 1945, the FAF took as its organizational foundation the Synthesis of Sébastien Faure and had different tendencies within it: individualists, humanists, trade unionists, libertarian communists, among others.[85] Starting in 1950, a trend led by George Fontenis and influenced by the Platform began to function without the knowledge of others and founded the Organization Thought Battle Organisation Pensée Bataille, a secret organization whose objective was to give the FAF a revolutionary leadership, driving away those opposed to the class struggle and social anarchism.[86]

In the three years after its founding, the OPB grew in influence and in 1953, at the Paris congress, now without many of its members, under the influence of the platformists the FAF became the Libertarian Communist Federation (FCL) and adopted as a programmatic document the Libertarian Communist Manifesto of Fontenis, also inspired by the Platform.[87] Its existence was relatively short and between 1956 and 1957 the FCL ceased its activities, mainly because of the Algerian war of independence in 1954—in which its militants got involved—repression, the rise of the French Communist Party and its own mistakes.[88]

This process caused immense trauma, especially due to the exclusion of members of the FAF, including its founders, and because of the way in which the OPB was constituted and made use of its ideas. By the end of 1953, the FAF was reconstituted by rekindling synthetist positions and the dispute with the FCL dragged on to its end.[89] In addition to the incorporation of theoretical elements of Marxism, such as dialectical materialism,[90] an already controversial issue, the FCL was involved in very complicated episodes. The first took place in 1955, with the decision to present candidates for the 1956 electoral campaign, an effort that was subsequently the object of self-criticism by its own members and that at the time earned criticism from both synthesists and important platformist sectors, like those who later formed the Anarchist Groups of Revolutionary Action Grupos Anarquistas de Acción Revolucionaria and the newspaper Rojo y Negro. The second was proximity with André Marty, candidate in the 1956 elections together with Fontenis and others from the FCL. Marty was a former member of the French Communist Party who during the Spanish Revolution had been responsible for the International Brigades and had ordered the slaughter of dozens of anarchists.[91]

In Italy, the formation of Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action (GAAP) was carried out by a platformist sector of the Italian Anarchist Federation. Expelled in 1950, this sector—who criticized the reformism and idealism of its organization of origin and advocated the creation of an anarchist party inspired by the Platform—acted as GAAP until 1956, the year in which it merged with Marxist groups to form Communist Action, a far-left sector of the Italian Communist Party that subsequently contributed to the creation of the Movement of the Communist Left.[92]

Be that as it may, both French and Italian platformism have had further developments and influenced organizations up to the present, the vast majority of which are inscribed in the anarchist camp.

It is not difficult to demonstrate the consequences of the analyzes of French and Italian platformists of that period and of the generalization of its postulates in all sectors of anarchism inspired by organizational dualism in general and in the Platform in particular. Despite the virtues of the projects in question—there is no doubt about the theoretical and practical relevance of some of the contributions of the French and Italian platformists of the 1950s—it seems clear that a significant part of them, especially the FCL and the GAAP, brought serious problems. The mode of formation and action of the OPB, the position in favor of elections and the proximity to an authoritarian communist of the stature of Marty of the FCL and the fusion of the GAAP with the Marxists are examples that, although they responded to a specific context, broke with the anarchist principles and strategy enunciated in the Platform.

Without a doubt, they armed the adversaries of the Platform with powerful arguments. As we have seen, the controversy surrounding the Platform was already complicated in its time and since its publication it was accused of Bolshevik deviation by its detractors. The French and Italian cases reinforced these criticisms.

By refraining from making a less ideological analysis of the Platform, comparing its fundamental elements with anarchist classics and ignoring the case of Bulgarian platformism,[93] the Synthesists ended up generalizing these examples—especially the so-called “Fontenis case” [L’affaire Fontenis] in France—and turned them into paradigmatic examples of the modus operandi of platformism.

This is how the argument was constituted that very often equates Bakuninist[94] and platformist organizational dualism to a kind of Marxist and/or Bolshevik deviation from anarchism, to a kind of anarcho-Bolshevism. The dominant interpretation of the Platform exercised by the French synthesists and the dissemination that its argumentation reached—orally and in writing—explain that such positions will be uncritically consolidated by the world between researchers and militants.

Concluding

Although organizational dualism has not been defended by the majority organizationist anarchists, it has representatives of unquestionable importance and magnitude among anarchists: Bakunin, Malatesta and the editors of Dielo Trudá, among them Makhno and Archinov.

Toward the end of the 1860s, Bakunin carried out a theoretical and practical praxis that includes the Alliance and International Workingmen’s Association and contributes decisively to the debate on anarchist political organization. In our view, his positions constitute the fundamentals of the Dielo Trudá Platform. Malatesta also held positions close to the Platform, although, as we have seen, this does not occur in all his writings on the subject: it is not only about differences with respect to some issues of the Platform, but also that at distinct moments he comes close to the Synthesis position.

Taking into account the role of Bakunin and Malatesta in anarchism and that of figures like Makhno and Archinov, it is not very fair to equate their positions with some kind of Leninist or Bolshevik deviation and an alleged anarcho-Bolshevism. Logically, to claim that the Platform contains authoritarian positions implies ascribing responsibility for this to Bakunin. And yet it seems quite evident that both are anarchists and that their positions about the anarchist political organization are fully reconcilable with their other positions.

From the analysis of the debate between Malatesta on the one hand and Makhno and Archinov on the other, we can conclude the following: there is no doubt that the positions in question are anarchist and that they share the opinion on the need to organize anarchists on two levels—as workers in popular mass movements and as anarchists in revolutionary political organizations— and on the duty of anarchists to influence workers in general as much as possible. At the same time, we consider Malatesta’s criticisms misplaced, which claimed that the Platform is proposing a hierarchical model of organization and that the executive committee proposed by them would have the function of controlling decisions of the organization.

Be that as it may, we can at least identify three real differences between Malatesta and Makhno and Archinov on the following issues: individual and collective responsibility; fragmentation and the need for union of anarchists; level of autonomy and independence of individuals and groups in the anarchist organization. If for Malatesta responsibility is essentially individual, for Makhno and Archinov it is both individual and collective, so that it binds the militant and the organization at the same time. If for Malatesta the fragmentation of anarchists is not a problem of the first order, for Makhno and Archinov it urgently needs to be overcome in order to allow the union of as many anarchists as possible, provided they are in accordance with the organization’s program and strategy. If for Malatesta individuals should have the widest autonomy and independence in groups and these groups in the federations, to Makhno and Archinov unity of action is fundamental, even if it requires a majority vote.

Finally, we must add that for us there is a nexus between certain positions of Bakunin, Malatesta and the Platform that have made it possible to develop a powerful theory of anarchist political organization and that these have served as inspiration for important political experiences. In the specific case of the Platform, it inspired a considerable set of anarchist political practices but, as we have seen, the French and Italian experiences of the 1950s, despite their virtues, offered elements for the argument of “Bolshevik deviation” that had been sustained since the Platform was published. Considering the ideologicalized analysis of the debate and the cases in question, in addition to the dominance of the French interpretation, we can get an idea of ​​why the Platform has been considered as a Bolshevik element of anarchism or even something foreign to the anarchist tradition. We have tried to show that this has no foundation.

Although there are reports about the reception of Dielo Trudá by Russian anarchists who were in Rio Grande do Sul,[95] it seems that in Brazil the Platform was not discussed even at that time nor in subsequent decades. Although there were different anarchist positions throughout the twentieth century which bear similarities to those outlined in the Platform,[96] it was not until the end of the decade 1990 and early 2000 that the text had been read, translated and discussed by Brazilian militants.[97] Those who have led the debate are the militants involved in especifismo anarchism, influenced by the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation, who without knowing the Platform at the time of its formation, reached quite similar conceptions via Bakunin and Malatesta.

Without a doubt, reflection on the Platform should not be taken as an inflexible guide for structuring a political organization. But to reject it on the false argument that it is an “authoritarian deviation” from anarchism or that its contributions should be confined to a specific context is to ignore all the political debates before and after this document, which link the organizational discussion to a long central thread. We understand that it is possible to advance the debate on anarchist political organization if we do it jointly with other contributions, both theoretical and practical, among others those of Bakunin and Malatesta. To continue working on deepening this debate seems to us an urgent need.

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Notes

[1] Felipe Corrêa and Rafael Viana da Silva, “Introduction à l’édition francophone.”

[2] This claim is also supported by the studies mentioned above (Corrêa, Van der Walt, De Laforcade, Viana da Silva). On organizational dualism in theory and practice see the previous chapter “Organizational Issues within Anarchism.”

[3] Mikhail Bakunin, Bakounine: Oeuvres Complètes [CD-ROM]. Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History (IISH), 2000.

[4] Gaston Leval, Bakunin: fundador do sindicalismo revolucionário.

[5] See for example: René Berthier, “Bakounine: une théorie de l’organisation” and “Postface.”

[6] In recent decades, the silencing by French anarchists of Bakunin’s work is remarkable, especially with regard to the question of anarchist political organization. Virtually none of the numerous programs of the Alliance were included in the published books of this anarchist. Perhaps this question can be explained by following the hypothesis that René Berthier put forward in a talk in 2014 in Brazil. For him, for a long time the French linked Bakunin to Marxism under the umbrella of a so-called “libertarian Marxism,” defended by Daniel Guérin. Thus it can be explained, according to him, that a magazine like Itinéraire, which dedicated its issues to the “great anarchists” of history, does not have any issue on Bakunin. It is Berthier himself who, to a certain extent, along with other researchers and activists, has taken up the discussion about Bakunin’s work.

[7] Mikhail Bakunin, “Letter to Morago (May 21st, 1872).” On the Alliance, see Felipe Corrêa, Liberdade ou Morte: teoria e prática de Mikhail Bakunin, chapters 10 and 13.

[8] Mikhail Bakunin, “Letter to Cerretti (March 13–27, 1872).”

[9] Mikhail Bakunin, “Statuts secrets de l’Alliance: Programme et objet de l’organisation révolutionnaire des Frères internationaux,” “Letter to Cerretti (March 13–27, 1872)”and “Letter to Morago (May 21st, 1872).”

[10] Mikhail Bakunin, “Statuts secrets de l’Alliance: Programme et objet de l’organisation révolutionnaire des Frères internationaux” y “Statuts secrets de l’Alliance: Programme de la Société de la Révolution Internationale.”

[11] Mikhail Bakunin, “Letter to Morago (May 21st, 1872).”

[12] It should be noted that during his long anarchist career, which spans more than sixty years, Malatesta defended different positions on anarchist political organization. If in some cases it is close to Bakunin’s conceptions and, as we will argue, to those of the Platform, in other cases his positions are more related to the Synthesis. It should also be noted that the term “party,” used by Malatesta in this period, must be placed in its historical context. It is a term that anarchists will gradually abandon, especially after the Russian Revolution, when it becomes more directly linked to Bolshevism and other initiatives to conquer the state, either through revolution or electorally.

[13] Errico Malatesta, “A organização II.”

[14] Errico Malatesta, “A organização II” and “Enfim. O que é a ‘ditadura do proletariado’,” p. 87.

[15] Errico Malatesta, “Ação e disciplina,” p. 24.

[16] Errico Malatesta, “A organização II,” p. 62.

[17] Errico Malatesta, “La propaganda anarquista,” pp. 170–172.

[18] Errico Malatesta, “Programa anarquista,” p. 14.

[19] Errico Malatesta, Ideología anarquista, p. 193.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid., p. 31.

[22] Errico Malatesta, “Programa anarquista,” p. 26.

[23] Although the Leninist party form is described in 1902 in Lenin’s work, What is to be done?, the model will not be internationally divulged until after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

[24] Vladimir I. Lenin, O que fazer?

[25] Any serious researcher would be horrified to hear this characterization of the members of Dielo Trudá. In the 2014 talk mentioned, for example, researcher René Berthier (who is also a member of a synthesist organization) was clear and emphatic when he heard it from another synthesist stating: “That does not exist.”

[26] Dielo Trudá, “Plataforma Organizacional dos Comunistas Libertários.”

[27] Frank Mintz, “Contexto de la Plataforma.”

[28] Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame […], p. 256.

[29] Many of the texts on the debate can be found on the Nestor Makhno Archive: http://www.nestormakhno.info. Among the anarchists who contributed to this broad debate are: Malatesta, Makhno and the The Platform’s own authors —Piotr Archinov, Ida Mett, Jean Walecki, Benjamin Goldberg (Ranko)—in addition to Gregori Maximoff, Volin, Senya Fleshin, Camilo Berneri, Luigi Fabbri, Sébastien Faure and Maria Isidin, among others. For a full compilation of the interventions in this debate, see Felipe Corrêa (ed.), “Dossiê A Plataforma Organizacional”: https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/plataforma-organizacional.

[30] There are two homonymous historical texts that, although they have have significant differences, theoretically ground the “anarchist synthesis”: Sébastien Faure, “A sintese anarquista,” and Volin, “A sintese anarquista.”

[31] Errico Malatesta, “A organização I” and “A organização II.”

[32] Errico Malatesta, Ideología anarquista.

[33] Errico Malatesta, “Communism and Individualism.”

[34] Errico Malatesta, “Individualism and Communism in Anarchism.”

[35] Maurizio Antonioli (ed.) The International Anarchist Congress: Amsterdam (1907).

[36] Errico Malatesta, “Individualism and Communism in Anarchism,” pp. 14–18.

[37] Ibid., pp. 19–21.

[38] Errico Malatesta, “Intervention, 6th session,” p. 96.

[39] Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame […], p. 250.

[40] The debate was reflected in the correspondence between the two: Errico Malatesta, “Um projeto de organização anarquista” and “Resposta de Malatesta a Nestor Makhno,” and Nestor Makhno, “Reposta a “Um projeto de organização anarquista” and “Uma segunda carta a Malatesta.” Malatesta’s article “A propósito da responsabilidade coletiva” can also be useful.

[41] Alexandre Skirda, a Russian translator who, in addition to participating in the political debate, was in charge of the publication of the new translation of the Platform into French, says about the original translation: “Let us remember that Volin’s first translation was described as ‘vile and boring’ and its author accused of not being ‘careful to adapt the terminology and phrases to the spirit of the French movement’ (Le Libertaire, 106, 04/15/1927). We investigated what these accusations could refer to and found, indeed, several consciously distorted terms: napravlenie, which means both ‘direction’ and ‘orientation’, was consistently used in the former sense. The same occurs with the term rukovodstvo, which means ‘conduct’ and as a derived verb it has the sense of ‘guide, lead, direct, manage’ but it was also systematically translated as ‘direct’. The most flagrant case is that of zatrelchtchik, which appears in the last sentence of the Platform and means ‘instigator’ but Volin translated it as ‘vanguard’. This is how, through light brushstrokes, the deep meaning of a text can be modified.” Alexandre Skirda, Autonomie individuelle et force collective: les anarchistes et l’organisation de Proudhon à nos jours, pp. 245–246.

[42] We can mention the case of the Nabat Confederation, which brought together various anarchist organizations. Although the differences in analysis between historians and anarchists themselves on the organizational conception and anarchism of Nabat do not allow us to know for sure if it was closer to the conception of the Synthesis or the Platform, we can affirm that, along with the experience of the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions, it broadly contributed to the Platform. Piotr Archinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement.

[43] Errico Malatesta, “Um projeto de organização anarquista.”

[44] The discussion between Malatesta and Makhno got very complicated due to terminological problems, to which the issues previously noted on translation contributed.

[45] Errico Malatesta, “Resposta de Malatesta a Nestor Makhno.”

[46] Nestor Makhno, “Uma segunda carta a Malatesta.”

[47] Dielo Trudá, “Plataforma Organizacional dos Comunistas Libertários.”

[48] Dielo Trudá, “Suplemento a la Plataforma Organizativa (Preguntas y respuestas).”

[49] Nestor Makhno, “Resposta a ‘Um projeto de organização anarquista’.”

[50] Dielo Trudá, “Plataforma Organizacional dos Comunistas Libertários.”

[51] Ibid.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Errico Malatesta, “Um projeto de organização anarquista.”

[54] Ibid.

[55] Nestor Makhno, “Resposta a ‘Um projeto de organização anarquista’.”

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Piotr Archinov, “O velho e o novo no anarquismo.”

[59] Ibid.

[60] Errico Malatesta, “Resposta de Malatesta a Nestor Makhno.”

[61] Ibid.

[62] Nestor Makhno, “Uma segunda carta a Malatesta.”

[63] Errico Malatesta, “A propósito da responsabilidade coletiva.”

[64] Errico Malatesta, “Resposta de Malatesta a Nestor Makhno.”

[65] Dielo Trudá, “Plataforma Organizacional dos Comunistas Libertários.”

[66] Nestor Makhno, “Uma segunda carta a Malatesta.”

[67] Ibid.

[68] Piotr Archinov, “O velho e o novo no anarquismo.”

[69] Errico Malatesta, “Resposta de Malatesta a Nestor Makhno.”

[70] Piotr Archinov, “O velho e o novo no anarquismo.”

[71] Errico Malatesta, “Um projeto de organização anarquista.”

[72] Ibid.

[73] Piotr Archinov, Historia del movimiento makhnovista.

[74] Alexandre Skirda, “Polémicas en torno del libro de Archinov: Historia del movimiento makhnovista,” p. 232.

[75] Piotr Archinov, “A makhnovitchina e o anarquismo.”

[76] Alexandre Skirda, “Polémicas en torno del libro de Archinov: Historia del movimiento makhnovista,” pp. 233–234.

[77] This and other writings from the author in Frank Mintz (ed.) Anatol Gorelik: el anarquismo en la Revolución Rusa.

[78] As mentioned above, the whole debate can be found in Felipe Corrêa (ed.), “Dossiê A Plataforma Organizacional.”

[79] Volin et al., “Reply to the Platform (Synthesist).”

[80] Nick Heat, “Introdução histórica.”

[81] David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement (1917–1945), pp. 174–176.

[82] Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame […], p. 258.

[83] Michael Schmidt, Anarquismo búlgaro em armas: a linha de massas anarco-comunista, p. 40. The Bulgarian Platform appears in the appendix of this book.

[84] Nick Heat, “Introdução histórica”; José A.G. Danton, “Para pensar el anarquismo desde nuestra realidad: sobre el Manifiesto comunista libertario,” p. 19.

[85] Maurice Joyeux, “L’affaire Fontenis.”

[86] Alexandre Skirda, Autonomie individuelle et force collective: les anarchistes et l’organisation de Proudhon à nos jours, pp. 203–213.

[87] George Fontenis, Manifeste du communisme libertaire.

[88] José A.G. Danton, “Para pensar el anarquismo desde nuestra realidad […],” pp. 19–20.

[89] Maurice Joyeux, “L’affaire Fontenis.”

[90] Alexandre Skirda, Autonomie individuelle et force collective […], p. 343.

[91] “Organisation, pensée, bataille,” in Noir et Rouge. Cahiers d’Études Anarchistes Revolutionnaires: Anthologie 1956–1970; Cédric Guérin, Pensée et action des anarchistes en France: 1956–1970; Maurice Joyeux, “L’affaire Fontenis,” p. 81.

[92] José A.G. Danton, “Para pensar el anarquismo desde nuestra realidad […],” p. 20; Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici (FdCA), Anarchist communists: a question of class, p. 107.

[93] Bulgarian platformism is quite a different example from the French and Italian cases of the 1950s and became known in France through Balkansky’s publications. See for example this book published even by a group of the French-Francophone Anarchist Federation (FAF): Georges Balkansky, Histoire du mouvement libertaire en Bulgarie.

[94] Let us recall, as we have already pointed out, that the French attributed a certain authoritarian character to an important part of Bakunin’s work.

[95] Edgar Rodrigues, Renato Ramos y Alexandre Samis, Against all tyranny! Essays of anarchism in Brazil, p. 19.

[96] For an analysis of the experiences of the forties and sixties of twentieth century São Paulo and Río de Janeiro, see Rafael Viana da Silva, Elementos inflamáveis: organizações e militância anarquista no Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo (1945–1964).

[97] Dielo Trudá, “Plataforma Organizacional dos Comunistas Libertários.”

__________

Source: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/felipe-correa-and-rafael-viana-da-silva-bakunin-malatesta-and-the-platform-debate-the-question

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I think it is useful to set up as a framework for discussion four somewhat idealized positions with regard to the role of the state in an advanced industrial society. I want to call these positions: (1) classical liberal, (2) libertarian socialist, (3) state socialist, (4) state capitalist, and I want to consider each in turn. Also, I’d like to make clear my own point of view in advance, so that you can evaluate and judge what I am saying. I think that the libertarian socialist concepts, and by that I mean a range of thinking that extends from left-wing Marxism through to anarchism, I think that these are fundamentally correct and that they are the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society.

In contrast, it seems to me that the ideology of state socialism, i.e. what has become of Bolshevism, and that of state capitalism, the modern welfare state, these of course are dominant in the industrial societies, but I believe that they are regressive and highly inadequate social theories, and a large number of our really fundamental problems stem from a kind of incompatibility and inappropriateness of these social forms to a modern industrial society.

Let me consider these four points of reference in sequence, beginning with the classical liberal point of view.

Classical Liberalism

Classical liberalism asserts as its major idea an opposition to all but the most restricted and minimal forms of state intervention in personal and social life. Well, this conclusion is quite familiar, however the reasoning that leads to it is less familiar and, I think, a good deal more important than the conclusion itself.

One of the earliest and most brilliant expositions of this position is in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “Limits of State Action” which was written in 1792, though not published for 60 or 70 years after that. In his view the state tends to, I quote, “make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends, overlooking his individual purposes, and since man is in his essence a free, searching, self-perfecting being, it follows that the state is a profoundly anti-human institution.” I.e. its actions, its existence are ultimately incompatible with the full harmonious development of human potential in its richest diversity and, hence, incompatible with what Humboldt and in the following century Marx, Bakunin, Mill, and many others, what they see as the true end of man.

And, for the record, I think that this is an accurate description. The modern conservative tends to regard himself as the lineal descendant of the classical liberal in this sense, but I think that can be maintained only from an extremely superficial point of view, as one can see by studying more carefully the fundamental ideas of classical libertarian thought as expressed, in my opinion, in its most profound form by Humboldt.

I think the issues are of really quite considerable contemporary significance, and if you don’t mind what may appear to be a somewhat antiquarian excursion, I’d like to expand on them.

For Humboldt as for Rousseau, and before him the Cartesians, man’s central attribute is his freedom. Quote: “To inquire and to create, these are the centers around which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve.” “But,” he goes on to say, “all moral cultures spring solely and immediately from the inner life of the soul and can never be produced by external and artificial contrivances. The cultivation of the understanding, as of any of man’s other faculties, is generally achieved by his own activity, his own ingenuity, or his own methods of using the discoveries of others.”

From these assumptions quite obviously an educational theory follows, and he develops it but I won’t pursue it. But also far more follows. Humboldt goes on to develop at least the rudiments of a theory of exploitation and of alienated labor that suggests in significant ways, I think, the early Marx. Humboldt in fact continues these comments that I quoted about the cultivation of the understanding through spontaneous action in the following way.

He says, “Man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does, and the laborer who tends the garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits. And since truly human action is that which flows from inner impulse, it seems as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists, that is men who love their labor for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and invented skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character and exult and refine their pleasures, and so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often tend to be degraded. Freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being but remains alien to his true nature. He does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness. And if a man acts in a mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instruction, rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and power, we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”

For Humboldt then man “is born to inquire and create, and when a man or a child chooses to inquire or create out of his own free choice then he becomes in his own terms an artist rather than a tool of production or a well trained parrot.” This is the essence of his concept of human nature. And I think that it is very revealing and interesting to compare it with Marx, with the early Marx manuscripts, and in particular his account of, quote “the alienation of labor when work is external to the worker, not part of his nature, so that he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself and is physically exhausted and mentally debased. This alienated labor that casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines, thus depriving man of his species character, of free conscious activity and productive life.”

Recall also Marx’s well known and often quoted reference to a higher form of society in which labor has become not only a means of life but also the highest want in life. And recall also his repeated criticism of the specialized labor which, I quote again, “mutilates the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrades him to become a mere appurtenance of the machine, makes his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed, estranges him from the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in very proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power.”

Robert Tucker, for one, has rightly emphasized that Marx sees the revolutionary more as a frustrated producer than as a dissatisfied consumer. And this far more radical critique of capitalist relations of production flows directly, often in the same words, from the libertarian thought of the enlightenment. For this reason, I think, one must say that classical liberal ideas in their essence, though not in the way they developed, are profoundly anti-capitalist. The essence of these ideas must be destroyed for them to serve as an ideology of modern industrial capitalism.

Writing in the 1780’s and early 1790’s, Humboldt had no conception of the forms that industrial capitalism would take. Consequently, in this classic of classical liberalism he stresses the problem of limiting state power, and he is not overly concerned with the dangers of private power. The reason is that he believes in and speaks of the essential equality of condition of private citizens. Of course, he has no idea, writing in 1790, of the ways in which the notion of a private person would come to be reinterpreted in the era of corporate capitalism.

He did not foresee, I now quote the anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker, “that democracy with its model of equality of all citizens before the law and liberalism with its right of man over his own person both would be wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy. Humboldt did not foresee that in a predatory capitalist economy state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence, to prevent the destruction of the physical environment. I speak optimistically of course.”

As Karl Polanyi, for one, has pointed out: “The self-adjusting market could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society. It would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.” I think that is correct. Humboldt also did not foresee the consequences of the commodity character of labor. The doctrine is, again in Polanyi’s words, “that it is not for the commodity to decide where it should be offered for sale, to what purpose it should be used, at what price it should be allowed to change hands, in what manner it should be consumed or destroyed.” But the commodity in this case is of course human life. And social protection was therefore a minimal necessity to constrain the irrational and destructive workings of the classical free market.
Nor did Humboldt understand in 1790 that capitalist economic relations perpetuated a form of bondage which long before that, in fact as early as 1767, Simon Linguet had declared to be even worse than slavery, writing “it is the impossibility of earning a living by any other means that compels our farm laborers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him. What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? He is free, you say, that is his misfortune. These men, it is said, have no master. They have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of masters: that is need. It is this that reduces them to the most cruel dependence.”

And if there is something degrading to human nature in the idea of bondage – as every spokesman for the enlightenment would insist -, then it would follow that a new emancipation must be awaited, what Fourier referred to as the third and last emancipatory phase of history, the first having made serfs out of slaves, the second wage earners out of serfs, and the third, which will transform the proletariats to free men, by eliminating the commodity character of labor, ending wage slavery and bringing the commercial, industrial and financial institutions under democratic control.

These are all things that Humboldt in his classical liberal doctrine did not express and didn’t see, but I think that he might have accepted these conclusions. He does, for example, agree that state intervention in social life is legitimate “if freedom would destroy the very conditions without which not only freedom but even existence itself would be inconceivable”, which are precisely the circumstances that arise in an unconstrained capitalist economy. And he does, as in the remarks that I quoted, vigorously condemn the alienation of labor.

In any event, his criticism of bureaucracy and the autocratic state stands as a very eloquent forewarning of some of the most dismal aspects of modern history, and the important point is that the basis of his critique is applicable to a far broader range of coercive institutions than he imagined, in particular to the institutions of industrial capitalism.

Though he expresses a classical liberal doctrine, Humboldt is no primitive individualist, in the style of for example Rousseau. Rousseau extols the savage who lives within himself but Humboldt’s vision is entirely different. He sums up his remarks as follows: “The whole tenor of the ideas and arguments unfolded in this essay might fairly be reduced to this ‘that while they would break all fetters in human society, they would attempt to find as many new social bonds as possible, the isolated man is no more able to develop than the one who is fettered.’” And he, in fact, looks forward to a community of free association, without coercion by the state or other authoritarian institutions, in which free men can create and inquire and achieve the highest development of their powers.

In fact, far ahead of his time, he presents an anarchist vision that is appropriate perhaps to the next stage of industrial society. We can perhaps look forward to a day when these various strands will be brought together within the framework of libertarian socialism, a social form that barely exists today, though its elements can perhaps be perceived. For example, in the guarantee of individual rights that has achieved so far its fullest realization, though still tragically flawed, in the western democracies or in the Israeli kibbutzim or in the experiments of workers’ councils in Yugoslavia or in the effort to awaken popular consciousness and to create a new involvement in the social process which is a fundamental element in the third world revolutions coexisting uneasily with indefensible authoritarian practice.

Let me summarize the first point. The first concept of the state that I want to set up as a reference is classical liberal. Its doctrine is that the state functions should be drastically limited. But this familiar characterization is a very superficial one. More deeply, the classical liberal view develops from a certain concept of human nature, one that stresses the importance of diversity and free creation. Therefore, this view is in fundamental opposition to industrial capitalism with its wage slavery, its alienated labor and its hierarchic and authoritarian principles of social and economic organization.
At least in its ideal form, classical liberal thought is opposed as well to the concepts of possessive individualism that are intrinsic to capitalist ideology. It seeks to eliminate social fetters and to replace them by social bonds, not by competitive greed, not by predatory individualism, not of course by corporate empires, state or private. Classical libertarian thought seems to me, therefore, to lead directly to libertarian socialism or anarchism, if you like, when combined with an understanding of industrial capitalism.

Libertarian Socialism and Anarchism

The second point of reference that I want to discuss is the libertarian socialist vision of the state. A French writer, rather sympathetic to anarchism, once wrote that “anarchism has a broad back – like paper it endures anything.” And there are many shades of anarchism. I am concerned here only with one, namely the anarchism of Bakunin who wrote in his anarchist manifesto of 1865 that to be an anarchist one must first be a socialist. I am concerned with the anarchism of Adolf Fisher, one of the martyrs of the Hay Market affair in 1886, who said that every anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist. A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production. Such property is indeed, as Proudhon in his famous remark asserted, a form of theft. But a consistent anarchist will also oppose the organization of production by government.

Quoting “it means state socialism, the command of the state officials over production and the command of managers, scientists, shop officials in the shop. The goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation, and this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves, being master over production, by some form of workers’ councils.” These remarks, it happens, are quoted from the left wing Marxist Anton Pannekoek, and in fact radical Marxism – what Lenin once called infantile ultra-leftism – merges with anarchist currents. This is an important point, I think, and let me give one further illustration of this convergence between left wing Marxism and socialist anarchism.

Consider the following characterization of revolutionary socialism: “The revolutionary socialist denies that state ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen why the state cannot democratically control industry. Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees. Socialism will fundamentally be an industrial system; its constituencies will be of an industrial character. Thus those carrying on the social activity and industries of society will be directly represented in the local and central councils of social administration. In this way the powers of such delegates will flow upwards from those carrying on the work and conversant with the needs of the community. When the central industrial administrative committee meets it will represent every phase of social activity. Hence the capitalist political or geographical state will be replaced by the industrial administrative committee of socialism. The transition from one social system to the other will be the social revolution. The political state throughout history has meant the government of men by ruling classes; the republic of socialism will be the government of industry administered on behalf of the whole community. The former meant the economic and political subjection of the many, the latter will mean the economic freedom of all. It will be, therefore, a true democracy.”

These remarks are taken from a book called “The State: Its Origins and Function”, written by William Paul in early 1917, just prior to Lenin’s “State and Revolution”, which is his most libertarian work.

William Paul was one of the founders of the British Communist Party, later the editor of the British Communist Party Journal. And it is interesting that his critique of state socialism resembles very closely, I think, the libertarian doctrine of the anarchists, in particular, in its principle that the state must disappear, to be replaced by the industrial organization of society in the course of the social revolution itself. Proudhon in 1851 wrote that what we put in place of the government is industrial organization, and many similar comments can be cited. That, in essence, is the fundamental idea of anarchist revolutionaries. What’s more important than the fact that many such statements can be cited is that these ideas have been realized in spontaneous revolutionary action several times. For example, in Germany and Italy after the first World War, in Catalonia in 1936.

One might argue, or at least I would argue, that council communism in this sense, in the sense of the long quotation that I read is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, technocrats, a vanguard party, a state bureaucracy, or whatever. Under these conditions of authoritarian domination, the classical liberal ideals which are expressed also by Marx and Bakunin and all true revolutionaries cannot be realized.

Man will, in other words, not be free to inquire and create, to develop his own potentialities to their fullest. The worker will remain a fragment of a human being, degraded, a tool in the productive process directed from above. And the ideas of revolutionary libertarian socialism, in this sense, have been submerged in the industrial societies of the past half century. The dominant ideologies have been those of state socialism and state capitalism.

But there has been an interesting resurgence in the last couple of years. In fact, the theses that I quoted from Anton Pannekoek were taken from a recent pamphlet of a radical French workers group, and the quotation that I read from William Paul on revolutionary socialism was taken from a paper by Walter Kendall at the National Conference on Workers Control in Sheffield, England, last March.

Both of these groups represent something significant. The Workers Control Movement in England, in particular, has developed into, I think, a remarkably significant force in the last few years. It includes some of the largest trade unions, for example the Amalgamated Engineering Federation which, I think, is the second largest trade union in England and which has taken these principles as its fundamental ideas. It’s had a series of successful conferences, putting out an interesting pamphlet literature, and on the continent there are parallel developments. May 1968 in France of course accelerated the growing interest in council communism and similar ideas and other forms of libertarian socialism in France and Germany, as it did in England.

Given the general conservative cast of our highly ideological society, it’s not too surprising that the United States is relatively untouched by these currents. But that too may change. The erosion of the Cold War mythology at least makes it possible to discuss some of these questions, and if the present wave of repression can be beaten back, if the left can overcome its more suicidal tendencies and build on the achievements of the past decade, the problem of how to organize industrial society on truly democratic lines, with democratic control in the workplace as well as in the community, this should become the dominant intellectual issue for those who are alive to the problems of contemporary society. And as a mass movement for revolutionary libertarian socialism develops, as I hope it will, speculation should proceed to action.

It may seem quixotic to group left Marxism and anarchism under the same rubric, as I have done, given the antagonism throughout the past century between the Marxists and the anarchists, beginning with the antagonism between Marx and Engels on the one hand and, for example, Proudhon and Bakunin on the other. In the nineteenth century at least, their differences with regard to the question of the state was significant, but in a sense it was tactical. The anarchists were convinced that capitalism and the state must be destroyed together. But Engels, in a letter of 1883, expressed his opposition to this idea as follows: “The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly conquered power, hold down its adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers, similar to those after the Paris commune.”

Now, the Paris Commune, I think it is fair to say, did represent the ideas of libertarian socialism, of anarchism if you like, and Marx wrote about it with great enthusiasm. In fact, the experience of the commune led him to modify his concept of the role of the state and to take on something more of an anarchist perspective of the nature of social revolution, as you can see, for example, by looking at the introduction to the Communist Manifesto, the edition that was published in 1872. The commune was of course drowned in blood, as the anarchist communes of Spain were destroyed by Fascist and Communist armies. And it might be argued that more dictatorial structures would have defended the revolution against such forces. But I doubt this very much, at least in the case of Spain, it seems to me that a more consistent libertarian policy might have provided the only possible defense of the revolution.

Of course this can be contested and this is a long story that I don’t want to go into here, but at the very least it is clear that one would have to be rather naive, after the events of the past half century, to fail to see the truth in Bakunin’s repeated warnings that the red bureaucracy would prove to be the most violent and terrible lie of the century. “Take the most radical revolutionary and place him on the throne of all Russia”, he said in 1870, “or give him dictatorial power, and before a year has passed he will become worse than the Czar himself.”

I’m afraid, in this respect Bakunin was all too perceptive, and this kind of warning was repeatedly voiced from the left. For example, in the 1890’s the anarchosyndicalist Fernand Pelloutier asked, “Must the transitional state to be endured necessarily or inevitably be the collectivist jail? Might it not consist of a free organization limited exclusively by the needs of production and consumption, all political institutions having disappeared?”

I don’t pretend to know the answer to that question, but I think that it is tolerably clear that unless the answer is positive, the chances for a truly democratic revolution that will achieve the humanistic ideals of the left are perhaps rather slight. I think Martin Buber put the problem quite succinctly when he said: “One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.” For just this reason, it is essential that a powerful revolutionary movement exist in the United States, if there are to be any reasonable possibilities for democratic social change of a radical sort anywhere in the capitalist world. And comparable remarks, I think, undoubtedly hold for the Russian empire.

Lenin until the end of his life stressed the idea that “it is an elementary truth of Marxism that the victory of socialism requires the joint effort of workers in a number of advanced countries. At the very least it requires that the great centers of world imperialism be impeded by domestic pressures from counter revolutionary intervention. Only such possibilities will permit any revolution to overthrow its own coercive state institutions as it tries to bring the economy under direct democratic control.

Let me summarize briefly again. I have mentioned so far two reference points for discussion of the state, classical liberalism and libertarian socialism. They are in agreement that the functions of the state are repressive and that state action must be limited. The libertarian socialist goes on to insist that the state power must be eliminated in favor of the democratic organization of the industrial society with direct popular control over all institutions by those who participate in as well as those who are directly affected by the workings of these institutions. So one might imagine a system of workers’ councils, consumer councils, commune assemblies, regional federations, and so on, with the kind of representation that is direct and revocable, in the sense that representatives are directly answerable to and return directly to the well defined and integrated social group for which they speak in some higher order organization, something obviously very different than our system of representation.

Now it might very well be asked whether such a social structure is feasible in a complex, highly technological society. There are counter arguments, and I think they fall into two main categories. The first category is that such an organization is contrary to human nature, and the second category says roughly that it is incompatible with the demands of efficiency. I’d like to briefly consider each of these.

Consider the first, that a free society is contrary to human nature. It is often asked, do men really want freedom, do they want the responsibility that goes with it. Or would they prefer to be ruled by a benevolent master. Consistently, apologists for the existing distribution of power have held to one or another version of the idea of the happy slave. Two hundred years ago Rousseau denounced the sophistic politicians and intellectuals “who search for ways to obscure the fact,” so he maintained, “that the essential and the defining property of man is his freedom. They attribute to man a natural inclination to servitude, without thinking that it is the same for freedom as for innocence and virtue. Their value is felt only as long as one enjoys them oneself, and the taste for them is lost as soon as one has lost them.” As proof of this doctrine he refers to the marvels done by all free peoples to guard themselves from oppression. “True” he says “those who have abandoned the life of a free man do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace, the repose they enjoy in their chains. But when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it, when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword and death to preserve only their independence, I feel it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.” A comment to which we can perhaps give a contemporary interpretation.

Rather similar thoughts were expressed by Kant 40 years later. He cannot, he says, “accept the proposition that certain people are not right for freedom, for example, the serfs of some landlord. If one accepts this assumption, freedom will never be achieved. For one cannot arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already acquired it. One must be free to learn how to make use of ones powers freely and usefully. The first attempts will surely be brutal and will lead to a state of affairs more painful and dangerous than the former condition, under the dominance but also the protection of an external authority. However, one can achieve reason only through ones own experiences, and one must be free to be able to undertake them. To accept the principle that freedom is worthless for those under ones control and that one has the right to refuse it to them forever is an infringement on the right of God himself, who has created man to be free.”

This particular remark is interesting because of its context as well. Kant on this occasion was defending the French revolution during the terror against those who claimed that it showed the masses to be unready for the privilege of freedom. And his remarks, too, I think, have obvious contemporary relevance. No rational person will approve of violence and terror, and in particular the terror of the post-revolutionary state that has fallen into the hands of a grim autocracy has more than once reached indescribable levels of savagery. At the same time, no person of understanding or humanity will too quickly condemn the violence that often occurs, when long subdued masses rise against their oppressors or take their first steps toward liberty and social reconstruction.

Humboldt, just a few years before Kant, had expressed a view that was very similar to that. He also said that freedom and variety are the preconditions for human self-realization. “Nothing promotes this rightness for freedom so much as freedom itself. This truth perhaps may not be acknowledged by those who have so often used this unrightness as an excuse for continuing repression, but it seems to me to follow unquestionably from the very nature of man. The incapacity for freedom can only arise from a want of moral and intellectual power. To heighten this power is the only way to supply the want, but to do so presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous activity. Those who do not comprehend this may justly be suspected of misunderstanding human nature, and wishing to make men into machines.”

Rosa Luxemburg’s fraternal sympathetic critique of Bolshevik ideology and practice was given in very similar terms. “Only the active participation of the masses in self-government and social reconstruction could bring about the complete spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule, just as only their creative experience and spontaneous action can solve the myriad problems of creating a libertarian socialist society.”

She went on to say that historically the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest central committee, and I think that these remarks can be translated immediately for the somewhat parallel ideology of the soulful corporation which is now fairly popular among American academics. For example, Carl Kaysen writes: “No longer the agent of proprietorships seeking to maximize return on investment, management sees itself as responsible to stock holders, employees, customers, general public and perhaps most important the firm itself as an institution. There is no display of greed or graspingness, there is no attempt to push off on the workers and the community at least part of the social costs of the enterprise. The modern corporation is a soulful corporation.”

Similarly, the vanguard party is a soulful party. In both cases those who urge that men submit to the rule of these benevolent autocracies may, I think, justly be accused of wishing to make men into machines. Now, the correctness of the view that is expressed by Rousseau and Kant and Humboldt and Luxemburg and innumerable others, I don’t think that the correctness of this is for the moment susceptible to scientific proof. One can only evaluate it in terms of experience and intuition. But one can also point out the social consequences of adopting the view that men are born to be free, or that they are born to be ruled by benevolent autocrats.

What of the second question, the question of efficiency? Is democratic control of the industrial system, down to its smallest functional units, incompatible with efficiency? This is very frequently argued on several grounds. For example, some say that centralized management is a technological imperative, but I think the argument is exceedingly weak when one looks into it. The very same technology that brings relevant information to the board of managers can bring it at the time that it is needed to everyone in the work force. The technology that is now capable of eliminating the stupefying labor that turns men into specialized tools of production permits in principle the leisure and the educational opportunities that make them able to use this information in a rational way. Furthermore, even an economic elite which is dripping with soulfulness, to use Ralph Miliband’s phrase, is constrained by the system in which it functions to organize production for certain ends: power, growth, profit, but not in the nature of the case human needs, needs that to an ever more critical degree can be expressed only in collective terms. It is surely conceivable and is perhaps even likely that decisions made by the collective itself, will reflect these needs and interests as well as those made by various soulful elites.

In any event, it is a bit difficult to take seriously arguments about efficiency in a society that devotes such enormous resources to waste and destruction. As everyone knows, the very concept of efficiency is dripping with ideology. Maximization of commodities is hardly the only measure of a decent existence. The point is familiar, and no elaboration is necessary.

State Socialism and State Capitalism

Let me turn to the two final points of reference: the Bolshevik or state socialist and the state capitalist. As I have tried to suggest, they have points in common, and in interesting respects they diverge from the classical liberal ideal or its later elaboration in libertarian socialism. Since I am concerned with our society, let me make a few rather elementary observations about the role of the state, its likely evolution and the ideological assumptions that accompany and sometimes disguise these phenomena.

To begin with, it is obvious that we can distinguish two systems of power, the political system and the economic system. The former consists in principle of elected representatives of the people who set public policy. The latter in principle is a system of private power, a system of private empires, that are free from public control, except in the remote and indirect ways in which even a feudal nobility or a totalitarian dictatorship must be responsive to the public will. There are several immediate consequences of this organization of society.

The first is that in a subtle way an authoritarian cast of mind is induced in a very large mass of the population which is subject to arbitrary decree from above. I think that this has a great effect on the general character of the culture. The effect is the belief that one must obey arbitrary dictates and accede to authority. And I think that in fact a remarkable and exciting fact about the youth movement in recent years is that it is challenging and beginning to break down some of these authoritarian patterns.

The second fact that is important is that the range of decisions that are in principle subject to public democratic control is quite narrow. For example, it excludes in law in principle the central institutions in any advanced industrial society, i.e. the entire commercial, industrial and financial system. And a third fact is that even within the narrow range of issues that are submitted in principle to democratic decision making, the centers of private power of course exert an inordinately heavy influence in perfectly obvious ways, through control of the media, through control of political organizations or in fact by the simple and direct means of supplying the top personnel for the parliamentary system itself, as they obviously do. Richard Barnet in his recent study of the top 400 decision makers in the postwar national security system reports that most have, I quote now, “come from executive suites and law offices within shouting distance of each other, in 15 city blocks in 5 major cities.” And every other study shows the same thing.

In short, the democratic system at best functions within a narrow range in a capitalist democracy, and even within this narrow range its functioning is enormously biased by the concentrations of private power and by the authoritarian and passive modes of thinking that are induced by autocratic institutions such as industries, for example. It is a truism but one that must be constantly stressed that capitalism and democracy are ultimately quite incompatible. And a careful look at the matter merely strengthens this conclusion. There are perfectly obvious processes of centralization of control taking place in both the political and the industrial system. As far as the political system is concerned, in every parliamentary democracy, not only ours, the role of parliament in policy formation has been declining in the years since WWII, as everyone knows and political commentators repeatedly point out.

In other words, the executive becomes increasingly powerful as the planning functions of the state become more significant. The House Armed Services Committee a couple of years ago described the role of Congress as that of a sometimes querulous but essentially kindly uncle who complains while furiously puffing on his pipe but who finally, as everyone expects, gives in and hands over the allowance. And careful studies of civil military decisions since WWII show that this is quite an accurate perception.

Senator Vandenberg 20 years ago expressed his fear that the American chief executive would become the number one warlord of the earth, his phrase. That has since occurred. The clearest decision is the decision to escalate in Vietnam in February 1965, in cynical disregard of the expressed will of the electorate. This incident reveals, I think, with perfect clarity the role of the public in decisions about peace and war, the role of the public in decisions about the main lines about public policy in general. And it also suggests the irrelevance of electoral politics to major decisions of national policy.

Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place. The corporate executives and the corporation lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive, assisted increasingly by a university based mandarin class, remain in power no matter whom you elect.

Furthermore, it is interesting to note that this ruling elite is pretty clear about its social role. As an example take Robert McNamara, who is the person widely praised in liberal circles for his humanity, his technical brilliance and his campaign to control the military. His views of social organization, I think, are quite illuminating. He says that vital decision making in policy matters as well as in business must remain at the top. That is partly, though not completely, what the top is for. And he goes on to suggest that this is apparently a divine imperative. I quote: “God is clearly democratic, he distributes brain power universally, but he quite justifiably expects us to do something efficient and constructive with that priceless gift. That’s what management is all about. Management in the end is the most creative of all the arts, for its medium is human talent itself. The real threat to democracy comes from under-management. The under-management of society is not the respect of liberty, it is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. If it is not reason that rules man then man falls short of his potential.”

So reason then is to be identified as the centralization of decision making at the top in the hands of management. Popular involvement in decision making is a threat to liberty, a violation of reason. Reason is embodied in autocratic, tightly managed institutions. Strengthening these institutions within which man can function most efficiently is, in his words, “the great human adventure of our times.” All this has a faintly familiar ring to it. It is the authentic voice of the technical intelligentsia, the liberal intelligentsia of the technocratic corporate elite in a modern society.

There is a parallel process of centralization in economic life. A recent FTC report notes that the 200 largest manufacturing corporations now control about two thirds of all manufacturing assets. At the beginning of WWII the same amount of power was spread over a thousand corporations. The report says: “A small industrial elite of huge conglomerate companies is gobbling up American business and largely destroying competitive free enterprise.” Furthermore it says: “These two hundred corporations are partially linked with each other and with other corporations in ways that may prevent or discourage independent behavior in market decisions.” What is novel about such observations is only their source, the FTC. They are familiar, to the point of cliche, among left-liberal commentators on American society.

The centralization of power also has an international dimension. Quoting from Foreign Affairs, it has been pointed that “on the basis of the gross value of their output, US enterprises abroad in the aggregate comprise the third largest country in the world, with a gross product greater than that of any country except the United States and the Soviet Union. American firms control over half the automobile industry in England, almost 40% of petroleum in Germany, over 40% of the telegraphic, telephone and electronic and business equipment in France, 75% of the computers. Within a decade, given present trends, more than half of the British exports will be from American owned companies.” Furthermore, these are highly-concentrated investments: 40% of direct investment in Germany, France and Britain is by three firms, American firms.

George Ball has explained that the project of constructing an integrated world economy, dominated by American capital, an empire in other words, is no idealistic pipe dream, but a hard headed prediction. It is a role, he says, into which we are being pushed by the imperatives of our own economy, the major instrument being the multinational corporation which George Ball describes as follows: “In its modern form, the multinational corporation, or one with worldwide operations and markets, is a distinctly American development. Through such corporations it has become possible for the first time to use the world’s resources with maximum efficiency. But there must be greater unification of the world economy to give full play to the benefits of multinational corporations.”

These multinational corporations are the beneficiary of the mobilization of resources by the federal government, and its world wide operations and markets are backed ultimately by American military force, now based in dozens of countries. It is not difficult to guess who will reap the benefits from the integrated world economy, which is the domain of operation of these American based international economic institutions.

At this stage in the discussion one has to mention the specter of communism. What is the threat of communism to this system? For a clear and cogent answer, one can turn to an extensive study of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and National Planning Association called the Political Economy of American Foreign Policy, a very important book. It was compiled by a representative segment of the tiny elite that largely sets public policy for whoever is technically in office. In effect, it’s as close as you can come to a manifesto of the American ruling class.

Here they define the primary threat of communism as “the economic transformation of the communist powers in ways which reduce their willingness or ability to complement the industrial economies of the West.” That is the primary threat of communism. Communism, in short, reduces the willingness and ability of underdeveloped countries to function in the world capitalist economy in the manner of, for example, the Philippines which has developed a colonial economy of a classic type, after 75 years of American tutelage and domination. It is this doctrine which explains why British economist Joan Robinson describes the American crusade against communism as a crusade against development.

The cold war ideology and the international communist conspiracy function in an important way as essentially a propaganda device to mobilize support at a particular historical moment for this long time imperial enterprise. In fact, I believe that this is probably the main function of the cold war. It serves as a useful device for the managers of American society and their counterparts in the Soviet Union to control their own populations and their own respective imperial systems. I think that the persistence of the cold war can be in part explained by its utility for the managers of the two great world systems.

There is one final element that has to be added to this picture, namely the ongoing militarization of American society. How does this enter in? To see, one has to look back at WWII and to recall that prior to WWII, of course, we were deep in the depression. WWII taught an important economic lesson, it taught the lesson that government induced production in a carefully controlled economy – centrally controlled – could overcome the effects of a depression.

I think this is what Charles E. Wilson had in mind at the end of 1944 when he proposed that we have a permanent war economy in the postwar world. Of course, the trouble is that in a capitalist economy there are only a number of ways in which government intervention can take place. It can’t be competitive with the private empires for example, which is to say that it can’t be any useful production. In fact, it has to be the production of luxury goods, goods not capital, not useful commodities, which would be competitive. And unfortunately there is only one category of luxury goods that can be produced endlessly with rapid obsolescence, quickly wasting, and no limit on how many of them you can use. We all know what that is.

This whole matter is described pretty well by the business historian Alfred Chandler. He describes the economic lessons of WWII as follows: “The government spent far more than the most enthusiastic New Dealer had ever proposed. Most of the output of the expenditures was destroyed or left on the battlefields of Europe or Asia but the resulting increased demand sent the nation into a period of prosperity, the likes of which had never before been seen. Moreover, the supplying of huge armies and navies fighting the most massive war of all time required a tight centralized control of the national economy. This effort brought corporate managers to Washington to carry out one of the most complex pieces of economic planning in history. That experience lessened the ideological fears over the government’s role in stabilizing the economy.”

This is a conservative commentator, I might point out. It may be added that the ensuing cold war carried further the depoliticization of the American society and created the kind of psychological environment in which the government is able to intervene in part through fiscal policies, in part through public work and public services, but very largely, of course, through defense spending.

In this way, to use Alfred Chandler’s words, “the government acts as a coordinator of last resort when managers are unable to maintain a high level of aggregate demand.” As another conservative business historian, Joseph Monsen, writes, “enlightened corporate managers, far from fearing government intervention in the economy, view the new economics as a technique for increasing corporate viability.”

Of course, the most cynical use of these ideas is by the managers of the publicly subsidized war industries. There was a remarkable series in the Washington Post about a year ago, by Bernard Nossiter. For example, he quoted Samuel Downer, financial vice president of LTV Aerospace, one of the big new conglomerates, who explained why the postwar world must be bolstered by military orders. He said: “Its selling appeal is the defense of the home. This is one of the greatest appeals the politicians have to adjusting the system. If you’re the president and you need a control factor in the economy, and you need to sell this factor, you can’t sell Harlem and Watts but you can sell self-preservation, a new environment. We are going to increase defense budgets as long as those bastards in Russia are ahead of us. The American people understand this.”

Of course, those bastards aren’t exactly ahead of us in this deadly and cynical game, but that is only a minor embarrassment to the thesis. In times of need, we can always follow Dean Rusk, Hubert Humphrey and other luminaries and appeal to the billion Chinese armed to the teeth and setting out on world conquest.

Again, I want to emphasize the role in this system of the cold war as a technique of domestic control, a technique for developing the climate of paranoia and psychosis in which the tax payer will be willing to provide an enormous endless subsidy to the technologically advanced sectors of American industry and the corporations that dominate this increasingly centralized system.

Of course, it is perfectly obvious that Russian imperialism is not an invention of American ideologists. It is real enough for the Hungarians and the Czechs, for example. What is an invention is the uses to which it is put, for example by Dean Acheson in 1950 or Walt Rostow a decade later, when they pretend that the Vietnam war is an example of Russian imperialism. Or by the Johnson administration in 1965 when it justifies the Dominican intervention with reference to the Sino-Soviet military bloc. Or by the Kennedy intellectuals, who as Townsend Hoopes put it in an article in the Washington Monthly in the last month, were deluded by the tensions of the cold war years, and could not perceive that the triumph of the national revolution in Vietnam would not be a triumph for Moscow and Peking. It was the most remarkable degree of delusion on the part of presumably literate men.

Or, for example, by Eugene Rostow who in a recent book that was very widely praised by liberal senators and academic intellectuals, outlined the series of challenges to world order in the modern era as follows: “Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler,” and continuing in the postwar world, “general strikes in France and Italy, the civil war in Greece, and the attack on South Vietnam where Russia has put us to severe tests in its efforts to spread communism by the sword.”

This is a very interesting series of challenges to world order: Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, general strikes in France and Italy, the civil war in Greece and the Russian attack on South Vietnam. If one thinks it through, he can reach some pretty interesting conclusions about modern history.

One can continue with this indefinitely. I mean to suggest that the cold war is highly functional both to the American elite and its Soviet counterpart who in a perfectly similar way exploit Western imperialism, which they did not invent, as they send their armies into Czechoslovakia.

It is important in both cases in providing an ideology for empire and for the government subsidized system here of military capitalism. It is predictable then that the challenges to this ideology will be bitterly resisted, by force if necessary. In many ways, American society is indeed open and liberal values are preserved. However, as poor people and black people and other ethnic minorities know very well, the liberal veneer is pretty thin. Mark Twain once wrote that “it is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.” Those who lack the prudence may well pay the cost.

Roughly speaking, I think it is accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, at least in very large measure. The people, so-called, do exercise an occasional choice among those who Marx once called the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes. Those who find this characterization too harsh may prefer the formulations of a modern democratic theorist like Joseph Schumpeter who describes modern political democracy, favorably, “as a system in which the deciding of issues by the electorate is secondary to the election of the men who are to do the deciding. The political party”, he says accurately, “is a group whose members propose to act in concert in the competitive struggle for political power. If that were not so, it would be impossible for different parties to adopt exactly or almost exactly the same program.” That’s all the advantages of political democracy, as he sees it.

This program that both parties adopt more or less exactly and the individuals who compete for power express a narrow conservative ideology, basically the interests of one or another element in the corporate elite, with some modifications. This is obviously no conspiracy. I think it is simply implicit in the system of corporate capitalism. These people and the institutions they represent are in effect in power, and their interests are the national interest. It is this interest that is served primarily and overwhelmingly by the overseas empire and the growing system of military state capitalism at home.

If we were to withdraw the consent of the governed, as I think we should, we are withdrawing our consent to have these men and the interests they represent, govern and manage American society and impose their concept of world order and their criteria for legitimate political and economic development in much of the world. Although an immense effort of propaganda and mystification is carried on to conceal these facts, nonetheless facts they remain.

We have today the technical and material resources to meet man’s animal needs. We have not developed the cultural and moral resources or the democratic forms of social organization that make possible the humane and rational use of our material wealth and power. Conceivably, the classical liberal ideals, as expressed and developed in their libertarian socialist form, are achievable. But if so, only by a popular revolutionary movement, rooted in wide strata of the population, and committed to the elimination of repressive and authoritarian institutions, state and private. To create such a movement is the challenge we face and must meet if there is to be an escape from contemporary barbarism.

________

Text source here.

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By political philosophy, I mean a way of thinking about politics, institutions and decision-making. How people arbitrate their business with one another, theories of government – or self-government – or the abolition of all hierarchy. I liked to boil down anarchism into a few pithy phrases like, “anarchism is about no one having power over anyone else.”

I was not wrong. Anarchism is indeed about all of these things. It is indeed a political philosophy. It is indeed about how people take decisions together and manage their affairs collectively. But I thought this was its philosophy in toto, that there was nothing more to it. It was a way of thinking that was separate from our interior realities. It is an external philosophy, above all about how we behave towards one another.

These ideas take you far in analysing the current political and economic situation and working out how to reform it and replace it. In place of a top-down system of government, we need a system where decisions are made by the mass, including everyone with a stake. In place of an economic system controlled by the few with massive wealth, we need one where shares are equal, both in terms of wealth but also in terms of agency; where everyone gets a say over the economic affairs that affect them, whether in the workplace or society at large. The individual and society are at the heart of this idea. Individuals must be free to act as they please, but always taking into account the needs of others – a fair and equal negotiation (this isn’t the most purely libertarian form of anarchism, of course, more socialist libertarianism).

But who is that individual and how do they think? Anarchists are sceptical of formal religion, seeing it as another form of social control where agency is denied the individual in favour of a rigid orthodoxy enforced hierarchically – most often by men. The claim that god exists is seen as a veil, used to conceal many human wrongs and injustices, excused as a universal salve and explanation. Anarchism rejects religion: no gods, no masters.

Thus, I had been sceptical of those who sometimes called themselves spiritual anarchists. What is spiritualism but another kind of religion that confuses and misleads us from our earthly realities? I saw what can loosely be called spiritualism as narcissistic and selfish, with its focus on the individual soul and its needs and expression. Some of those I saw talking of spiritualism retreated from the battleground of society into drugs and other forms of refuge, both physical and mental. The battle is in our cities and streets, here and now, I argued crossly.

But those same ‘spiritualists’ claimed to me that there could not be revolution of the whole of society without revolutionising the way that individuals think within it. You couldn’t expect that society would adopt practices of equality, respect and inclusion unless we ourselves were transformed from the rationalism and analytic thinking that sees everything as structure or transaction. The interior needed to be reformed too. You couldn’t have revolution in one without revolution in the other.

I have come to think that they might be right. At the heart of all anarchism is how we treat other people. Anarchism demands that this treatment is always respectful and egalitarian: no one can coerce another, whether by overt means or subtle. My kind of anarchism demands that we treat others as they wish, not as we wish (which is, by the way, an explicit rejection of the so-called ‘golden rule’, under which we treat others as we would wish to be treated. Instead we must attend to what they say they want, not what we think they want). We must give up all notions of domination, of influence and getting others to do what we want. We must give up all power.

I once worked in government. I was agog with power, convinced that I worked among an elite few who understood the needs of society – in my case, in foreign policy and diplomacy – better than society understood itself. This fed my ego and structured my life around career and status. It has been a hard road to abandon these pillars of my sense of worth and self. If I don’t have power, what am I? If I cannot tell others what to do, what value do my ideas and wishes have? If it’s just me, what am I?

I have found that I need to believe in something. I’m not sure what I would call it. But I suspect my spiritualist friends would call it just that: spiritual need. It’s a belief that there are values and meanings outside ourselves but which animate and inspire our interior realities. Religions might name this thing god, expressed through litany. But my litany is anarchism, and I’m not willing to call that guiding spirit god. It is more earthly, it is more human.

I identify it by observing the core of anarchist practice: the interaction with others. How we treat other people. In anarchism, that interaction must be guided by consideration and caring, the putting of the needs of others on an equal footing to our own. At least: in its most extreme iteration, it is the erasure of self. Lao Tzu talks about this in the Tao te Ching. It is having power by giving up all power. He reached this conclusion thousands of years ago. It is a harmony between how we see and treat others and how we treat ourselves.

There is a word for this practice: it is Love.

Without this ‘spiritual’ core, anarchism struggles to make sense. If it is judged in the terms of current capitalist culture, it is not necessarily a more efficient or productive practice: it does not necessarily produce more goods or make more money.

What it accomplishes is in fact of infinite worth: the beauty of humans living with one another in love and respect and equality. These are abstract, ineffable things that cannot be measured in euros, pounds or dollars. Indeed, this stuff is beyond all terms themselves – and this is why it’s hard to put it into words too. It is on a plane above all that. And if you want to call this a ‘spiritual’ plane, I am happy with that. What goes on in the spirit or the soul matters, for it matters to the exterior reality too. What we believe in ourselves is intrinsic to how we engage with the world. One doesn’t work without the other.

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Carne Ross is a former British diplomat, author of The Leaderless Revolution: How ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century, and the subject of the film Accidental Anarchist

http://www.accidentalanarchist.net/

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To be clear, this program does not represent our collective as a whole, nor the international anarchist movement. There should be as many such programs as there are anarchists. As you read this, reflect on what resonates and what does not; think about what changes you want to make in the world and what means of change are consistent with your values and desires.

How to Use this Program

What follows is the opposite of an ordinary political program. It is not written in stone; it does not pretend to represent a general will, the public, the people, or any such abstraction.

Anarchists understand freedom as arising from an ongoing process; it is something we create individually and communally every day of our lives. In our view, it cannot be defined via a piece of paper or granted to us by a powerful institution; each of these practices actually destroys freedom. We also believe that defining and obtaining freedom for ourselves is the best way to guarantee our well-being.

Anarchist analyses of capitalism, the state, patriarchy, and colonialism have proven useful in countless social struggles over the past several decades, as have our critiques of reformism, authoritarian revolution, and the institutional left—and perhaps most importantly, our practices of mutual aid and self-organization. Anarchist forms of struggle have also proven compatible with a number of other struggles that have left their mark on the world, as well as influencing and informing anarchism as a living concept.

We do not present a program on the premise that we could lay claim to an absolute truth, nor that this program could speak to all the visions of liberation that we act in solidarity with. Short of presenting a complete vision, we still find the need to express some vision, no matter how partial. Recent experience has shown that we cannot win a revolution that we are not even able to imagine.

That is the primary purpose of this document: to aid in imagining what sort of changes we would begin working towards right now if we were able to abolish the government or create an autonomous zone. None of these are absolute truths we would want to impose, forcing everyone to support a single vision of freedom and revolution. Rather, this offers a way of envisioning principles and goals that many of us would fight for, which will inevitably shift and grow along the way as we enter into conflict and dialogue with other people and other visions. The point is not to convince everyone that our vision of freedom is the correct one. We will be most free when each of us can imagine our own best possible world in every given moment.

Not even the people writing and publishing it think this document is a valid program or a complete proposal. Our hope is that it will serve as a point of departure for discussion and debate, helping people to articulate similar visions, conflicting visions, or visions that are simply different. The more people who imagine the world of their dreams and reflect on how countless such worlds can fit into a single world, breaking with the homogenizing Western project, the greater our collective intelligence will be.

This program deals with some painful topics that no single collective has the right to decide. We concluded that it would be less harmful to address those topics imperfectly than to avoid them and pretend they do not exist. We hope that our inadequate attempts will inspire others to do better. The incompleteness of this program expresses a fundamental anarchist principle: no one can ever express everyone’s needs. Whatever you find missing, it’s up to you to fill it in, and up to all of us to support each other through the process of accomplishing this together.

At the end, there is a short glossary that explains what we mean by certain terms.

An Anarchist Program

0. The Ends Are the Means

Those who support an anarchist program live and organize in a way that makes the program imminently possible, not in some distant future after a dictatorial party has acquired power. This represents a completely different way of creating power starting right now.

Nothing in this program, not even the abolition of the state, can justify means of struggle that would not be at home in the world we wish to inhabit, nor the postponing of questions of freedom and well-being until after some state of exception that we dress up as a revolution.

1. Mutual Survival

Under capitalism, no one has a right to survival. We are all forced to pay for the means of survival—and some of us can’t. Millions of people die every year from easily preventable causes; billions live in misery because they are denied the means for a healthy, dignified life. That ends now.

A. Every person and every community has a right to their means of survival.

B. It follows that persons and communities that choose to constitute themselves in a way that destroys others’ means of survival, or that withhold those means in exchange for some service (exploitation), are destroying the possibility for mutual survival. Therefore, their “way of life” does not constitute survival—it endangers survival.

C. Persons and communities are right to defend themselves against exploitation or threats to their means of survival, preferably by convincing those who threaten or exploit them to change their way of life to a more harmonious, mutually feasible pattern—but also, if necessary, by force.

D. Conflict and death have always been a part of life, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. With current technologies, attempts to stave off death are predicated on multiplying deaths among those who lack access to such technologies. It follows that survival is not the absence of death, but the possibility for a healthy and fulfilling life, as well as the possibility to pass something of that life on to future generations.

E. In this sense, the opposite of life is not death, but extermination, the total annihilation of a group, including even the destruction of the memory of that group. Extermination belongs to the state. It precludes the possibility of mutual survival.

2. Decolonization

Colonization is crucial to the global spread of capitalism and the devastation it has entailed. This devastation has ongoing repercussions at every level. Colonization is the basis of the United States; it has also been foundational to the major European states that functioned as the architects of the current global system of statism and capitalism. The partial revolutions of the 20th century did not alter the basic colonial frameworks they inherited. All of this must change.

A. Colonized peoples have a right to reconstitute their communities, their languages and knowledge systems, their territories, and their organizational systems. All of these are fluid realities that members of such communities adapt to their present needs.

B. Settler societies must be destroyed. Because they are so historically ingrained, their abolition will not be a single moment of compensation (as though a price tag could be attached to all the suffering that has been caused), but a complex and evolving process. Indigenous communities should be able to define what decolonization looks like from a position of strength and healing, such as the abolition of the United States (and Canada and other nations) will allow. This is also necessary to break with the gunboat diplomacy that has characterized much of settler colonialism.

C. By definition, we cannot and will not define the limits of decolonization from the present moment, from within the reality of a settler society. Anarchists, Indigenous and otherwise, favor models of decolonization that break with colonial logics and repudiate nation-states, ethnic essentialism, punitive and genocidal practices, and mere reforms regarding who holds state power.

D. Settler communities that have historically and to the present day played the role of an aggressive and hostile neighbor helping to police and exploit Native communities in the reservation system will be encouraged to disband, and will be treated as paramilitaries if they continue any form of hostility. All “Man Camps” will be disbanded immediately, and resources will be dedicated to helping find missing Indigenous women and two-spirit people.

E. Universities, museums, and other institutions will return all bodies, body parts, art, and artifacts stolen from Indigenous communities.

F. It is right for Indigenous communities to recover all the territory they need for their full cultural, spiritual, and material survival.

G. Priority might be given to recovering land of spiritual importance, land that had belonged to the government, and large commercial holdings—but again, preconceived limitations should not be placed on how decolonization will unfold.

H. Communities in countries that maintained external colonial projects (e.g., the United Kingdom, Spain, France) will facilitate a large-scale transfer of useful resources expropriated from their abolished governments, the wealthy, and institutions that existed to serve the wealthy (e.g., private hospitals). These resources will go to communities in the ex-colonies.

3. Reparations and Ending Anti-Blackness

Anti-Blackness and other forms of racism are fundamental to the current power structure. They grew out of colonialism and capitalism from the very beginning, to such an extent that capitalism is inseparable from racism, though the latter can take many forms. It is impossible to fully abolish these power structures without striking at the historically grounded legacies of racism.

A. Communities of people largely descended from the survivors of slavery are right to take over large landholdings that had previously been plantations, as well as the excess wealth of families and institutions that profited off of slave labor. This redistribution should be carried out on a communal rather than an individual basis, to avoid encouraging identitarian processes that declare individuals legitimate or illegitimate based on abstract criteria. Those who organize a collective or communal expropriation have the right to define their own experiences and how oppression has affected them historically, as well as to choose how to constitute themselves and whom to invite into their community.

B. Historically racialized neighborhoods that have been gentrified may be reclaimed. Because many neighborhoods, before gentrification, are in fact quite diverse and working class people of all races can lose their homes, those who are involved in housing and anti-racist struggles at the time of the revolution may form assemblies to organize the process of inviting people back into reclaimed neighborhoods, for example prioritizing prior residents or their children, and finding ways to strike a balance between revitalizing Black and other cultures of resistance and creating practices of cross-racial solidarity that break down the segregations and separations of racism.

C. People in neighborhoods that are infrastructurally unsound or unsanitary, that suffer from environmental racism or other harmful effects that will continue causing health problems into the foreseeable future, may expropriate and move into wealthy neighborhoods (preferentially targeting the wealthiest). The prior residents of those neighborhoods may move into the vacated, substandard neighborhood with an eye towards improving it through their own effort, or they may move into other unused housing, of which there is plenty, thanks to capitalist real estate markets.

D. Weapons taken from the disbanded police and military will be distributed among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities, and to volunteer militias that fought unambiguously on the anti-racist side during the entirety of the revolutionary conflict. The communities will decide what is to be done with the weapons—whether to distribute, store, or dismantle them.

E. Resources related to education and healthcare may be taken from wealthy neighborhoods for the benefit of racialized neighborhoods.

F. The onus is on white anti-capitalists, or more correctly, anti-capitalists in the process of definitively breaking with their whiteness, to work with other white people to achieve a process of reparations that is as peaceful as possible, to help them move to other neighborhoods or territories in the case that they are evicted, to soften their landing and help them find the means for dignified survival, without creating entrenched identities or resentment that might encourage intergenerational conflicts or keep whiteness alive.

G. Assemblies of people committed to the relevant causes at the time of the revolution will set up truth and reconciliation committees to deal with whatever racist atrocities are brought to their attention, such as the forced sterilizations carried out in ICE facilities. The processes for uncovering the truth of these atrocities and achieving some kind of reconciliation will not be purely symbolic, and they need not delegitimize personal acts of revenge, but they will strive for some form of collective healing and transformative justice rather than punitive and carceral measures.

All the following points of the program are contingent on points 1-3 being put in motion in a way that is satisfactory to those who have suffered white supremacy, colonization, and racial capitalism. The rights and principles in point 4, for example, about access to land, must not be used to thwart efforts by Indigenous communities to get their Land Back.

4. Land

The way capitalism and Western civilization have taught us to think about the land and the way to treat it has brought us to the brink of disaster. The paradigm of land as property, as a resource to be exploited, is simultaneously a failure and a travesty. The commodification of land has been instrumental to colonialism and exploitation, while the measuring, demarcation, and assertion of dominion over land has been central to the state throughout its history.

A. Land is a living thing. Land cannot be bought and sold.

B. Land belongs to those who belong to it, which is to say, those who take care of it and those whose survival is based on it.

C. Land should be respected. Communities should consider the personhood of the land and all other beings that exist in relation with it. The idea that only humans of a predetermined type have personhood is responsible for a large part of the disaster we face.

D. Land is the basis for survival, and all land is interconnected.

E. It follows that defense of the land is self-defense, and is therefore right.

F. A community that exists in an intimate, localized relationship with the land, or a community that historically has had such a relationship and proved to be good stewards of the land, will probably know best how to interrelate with a specific territory. Others should defer to them in questions regarding defending and caring for the land.

G. It is the responsibility of all communities to aid and accompany the land as it heals from centuries of capitalism and the state.

5. Water

Water is life.

A. All communities must return the water they use to the river, lake, or aquifer as clean as they found it.

B. All communities have a responsibility to help their watershed heal and purify itself after centuries of capitalist aggression.

C. In view of climate change, desertification, and all the other forms of damage to the planet, all communities have a responsibility to adapt their lifeways in the event of water scarcity, and to help each other to migrate if increasing water scarcity and desertification render a dignified survival impossible.

D. In the event of water scarcity, priority for water use is given to localized forms of sustainable agriculture and to preserving the habitats of other forms of life.

E. Polluting the water or taking so much that others downstream or in the same aquifer do not have enough for a dignified survival is an act of aggression.

F. Communities should respond to assaults on their water with attempts at dialogue and negotiation, but if these attempts are fruitless, they are right to defend themselves.

6. Borders

The global system we are abolishing is based on states asserting sovereignty over clearly demarcated borders, alternately cooperating and competing in capitalist accumulation and warfare. Nation-states have always led to cultural and linguistic homogenization and genocide, and borders have revealed themselves to be increasingly murderous mechanisms. All that, henceforth, is abolished.

A. People and communities, in concert, decide what communities they want to be a part of, and how they wish to be constituted, respectively. This is the principle of voluntary association.

B. All together, as best we can, we will develop principles of Freedom of Movement, balanced with a respect for the communities that are the custodians of the territories others wish to move through. These two principles necessitate the abolition of borders, on the one hand, and the abolition of individualistic, entitled tourism on the other. It is reasonable for communities, which exist in relation to a specific territory, to expect privacy as well as basic respect from visitors; at the same time, it is good for people to be able to move freely in search of a better life or even simply because movement brings them joy and well-being. These two rights, such as they are, may come into conflict. Communities and individuals commit to resolving those conflicts as constructively as possible.

C. Communities commit to offering basic hospitality and safe conduct to migrants. This could include migrants who wish to return home, having been forced to emigrate by the effects of capitalism. It could include the migration of entire communities fleeing the long-term effects of environmental racism.

D. Communities will coordinate across territories as they see fit. This could include federations organized along linguistic lines (for the sake of convenience), coordinating bodies in a shared watershed, and more. Anarchists recommend redundant, overlapping forms of organization, as well as membership in multiple communities, to resist the potentially militaristic reproduction of bordered units or essentialist identities.

7. Housing

Even governments that enshrine the right to housing in their constitutions have failed to guarantee this basic need. As Malatesta pointed out, capitalism is the system in which builders go homeless because there are too many houses.

A. Houses belong to those who live in them.

B. No one has a right to more houses than they need. This should not be reduced to a principle of “one family, one house,” because of the danger in normalizing one model of the family, and because some dynamic families include movement between multiple nodes, and to respect pastoral and other societies organized around seasonal migrations. However, this does mean that the vacation houses of the rich are fair game for expropriation for those who need access to land or decent housing.

C. Housing is not a commodity to be bought and sold.

D. Communities will make sure all their own members have dignified housing, and then they will help neighboring communities find the resources they need to meet their housing needs.

E. Anarchists will encourage the transformation of housing, which capitalist real estate development and urban planning utilized specifically to promote patriarchal nuclear families. People are encouraged to change their vital spaces in a way that enables more communal practices of kinship, child-rearing practices not based in the heterosexual couple, and autonomous spaces for women and gender nonconforming people.

F. Anarchists will make it a priority to provide safe housing for people fleeing abusive relationships and circumstances.

G. Communities will begin immediately, within their means, to modify housing to be ecologically sustainable, and to modify settlement patterns so that housing nuclei correspond to ecological and cultural needs, moving away from the present reality in which existing housing corresponds to the imperatives of capitalism. As this process will take decades, communities should develop plans and share ideas for organizing the transition, taking into account that there will be a rapid shift away from fossil fuels and changes in the availability of different construction materials.

H. Evicting people from their houses is an emotionally traumatizing act that we do not want to form a part of the world we are building. However, many historically oppressed communities find themselves living in situations that directly shorten their lives, whereas the ostentatious housing of rich people represents generations of accumulated plunder; in those cases, it is better for them to take the housing of those who profited off their misery than to continue in misery. Under capitalism, there is no inalienable right to remain in a particular house, and we are not carrying out a revolution in order to give rights to rich people they did not even claim under their own chosen system.

8. Food

A key aspect of capitalist accumulation has been the industrialization and hyper-exploitation of food producers, both human farmers and other forms of life, trying to squeeze out an ever-growing surplus. This has led to the acts of genocide associated with the commodification of the land, the total destruction of peasant societies, deforestation and monocrop deserts, mass starvation, mass extinction, pollution, climate change, dead zones in the ocean, the destruction and commodification of communities of different living beings, the murder of living soil, and the systematized imprisonment and torture of non-human animals. How we feed ourselves is a nexus that brings together how we organize our society and the relationships we create with the broader ecosystem.

A. Everyone has a right to all the food they need for a healthy, dignified life.

B. Making sure that everyone has enough food is a collective responsibility.

C. Arbitrarily placing limits on or destroying the food supply that others depend on is an assault on their survival. They may respond to this with legitimate self-defense.

D. Workers in food production industries at the time of the revolution will socialize the means of production under their control with the aim of ensuring everyone’s access to food.

E. Communities will begin the process of redistributing large tracts of farmland and reclaiming land in urban environments to enable food sovereignty and to share access to the means to feed ourselves.

F. Agriculture will transition away from the current petroleum-dependent, highly industrialized model to a localized, ecocentric model designed to fulfill two purposes: ensuring food security and restoring the health of the planet. The human diet will be resituated in an ecosystemic logic.

G. Particularly damaging technologies like factory trawlers and animal warehouses for industrial-scale meat and dairy production will be dismantled as quickly as possible.

9. Healthcare

Under capitalism and the state, healthcare has been used as a form of extortion to keep poor people in misery and in debt, to surveil, discipline, and control our bodies, and particularly to torture and control women, trans and non-binary people, racialized people, and people with different abilities and mental health difference. It is one of the most damning indictments of the present system that the practices that should focus on healing function as a venue for cruelty and profiteering.

A. Everyone has a right to preventive therapies and living conditions that guarantee them the best possible health.

B. Everyone has a right to define for themselves what constitutes health, in dialogue with their community. People who share a collective experience or identity related to gender, sexuality, physical ability, mental health, ethnicity, or anything else, may develop their own definition or ideal of health; members of those groups are free to subscribe to those definitions or not to subscribe to them.

C. Everyone has a right to alter their body, in line with their gender expression or for whatever reason, as they see fit. People have an unrestricted right to contraceptives and abortion.

D. No healthcare worker can be forced to perform a procedure that they do not agree with, but denying someone access to a medical procedure is an assault on their bodily autonomy. Training in skills related to healthcare will be spread as widely as possible so no one is ever in the position of gatekeeping access to healthcare.

E. Everyone has a right to the full extent of treatment available to them in their community, or to travel in search of better conditions or better treatment options.

F. Healthcare workers at the time of the revolution will socialize the hospitals and other institutions and infrastructures at their disposal, and do their best to ensure continuing access to healthcare, to universalize and improve access and quality of treatment, to equalize treatment for historically marginalized populations, to facilitate reconciliation processes to address the abuse of such populations by the medical profession, and to reorganize their profession to remove all capitalist influences and classist organization, while still weighting internal hierarchies to favor training and experience.

G. Trafficking in healthcare, including the threat to withhold healthcare, is an act of aggression.

H. As part of the process of self-definition of health, anarchists will encourage the formation of assemblies that center people’s own needs and experiences, breaking the tradition that establishes healthcare professionals as the protagonists and people as mere receptacles for illness or treatment. People will share and increase knowledge of their own bodies, availing themselves of the tools they need to be proactive in securing the greatest health and happiness possible.

10. Education

Public education has been used to create patriotic, obedient, and white supremacist civil servants, soldiers, and citizens. For even longer, Catholic education in Europe and in the colonies was used to justify colonialism and state authority. Both public and private education are linked to systematic child abuse. Contrary to classist stereotypes, people with more formal education are often more able to dismiss facts that contradict their prejudices or worldview. Education as it stands is a cornerstone of oppression.

On the contrary, education should be an unending process of growth and self-actualization. Anarchists have always been at the forefront of experimenting with models of liberating education that break with the standard formulas of patriotic, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist education.

A. Knowledge must be free; it belongs to the community.

B. Everyone must be able to access whatever educational opportunities they desire. Anarchists will encourage specific projects that end the oppressions that limit people’s access to education because of their gender, sexuality, race, class, or other divisions. Examples might include intensive trainings in fields like math, sciences, and mechanics for people from groups that have historically been discouraged from entering those fields, or history and literature courses that center the voices and experiences of subjects other than upper-class heterosexual white men. Such projects will also deploy a diversity of learning environments that do not assume a single, normative standard of physical and mental abilities.

C. Anarchists will help ensure that historically marginalized groups can obtain the resources they need to identify and develop the body of knowledge that is important to their specific community and to spread it as they see fit.

D. Children are free to engage in educational settings as they see fit, in dialogue with their communities. Free children who have all their basic needs met are constantly engaged in their own education, independently of whether they do so in a formal setting.

E. Teachers and professors who want to continue working as such may organize basic education, but anarchists will encourage the emergence of new projects based on liberating models of education rather than rote memorization or the completion of preconceived modules, especially collective self-organized self-education projects.

F. Professions that prove to be useful and desirable after the demise of capitalism will organize educational programs to train new members of the profession, expropriating resources from schools and universities or taking over teaching spaces within them, in dialogue with other professions.

G. Scientific organizations may constitute themselves to provide for professional training in universities, and to maintain laboratories and peer-reviewed papers. They will discuss ways to raise the resources necessary to maintain laboratories and needed technologies without capitalizing on the processes of knowledge production. One possible solution is that scientific experimentation will have to respond largely to the needs voiced by communities as a whole.

H. The advanced education needed to become a scientist is a gift from the community to the individual; the knowledge the scientists help produce should be a gift back to the community. Scientists should also honor their responsibility to share tools for education as widely as possible. Scientific knowledge and training should not be concentrated in a few hands. Good science thrives on widespread participation in the process of research and review. For science to live, scientists must cease to treat other human beings as objects in a petri dish and focus on equipping them to participate in that process.

I. Scientists, teachers, and other educators will facilitate reconciliation processes to deal with forms of abuse they may have been complicit in before the revolution, from facilitating police violence against students to working with corporations that caused people harm. Accredited scientists who used their knowledge to aid fossil fuel, armaments, and similar industries should be stripped of their perceived legitimacy in the same way that doctors can be delicensed for malpractice.

J. Associations of scientists will decide if they actually need to use some form of licensing in order to assure the quality of their work. The answer may not be the same for heart surgeons as for botanists. This implies a balance between the needs of scientists to ensure standards of quality, the interests of people to prevent monopolies or gatekeepers that limit access to knowledge and training, as well as people’s need for transparency—ensuring, for example, that those they entrust with their medical care or technological projects that might pollute their environment have not been dangerously negligent in the past. Associations of laypeople will also organize to weigh in on these decisions.

11. Production

Under capitalism, production is one of the chief means of accumulating capital for the wealthy—through alienated work, exploitation, and the destruction of the environment. In anarchy, the only question is how to meet socially defined needs, which include everything from collective survival to the need people feel to grow and enjoy life.

A. Ex-workers will seize their workplaces at the earliest convenience, studying whether the workplace (factory, workshop, office, store, restaurant, etc.) can be modified to produce something socially useful in a healthy way. If not, the workplace will be dismantled and its resources shared out among ex-workers, neighboring communities, and useful workplaces.

B. Ex-workers, excluding managers while welcoming unemployed people with pertinent skills who had been denied access to employment under capitalism, will create some form of collective, cooperative, or communal structure to organize their workplaces, federating with other workplaces across their industry in order to oversee the production of socially useful goods.

C. Delegates within these productive federations must be beholden to a specific collective mandate (promoting positions that arise from their base assembly), they must be immediately recallable if they fail that mandate, and they must continue to exercise their craft. Workplace assemblies will decide if delegates must carry out their normal work on a daily basis or if they may be excused for a limited number of months before returning to normal work, as demanded by the conditions of their work and the needs of the federative labor (for example, delegates may have to travel long distances and might not be able to work during certain periods).

D. Those who wish to be professional representatives, doing no other work but that of bureaucrats and politicians, may form their own federations of representatives in which to go about representing themselves and others to the best of their abilities. For this purpose, it is recommended that they paint their faces white, don berets and striped shirts, travel from community to community, and hold their committee meetings open to the public. People don’t need bureaucrats—but we will always need entertainment!

E. No one may be forced to work. Communities and productive federations will do their utmost to operate according to a logic of abundance rather than a logic of scarcity or monopoly. People who wish to carry out productive or creative labors in a more individual setting or manner will be encouraged to do so, and insofar as it is possible, they will be afforded the space and resources they need, though in moments of absolute scarcity, such as the difficult years of the transition, communities may prefer to favor more effective collective workplaces that are immediately responding to a community need.

F. The gendering of different productive activities is abolished. Anarchists encourage their communities to reflect on how different useful, necessary, and beneficial activities are unequally recognized and rewarded with status, and propose initiatives or new traditions by which to eliminate these vestiges of patriarchy.

G. Ex-workers are encouraged to fully transform their workplaces, deconstructing machinery into its component tools if need be in order to work at a safer pace and create an environment that is healthy in terms of noise, air quality, chemicals, and non-repetitive labors.

H. Workplaces will strike a balance between the creative or productive desires of the members, the needs of surrounding communities, and the needs of society as a whole. This means encouraging artisans in their creative development, making sure not to pollute nearby communities with harmful chemicals or excessive noise, and seeking to create things that others in society need, though embracing the logic of abundance means giving this latter directive the broadest possible interpretation except in cases of acute scarcity that threaten a community’s survival.

I. Destructive energy infrastructure will be phased out at the safest pace possible. Experts in the relevant fields will be encouraged to oversee the shutting down of nuclear power plants according to a schedule that leaves the smallest amount of highly radioactive waste and the plugging of oil wells so they do not contaminate ground water.

J. On a less urgent timeline, communities will explore the decommissioning of highly destructive “green energy” projects that endanger river populations, migratory birds, and other living things. This work will depend on the development of localized, ecological energy production and the drastic reduction of overall energy use, a part of which is the redesigning of buildings to allow for passive solar heating and cooling, a demanding endeavor that cannot be accomplished in a single decade.

K. Communities will decide what technologies and what kinds of scientific experimentation and development they will support. However, in all cases, the communities and scientific organizations involved must be able to absorb or remediate all the negative consequences of that technology. There is no justification for mining someone else’s territory or creating toxic substances that future generations will have to deal with.

12. Distribution, Communication, and Transportation

Localizing power in people and communities has an adjunct in organizing the material means of survival on as local a level as possible, for example through principles like food sovereignty. However, the danger of dependence on an exploitative socioeconomic system decreases dramatically when people can meet most of their survival needs through the resources and activity of a small local network of communities. For the remainder of those needs, as well as all the things that make life more enjoyable, it may be necessary to organize distribution across multiple regions of a continent and beyond. Additionally, travel is extremely important in an anarchist society to inculcate a global consciousness, encourage reciprocity and solidarity, prevent the emergence of borders, and collectivize knowledge as much as possible.

A. All state-backed currencies are abolished. All monetary debts are canceled.

B. Exchange of goods between communities shall be done in as equitable a manner as possible. Communities in close contact may prefer a free exchange or gift economy. Communities without the basis of trust that makes a gift economy easier to practice may decide to use quid pro quo trade, but trading up for profit (serial trading to capture a growth of value) or charging interest on the lending of goods can be considered attempts at coercion and exploitation.

C. Communities should pursue food sovereignty, meeting the majority of their survival needs from their local land base, but beyond that, infrastructures should be maintained to encourage exchange and travel.

D. Transport workers, together with affected communities, will collaborate to transform existing transportation infrastructure to be as ecologically sustainable as possible, while other infrastructures (e.g., airports and highways) are to be dismantled.

E. Already extracted fossil fuel reserves and existing infrastructures will be rationed, giving priority to the transition in agricultural production, global reparations of resources, and maintaining connectivity in rural areas with no transportation alternatives.

F. Communities, transportation workers, and those involved in fighting against patriarchal violence at the time of the revolution will work together to make sure that people can travel freely and safely regardless of their gender. Communities that enable or permit violence against women or gender non-conforming people traveling through their territory are considered to be in aggression against the rest of the world.

G. Communities will do their best to maintain existing communications infrastructure so that they can remain in touch to communicate globally and share the experiences of their respective revolutionary processes. In the long term, they will explore ways to maintain those infrastructures they find useful with recycled or non-harmful materials. They will also study whether addictive and depressive behaviors related to social networking technologies are intrinsic to those technologies or a maladaptive response to the alienations of capitalism.

13. Conflict Resolution and Transformative Justice

Prisons and police have existed for far too long, destroying people and communities. There are ways to deal with the inevitable conflicts of social existence that see people as capable of growth, redemption, and healing, and that are organized to meet the needs of the community rather than to protect a system of oppression and inequality. The revolution is a process of destroying state power; it is also a process of the rebirth of real communities. Capitalism forced us to be dependent on its mechanisms for our survival, but once it is abolished, our survival once again becomes something we create collectively.

A. Communities are reconstituted through the assemblies and other spaces through which they organize their territory and the survival of their members. A part of this means being accountable to the community on which our survival depends, and taking part in the healthy resolution of conflicts, the healing of harm, and the restoring of reciprocal relations.

B. Communities will do their best to enable fluid ways of being and relating that break with the closed, patriarchal, and micro-oppressive structures that have been traditional in many places. However, no leeway need be given to the dominant concept of fluidity of late capitalism in which people move through space without ever acknowledging their relations, their impact on others, or the simple fact that their survival is not their personal property.

C. People involved in mediation, conflict resolution, and transformative justice will share resources and encourage communities to deal with conflict and harm in a restorative way that promotes healing and reconciliation. We will also make sure that the burden of this work does not fall disproportionately along gender lines.

D. Communities will define norms and boundaries around harmful behaviors, but anarchists will encourage them to develop practices that center dialogue and processes of healing and reconciliation, rather than the codification of prohibited behaviors and punishment.

E. Communities that already have traditions of mediation and reconciliatory processes are encouraged to share their experience as they see fit.

F. All prisons will be dismantled, with communities taking in ex-prisoners who had been convicted of harming other people and committing to working with them on exploring the circumstances around the harm.

G. Committees of people experienced in transformative justice will work with ex-prisoners who are not taken in and vouched for by any community, together with the communities harmed by them, to try to find a solution.

H. Given that total opposition to prisons is not a widespread position, anarchists will organize debates on other possible responses to the worst scenarios of harm—the small minority of cases in which people repeatedly kill, abuse, or victimize others. One possible proposal is to always favor reconciliation with all resources available, but to never delegitimize autonomous acts of self-defense or revenge, especially in cases in which reconciliation is not a realistic outcome.

I. Special attention will be given to all acts of gender and sexual violence, especially those that had been normalized under the patriarchal, punitive regime that is to be abolished. People active in opposing such violence will suggest appropriate structures and practices for communities to adopt.

14. Safety

The state thrives on the lie that security and freedom constitute a dichotomy, two things that exist in inverse proportion and that we must sacrifice each in equal measure to strike a balance between them. Because security is connected with survival, the state can convince us that we would not be able to enjoy what little freedom we have if we did not prioritize security and accept its protection.

In truth, our survival, our safety, and our freedom all depend on how well we can take care of one another, not how high we build walls around ourselves. As long as states exist, even only as a projection in the minds of the power-hungry, we will need to defend ourselves from those who would subjugate and exploit us; sometimes, we will also need to defend ourselves from those who cause harm by not recognizing others’ boundaries, not empathizing with others, or not realizing the consequences of their own actions. How we organize our defense can be dangerous to our freedom. It is also a challenge to conceive of dangers and conflicts in a way that transforms us and others, rather than fixing our antagonists as permanent enemies we need to destroy.

A. All police forces are abolished, and their members should participate in reconciliation processes to address the harm they have caused. Those who refuse may be viewed as statist paramilitaries.

B. Communities may create some kind of volunteer service to protect against various forms of aggression or interpersonal harm. However, to prevent anything like a police force from emerging, whatever form this service takes, it must focus on de-escalation and reconciliation rather than punishment; it should focus on calling out the rest of the community to deal with the conflict or instance of harm rather than monopolizing the response; and the participants must not have special privileges in terms of the right to use force or access to weapons that the rest of the community does not have.

C. Communities are encouraged to create some kind of protective group, tradition, or structure specifically designed to respond to and deal with gender violence in all its forms. They may wish this force to be composed of people other than cis men.

D. Because the state will not be abolished everywhere at once, and because many communities with hierarchical values may continue to exist and may try to subordinate neighboring communities to their will, there may be a need to create anarchist militias or other fighting units—both to defend a free territory and to engage in revolutionary warfare against a statist, imperialist territory. To deserve the terms “free militia” and “revolutionary warfare,” these must be dedicated to several key principles that distinguish them from statist armies. Simply tacking on a red flag is not enough. The fighters must be volunteers; they must be able to choose their own leaders and leadership structures. There must be no officers with aristocratic privileges. The entirety of the force must decide together on acceptable measures of discipline. Assemblies that transcend the free militias—for example, federations of the communities from which the fighters come—will decide the broad strategic objectives and guidelines for humanitarian conduct. In other words the militias must not be fully autonomous: they exist to defend the needs of broader communities, rather than dominating those communities or promoting their own interests on anything but a tactical level.

E. Free militias will avoid the logic of territorial, aggressive warfare in which the objective is to conquer a space defined as enemy territory. The purpose should either be defensive warfare, defending the communities and dissuading others from attacking, or revolutionary warfare, supporting people in an oppressive society who are fighting for their own freedom. In the latter case, the initiative must come from those oppressed people and must not be organized primarily by the militias of a neighboring territory.

F. Free communities do not try to eliminate or annihilate enemies. They defend their freedom and dignity, and support others who are doing so, and then they try to make friends or at the very least make peace.

G. Safety, in an anarchist framework, is not the protection of the weak by the strong, it is the empowerment and cultivated capacity for self-defense of all, with priority given to those whose gender socialization, racialization, or physical and psychological difference has specifically disempowered them under current oppressive conditions.

H. Peace, in an anarchist framework, is not simply the absence of armed conflict, especially when such absence indicates acquiescence to oppression. Peace is an outgrowth of happiness, freedom, and self-actualization, which we hope this program will foster more than capitalism ever has, and a proactive effort. Anarchists will encourage communities to engage and exchange not just with their immediate neighbors, but transcontinentally, sharing and creating cultural bonds, affinities, and friendships on a global scale so as to make the wars of conquest and annihilation that states have been practicing for millennia inconceivable.

15. Community Organization and Coordination

In opposition to involuntary citizenship and dictatorial or representative decision-making that imposes homogenizing laws on all of society, anarchism posits the principles of voluntary association and self-organization, meaning people are free to form themselves into groups of their choosing, to organize those groups as they see fit, and to order their lives on a daily basis, with everyone’s participation.

A. Every community is autonomous and free to organize its own affairs. Every community should develop its own methods and structures of organization and subsistence.

B. Anarchists encourage models that prioritize well-being and prevent the reemergence of statist organization, including the gift economy within communities, and overlapping, redundant forms of organization that prevent the centralization of power, such as combinations of federated territorial assemblies, workplace assemblies, infrastructural organizations, and professional and educational organizations. The goal is to tie people together in a multiplicity of organizational spaces. This way, many different organizational models and cultures can be practiced, since none are neutral or equally accessible to everyone; conflict is mediated by multiplying relationships through numerous organizational and territorial bonds; and the emergence of a political class that is skilled in manipulating assemblies and that thrives in the alienated space of politics is discouraged. If there is no central space where all decisions and authority are legitimated, no matter how participatory that space pretends to be, there can be no political class. This is the difference between democracy and anarchy—not to mention the fact that anarchism has historically opposed slavery, capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, and the like, whereas democracy has often relied upon them.

C. In order to prevent the return of authoritarian dynamics in the guise of democracy, anarchists would do well to facilitate community processes exploring how formal and informal mechanisms of decision-making distribute gendered power and how vital informal, non-legitimized spaces are to the organization of daily life—but also identifying which informal spaces enable the centralization of power and studying how different ways of organizing, opening, and diffusing formal spaces can serve to prevent rather than facilitate the centralization of power.

D. As a general rule, the only time it is acceptable to intervene in the affairs of a neighboring community is in matters of self-defense, when they do not respect their neighbors’ need for freedom and a dignified survival.

E. When a community does not respect its members’ need for food, water, shelter, healthcare, and bodily integrity, it is good for neighboring communities to offer those members support and refuge. The neighboring communities may support efforts by oppressed or exploited members of the first community to end their oppression, but liberation must always be the task of those who are most directly affected by oppression. Communities should try to avoid intervening directly or forcefully in the affairs of their neighbors.

F. Communities should strive to accept the inevitable differences they have with their neighbors, aiming to foster relations of dialogue and peace. In the case of communities that do not respect the dignity and survival of others, it may be preferable to seek mediation or cut off connections rather than escalating to physical conflict.

G. Many communities will find the need or the desire to join in larger associations for matters of culture, production, and distribution and in order to share common resources. It is preferable to form free federations or associations that maintain power at the local level, while also creating multiple, cross-cutting organizational ties so that every person in every community is a member of multiple groups—for example, the coordinating body to protect a shared watershed, a cultural-linguistic grouping, a scientific association and university system, a producers’ and consumers’ union for sharing resources, and a territorial confederation. In this way, each community has a richer web of relationships, and in the case of conflicts, disputes do not fracture into two belligerent sides, but everyone is tied together by other relationships so there is an abundance of mediators and a general interest in preserving the peace.

16. The Planet

Capitalism has brought the planet to the brink of collapse. It is not enough to destroy capitalism. We must also uproot the capitalist, Western way of relating with the land in favor of healthy, reciprocal, ecocentric relations, and we must do everything possible to heal the planet and all the living communities that share it.

A. It is our responsibility to help the planet heal and help ensure the survival and continuity of all living communities.

B. Communities will tend to their territories as best they can to remediate the destruction and pollution caused by capitalism, to identify and protect species and ecosystems that are in danger, to promote the rewilding of spaces, and to conceive of themselves as part of the ecosystem.

C. Communities and scientific associations will pool resources and share information in order to track problems of global concern, such as greenhouse gases, vulnerable species, dead zones and plastic pollution in the oceans, radiation, and other forms of long-term pollution. They will set targets and make recommendations to specific communities and territorial confederations with the goal of ameliorating these problems as thoroughly and fairly as possible.

Glossary

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Community

A community is a group of people who live together, mutually creating their material and cultural survival. Because communities define and organize themselves, it is difficult to give them a specific definition. In some cases, community refers to the smaller group, between 30-150 people, that coordinates more closely for the organization of daily affairs, taking advantage of the small numbers and close relationships to decide their affairs smoothly and horizontally. In other cases, it can also refer to the supra-community of several, dozens, or even hundreds of communities that share common languages and culture and an identification with a territory, and that coordinate frequently for matters of subsistence, infrastructure, education, and other matters.

In some cases in the text, living communities does not refer exclusively to humans but to all living things that exist in a web of relationships.

Excess Wealth

Communities should decide for themselves what constitutes excess wealth or a wealthy person. However, the intention in this text is not at all to follow in the footsteps of left-wing populism and focus our disapproval on billionaires or even millionaires. On the contrary, we feel the bar should be set much lower. For determining wealthiness, we suggest the guidepost as having three times more wealth than is average in a given geographical region (e.g., those making more than three times the average wage in their country before the abolition of capitalism and nation-states). Excess wealth, after the abolition of money, is everything a wealthy person possesses that is not necessary for their dignified survival, especially what they had used to ostentatiously set themselves apart from the average.

Managers

A manager is someone whose job is to monitor and discipline other workers in order to increase their productivity and facilitate their exploitation. At each workplace, people can decide whether a person did something genuinely useful before the revolution and whether a part or the whole of their job category can be redeemed.

Rights

In this document, we do not use the concept of rights in the Christian or liberal fashion, as a set of properties guaranteed by God or nature, nor in the statist fashion, as a list of opportunities that a state must safeguard for all its citizens. We mean it strictly in an anti-authoritarian ethical sense: things that we consider it right for people to have, to take, or to defend, so much so that we would fight alongside them to help them protect or recover these things if they were threatened.

Territory

We do not understand territory as a dead, two-dimensional space demarcated on a map, with borders and a fixed area. Territory is the earth, it is alive, it is a web of relationships. The only rightful claim people have to a specific territory is if they are a part of that web of relationships and help keep the web vibrant and alive. Because memory is an important part of knowing and respecting a territory, people who had a strong relationship with a territory and were forced off that land still have a relationship with the territory.

Additionally, territory implies movement. This is not a proposal for allotting equal parcels to roughly interchangeable communities. All territory is specific, and the healthiest way to relate with the territory will change from region to region. Nomadic or semi-nomadic lifeways are just as legitimate, just as intimately connected with the territory, as sedentary ones (excluding, of course, those based on private property and exploitation). Following this logic, claims to territory can and do overlap, with different groups carrying out different activities related to subsistence, spirituality, play, and the like at different moments and in different ways.

Transition

The only kind of transition referred to in this document describes the transformation of existing capitalist infrastructure into the kind of infrastructure suited to a free society. This is simply a recognition that it will involve difficulties and a great deal of effort to make universal food, housing, and healthcare a reality by means of infrastructures and productive practices that do not harm the planet. We do not contemplate any kind of transitional state. The state never fades away; it must be destroyed.

Workers

Under capitalism, workers designates an alienated category: we are those who sell our activity in order to buy back a small part of the value we produce. We are the ones who carry out the labor that gives society life; yet it is important to emphasize that we do not seek to identify with our alienation, the quality that makes us workers, but rather to abolish it, especially since under capitalism, work creates so many useless or harmful things and is organized in a way that tends to be terrible for our health. Ex-workers, then, are those who had been forced to be workers under capitalism, but who, with the abolition of capitalism, abolish the category of wage work and other compulsory labors. They may deserve some special legitimacy when it comes to expropriating the resources of their former workplace or industry; like everyone else, they are engaged in the endeavor of transforming human activity in order to create abundance for all and to blur the distinctions between learning, work, and play.

CRIMETHINC

The post Exercise: What Would an Anarchist Program Look Like? – Crimethinc appeared first on Void Network.