rigorousintuition.ca

hanshan wrote:

Wombaticus Rex wrote:timely and related:

http://steelweaver.tumblr.com/post/6555 ... ought-tank

A million individuals can overthrow a government, but can’t build anything in its place, can’t stop the vacuum being filled by invisible, insidious forces worse than the nation state.

Sad, really...


...

Building a (modular) thought tank

[These thoughts have been with me for a while. But a couple of things have sparked me off today: Emily James, talking about her documentary Just Do It, remarked that filming the young activists that are the subject of the film had made her come off the fence – where she had previously said “’it’s not my place to tell others what to do’ – in a sort of late-’90s relativist kind of way”. And it does seem like there is a genuine resurgence of reality amongst those of the current generation entering adulthood.

This got me thinking about how so much of internet culture is built upon those values of the ’90s which appear no longer fit for purpose – the myth of infinitude, the aversion to a stable identity, to commitment, to belonging - and also to attempt to map the tension between dispersion and centralisation, and to try to make the case for a new, higher, intelligent synthesis of the two.

And reading @leashless’ http://files.howtolivewiki.com/in_a_pag ... overty.pdf

made me ask – if these logical arguments are sitting unread on a server, if the truths and poetry and impassioned calls to arms Vinay has furnished us with are failing to spark the revolution, what would it take for something to happen? I think part of the answer to that is a new banner, or banners, or holarchic nest of banners, around which we can gather, about which we can build momentum, by which we can be recognised, with all the risks and triumphs which result from that.]

OK.

Let’s triangulate the space: On the one hand, diversity, openness, multiplicity, all the endless infinite unbounded possibility of the wild frontiers of cyberspace. Multiplying identities, loyalties, spreading ideas and memes through promiscuous chains of association; but also, knowing no-one, alienated from reality, divorced from spatiality, spaffing your best work out into the void for fear of actually having to commit to being part of something real - for fear of belonging.

On the other, enclosure, trust, linearity, immediatism, stability, security, concerted collective effort and achievement. Conspiracies, secret societies, gangs, child porn rings; but also, effective political movements, activist cells, tongs, special forces corps, brand-recognition co-ops, reliable and accountable media hubs.

It’s easy to see why the pendulum swung one way. Enclosure had won a long time before we turned up. Fossilised carcasses of once-vital political parties, running on sheer inertia and the locked-down lack of any chance of a viable alternative. Unions fighting to preserve the particular kind of capitalist exploitation that was around when the current bosses got their seat at the table. Corporations closing down the map on anything resembling independent operations or operators.

So when the opportunity came to board the Mayflower for an untamed new world of electronic release, it was relished: ” The Boomers started to conceive it; the Xers started to build it; but the Ys would board it, bound for infinity on a ray of light that would never look back.” Late-’90s cultural fissipation; identity politics dividing any last embarrassing attachments to ideology into ‘Real World’ soundbites; musical subgenres cross-breeding like HIV tropisms; fetishisation of gender and sexual diversity that never quite jumped the synapse from diverting entertainment to actual experimentation.

And then when dial-up went broadband, the gloves were off. A whole new continent to explore, and exploit, and eventually fill with obese depressed nihilistic memetic children. Simultaneously, you can see politicians appealing to Joe Average by decrying any connection to established political theory; “you and me,” they say, “aren’t like those pencilneck policy wonks - we’re happy not knowing the first thing about what ought to be done. Don’t you want someone like me - someone like you - to be in charge?” Political opinion outsourced to a multitude of research institutes and think tanks, which pretend to look afresh at the world and to stumble, a-politically, upon their brand of obvious truths. Technocratic consensus. The possibility of radical political change reduces to just one option - the scorched-earth shock doctrine of anti-political politics. Let’s just hope no real world problems come along that actually require positive collective intent to respond.

But we have now come to the limit term of that trend. A thousand political bloggers don’t add up to a healthy ecosystem of media megafauna any more than an uptick in plankton numbers makes up for the loss of the right whales. A million individuals can overthrow a government (so long as it doesn’t fight back), but can’t build anything in its place, can’t stop the vacuum being filled by invisible, invidious forces worse than the nation state. Political indifference makes it easier to mock the established parties, but doesn’t stop the thin blue line from daubing itself in student red.

To be fair, there has been a real push to apply the potentialities of new technology, social space and interaction to politics and government, to pressure groups, activism, currency et al. And there is no doubt these overly structurated worlds can benefit from de-centralisation, de-hierarchisation, bottom-up feedback.

But we are beginning to recognise that simply handing over the valuable code of localism, connectivity and gift entrepreneurialism to governmental forces might just be to further enable the dismantling of the protective aspect of the state, and thereby extend techno-capitalism’s mass-appropriation of our lives. I think there is an equal extent to which the new world of free agents we have been building might advantageously adopt the advantages of enclosure where appropriate.

Maybe its time for the pendulum to swing back the other way. It is clearly no longer enough to connect online, to discuss and observe and critique, echoing voices in endless confabulations, safe in the virtual playroom until this year’s Zuckerberg decides to pull the plug. It’ s not even enough to gather, momentarily, around a flag of convenience, to create spectacle and sound and disorder, to win a battle but lose the war for lack of any viable - plausible - plan for reconstruction. It’s not enough to pass on information online, even to create our own hubs to collate it, for us all to know that we are right, if we continue to cede the central plains of national thought-space to the established outlets.

In short, we need to learn to build. We need to build… the first metaphor that came to me was “a thought tank”; we can’t make it across the shell-scarred no-man’s land of media lockdown and apathetic inertia on our own, so we need to construct some kind of collective vehicle that we can safely pilot to our destination.

Some of us will provide the engine of inspiration, of meaning, of narrative direction; some will provide the armour of bulletproof theory, political argument, prepared rebuttals to obvious counterattacks; some the weaponry of direct assault on the moribund paradigms of a dying system; and some the simple fuel of personal liberation and enquiry – all deftly welded into a single fighting machine.

But we don’t want to throw away everything we learnt from the other swing of the pendulum. We don’t want to become embedded once again in unwieldy, ungovernable motorised behemoths. What we need is something closer to the modular structure of open source ecology. What we need is to make everything in our lives cellular. When freedom and stability intermesh in creative harmony we get an effective holarchy.

Activists have got this started already. Climate Change Camp, say, or Climate Rush or Plane Stupid, cross-linking, multiplying loyalties (half the people there also members of Amnesty and Greenpeace) sub-divided into affinity groups, each in turn made up of individuals - a fractal conspiracy, splitting and merging like shoals.

Fine. But why stop there? Where did the Make Poverty History coalition go? Where are all the other arms of the Global Justice Movement? Why is it that Conservatives, or Republicans, can hold diametrically opposed opinions on matters of absolute importance to them, but still gather under a single banner, in order to win.

Aren’t we more aligned on the things that really matter? Once upon a time, schisms and ideological differences must have been overcome - there must have been genuine positive collectivising momentum - to create the Chartist movement, or the Unions, or the Labour movement, or the Civil Rights movement. Now, people wait to be told where to sit by their chosen charity. Where did this impulse go? How can we get it back? ( I know we’ve already got it back. A bit. But what of the people we need to create a critical mass? Do we really have to wait until things get so bad they are forced into understanding? Can’t we skip ahead to the good bit?)

And it’s not enough to think simply in terms of activism. The ideological territory has to be won back, inch by blood-soaked inch. The frames and memes of the status quo will not die easily. Individual opinions of lone bloggers don’t seem to be swaying the collective opinion of the masses.

So - A modular thought tank: leveraging the power of holarchic stability to gain presence and weight in the ideological arena.

A modular philosophy: the myth that a philosophy must appear, all of a piece, from the mind of a single individual, is passing along with the isolated gothic Western ego that produced it. Why can’t we model how we actually think; agreement on the broadest beams of the structure, with space for dissensus in application, in implication, in details?

A modular movement: To be part of a traditional political party means to sign up to their program, and any hope of change must be of change from within. A modular party can incorporate levels of diversity within it - the fundamentals are agreed upon, but the details are up for grabs. An internal holarchy of nested variation. Nowadays, when (the right kinds of) conversations can happen in public, with the public, with full transparency, this is not a weakness but an advantage. (Witness the crowd-sourced constitution in Iceland – diversity of opinion as guarantor of authenticity, of representativity).

And, within this, there is room for different types of movement. Dark Mountain, for example, is necessarily non-programmatical - a deliberately loose space for conversation. But, at a certain stage, the conclusions drawn from conversation become clear enough that people are willing to proceed to action from them, and that requires more enclosure, more containment, more collective unity.

At one point, Vinay said something about the Far Right in the US trying again and again to find the right electable plausible-looking but actually extremely conservative female that would resonate with the American public (Coulter, Palin, Bachmann) – and that, so long as they kept plugging away, it was only a matter of time until they succeeded.

This got me thinking: can’t we say the same about this global environment-poverty-justice-personal transformation thing that keeps on nearly becoming legible? It’s not anti-Globalisation, its not Make Poverty History, its not the Zeitgeist movement, it’s not the Global Oneness Project, it’s definitely not the Wayseers. But if we keep on plugging away, might it not take something from all of these? Does it need to be a zero-sum competition? Aren’t we merely searching for a single banner that says “We have gone wrong – ethically, ecologically, economically. We can go right”?

I guess I’m just looking at the gameboard and seeing the two poles unintegrated – at one end, progressive thought existing in a fragmented, atomised space; at the other, real power locked into immovable inherited structural blocs. What would it take to bring the two attributes into constructive interplay? What would it look like to genuinely raise a new banner?:

=Top level: Unification of environmental, pro-freedom, anti-poverty, anti-capitalist movements. We don’t need to invent this - it already exists. It just needs greater capacity for collective intent, and better branding.

Philosophy:

- Integrated theory of global justice. Evolving, holarchic account of thinking and plans; from top level of simple statement of values down through all the details, sublevels mapping the arguments and resolutions and reasons for decisions. So any child in the world with access to the internet can understand, argue, contribute.

Information:

- Global people-owned Media. Globally crowd-source funding for television, internet and print media to replace economically and politically compromised existing outlets. As in, everyone who would like to read a more radical, reality-connected version of the Guardian without the weak-willed obeisence to the celebrity/lifestyle/consumption features model, raise your hands now. If we own it, we can collectively vote on its editorial policy.

Action:

- Start Global Justice Movement political parties. Elect them.

- Activists fight on every other political front available. Keep doing what they are doing, but they make it clear it is part of the collective movement.

- Build alternatives - technological, social, communal. Start organisations and companies. Create and disseminate.

= Middle levels: National and regional movements, political parties, media outlets. Plus, specialised focuses on different aspects of global justice issues - organisations, companies, e.g. Greenpeace, Amnesty. Specialised media outlets. As we own the top level outlets also, why not an editorial policy of including a certain proportion of information and editorial content in top-level media from different second-level collectives? National newspapers. Local TV. Art: Collectives, movements, crowd-sourced feature films; enthuse, inspire, transmit, disseminate, reinstall, reinforce.

= Lowest levels: Now it gets interesting. Localised movements, grassroots activism, small organisation innovators, individual artists, all diverse and organic and creative and cross-breeding and cross-fertilising and mutating and feeding back in to the levels above. How much more interesting would a national newspaper be if there were genuinely modular movements happening across the country, rather than just the isolated incidents of a fragmented populace of individuals? How much more incentive would there be to form those movements if there was a higher-level tier that might report on your actions and ideas and manifestos and actions?

Preachers and hackers and athletes and inventors and protestors, all operating in a structured gamespace of practical and ideological ferment and exchange. But not on their own - organising themselves into affinity groups and tongs and movements and online hubs and aggregates and magazines. Leveraging the human instinct for collective gossip - all the energy that currently goes into sustaining celebrity froth - into a synergising collective focus, that actually might achieve something, that can contribute to something larger.

I am not suggesting anything new. We have all the arguments in place. We have a hundred thousand articles online already making the points we want to make, rebutting the arguments we hear again and again. We have the technology, the strategies, the policies, the constitutions, the legal models, the alternative steady-state economic systems, the means of organising and making collective decisions. We have much of the infrastructure in the form of governments, NGOs, universities, existing media channels. Our only obstacles to genuine unified action are psychological, cultural, social: we lack synergetic communication; we lack belief that we are the global majority; we lack a single banner to gather around. So here’s my pitch for infamy: “The Global Justice Movement”.

A more detailed fantasy to follow…

http://steelweaver.tumblr.com/post/6555 ... ought-tank

DrVolin wrote:The ninety percent of slaves and foreigners in the city might well have had a somewhat less elevated view of the Athenian assembly's virtues.

Patience, cynicism, and idealism must go together. They rarely do. More and more I think the solution is to build local networks of limited reach, based on kinship or community relations, and in control of productive assets that provide at least partial subsistence. Change, or rather construction, is possible, locally and among small but viable numbers of like-minded people.

Global radical change is possible, but unsustainable and undesirable [is this a law of nature?]. It is always involuntary and imposed on the majority [a statement of fact?]. Any large aggregate can only be radicalized through totalitarian rule. [i'd say that is false, demonstrably so.] Since totalitarianism is evil, it follows that only small, voluntarily formed aggregates should be radical. Some medieval monastic orders come to mind, as does the initial Norse colonization of Iceland.

But the Monks were too closely integrated with ancient temporal and spiritual hierachies, and inevitably found their autarcic enclaves prey to feudal reality. Even the Althing was soon corrupted and Thingvellir became the playground of vain and manipulative chieftains using violence and fear to control the surplus produced by fearful farmers seeking peace and security at the expense of liberty and self-determination.

The Brukman Battle
By Naomi Klein - April 23rd, 2003

In 1812, bands of British weavers and knitters raided textile mills and smashed industrial machines with their hammers. According to the Luddites, the new mechanized looms had eliminated thousands of jobs, broken communities, and deserved to be destroyed. The British government disagreed and called in a battalion of 14,000 soldiers to brutally repress the worker revolt and protect the machines.

Fast-forward two centuries to another textile factory, this one in Buenos Aires. At the Brukman factory, which has been producing men’s suits for fifty years, it’s the riot police who smash the sewing machines and the 58 workers who risk their lives to protect them.

On Monday, the Brukman factory was the site of the worst repression Buenos Aires has seen in almost a year. Police had evicted the workers in the middle of the night and turned the entire block into a military zone guarded by machine guns and attack dogs. Unable to get into the factory and complete an outstanding order for 3,000 pairs of dress trousers, the workers gathered a huge crowd of supporters and announced it was time to go back to work. At 5 p.m., 50 middle aged seamstresses in no-nonsense haircuts, sensible shoes and blue work smocks walked up to the black police fence. Someone pushed, the fence fell, and the Brukman women, unarmed and arm in arm, slowly walked through.

They had only taken a few steps when the police began shooting: tear gas, water cannons, first rubber bullets, then lead. The police even charged the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, in their white headscarves embroidered with the names of their “disappeared” children. Dozens of demonstrators were injured and police fired tear gas into a hospital where some had taken refuge.

This is a snapshot of Argentina less than a week before its presidential elections. Each of the five major candidates is promising to put this crisis-ravaged country back to work. Yet Brukman’s workers are treated as if sewing a grey suit were a capital crime.

Why this state Luddism, this rage at machines? Well, Brukman isn’t just any factory, it’s a fabrica ocupada, one of almost 200 factories across the country that have been taken over and run by their workers over the past year and a half. For many, the factories, employing more than 10,000 nationwide and producing everything from tractors to ice cream, are seen not just as an economic alternative, but as a political one as well. “They are afraid of us because we have shown that if we can manage a factory we can also manage a country,” Brukman worker Celia Martinez said on Monday night. “That’s why this government decided to repress us.”

At first glance, Brukman looks like every other garment factory in the world. As in Mexico’s hyper modern maquiladoras and Toronto’s crumbling coat factories, Brukman is filled with women hunched over sewing machines, their eyes straining and fingers flying over fabric and thread. What makes Brukman different are the sounds. There is the familiar roar of machines and the hiss of steam, but there is also Bolivian folk music, coming from a small tape deck in the back of the room, and softly spoken voices, as older workers leaned over younger ones, showing them new stitches. “They wouldn’t let us do that before,” Martinez says. “They wouldn’t let us get up from our workspaces or listen to music. But why not listen to music, to lift the spirits a bit?”

Here in Buenos Aires, every week brings news of a new occupation: a four-star hotel now run by its cleaning staff, a supermarket taken by its clerks, a regional airline about to be turned into a cooperative by the pilots and attendants. In small Trotskyist journals around the world, Argentina’s occupied factories, where the workers have seized the means of production, are giddily hailed as the dawn of a socialist utopia. In large business magazines like The Economist, they are ominously described as a threat to the sacred principle of private property. The truth lies somewhere in between.

In Brukman, for instance, the means of production weren’t seized, they were simply picked up after they had been abandoned by their legal owners. The factory had been in decline for several years, debts to utility companies were piling up, and over a period of five months, the seamstresses had seen their salaries slashed from 100 pesos a week to a mere two pesos – not enough for bus fare.

On December 18, the workers decided it was time to demand a travel allowance. The owners, pleading poverty, told the workers to wait at the factory while they looked for the money. “We waited for them until evening. We waited until night,” Martinez says. “No one came.”

After getting the keys from the doorman, Martinez and the other workers slept at the factory. They have been running it every since. They have paid the outstanding bills, attracted new clients, and without profits and management salaries to worry about, managed to pay themselves steady salaries. All these decisions have been made democratically, by vote in open assemblies. “I don’t know why the owners had such a hard time,” Martinez says. “I don’t know much about accounting but for me it’s easy: addition and subtraction.”

Brukman has come to represent a new kind of labour movement here, one that is not based on the power to stop working (the traditional union tactic) but on the dogged determination to keep working no matter what. It’s a demand that is not driven by dogmatism but by realism: in a country where 58 per cent of the population is living in poverty, workers know that they are a pay cheque away from having to beg and scavenge to survive. The specter that is haunting Argentina’s occupied factories is not communism, but indigence.

But isn’t it simple theft? After all, these workers didn’t buy the machines, the owners did – if they want to sell them or move them to another country, surely that’s their right. As the federal judge wrote in Brukman’s eviction order, “Life and physical integrity have no supremacy over economic interests.”

Perhaps unintentionally, he has summed up the naked logic of de-regulated globalization: capital must be free to seek out the lowest wages and most generous incentives, regardless of the toll that process takes on people and communities.

The workers in Argentina’s occupied factories have a different vision. Their lawyers argue that the owners of these factories have already violated basic market principles by failing to pay their employees and their creditors, even while collecting huge subsidies from the state. Why can’t the state now insist that the indebted companies’ remaining assets continue to serve the public with steady jobs? Dozens of workers’ cooperatives have already been awarded legal expropriation. Brukman is still fighting.

Come to think of it, the Luddites made a similar argument in 1812. The new textile mills put profits for a few before an entire way of life. Those textile workers tried to fight that destructive logic by smashing the machines. The Brukman workers have a much better plan: they want to protect the machines and smash the logic.

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2003 ... man-battle

DrVolin wrote:Yes, I'm afraid that's it. Sadly. Most people are eager to give up responsibility and welcome the overlords. Even those who don't are often easy prey for thugs who would rather pillage than produce, whether the pillage is in the form of war or taxes. The only antidote is distance. The only cure is subsistence on your own terms and not theirs. And all too often, the only way is death at their hands. Fortunately, the asteroid belt is quite large and difficult to scan. There is hope for the future.

DrVolin wrote:Well then, it would have to be Voline, wouldn' it?

Red Fascism

Date: 1934


I’ve just been reading an extract from a letter from our valiant comrade A[lfonso] Petrini [1] who is in the USSR, under banishment. There I came upon the following lines: “(...) They’re locking us all up, one by one. Real revolutionaries may not enjoy freedom in Russia. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech have been wiped out, so there is no difference between Stalin and Mussolini.”

I have deliberately emboldened the last phrase, for it is spot on. However, for the accuracy of this short phrase and all its ghastly realism to be appreciated, it is essential that we have a deep and clear-cut grasp of fascism: deeper and more clear cut than is generally the case in leftist circles.

On the basis of such a grasp, the reader will understand Petrini’s statement not as some sort of a catch-phrase but as the precise expression of a very sad fact.

Twelve years ago, when Mussolini’s movement — Italian fascism — achieved its victory, the general belief was that it was merely a localised, passing phenomenon without future prospects.

Since then, not only has “fascism” been consolidated in Italy, but kindred movements have emerged and carried the day in a number of other countries. Elsewhere, under some semblance or another, “fascism” represents a menacing school of thought. The very expression, once entirely localised, has now become widespread and international.

This state of affairs forces us to the following conclusion: the so-called “fascist” movement must have sound, deep-rooted, far-reaching historical foundations.

Now what could those foundations be? What might the main factors be underpinning the birth and above all the success of fascism?

Speaking for myself, I can come up with three which I regard, taken altogether, as the factors underpinning its success.

1. The economic factor. This is quite clear cut and widely understood. Here it is, in a few words: private capitalism (the economic foundation of which is demand freely competing for maximum profit and the political expression of which is bourgeois democracy) is falling apart and bankrupt. Violently assailed by all its enemies, whose numbers are on the rise, it is immersed in filth, crime and impotence. Wars, crisis, whole armies of the unemployed, impoverished masses, contrasted with material wealth galore and the boundless possibility of adding still further wealth, have exposed private capitalism’s powerlessness to resolve the economic problems of the age. These days there is a growing awareness of its death throes and imminent demise. So, instinctively or knowingly, thoughts have turned to replacing it with some new brand of capitalism, in the hope that the latter will be able to “save the world”. Yet again in human history, thoughts are turning to the lofty mission of a strong, all-powerful State based upon dictatorship. Thoughts are turning to a state capitalism directed by a dictatorships that “is above private interests”. Such is the new brand of capitalism underpinning fascism economically.

2. The social factor. This too is very clear cut and widely understood. The failure of private capitalism with all its horrific implications has conjured up an unmistakably revolutionary situation. The increasingly unhappy masses are stirring. Revolutionary currents are gaining ground. Organised workers are making increasingly active preparations to do battle with a system which grinds them down to the advantage of a gang of bandits. The working class, freely and pugnaciously organised (along political, trade union and ideological lines) is becoming more and more of an irritation, more and more of a threat to the propertied classes.

The latter have woken up to how precarious their situation is. And are running scared. So, instinctively or consciously, they are looking for a way out. They strive at all costs to cling to their privileged position which is based on exploitation of the toiling masses. What matters above all else is that the latter should remain an exploited, wage-dependent flock fleeced by its masters.

If the current model of exploitation cannot be sustained, a change of model will be called for (no great deal) to ensure that the underlying situation is unchanged. The masters of today can remain such as long as they agree to become members of a vast economic, political, social and essentially statist panel of leaders. Now, if this new social structure is to be made a reality, there has to be, above all else, an almighty state led by a strong man, a mailed fist, a dictator, a Mussolini, a Hitler! Such is the new brand of capitalism by which fascism is being fed, socially.

Were fascism based only upon these two things — its economic and its social underpinnings — it would never have gained the power we know it possesses. No doubt about it: the organised labouring masses would swiftly have stopped it in its tracks once and for all. Indeed, the means whereby the working class generally does battle with capitalism would, with a few minor adjustments, be of service still in effectively fighting against the reaction and fascism. Which would be simply the latest chapter of the workers’ great historic struggle against their exploiters. How many times during the course of history to date has the enemy adopted a new tack, donned a new mask or switched weapons! None of which ever stopped the workers from carrying on with their fight, without loss of equilibrium or confidence, without letting themselves be undone by the enemy’s maneuvering and U-turns!

Now, here we come to the important point. Whilst it may be regarded as a new (defensive and offensive) ploy by capitalism, fascism, wheresoever it set seriously about its task, scored such a stunning, extraordinary, fantastic success that the working class’s struggle proved, all of a sudden and universally — and this goes for Italy as well as for Germany, for Germany as well as for Austria, for Austria as well as elsewhere — not just testing but utterly ineffective and powerless. Not only has liberal bourgeois democracy failed to defend itself, but so have socialism, (Bolshevist) communism, the trade union movement, etc. They have all failed utterly to stand up to a capitalism with its back to the wall as it has maneuvered to save its skin. Not only have all these forces failed to wage a successful resistance against a capitalism overhauling its shaken ranks, but it has been the latter which has been quick to regroup and crush all its foes.

Socialism, so mighty in Germany, Austria and Italy, has proved powerless. “Communism”, itself very strong, especially in Germany, has proved powerless. The trade unions have proved powerless. How are we to account for this?

An already highly complicated problem is becoming even more so, if we think about the current situation in the USSR. As we know, there it was an authoritarian state communism (Bolshevism) that scored a stunning and rather easy victory in the events of 1917. Now, these days, nearly seventeen years on from that victory, not only is communism proving powerless to resist fascism abroad, but, where the regime within the USSR itself is concerned, the latter is more and more often being described more and more deliberately as “red fascism“. Comparisons are drawn between Stalin and Mussolini. Note is taken of the ferocious repression of the toiling masses by the ruling apparatus there which makes up a million persons of privilege dependent, as they are everywhere else, by the way, upon military and police powers. The absence of all freedom is noted. So too is the arbitrary and relentless persecution. And what counts is that such discoveries or opinions are coming, not from bourgeois quarters, but above all from the ranks of revolutionaries ... socialists, syndicalists, anarchists, and even from the ranks of the communist (Trotskyist) opposition which, on this basis, is “resuming the fight for emancipation” and launching the Fourth International.

All of these things are extremely worrying. They lead us inescapably to this conclusion, which may appear paradoxical: that even in the USSR, albeit under a different guise, it is fascism that has carried the day: that it is a new capitalism (state capitalism under the leadership of a mailed fist, a dictator, Stalin) that is in the saddle.

How are we to account for all this?

And might there yet be some other element, some other basis, some other raison d’etre that could be affording fascism some exceptional edge?

To which my answer is Yes. Here we have the third factor: the one I have yet to explore. I regard it as the most important one of all, as well as the most complicated and the least understood. Yet it is the one that explains everything for us.

3. The psychological (or ideological!) factor. The underlying factor in the successes of the fascists and the powerlessness of the forces of emancipation is, as I see it, the poisonous notion of dictatorship per se. I would even go further. There is a notion so widespread that it has all but turned into an axiomatic truth. Millions upon millions, even today, would be astounded to find it called into question. Better still: a goodly number of anarchists and syndicalists too see nothing suspect in it. Speaking for myself, I regard it as entirely wrong-headed. Now, every false notion embraced as a fact poses a great danger to the cause it affects. The notion in question is as follows: in order to win in the struggle and achieve their emancipation, the toiling masses have to be guided and led by some “elite”, some “enlightened minority”, by “far-seeing” men on a level higher than the masses.

That such a theory — which I see as merely a sweetened expression of the notion of dictatorship, for, in fact, it strips the masses of all freedom of action and enterprise — that a theory such as this can be peddled by exploiters, is perfectly understandable. But that such a notion should be anchored in the minds of those who purport to be liberators and revolutionaries, is one of the queerest phenomena history has to show. For — and this strikes me as obvious — if they are to shrug off exploitation, the masses should be led no longer. Quite the contrary: the toiling masses will rid themselves of all exploitation only once they have found a way of ridding themselves of all tutelage, of shifting for themselves, using their own initiative, in pursuit of their own interests, with the assistance and from within the ranks of their own authentic class agencies — trade unions, cooperatives, etc., — federated one with another.

The notion of dictatorship — be it mailed fist or velvet glove — being universal and universally embraced, the way is open for fascist psychology, ideology and action. That psychology penetrates, poisons and disintegrates the entire workers’ movement and points it along a dangerous path.

If the reckoning is that dictatorship is needed to direct the working class’s struggle for emancipation, then in actuality the class struggle turns into a competition between dictators. At bottom, the point of that struggle is to find out who will retain or win a decisive hold over the masses. So the outcome of the contest depends on all sorts of rather incidental circumstances. Dictator X carries the day here, dictator Y or Z yonder. Either of them may profess very different, indeed contradictory ideals. But the fact remains that in place of unfettered, far-ranging activity by the masses themselves, it is the winner who will lead the masses dragooned into following him on pain of ghastly repression. It must be obvious that such a prospect can have nothing to do with actual emancipation of the labouring masses.

The notion of dictatorship, of elite leadership inevitably leads to the formation of political parties: agencies which nurture and support the future dictator. In the end, such and such a party will triumph over the rest. At which point its dictatorship climbs into the saddle. No matter which it may be, it quickly conjures up its appointments and, ultimately, its privileged strata. Subjecting the masses to its will. Oppressing them and exploiting them and, deep down, inevitably becoming fascist.

So my vision of fascism is quite elastic. As I see it, any school of thought that countenances dictatorship — be it of all-out or kid-glove, “right wing” or “left wing” variety — is, deep down, objectively and essentially fascist. In my eyes, fascism is primarily the notion of the masses being led by some “minority”, some political party, some dictator. In terms of psychology and ideology, fascism is the idea of dictatorship. That idea articulated, spread or implemented by the propertied classes is readily understood. But when that same idea is taken up and implemented by ideologues from the working class as the road to emancipation, that should be deemed a poisonous aberration, a short-sighted, silly nonsense, a dangerous deviation. For, being essentially fascist, that idea, if put into effect, leads inevitably to a profoundly fascist social organisation.

This truth has been comprehensibly — and incontrovertibly — borne out by the “Russian experience”. The notion of dictatorship as a means of emancipating the working class has been put into practice there. Well, its implementation has inevitably brought forth an effect which these days is becoming plainer and plainer and which soon even the most ignorant, short-sighted and pig-headed will be forced to acknowledge: instead of leading to the emancipation of the working class, the victorious revolution actually and despite all the theorising of the dictator-liberators, brought forth the most comprehensive, ghastliest enslavement and exploitation of that working class at the hands of a privileged ruling class.

So much for the third and chief factor in fascism’s special power. It is fed primarily by the deeply fascist — and unwittingly fascist — ideology of a multitude who would be the first to be astonished and outraged to be accused of being fascists. That ideology, which has seeped in everywhere, even into the ranks of the “emancipators” and workers themselves, is poisoning the workers’ movement, making it flabby and breaking it down. It kills off genuine activity by the masses and whittles their struggles and indeed their successes to nothing — or rather, to a fascist outcome.

This — alas! — is why Petrini has it right. “No difference between Stalin and Mussolini.” Which is why the “red fascism” is no catchprase but an accurate expression for a very sad fact.

Yet there is consolation to be had. The masses learn through all too palpable first hand experience. And the experience is there. Across one sixth of the globe it is an everyday fact. Its real outcomes are starting to become more and more widely known in greater and greater detail. We must wait for the labouring masses of every land to derive from it, at the opportune moment, the lesson vital to the success of their future struggles.

Whether this hope comes true depends largely on the conduct of those who have understood already. They have a duty to make the most energetic efforts to get the vast toiling masses to recognise the negative lessons of the Russian experience.

We anarchists, who have come to understand, must step up and intensify our propaganda, whilst keeping that experience in the forefront of our minds. If we do our duty, if we help the masses understand in time, then the USSR’s “red fascism” will, historically speaking, have rendered a useful service: and, by acting it out, done the idea of dictatorship to death.

Voline
Footnotes

[1]^ Alfonso Petrini: Ancona-born Italian anarchist sentenced in absentia by the Italian courts to 17 years behind bars for his alleged part in the killing of the carabinierie Antei during the revolutionary disturbances in Ancona in 1920.

Notes: First published in the July 1934 edition of Ce qu'il faut dire (Brussels). Reprinted (Itinéraire No 13, 1995, Paris). Translated by: Paul Sharkey.

Source: Retrieved on November 24, 2010 from http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/dbrvxg

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Vol ... scism.html

...It was this opposition to wage labour which drove Proudhon's critique of state socialism. He continually stressed that state ownership of the means of production was a danger to the liberty of the worker and simply the continuation of capitalism with the state as the new boss. As he put it in 1848, he "did not want to see the State confiscate the mines, canals and railways; that would add to monarchy, and more wage slavery. We want the mines, canals, railways handed over to democratically organised workers' associations . . . these associations [will] be models for agriculture, industry and trade, the pioneering core of that vast federation of companies and societies woven into the common cloth of the democratic social Republic." He contrasted workers' associations run by and for their members to those "subsidised, commanded and directed by the State," which would crush "all liberty and all wealth, precisely as the great limited companies are doing." [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 62 and p. 105]

Marx, of course, had replied to Proudhon's work System of Economic Contradictions with his Poverty of Philosophy. However, Marx's work aroused little interest when published although Proudhon did carefully read and annotate his copy of it, claiming it to be "a libel" and a "tissue of abuse, calumny, falsification and plagiarism" (he even called Marx "the tapeworm of Socialism.") [quoted by Woodcock, Op. Cit., p. 102] Sadly, Proudhon did not reply publicly to Marx's work due to an acute family crisis and then the start of the 1848 revolution in France. However, given his views of Louis Blanc and other socialists who saw socialism being introduced after the seizing of state power, he would hardly have been supportive of Marx's ideas.

So while none of Proudhon's and Stirner's arguments were directly aimed at Marxism, their critiques are applicable to much of mainstream Marxism as this inherited many of the ideas of the state socialism they attacked. Much of their analysis was incorporated in the collectivist and communist ideas of the anarchists that followed them (some directly, as from Proudhon, some by co-incidence as Stirner's work was quickly forgotten and only had an impact on the anarchist movement when he was rediscovered in the 1890s). This can be seen from the fact that Proudhon's ideas on the management of production by workers' associations, opposition to nationalisation as state-capitalism and the need for action from below by working people themselves, all found their place in communist-anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism and in their critique of mainstream Marxism (such as social democracy) and Leninism. Echoes of these critiques can be found Bakunin's comments of 1868:

"I hate Communism because it is the negation of liberty and because for me humanity is unthinkable without liberty. I am not a Communist, because Communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the State all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the State . . . I want to see society and collective or social property organised from below upwards, by way of free associations, not from above downwards, by means of any kind of authority whatsoever . . . That is the sense in which I am a Collectivist and not a Communist." [quoted by K.J. Kenafick, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx, pp. 67-8]

...


Bakunin and Marx famously clashed in the first International Working Men's Association between 1868 and 1872. This conflict helped clarify the anarchist opposition to the ideas of Marxism and can be considered as the first major theoretical analysis and critique of Marxism by anarchists. Later critiques followed, of course, particularly after the degeneration of Social Democracy into reformism and the failure of the Russian Revolution (both of which allowed the theoretical critiques to be enriched by empirical evidence) but the Bakunin/Marx conflict laid the ground for what came after. As such, an overview of Bakunin's critique is essential as anarchists continued to develop and expand upon it (particularly after the experiences of actual Marxist movements and revolutions confirmed it).

First, however, we must stress that Marx and Bakunin had many similar ideas. They both stressed the need for working people to organise themselves to overthrow capitalism by a social revolution. They argued for collective ownership of the means of production. They both constantly stressed that the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves. They differed, of course, in exactly how these common points should be implemented in practice. Both, moreover, had a tendency to misrepresent the opinions of the other on certain issues (particularly as their struggle reached its climax). Anarchists, unsurprisingly, argue Bakunin has been proved right by history, so confirming the key aspects of his critique of Marx.

So what was Bakunin's critique of Marxism? There are six main areas. Firstly, there is the question of current activity (i.e. whether the workers' movement should participate in "politics" and the nature of revolutionary working class organisation). Secondly, there is the issue of the form of the revolution (i.e. whether it should be a political then an economic one, or whether it should be both at the same time). Thirdly, there is the prediction that state socialism will be exploitative, replacing the capitalist class with the state bureaucracy. Fourthly, there is the issue of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Fifthly, there is the question of whether political power can be seized by the working class as a whole or whether it can only be exercised by a small minority. Sixthly, there was the issue of whether the revolution be centralised or decentralised in nature. We shall discuss each in turn.

On the issue of current struggle, the differences between Marx and Bakunin are clear. For Marx, the proletariat had to take part in bourgeois elections as an organised political party. As the resolution of the (gerrymandered) Hague Congress of First International put it: "In its struggle against the collective power of the propertied classes the proletariat cannot act as a class except by constituting itself a political party, distinct from and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes . . . The conquest of political power has therefore become the great duty of the working class." [Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 243]

This political party must stand for elections and win votes. As Marx argued in the preamble of the French Workers' Party, the workers must turn the franchise "from a means of deception . . . into an instrument of emancipation." This can be considered as part of the process outlined in the Communist Manifesto, where it was argued that the "immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties," namely the "conquest of political power by the proletariat," the "first step in the revolution by the working class" being "to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy." Engels later stressed (in 1895) that the "Communist Manifesto had already proclaimed the winning of universal suffrage, of democracy, as one of the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat" and that German Social Democracy had showed workers of all countries "how to make use of universal suffrage." [Marx and Engels Reader, p. 566, p. 484, p. 490 and p. 565]

With this analysis in mind, Marxist influenced political parties have consistently argued for and taken part in election campaigns, seeking office as a means of spreading socialist ideas and as a means of pursuing the socialist revolution. The Social Democratic parties which were the first Marxist parties (and which developed under the watchful eyes of Marx and Engels) saw revolution in terms of winning a majority within Parliamentary elections and using this political power to abolish capitalism (once this was done, the state would "wither away" as classes would no longer exist). In effect, as we discuss in section H.3.10, these parties aimed to reproduce Marx's account of the forming of the Paris Commune on the level of the national Parliament.

Bakunin, in contrast, argued that while the communists "imagine they can attain their goal by the development and organisation of the political power of the working classes . . . aided by bourgeois radicalism" anarchists "believe they can succeed only through the development and organisation of the non-political or anti-political power of the working classes." The Communists "believe it necessary to organise the workers' forces in order to seize the political power of the State," while anarchists "organise for the purpose of destroying it." Bakunin saw this in terms of creating new organs of working class power in opposition to the state, organised "from the bottom up, by the free association or federation of workers, starting with the associations, then going on to the communes, the region, the nations, and, finally, culminating in a great international and universal federation." In other words, a system of workers' councils. As such, he constantly argued for workers, peasants and artisans to organise into unions and join the International Workingmen's Association, so becoming "a real force . . . which knows what to do and is therefore capable of guiding the revolution in the direction marked out by the aspirations of the people: a serious international organisation of workers' associations of all lands capable of replacing this departing world of states." [Bakunin on Anarchism, pp. 262-3, p. 270 and p. 174] To Marx's argument that workers should organise politically (i.e., send their representations to Parliament) Bakunin realised that when "common workers" are sent "to Legislative Assemblies" the result is that the "worker-deputies, transplanted into a bourgeois environment, into an atmosphere of purely bourgeois ideas, will in fact cease to be workers and, becoming Statesmen, they will become bourgeois . . . For men do not make their situations; on the contrary, men are made by them." [The Basic Bakunin, p. 108]

As far as history goes, the experience of Social Democracy confirmed Bakunin's analysis. A few years after Engels death in 1895, German Social Democracy was racked by the "revisionism" debate. This debate did not spring from the minds of a few leaders, isolated from the movement, but rather expressed developments within the movement itself. In effect, the revisionists wanted to adjust the party rhetoric to what the party was actually doing and so the battle against the revisionists basically represented a battle between what the party said it was doing and its actual practice. As one of the most distinguished historians of this period put it, the "distinction between the contenders remained largely a subjective one, a difference of ideas in the evaluation of reality rather than a difference in the realm of action." [C. Schorske, German Social Democracy, p. 38] By the start of the First World War, the Social Democrats had become so corrupted by their activities in bourgeois institutions they supported its state (and ruling class) and voted for war credits rather than denounce the war as Imperialist slaughter for profits. Clearly, Bakunin was proved right. (see also section J.2.6 for more discussion on the effect of electioneering on radical parties)...

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secH1.html

vanlose kid wrote:*

well, if "regulation" means outlawing capitalism and all it entails then i'm all for it.

and that is not impossible.

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vanlose kid wrote:^ ^
@ Nordic: not so much philosophical as practical. as far as i'm concerned anyway.

capitalism would be the idea that capital, i.e. money, in and of itself, is productive (that money begets money – interest/usury, fractional reserve banking etc.), and where an economy is defined/determined/ruled by money and those who have/own it (banks who create money out of nothing and charge for its use, financial instruments/products etc.) at the expense of those who do not. (see p. 1)

anyway, seems like i'm killing this thread so i'll back off.

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