Ditching Class: the Praxis of Anarchist Communist Economics

(From a chapter published in the AK Press book The Accumulation of Freedom)

Libertarian Communism, the Aspiration of Classes in Struggle

Class relationships stand at the core of global societies in our time. The interlocking web of capitalist and state power relations are embedded and reproduced as class exploitation at every level in communities. The abolition of class exploitation is the foundation of any future socialist economy, one which we hope would lead to a society where all people and communities would be able to develop autonomously to their full capacities. During every struggle for liberation and autonomy, class has stood in the way of further developing our human potential. Class has provided the bedrock for counter-revolutions and, even more threatening to liberation, has been capitalism’s ability to reproduce class relations even when the old actors, the capitalists, have fled the scene. New classes rise to take the place of the old ones, and the failure to do away with class altogether has led to some of the worst human tragedies, particularly in the former Soviet countries and various national liberation struggles.

Any group of people who seek to do away with class exploitation will run up against a problem. How is another form of economic activity possible? The easy answer is that capitalism is not eternal. Capitalism is realistically a marginal form of economic organization in human history, though one that spread from Western Europe a few centuries ago to become wholly dominant, and has left a path of carnage (human and environmental) in its wake. Still, we don’t want merely a different economy, but a better one, and hopefully one that transcends the problems of tyranny, inequity, waste, and deprivation.

Libertarian communism is one such possibility, though there needs to be a disclaimer. None of the so-called “communist countries” had any semblance of communism. All had class systems with workers and managers, with wage systems, and where the workers neither owned nor controlled their work and its products. Thus, those countries resembled capitalism more closely than a society based on the abolition of remuneration in the form of wages and democratic control. [i]

Likewise most people identified with communism today, only believed in communism after their own disclaimers. Marx, Lenin, and most of their followers made a distinction between higher and lower stages of communism, where we would pass from lower to higher communism as the revolution unfolded, the proletarian state withered away, and so on. Many Marxists thought of this lower stage as socialism. For this reason whenever mainstream Marxist theory attempted to address the question of post-revolutionary society, the emphasis was placed on the lower phase of communism. The lower phase, following Marx’s conception of a transition period, would bear some of the marks of the capitalist society which gave birth to it, including compulsion to work via a collectivist wage system— sometimes of labor vouchers, or at other times different wage schemes. For this reason, much of the Marxist communist economic literature isn’t actually communist, but focused on collectivist economics. The higher stage of communism is left to be determined by the post-revolutionary working class, except for a few exploratory remarks in Marx’s corpus.

Libertarian communist economics, however, have a few defining features:

1. A commitment to a future economy based on the praxis of the revolutionary working class and popular classes.
2. An economy based on the destruction of the wage system of labor, and a de-linking of the value of labor in production from the distribution of society’s wealth to its members.
3. Collective control and management of the entire economy by the direct control of workers and community members united in a council system of direct democracy.
4. The abolition of intermediary institutions of power governing the economy.

Libertarian communist economics’ assets are also some of its weaknesses, at least in regards to what is sometimes called prescriptive economics. Prescriptive economics attempts to lay out a vision, in our case, of a post-capitalist economic system based on some core values. Praxis is the concept of linking ideas and vision with concrete practices and struggles. Historically, it was the anarchist communists who generally took up the problem of the possibility of classless society, and even then only tempered by the necessary recognition of the leadership and innovation of everyday people to solve the problem concretely. The lack of materials on prescriptive economics can be traced in part to the strong commitment in anarchist and libertarian communist thought to the concept of praxis.

Acts of War: Why the greatest perpetrator of mass violence is the State itself

Victims of mass violence carried out by the US government

As a nurse, a human being, and an anarchist, I was horrified to see the trauma enacted on people in Boston.[1]  I was further saddened because I know that in our sick society tragedy breeds tragedy. Sadly, and predictably, the tragic Boston bombing has provided an opportunity for unprincipled people to go after opponents, to construct new political and cultural boogeymen, and for tabloid journalists to advance their careers. To be blunt, I am disgusted by Steven Kurlander’s recent piece written for the Huffington Post A Lesson of the Boston Bombings: Stop Classifying Criminal Anarchist Violence as Acts of War.[2] In times of turmoil there is a dangerous tendency for acts of violence to be used as tools to attack civil liberties, human rights, and the further conquest of power and wealth by elites. Kurlander’s article contributes to this environment by using the tragic Boston event to justify dominant power and possibly crackdowns against political dissidents.

On Uneven Ground

“We had a major success with staffing! The company agreed to staffing ratios”. Applause erupts, smiles from the tired faces wearing our glorified pajamas.

Her words swirled about in my brain. I saw images- the faces of patients-, hours of the day- lifting, bending, pressing syringes, rushing down halls-, and all the moments of crisis I’ve carried with me through the years. The weight of the hospital pulls on your soul.

The hall was set with folding tables and cheap plastic tablecloths decorated the sad displays of institutional food. Bizarre textured wallpaper seems wrapped around the whole room, blanketing the scene in dull flesh colors. The union meeting took place in one of the conference rooms of the hospital, the same place where we receive trainings about how to smile, how much money is being lost, and why our work is never enough.

Staffing is a word, but in hospitals it’s everything. It means how many patients a nurse takes care of. Bad staffing can produce situations of such intense work that you literally have no idea where you are, responding second-to-second without any view of what happened or what comes next. Staffing is why we cry in the break room for patients who died in shameful avoidable situations, when we grimace in pain in the bathrooms having suppressed our bodies to complete too many tasks, and when we feel the emptiness of futility to help human beings face-to-face with reasonable needs and nothing to be done. Senseless.

Fall Down Seven Times, Get up Eight: An anarchist nurse’s reflections on violence against the people

I’ve never been violently assaulted, lost a loved one to violence, or been put through whatever it must be like to be witness to such terrible events. A murderer did try to kill my friends and ended up massacring people I knew. The killer, who likely was mentally ill, used his fundamentalism to justify slaughtering people who he didn’t know and who only had shown him kindness, because he believed they were filled with sin. Watching one’s friends suffer as anyone suffers from senseless violence stays with you and is a reminder of the weight of life and liberty, and the violation when others take those things from us.

Too often we seek to take the misery of world events and make them seem sensible. Now we all are searching for logic and clues that can help people speculate about and ultimately understand what happened in Boston. As a nurse, I watch what is unfolding with pain and the deepest sympathies for everyone touched by this situation; families sick with worry pacing the halls of hospitals, waiting; the healthcare workers stretching their bodies to the limits to try and do the best for all the people lying in beds; most of all the injured regaining awareness of what has become, how to adjust to their role of being cared for by others, and surely frightened about what their future will be.

I feel the deepest pain for the injured because I’ve seen how hard it is to carry oneself through life with serious injuries. Patients who lose limbs, suffer paralysis, and who end up with incapacities fight everyday. There are wounds to be dressed, pressure ulcers to stave off, phantom limb and nerve pains that are difficult to beat back. Patients deal with assumptions, strange looks, and strangers placing their own biases upon them. Injury is a life long affair, and something that places unnecessary burden in our society because of our unwillingness and inability to win real healthcare worthy of human beings. I’ve taken care of many gunshot wound patients, who carry with them the weight of a single moment with them for decades. Nearly all of them are young black men. Looking at someone paralyzed from the waste down with a personality, aspirations, and character, and I can’t help but wonder what could cause someone to rob another of all the joys they could have had making love, running, and feeling the sand in their toes. With violence, youth are being robbed daily of their humanity in a system that reproduces terror in every generation. To place that burden on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of individuals solely out of a desire to advance a political statement or cause is the height of a monstrosity.

Translation of The Resistance to Capitalism

This is the translation of the first chapter of an essay in an out of  print text by Emilio Lopez Arango, one of the premier theorists of the FORA up through the 20s when he was assasinated.

 

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The Resistance to Capitalism by Emilio Lopez Arango

The workers movement is determined by the assembly of moral and material factors that form and give life and reality to the social system, and that in the process of the capitalist civilization enslave humanity to the rule of necessities. But the proletariat, if pushed to struggle for bread, isn’t limited to aspirations of gaining a better wage; they aspire also to break the yoke of economic exploitation and liberate oneself from the domination of the privledged castes in the political sphera; in the struggle against the state.

If for the anarchists every immediate solution is relative, because it is limited by the law of capitalist equilibrium, in consequence syndicalism can’t be a theory of the future. This does not mean that anarchism opposes revolutionary objectives as an expression of the absolute to the contingent reality. On the contrary, it’s about facts and experiences that libertarian theories should create a base for direction, searching in the working masses for the necessary elements to promote the advancement of history and decide social progress against the reactionary currents.

Fighting for the Future: The Necessity and Possibility of National Political Organization for Our Time

Reposting this here because we’re having trouble with formatting on other websites.

By Adam Weaver and SN Nappalos

In the midst of the worst economic crisis in decades, the left stands at a crossroads. Despite widespread anxiety, restructuring, stirrings, and disruptions, the left has been unable to respond or develop bases for movements and revolutionary organization in any meaningful sense. In many ways the eruption of the Occupy movement onto the center stage with all of its weaknesses in politics, structure, and dynamics, was a reflection of this. The events of Wisconsin, Occupy, the Oakland General Strike, and the May 1^st mobilizations have brought to the fore the nature and potential of combative movements from below as well as the limits of present politics. At the very least since the financial crisis of 2008, social activists are looking for clearer paths towards anti-capitalist alternatives. Many are realizing that something more is needed beyond endless activism, protest politics, and vertical-style union and NGO mobilization. The base level of political education on the left, provided largely by non-profits and liberal university campuses, suddenly seem to have even fewer answers than before. This has left many turning towards political study to deepen their analysis as well as taking up questions around the need for political organization.

We need to ask ourselves, in this time of crisis how can movements be built in an atmosphere of ruling class assaults, disorganization of the popular classes, and sporadic resistance efforts? What are the roles of revolutionaries within movements? What are the strategies to keep ourselves going for the long haul work that radical social change requires? What are the lessons of the past decades in social movements and revolutionary organizations? How do we politically develop the existing revolutionaries and help shape new ones to build a larger milieu of revolutionary organizers, thinkers, and supporters based in popular struggle? How would this milieu and potential political organization relate to broader social movements, other forces on the left, those we share perspectives with, and with those we do not?

Syndicalism and Anarchism- translation of Emilio López Arango

This piece has a number of intriguing ideas that were circulating in the FORA. One element is the rejection of the traditional understanding of the union, including the label of anarchosyndicalism. The FORA never took on the industrialist structure of a union, favoring instead a different path with it’s resistance societies. Likewise we see the rejection of the post-revolutionary role of unions. Lopez Arango counterposes a static view of unions and anarchism to one inherently grounded in trajectories of struggle, and puts the dynamics of change in struggle at the core of revolutionary work. Though this is only fragmentary, it provides a rare insight into another side of anarchism and unions, and one that gives a refreshing departure from more schematic and purely moralistic or ideological orientations.

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From the weekly supplement of La Protesta, July 13, 1925

Emilio López Arango (translated SN Nappalos)

In a translation of “Pensiero e Volonte” from Rome, an article by Malatesta was published about the relation in theory and fact between anarchism and syndicalism. The aforementioned comrade raised a point of contradiction between those two terms, describes the role of the labor movement and activity of anarchists inside and outside of the unions, and in a final note subtlety gathered words written in La Protesta[1]. The article of Malatesta generalizes a problem not yet sufficiently discussed and clarified.

He expresses his point of view that deserves the greatest respect, and despite offering some suggestions to share we don’t rush to pick it up with the only intention of outlining our thesis on the subject. But the note added at the end there of comrade Malatesta, forces us to clarify the value of some words that may have different meaning in Italy and Argentina, as terms now in vogue lend themselves to frequent and unfortunate confusion.

When we refer to the cultural work of political anarchism, we don’t want to say that specific anarchist organizations (like the Italian or French, for example) are limited to making propaganda via the book, pamphlet and newspaper, or capturing adherents with conferences in social centers, ateneos, etc. We also don’t want to be guilty of attributing the intention of these militants to wait for all workers to develop before social revolution is possible. Yes, we note the existence of a cultural movement diluted in the environment, imprecise in its form of activity with tendencies of covering all of humanity with ideals of redemption. And we do not believe in the efficacy of that medium, which for it’s own inaccuracy goes unnoticed by the workers themselves. We oppose systematic propaganda in the union and the anarchist objective in the economic organizations that Malatesta and other comrades consider neutral ground in the struggle of tendencies that divide the proletariat. Malatesta concludes that from this interpretation of the labor movement, particularly held by us in this country, our opposition to political anarchism-of party or cultural center- follows and is inspired by the anarcho-syndicalist perspective. That is precisely his error, that anarcho-syndicalism is a combination of the anarchist and syndicalist tendencies, a hybrid product of this confusing period. In that grammatical compound is disguised the old reformist tendency applied to the labor movement in some way the product of preaching ideological neutrality in the unions. Without wishing to insult the old master, we declare that Malatesta as Fabbri-the theorist of the unity of the classes and of the doctrinal disregard in the workers movement- is closer than we are to anarcho-syndicalism.