CHAPTER 12
THE ANARCHIST STRUGGLE

 

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF a free society involves a social revolution that will remove the institutions of class, property and government.  On the method of this struggle the anarchists differ from the political revolutionaries and pseudo-revolutionaries.  They accept neither the Social Democratic idea of the gradual evolution of a socialist society through the use of parliament and other institutions of capitalist democracy, nor the Leninist idea of the seizure of State power by a party representing one class which will, in theory, usher in the classless society by governmental means.

Parliament is an institution moulded by the bourgeoisie for the purpose of achieving their own revolution and maintaining their own control over society.  A few hundred men are chosen by suffrage to represent, in the case of England, some forty-five million people.  These men are almost invariably professional politicians, who regard parliament as their career and, although theoretically they represent the people of the country, in fact the conditions of parliamentary elections are such that they must be supported by some vested interest, at worst a group of capitalists, at best a reformist trade union, before they can fight the election campaign.  In parliament, if they are to make anything of a career for themselves, they must be attached to some party, of the Left, or Right, and vote, not according to their own judgment, but according to the political line of this party and the dictates of its leaders.  In this way they legislate on the affairs of the people in matters on which few of them have any real knowledge whatever.  A politician may have knowledge of the affairs of the interest that he represents, but the very nature of his career prevents him from gaining knowledge of more than a fraction of the affairs of the country.  He is therefore obliged, for very ignorance, to follow the lead of his party, and in this way a chamber consisting of lawyers, journalists, trade union officials and other parasites, chosen mostly for a gift of the gab, dictates the conditions under which the producers shall carry out their work and live their lives.

A party claiming to represent socialist ideas may achieve a majority and be allowed to form a government.  Once in power, it has to maintain itself there, and for this purpose has to use the coercive machinery that any other government would use to retain its hold on the nation.  The necessity of keeping its position governs its actions, and it is, like any other government, at the mercy of the people who control the economic life of society.  It cannot risk losing the co-operation of those who control finance and industry, i.e., the capitalist class, and consequently its policy is so shaped as not to offend these interests.  The longer it remains in office, the more its members become corrupted and moulded by the power they wield, the more they are concerned with power itself rather than with the use they might make of it.  Instead of using capitalist institutions for precipitating socialism, they find that these very institutions are formed in such a way that whoever uses them, unless he seizes the economic power controls of society, will in turn be used by the capitalists for their own ends.  Parliament was formed as a means of maintaining the interests of a particular ruling class, i.e. the capitalists, and while economic power is in the hands of the capitalists, the parliamentarian finds that, unless he does as they wish, their entire resources of economic, financial and propaganda power will be turned to his destruction and he must either obey or quit.  Thus, while capitalism still exists, the reformist party cannot progress towards socialism.  It may achieve minor amelioration’s within capitalism, but these will only be countenanced if the capitalists can afford to allow them, and will be withdrawn as soon as the ruling class can find an opportunity.  Parliamentary action, far from precipitating the social revolution, tends to perpetuate the existing order.

It thus results, through the working class party becoming a part of the capitalist governmental machine; in a class collaboration in which the exploiting class - the capitalist ruling class with its economic control - must always gain at the expense of the exploited working class.

Class collaboration, the entry of working class elements into the governing structure of capitalist society, is thus the negation of the social revolution.  The social revolution can only be achieved by the class struggle, the struggle of the exploited to wrest power from the hands of the exploiters and so abolish the class system.

This much is recognised in theory by the Leninists.  They hold that this struggle can only be maintained and won by a disciplined party who will seize power in the name of the working class and expropriate the capitalists from both political and economic control of society.  But they also maintain that this can be done only by the party seizing the governmental machine and instituting a dictatorship of the insurrectionary class, to be administered by the party.  Thus a new system of government is established, with the party in control of the political, economic and military power bases.  The governmental methods of the old society are perpetuated in the State, the army and the police force, under the control of the party, which in this way becomes itself a de facto ruling class.  Like every other government, the revolutionary administration is concerned first and foremost with the problem of retaining the power it has seized.  The affairs of society therefore come more and more under the control of this ruling group, and its members become increasingly concerned with power.  Power brings privilege, and the ruling class rapidly becomes the privileged class.  So a new incentive is added, and a change appears in the nature of the dictatorship, in that power is retained not to maintain the revolution but to further the interests of the ruling class.  The gulf appears between the party and the workers, who become once again an exploited class, and, instead of the class system having been abolished, a new ruling class has merely replaced the capitalist class.  The example of the Russian Revolution will reveal how this happens in practice.  The class struggle by political revolution in fact results in a negation of the classless society.

Thus, the social revolution to the free, classless society can be attained neither by the Social-Democratic method of reformist parliamentary action, nor by the Leninist method of a pseudo-revolutionary seizure of state power.  The first tends to perpetuate the present class society, with the incorporation of labour leaders into the existing ruling class.  The second, by its continuance of the institution of government, sets up a new class society in which the party that carried out the coup d’etat becomes the ruling class.

There remains, then, only one way to a free society.  That is by a struggle that will aim not at a political revolution, but at an entire revolution in social and economic relationships in which the state, class and property will be abolished at one and the same time.  Thus the anarchist conception of the class struggle differs from the Leninist conception in that it does not envisage or in practice involve the stewardship of any class during a period of transition, but stands for the immediate ending of the social and economic system which involves the division of society into exploiters and exploited and in its place advocates a society where there will be no kind of exploitation and where, therefore, class divisions will be abolished.  The only true class struggle is the struggle, not for the replacement of one class of rulers by another, but for the elimination of class itself.

The only section of the community which can carry out such a struggle is the class of the exploited, the class of the workers..  This is not from any intrinsic merit in the worker as such.  Individually, he may be no better than an individual bourgeois, and he may very well be just as much corrupted by the prevailing system of social relationships.  But his is the only class that, as a class, has an immediate interest in the social revolution.

This does not mean that individuals from the middle and the upper classes are not sincerely devoted to the revolution.  Many of the revolutionary leaders of the past have come from these strata of society, and one has only to remember men like Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Cafiero, Berneri, to realise that there will always be men who are motivated by their sense of justice to act in the cause of freedom against their own material interests.  Nevertheless, it is the working class who are most immediately concerned with the social revolution, and it is they who in the last resort hold control of the power bases of society whose command is necessary before the revolution can succeed.  Intellectuals and trained revolutionaries may prepare for the revolution, but at the zero hour only the mass direct action of the people can unseat the ruling class and prevent the rise of a new ruling class which will attempt to re-establish tyranny and exploitation in its own interests.

By the direct action of the workers is meant the action of the workers in the industrial field to attack a class society in its most vulnerable point, i.e. in its economic heel.  A political revolution involves the seizure of state power by a minority and the re-establishment of government.  A true social revolution involves the seizure of economic power by the exploited class, who will thus prevent the maintenance or re-erection of the institutions of government.

Every society rests, ultimately, on an economic basis, and the power of every ruling class depends on its control of the means of production.  Feudal society was based on the control of the land by the feudal nobility.  Capitalist society is based on the control of industry by capitalist proprietors.  Leninist society is based on the control of both industry and land by the party bureaucracy.  In every case power rests on this economic control.  If it were taken away neither military power nor political power could take its place nor could either of them prevail for long, for both are ultimately dependent on access to the products of agriculture and industry.

In every form of society economic power is, in practice, in the hands of the ruling class.  But the ultimate economic control rests with the men who carry out the actual physical operations of industry.  If every operative ceased to work his machine, if every farm hand ceased to guide his plough, if every locomotive driver let his engine stand idle on the lines, mere titular possession of the means of production would avail the ruling class little.  Their power rests on the toil of the worker, and without that toil their world will fall into paralysis.  Their political systems cannot work; their military machines cannot function unless they are fed by the services of workers in industry, in transport and in agriculture.  They are ultimately dependent on the co-operation of the producers on the economic field, and it is this dependence that gives the workers their power to carry out the social revolution.

Anarchism, and particularly anarcho-syndicalism, therefore rests its conception of the social revolution on the economic action of the workers.  Of this economic action the principal weapon is the strike, the withdrawal of co-operation in industry.  This weapon is also used by the reformist trade unions for the attainment of improvements in working conditions and wages under capitalist conditions.  It can, however, be successful in this respect only under an expanding capitalism, when it is in the interest of the capitalists to grant concessions rather than face a stoppage of production.  In a declining capitalism, or in capitalism under conditions of slump, the capitalists are unable to grant any major concessions and are thus forced to fight the strikes, which in these circumstances rarely end in favour of the workers.  Nevertheless, while realising the failure of strike action to gain any permanent improvements under the present system, the anarchists support the day-to-day struggle because it is a means of educating the workers in the nature of the forces they oppose, and of training them for the major struggle that lies ahead.

Moreover, the anarcho-syndicalist strike differs from the ordinary trade union strike in one important and fundamental point, i.e. it is more than a mere withdrawal of labour.  In the ordinary withdrawal of labour strike the workers are at an immediate disadvantage because they have voluntarily detached themselves from the means of production.  They have condemned themselves to a slow period of starvation, in which the boss will always beat them, unless market conditions make it more profitable for him to give in than to wait.  In a general strike which consisted of nothing more than a general withdrawal of labour, the ruling class would go short, but so would the people and it is almost certain that the people would starve first.

The anarchists therefore advocate an active form of general strike as being the only efficient revolutionary strike.  This involves the seizure and expropriation of the instruments of production by the workers, who would occupy the factories and railways and continue to work them, but would refuse to co-operate with the ruling class.  Food would be made and carried to the workers, but every form of product and service would be denied to the government and its forces.  Thus, while in an ordinary strike the worker has to rely merely on his withdrawal of labour and is segregated from the means of production, becoming susceptible in this way to economic distress, in the syndicalist strike he withdraws co-operation from the governing class, but still contributes his labour to the running of the factories and transport services he holds, by means of which the possibility of economic distress is withdrawn from the workers, and the main obstacle to the success of industrial action is removed.

There are other varieties of economic action that the workers can use in their struggle against the employing class and the state.  One of these is ca’canny, working slow, by which the tempo of production is decreased by the workers concentrating on turning out elaborately finished articles, or working according to rule.  The latter form was used to a great extent by railway employees in this country, when single depots were involved in minor disputes for which the union executives would not authorise a strike.  The men would work so as to carry out in every letter the elaborate rules laid down by the railway company, and in a very short time the result would be such confusion and delay in dealing with traffic that the employers very often gave in to the workers’ demands.

Another form of economic action is the boycott, used so widely by the Irish against their English exploiters, before they took masters of their own race.  The boycott, in general, runs in the field of consumption rather than in that of production.  For instance, workers can undermine the economic stability of certain industrialists by refusing to buy their goods.  The boycott can also be applied in the form of a refusal to co-operate with the government in various schemes of state organisation.

A third form of action, which has been used extensively by workers on the continent and is now being used by the people of India in their struggle for freedom, is sabotage.  Sabotage originally meant working clumsily; the word was derived from sabot, the French wooden shoe, which gives the idea of clumsiness.  But it has come to embrace any direct interference with the actual material instruments of production or transport in order to embarrass the state or the exploiter.  Thus it can mean mere bad workmanship, or it can mean equally well the interruption of transport by taking up the railway lines.  Sabotage in various forms has been used in almost all the recorded struggles of the people against their oppressors.  It was used extensively by British textile workers during the Luddite risings, and also by Russian peasants who destroyed their crops rather than have them taken away forcibly by the Bolsheviks.  Sabotage, organised carefully, can be an extremely effective weapon in any social struggle.  This is demonstrated by the fact that in time of war, governments are always anxious to promote sabotage in enemy countries while they attempt to suppress it in their own lands with the utmost savagery.

But of all the forms of economic action, the strike remains the most important, without which none of the other forms of action can be fully effective.  The true social revolution, as against the political revolution, must be based on the strike; which is the method that gives the only assurance of the workers themselves gaining and keeping power wrested from their oppressors.

Anarchists regard the general strike as the supreme revolutionary tactic that can shake and finally destroy the structure of authoritarian society and usher in the classless society.  They do not, however, as their opponents have declared, hold the optimistic belief that the state will necessarily fail at the challenge of a single general strike.  The revolutionary struggle may well involve a series of such strikes and a relatively long period of action on the part of the workers before the exploiting class are finally driven from their positions of power and government is eliminated.

Anarchists, as I have already indicated, do not believe that the revolution can be engineered by a party organisation or a conspiratorial society.  It can only come from a revolutionary urge developing among the people themselves.  The duty of the revolutionary is to assist the growth of this urge, and to present the true revolutionary objective to the people in order that the revolution may flow towards a libertarian society.  The revolutionary should never aspire to leadership as political revolutionaries have done in the past.  Such leadership brings power to the leading group and not to the people, and power thrust into the hands of leaders results inevitably in the erection of a new governmental state.

Anarchists, therefore, do not attempt to form political parties or establish cults of leadership.  Their vocation is to present the truth to the people in order that the people themselves may take their destiny into their own hands and carry through the social revolution.

They recognise however, that some form of organisation is necessary for prosecuting the economic struggle.  But they realise equally well that this cannot be in the form of a party, organised and governed from above and consisting only of a minority of the workers.  Instead, they envisage an organisation on an economic basis that will embrace all the workers, according to their industries and their place of work; by which means their struggle on the economic plane can best be maintained.  This form of organisation is embodied in the syndicate, whose nature I have already described in the chapter entitled “Anarcho-Syndicalism” (i.e. in the book Socialism from Below: A History of Anarchism available from ZB -ed.).  The syndicate, organised and governed by the workers themselves, protected by its lack of a permanent bureaucracy from the tendency towards centralism and authoritarianism which destroy both trade unions and political parties as revolutionary instruments, and connected organically with the functional life of the workers, is the best, and indeed the only effectual instrument that has so far been evolved for the prosecution of the struggle, towards the free society of anarchy.  Moreover, the syndicates are significant not only for their revolutionary role, but also for the fact that they contain the germ of the functional organisation upon which the new society can be built after the revolution.  It is only by understanding this dual role of the syndicates, as the destroyers of the old order and the builders of the new society, that we can work out the strategy of the Anarchist struggle.