By Sebastian Lamb, an editor of New Socialist, the publication of the New Socialist Group in Canada.
“So this is freedom — they must be joking.” - The Housemartins
We live in a free society. Or at least that’s what we’re constantly told.
Can Marxist and anarchist socialists put aside their disagreements and work together?
But it doesn’t take much effort to see what’s wrong with this claim. How free are people who live without adequate food and shelter? How free are we in the places where we work for pay? Lesbians and gays can marry, but heterosexism still scars the lives of queer people. Equal rights in law don’t translate into real equality for women, people of colour, immigrants, indigenous people and people with disabilities.
All this points to an important truth: even in the wealthiest capitalist countries, such as the Canadian state, we are far from free.
It’s not that there’s no freedom. In some ways, capitalist societies are freer than the other class-divided societies they replaced in much of the world. The French Revolution of the 1790s and other revolutions eroded or dismantled some forms of domination that were an obstacle to capitalist development, such as the rights of nobles and monarchs that restricted the powers of rich “commoners.” These revolutions opened the door to radical people’s struggles for freedom. But such struggles were repressed so that capitalists could reap the benefits of change without risking the loss of their own property and power.
But while it dismantled some forms of domination and oppression, capitalism reproduced and intensified others. Capitalist colonialism gave rise to a new form of oppression, racism. So it is highly misleading to paint a picture of freedom as the essence of capitalism.
Unfreedom
Clearly there are elements of freedom in Canadian society today. It would be foolish to deny that gains have been made: Laws prohibiting abortion and same-gender sex have been struck down. New laws have been established, recognizing union rights and protecting people from discrimination. These gains had to be fought for, often at great human cost, against state and corporate power.
Sadly, these advances don’t come close to making this a free society. The workplaces where society’s goods and services are produced are managerial dictatorships. Decisions that affect our lives are made by capitalists who are never elected, governments that aren’t accountable between elections, and top state officials for whom no one ever casts a ballot. Immigrants excluded from citizenship have even less influence over who governs us.
Sexism, racism, heterosexism and other forms of oppression are still part of the fabric of society. The Canadian state is a colonial settler-state that denies indigenous peoples and the Québecois the right to determine their own destinies without interference from the dominant Canadian nation. The young demonstrators who chanted “The Communist World is not communist, the Free World is not free!” in the late 1960s were right. Almost all of the Stalinist dictatorships that passed themselves off as “Communist” have collapsed. However, the end of the Cold War did not bring about freedom — just ask the people of occupied Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan.
A Radical View
Marxists and anarchists fought together in Seattle 2009
Freedom struggles are an important part of humanity’s history, going back thousands of years. They have included revolts by peasants and slaves, working-class upsurges, rebellions against colonialism, women’s mobilizations, anti-racist struggles, queer protests and more. We see aspirations for real freedom in these struggles.
But what would a free society look like? Socialists of different stripes have long argued that capitalism cannot deliver on its promise of freedom, and that it will take a radical transformation of society to realize that possibility. Unfortunately, most socialists have seen socialism as something that can be achieved by a committed minority (such as a party or army) on behalf of the majority. For such supporters of socialism from above, freedom is at best a secondary concern and at worst merely rhetoric.
A minority of socialists have always disagreed with this. For supporters of socialism from below, a free society — a society without class divisions, state power or oppression — cannot be handed down by a minority, no matter how sincere. It will be achieved as a result of the self-organized struggles of the exploited and oppressed themselves or not at all.
Today, anarchist supporters of socialism from below are more well-known for their commitment to a free society than Marxist socialists. For example, anarcho-communist Alexander Berkman wrote in 1929 that “we can live in a society where there is no compulsion of any kind… freedom from being forced or coerced, a chance to live the life that suits you best.”
Yet certain Marxist traditions have long articulated a strong revolutionary vision of a free society. The following lines appeared in 1847 in a publication of the political group to which Karl Marx then
Alexander Berkman, Murray Bookchin and Emma Goldman
belonged: “We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced… that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.”
Not all supporters of socialism from below have been as clear as this. But it is in this tradition that we find a truly radical view of freedom.
Real Freedom
Freedom is not just the absence of constraints. Freedom lies in our ability to choose among options and to create new options for ourselves and for others. This includes the freedom to change and for individuals to become what they wish to become (for example, to live our gender however we wish). It’s not a state of mind, but requires real material conditions. It cannot be achieved through the actions of individuals, but only in community.
To say that freedom is inherently social doesn’t mean that individual liberty is unimportant. It doesn’t mean that individuals need to subordinate themselves to other individuals or to social institutions acting in the name of the common good. There is a big difference between individualism (acting and thinking in one’s own narrow self-interest), and individual liberty.
The flowering of true individuality requires a society in which everyone is free. There must be free time — time in which people are free to do whatever they choose, so long as this doesn’t involve harming others. This requires a reduction in the time people spend producing the services and goods that society needs.
For this to happen, the world of work would have to be transformed. Workplaces would have to be democratized, so that workers manage themselves. Production would be for need, not for profit. The goals and products of labour would be determined through democratic planning, guided by ecological concerns. The overall organization of workplaces and the content of jobs would need to be reorganized in order to undermine divisions among workers such as those between manual and mental labour, and between unpleasant and more enjoyable tasks.
All across society, authoritarian hierarchies would have to be replaced by democratic structures for making and implementing decisions. As the anarchist socialist Murray Bookchin argued, “A free society will either be democratic, or it will not be achieved at all.”
An inconsistent commitment to socialist democracy in theory and practice has weakened the struggle for a free society. Such inconsistency can be seen in the functioning of many Marxist and anarchist groups. It is also evident in the writings of influential Marxist socialists Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky and major anarchist socialists such as Emma Goldman.
An Impossibility?
Today, the tradition of socialist democracy is largely unknown. In the 20th century, it suffered greatly at the hands of fascism and Stalinism, and was reduced to a marginal current. Today, many people in search of genuinely radical politics of freedom identify with anarchism. After all, anarchism is not stained by association with Stalinism, social democracy or bureaucratic union leaders. Yet what is striking about much of contemporary anarchism is that it is not dedicated to the struggle for a free, democratic, socialist society.
Derrick Jensen
Take, for example, writer Derrick Jensen. He argues that “civilization” (by which he means societies with cities) “is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization… Civilization is not redeemable… civilization turns the entire world into a labour camp, then a death camp… the endpoint of civilization is assembly-line mass murder.” So much for the possibility of freedom.
As Bookchin argued against earlier anti-civilization anarchists, to denounce “civilization as inherently oppressive of humanity in fact serves to veil the specific social relations that privilege exploiters over the exploited and hierarchs over their subordinates.” It is not civilization but capitalism that has caused a global ecological crisis, thanks to its cancerous profit-driven expansion. Capitalism, not urban society, made the Nazi killing machine possible.
The politics of Canadian anarchist Richard Day are not reactionary like Jensen’s, but he too rejects the struggle for a free society. His book Gramsci is Dead dismisses all politics of revolutionary social transformation (which he caricatures) and the possibility of a society without exploitation and oppression. In this, he openly follows two French thinkers: Michel Foucault, who saw revolutions as leading inevitably to new forms of domination and Jean Baudrillard, with whom Day agrees that “the masses” in the advanced capitalist countries have no “political potential.”
Day reaches this conclusion without anything resembling a careful study of the actual history of the past century of social struggles. Since he sees a free society as impossible, he argues that the best that can be hoped for is small-scale moments of freedom in the here and now, from battles against oppression to the creation of “alternative economies” like worker-run small businesses.
It should come as no surprise that ideas like Day’s are appealing to some people in societies like Canada. In this time and place, ecological crisis, exploitation and oppression are all too visible. However, the low level of popular resistance and the weakness of the radical left make mass movements and revolutionary change seem impossible.
Another World Is Possible
We should not resign ourselves to this politics of despair. In order to fight for real freedom one does not need to believe that it is likely to be achieved. So long as we believe that it is not impossible, there is good reason to do whatever we can to make this possibility more likely.
Fortunately, there are still people who refuse to abandon the slogan “Another World is Possible!” made famous by the global justice movement before the events of September 11, 2001. There are still voices insisting that this possible world must be a society of real freedom, beyond capitalism and the forms of oppression intertwined with it.
Hope in the possibility of real freedom has been extinguished even among many of those who clearly see the horrors that capitalism has unleashed, and dread the greater horrors it promises to deliver in the future. The few who maintain a revolutionary vision of freedom differ among ourselves on many issues. But small in number as we are, we would be wise to get clear about what we agree on and what we can do together.
By all means, we should discuss and debate our disagreements, but let’s keep these in perspective. The most fundamental political division among radicals today is not between “anarchists” and “Marxists.” People who accept these labels disagree among themselves more than they agree. The real division is between anti-capitalists who believe that liberation is possible and worth fighting for and those who, influenced by the despair and political confusion of our times, are resigned to the present reality of unfreedom.
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Get Rid of the Poodle! A Call for a Sustainable Economy [Draft]
“As a poodle may have his hair cut long or his hair cut short, as he may be trimmed with pink ribbons or with blue ribbons, yet he remains the same old poodle, so capitalism may be trimmed with factory laws, tenement laws, divorce laws and gambling laws, but it remains the same old capitalism.” – Daniel De Leon, in his November 2, 1908 Daily People editorial, “Trimming the Poodle”
“You cannot solve a problem using the same consciousness that created it.” – attributed to Albert Einstein, presumably sometime after 1908
Introduction
Change! was the word repeated ad nauseam by both corporate political parties in the United States in the months leading up to the November 2008 elections. Yet, thus far, we have seen little to no change at all.
This is especially true of our politicians’ approach to our economy. Amid much hand wringing over “zombie” and “vampire” banks, no one seems to be looking at the bigger picture of a Frankenstein economy that is composed of decomposing parts. Incredibly, the Democratic Party that currently controls both houses of Congress and the White House has continued the Bush Administration policy of throwing obscene amounts of tax money arbitrarily at selected corporations in an effort to “stimulate” the economy.
In fact, this bizarre practice is the culmination of nearly 30 years of “trickle down” economics and centuries of robber baron capitalism. However, this habit of attempting to jolt our Frankenstein economy to life from the top didn’t prevent the recession of the early 1980s. It didn’t prevent the failure of the savings and loan associations – remember them? – in the middle to late 1980s. It didn’t prevent the stock market crash of 1987. It didn’t prevent the recession of the early 1990s. It didn’t prevent the Internet business boom and bust of the later 1990s and early 2000s. It didn’t prevent the real estate boom and bust that some believe is at the root of our current crisis. And it won’t prevent similar crises in the future.
Clearly, we need real change – not just another change from Democrats back to Republicans, or from Republicans back to Democrats. Even the state capitalism that passes for “socialism” in some societies suffers from the same old, tired, top-down thinking.
Clearly, we need to change our whole way of looking at and engaging in our economy. We need a sustainable economy – an economy that is powered by our core values of grassroots democracy, social justice, non-violence and ecological wisdom.
What Is a Sustainable Economy?
An Economy Powered by Grassroots Democracy
In the United States and throughout much of the world, many claim to cherish democracy, yet few consider the idea that democracy shouldn’t end at the door to the workplace. Some believe that the dictates of property and ownership, no matter how unsafe, unequal and unfair, must be given an unquestionable supremacy in society in order for democracy to exist.
Yet, under the Frankenstein economy, we can see how lacking in democracy our society truly is. A handful of people – people who may not even know, understand or care what is wrong with our economy – can make decisions that destroy the livelihoods of millions of workers.
A sustainable economy will put basic economic decisions and the control of science and technology in the hands of the people. Every one of us will have a voice and a vote in managing our workplace, together with our fellow workers who work to produce the same good or service. We’ll elect our supervisors and managers – our fellow workers whom we recognize as the most experienced and capable in the work that we do. If these supervisors and managers fail to manage the workplace correctly, we, the workers who voted them in, can vote them out, delegating the responsibility to someone else. Management authority will flow from the bottom up instead of from the top down.
In addition, this sustainable economy will be more efficient, because we’ll manage our own work, and will be able to assess the everyday effectiveness of the way that our work is done. We’ll be able to make necessary changes without having to go through layers of unsympathetic bosses.
An Economy Powered by Social Justice
Under the Frankenstein economy, economic exploitation is the underlying injustice that breeds all kinds of other social injustice.
Extreme poverty and deprivation exist in an economy capable of producing great wealth. Employers and the governments that they control in countries throughout the world use fraud and force to suppress the aspirations of the nations’ working populations. In the United States, we are working longer and harder than ever, with all the personal and family stress that overwork produces. Even though we produce greater amounts of goods and services every year, most of us struggle just to maintain last year’s standard of living. Meanwhile, corporations use science and technology to lower labor costs and increase profits, to the detriment of, rather than for the benefit of, the majority.
A sustainable economy will guarantee us the full product of our labor, and thus the full benefit of their rising productivity. Every one of us will have the inalienable right to be a working member of the community and receive full compensation for the work that we contribute to the common effort. No one will have the right to profit and enrich him- or herself on the backs of the people who produce the wealth.
Moreover, our jobs will be secure, because we, not our employers, will own those jobs. Nobody is going to vote to eliminate his or her own source of livelihood unless the community of workers decides that he or she can produce something different that has a greater benefit for the community.
However, because a sustainable economy will operate as a market-free system, in which we own our own product and distribute it among ourselves on a fair and equitable basis, all the nonproductive jobs required by the irrational market system will be unnecessary. All of us now doing nonproductive work will be able to join in doing useful labor for the improvement of the living standards of all.
Coordinating our decisions with the rest of the economy – including the educational sector that can teach us new skills – we’ll be able to adjust our jobs to meet the changing needs and wants of society. Our livelihoods will be preserved instead of destroyed, with an added benefit for society as a whole.
Furthermore, a sustainable economy will direct our science and technology to producing what is most beneficial to the most people, not what is merely the most profitable for a few. As our productivity continues to rise, the hours of work required to produce the goods and services that we need will decrease.
Work will continue to be an important part of our lives in defining who we are as individuals – but it won’t be the only part.
With a shorter workweek, we’ll have time to develop our other talents and personal potential. We’ll have the time to be the best parents, students, friends and neighbors that we can be.
An Economy Powered by Non-Violence
Under the Frankenstein economy, a few people enrich themselves by taking the lion’s share of the wealth produced by the work of the majority, society is divided into opposing interests, and the result is conflict and strife.
Employers and the governments that they control wage battle against one another and against us for valuable resources, for control of markets, and for trade advantage. Exploitation breeds destructive oppression, irrational hatreds and war.
However, we do the actual fighting and dying. We are caught in the middle of these conflicts, suffering the most and gaining the least from them.
In a sustainable economy, we will work together as a unified community of workers, promoting intelligent cooperation and peace.
An Economy Powered by Ecological Wisdom
Under the Frankenstein economy, the air is being made unfit to breathe, industrial pollutants are poisoning the water and land, the earth’s resources are being exhausted, and rising temperatures threaten the very future of civilization.
A sustainable economy will ensure that resources are used wisely and aren’t wasted. When we’re working for ourselves, we’ll understand the importance of making the right choices when it comes to what to produce and how to produce it.
The quality as well as the quantity of goods produced must be considered. These goods should be made to last so that they don’t stress the environment by being thrown away and replaced sooner than necessary. This will also reduce energy use and decrease the production of greenhouse gases, by reducing overall production levels.
How goods are produced is also critical. The time and resources that minimize industrial pollution and waste must be allocated to ensure that we maintain a rational balance between consumption and preserving the environment.
A sustainable economy will achieve this balance because the purpose of production will be to meet the needs of people, and not to sell ever more merchandise for maximum profit through reckless and unplanned growth.
How Will We Build a Sustainable Economy?
Neither the Green Party, nor any other political party, nor a minority faction of workers can impose a sustainable economy on society. A benevolent dictator can’t give it to us. A philanthropic elite can’t grant it. It can only come into existence through the creative, coordinated action of the majority of workers.
Political Action
Nonetheless, we need the Green Party to represent and advocate a sustainable economy in the political arena. Through political activity, competing principles and programs rally support and votes, and, by winning a majority, become the ruling principles of society.
For a sustainable economy to come into existence, we need the Green Party to act in the political arena because existing laws protect and enforce the property interests of employers. If we were to start simply running our workplaces ourselves and assuming ownership of the product of our labor, the police would be called in and we would be arrested for trespassing and theft.
We need the Green Party to win a majority vote and enact new laws that validate the new system. The legal way would then be open for a peaceful and democratic change in the economics and governance of nations.
However, the Green Party can’t credibly advocate a sustainable economy if it doesn’t stick to the principles essential to the creation of such a system. Thus, throughout this process, the Green Party must remain true to its four pillars: grassroots democracy, social justice, non-violence and ecological wisdom.
Likewise, it is important for the Green Party to legislate with the goal of the new system in mind, and not to content itself with merely “trimming the poodle,” as Daniel De Leon put it so aptly in the quote above more than a century ago.
Economic Action
As essential as the Green Party will be to the success of a sustainable economy, equally important will be our simultaneous organization in our workplaces.
Labor union organization will unite us in the economic arena as our organization in the Green Party will unite us in the political arena. Organized labor will realize our economic power as wealth producers, and enable us to challenge the financial power of employers from a position of strength.
As our strength and confidence grows, we’ll challenge the dictatorial authority of the bosses in our workplaces. We’ll expand our own authority through our elected union representatives and labor councils, thereby creating the representational framework of the coming sustainable economy.
Thus, when political victory is won at the polls, and the Green Party enacts the legal change to a sustainable economy, we’ll be mentally and organizationally prepared to assume its responsibilities.
Political and economic action is the one-two punch that will create a sustainable economy.