(en) Australia, Statements and opinions from the Melbourne
Anarchist Communist Group by ablokeimet
This is the text of a presentation given by a MACG member during a debate on the class
struggle approach to Anarchism held at the Melbourne Anarchist Bookfair on Saturday 8
August 2015. It was delivered almost verbatim. ---- Thanks. I’m going to take it for
granted that we want an Anarchist society – one where capitalism and the State have been
abolished, where all forms of social oppression are eradicated and the human race lives
sustainably and in harmony with the Earth. What we’re debating here is how to get there –
the path from present day capitalism to an Anarchist society. ---- The traditional
Anarchist view of the route to an Anarchist society is through a workers’ revolution,
which occurs as the culmination of a progressively intensifying phase of class struggle.
This is the position I support. I think workers’ revolution is both possible and
necessary, for reasons I will go on to elaborate.
First of all, though, I’d like to clear up the concept of class, since it is often a
source of great confusion. The working class is composed of those with nothing to sell
except their labour. You don’t have to work in a factory to be working class, or even to
have a job at all. You don’t have to be a white, heterosexual male, either.
Now, I’m going to read out a list of categories of people. See if you’re in any of them:
* Your main source of income is interest, rent and/or dividends;
* You own a business and work inside it for your main income, regardless of whether you
employ anybody else. It doesn’t count if the so-called “business” is the supply of your
own labour to a single employer that supervises your actions as it would an employee and
is only doing it to avoid taxation and/or industrial relations laws;
* You are a manager in the public or private sector with the right to hire and fire;
* You are a copper, a prison warder, a military officer or member of the security services
(e.g. ASIO);
* You are a Member of Parliament or a local government Councillor, or a judge, magistrate
or person with similar powers (e.g. member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal).
* You are employed by a trade union, political party or NGO as an organiser or office bearer.
* You are reasonably confident that, in the next five or ten years, you will be in one of
the above categories. It doesn’t count if you’re just hoping or if you’ll need a bit of
luck for it to come off;
* You stand to inherit, whether from a spouse, parent or otherwise, millions of dollars
over and above a house to live in.
If you’re in one of those categories, can you put your hand up? You don’t have to say
which one it is, because there are some it may be embarrassing to admit to being a member
of. OK. Everyone who didn’t put their hand up is a member of the working class. You have
an objective interest in getting rid of capitalism, over and above any ethical commitment
you may have. Those of you who did put your hand up, you can still join the struggle as an
ally, provided you have the ethical commitment to do so. You’re just not in the same
position to have an impact.
So, what’s important about the working class? As we’ve just shown, it comprises the vast
majority of society. You can’t change society without having at least a majority of the
working class on your side and, if you want a revolution, the vast majority. Second, it is
the experience of co-operation in the capitalist workplace that provides the experience
that is necessary to co-operate in the class struggle. Solidarity in the struggle is based
on the solidarity learnt in production. This is fundamentally different from the
experience of small business traders or of peasant farm-owners in the Third World.
Many people point to the large numbers of workers who hold reactionary, Right wing ideas
and conclude that this makes workers’ revolution impossible. All this proves, however, is
that we haven’t had a revolution yet. It’s true that many workers are sexist, racist,
homophobic, transphobic or hold to other oppressive ideas. The key is to realise that
class struggle is the way to overcome them. The classic case is the Great Miners’ Strike
in Britain, where the consciousness of miners and the rest of the mining communities
achieved advances in a year that took the working class in the big cities a generation.
I’ll come back to this role of class struggle later.
The decisive arena of struggle in capitalist society is the workplace. This is because the
workplace is where the capitalists derive their power. Therefore, to take this power off
them, the workers need to organise in the workplace to take the power themselves. There
are other important arenas for struggle, but they are secondary. If we leave the workplace
to the capitalists, we hand over the resources of the entire economy to them.
Other strategies
It should be noted here that the unemployed and most students are working class, but they
have virtually no social power. Students will achieve far less by withholding their study
than they would through withholding the labour of flipping burgers and waiting on tables
that they do to support themselves while studying. In the Third World, the peasantry are,
almost everywhere, thoroughly integrated into and subordinated by the global capitalist
market. They can mount no systemic challenge. While the Zapatistas are an inspiration,
their struggle hasn’t been able to spread beyond the Chiapas and won’t do so. The decisive
levers of power are in the cities and can only be reached by the working class.
Insurrectionism is an approach to Anarchism that Anarchist Communists like me reject
unequivocally. Insurrectionists often have a good class analysis, but they only use it to
identify who is on what side – i.e. who they’ll throw rocks at and who they won’t. They
never use their class analysis as a guide to deciding how to act, how to struggle.
Insurrectionism takes on the State at its strongest point, its armed wing. Except in some
passages of high-flown rhetoric, it substitutes the militancy of a small minority for the
self-organising activity of the class as a whole. Taken to its logical conclusion (which
it was by some in the 1970s in some countries), it leads to guerrilla warfare, which is a
recipe for bloody defeat.
Parliamentary reformism is another dead end, though I don’t expect many adherents here.
The record of reformist political parties should be enough to show that this doesn’t work,
but there are two deeper reasons for concluding that Parliamentary reformism can’t work.
The first is that this is an inherently national form of struggle, based on capturing the
machinery of the nation State. In the era of neo-liberal globalisation, there is no
possibility of using that State for substantive reforms, let alone the abolition of
capitalism. As the recent experience of Syriza in Greece has shown, winning government is
merely a way of putting yourself in the position of imposing brutal attacks on the working
class that voted you into office. You don’t have a choice to do anything else.
The other reason it can’t work is that it bypasses the class struggle that is essential to
burning out the Right wing prejudices that infect the working class and divide it against
itself. Only the process of class struggle, escalating to the point of revolution, can
build the iron solidarity which is necessary to found society anew on libertarian and
co-operative lines. Workers will transcend greed and selfishness by the act of revolution
and thereby allow society to operate upon new principles.
The Simpler Way
Now let me turn to the politics of Ted Trainer, whose position [name deleted] here largely
defends. Ted posits that capitalism must be abolished and a radically non-authoritarian
society established, but rejects class struggle. Instead, he wants people to turn away
from the system and build sustainable alternatives. He sees that the State and the
capitalist system it defends will collapse from people withdrawing from under it, in a
situation aggravated by resource scarcity and environmental collapse.
The first thing that must be said about Ted’s strategy is that it is remarkably similar to
that of the Utopian Socialists who flourished in the first half of the 19th Century. It
especially makes me think of Charles Fourier, one of the most libertarian of them. The
difference is the environment in which Ted Trainer thinks the movement will grow. The old
Utopian Socialists weren’t expecting resource scarcity or limits to growth.
The second thing to say is that Ted is over-egging the pudding somewhat when it comes to
the sort of ecological limits within which humanity has to operate. The abolition of
capitalism will enable the abolition of large sectors of the economy, which exist solely
to maintain the current distribution of wealth and power. Advertising, finance, real
estate, insurance, the military and the State bureaucracy can be abolished at a stroke,
thus saving all the resources devoted to them and allowing an immediate reduction in the
working week through the reallocation of labour that entails. And that’s only the start.
In addition, high quality goods that are made to last can replace the shoddy ones that
prevail today. Hands up everyone who’s sick of kettles and toasters that break down as
soon as the warranty expires.
And the last part of Ted’s over-egging is energy. We will have a budget of renewable
energy within which to work, but it will be relatively generous. Wind farms and solar
power can be backed up by hydro-electricity to provide a substantial amount of energy,
perhaps as much as currently generated today.
Altogether then, it will be possible to reduce resource consumption greatly, even as Third
World living standards are considerably increased. We can dispense with private jets and
dune buggies, but everyone deserves modern health care and clean hot and cold running water.
The final thing to say about Ted Trainer’s strategy is that it can’t work. It won’t get to
where he wants to go. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, property. Resources in a
capitalist society are owned by capitalists or the State. This counts especially for land,
which is crucial to Ted’s vision. The working class was created by the enclosure of the
commons and the State maintains the enclosures. If you want those resources, and we
definitely need them, we have to fight for them. And secondly, I return once more to the
necessity for class struggle. Without class struggle, only tiny minorities will become
interested in ideas of transcending this society. To get the mass of the population on
board (i.e. the working class), it is necessary for workers to learn the lessons through
the struggle for their own interests. Without that, most workers, and therefore most
people, will remain committed to some form of capitalism. It is only in the crucible of
class struggle that the human race can forge and become committed to the vision of a new
society.
