Anarchist puts case for contesting elections
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One of Class War’s candidates explains why they contested the 2015 general election. He actually makes quite a good case.
In terms of the reasons given (local publicity, hustings, getting on the Andrew Neil show), they were re-inventing the wheel. It’s what we have realised for years. Also, that in putting up candidates you are not supporting the system.
We put up 10 candidates in that election and also got invited to hustings, the Andrew Neil show, etc. As it happened, on average we got more votes than them. John Bigger himself got 65 in Croydon South. All our candidates got more than that. Maybe because we were better behaved and weren’t trying to rival the Monster Raving Loony Party….
This classic criticism of classical anarchism, from 1911, has just been added to the Study Guides in the Education section of this site. Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Jean Grave, they are all dealt with.
Why Socialists Oppose Anarchism. Its Fallacies and Dangers Exposed
Follow the debate it has ignited at Libcom
http://libcom.org/forums/history/classic-criticism-classical-anarchism-12022020
Songster, David Rovics
” It’s not just about voting — mostly not. But that’s one small element of it. So yes, in case my conclusion for this thought process is not already abundantly clear — take to the streets, shut the cities down, stop business as usual, as much as and wherever possible. But also, vote for Bernie.”
Well, well, another of the mighty falls but at least he recognises the need for some form of political action, so perhaps he is a better anarchist than them.
There is a passage in Kohn’s articles saying that in France anarchists also sometimes voted :
“They condemn political action but vote for politicians who promise Government subsidies for union premises !”
Unfortunately he doesn’t give a source, but I am sure it will have happened.
By accident we seem to be carrying out an interesting experiment on libcom in the thread on those 1911 articles from the Socialist Standard on anarchism, with you as Mr Nice and me as Mr Nasty, you as the good cop me as the bad cop, which has gone on for more than 60 posts. But the response from dyed-in-the wool anarchists has been the same: hostility. I get accused of being a dogmatic Marxist while you get accused on opportunism.
It makes me wonder if anarchists really are our “fellow travellers” as in the Conference resolution passed last year. Personally, I never thought they were but then we are not expecting to win over dyed-in-the wool anarchists but only those who consider themselves vaguely anarchist and anti-capitalist. There are also those following the debate as by-standers.
In any event, at the present stage of the revolutionary movement, I think it best that each group keeps its independence and puts its own views before other workers.
I have suggested that many in fact have their own covert “hostility clause”.
I have indicated that it has been we who are flexible in our parliamentary political action approach, not declaring it to be suited for every situation and hoped that likewise they would also recognise that circumstances and conditions may well make electoral participation a tactic to be adopted. No-body took the opening. Dogmatism sometimes wears black.
But for my part, I will persist in seeking a broadening of that Thin Red Line, within our own organisation and on anarchist discussion lists.
alanjjohnston: “I have indicated that it has been we who are flexible in our parliamentary political action approach, not declaring it to be suited for every situation”
Really?
- In what way are our Clauses 6, 7 and 8 flexible for achieving world socialism?
- In what situations are our Clauses 6, 7 and 8 unsuitable for achieving world socialism?
From our pamphlet ‘whats wrong with using parliament’
“…This is not to say that the socialist majority only needs to organise itself politically. It does need to organise politically so as to be able to win control of political power. But it also needs to organise economically to take over and keep production going immediately after the winning of political control. We can’t anticipate how such socialist workplace organisations will emerge, whether from the reform of the existing trade unions, from breakaways from them or from the formation of completely new organisations. All we can say now is that such workplace organisations will arise and that they too, like the socialist political party…With the spread of socialist ideas all organisations will change and take on a participatory democratic and socialist character, so that the majority’s organisation for socialism will not be just political and economic, but will also embrace schools and universities, television, film-making, plays and the like as well as inter-personal relationships. We’re talking about a radical social revolution involving all aspects of social life.”
Are you saying our D of P is universal for all places and all times?
That the process of the implementation of socialism cannot vary depending on the social and political realities workers will face as class consciousness grows?
That the UK and other western bourgeois democracies are the only form of State entities around the world, that dictatorships or theocracies do not exist?
Although they weren’t socialist revolution but could be called social revolutions, the collapse of the former Soviet Unions satellites was a lot less conquering the political system but more de-legitimising them, no longer recognising them and it was not through any organised political parties but by peoples power just as our pamphlet states
“a constitution is just a piece of paper; what is important is how it is interpreted which is a reflection of political reality including the balance of forces between the ruling class and the working class. So-called “people’s power” is not just a myth.”
I think that interpretation of a socialist party being more than merely a parliamentarian party is the one I sympathise with. We are calling for a class party and such organisations need not be identical everywhere.
So, yes, my definition of a socialist movement is elastic.
From our pamphlet ‘whats wrong with using parliament’
Assertion
“[The socialist majority] does need to organise politically so as to be able to win control of political power.”
Comment
This assertion is a necessarily incomplete re-statement of Clauses 6, 7 and 8 of our D of P—our defining political stance.
Addendum
“[The socialist majority] also needs to organise economically to take over and keep production going immediately after the winning of political control.”
Comment
This truism is well taken for now, but it will probably be gratuitous advice to those about to install a social organisation that is consciously based upon common ownership and democratic control of the social means for producing use-values (not capital).
However, you propose this truism-for-now in support of a flexible alternative to Clauses 6, 7 and 8 of our D of P for-the-future, suitable for different so-called ‘political realities’.
* * *
All societies survive by their social organisation for producing and consuming use-values. No society can escape this nature-imposed necessity, despite fictional fantasy to the contrary.
How then do capitalist societies apparently survive by their social organisation for producing and distributing capital?
Clearly they can’t be subverting the nature-imposed compulsion to produce and consume use-values. Instead they have hijacked it, parasitically.
This apparent subversion of natural necessity
- is conditional upon private capitalist-class ownership and control of the social means for producing capital (not use-values) and
- has been transformed into the social necessity for a capitalist society to produce and distribute capital according to the inherent capitalist laws discovered by Marx—independent of any ‘political reality’.
No capitalist society, whether under ‘UK and other western bourgeois democracies’ or ‘dictatorships and theocracies’ can escape capital’s compulsion to produce and distribute capital (not use-values).
This remains our century-old case against so-called ‘communism’ that was based upon class ownership and control of the social means of production, despite leftist economic and political fantasy to the contrary.
Should you advocate this addendum as justification, within a social organisation still based upon private capitalist-class ownership and control of the social means of production, for a workable hybrid that somehow escapes the social compulsion to produce capital and to distribute it according to capital’s inherent laws as a flexible alternative to Clauses 6, 7 and 8, you turn everything that we know about capitalist society and necessity into fantasy.
Question
Are you saying our D of P is universal for all places and all times?
Answer
Yes. Under world-capitalist rule there is only one place. Likewise, when the hour strikes to expropriate the world capitalist class, there will be essentially only one—universal—time.
This is what our D of P was crafted for.
Question
That the process of the implementation of socialism cannot vary depending on the social and political realities workers will face as class consciousness grows?
Answer
There is only one social and political reality faced by workers and that is their common recognition that they have been robbed of their common means of social life.
Clauses 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of our D of P lay out the problem. Clauses 6, 7 and 8 lay out the solution, namely our Object.
Question
Although they weren’t socialist revolution but could be called social revolutions, the collapse of the former Soviet Unions satellites was a lot less conquering the political system but more de-legitimising them, no longer recognising them and it was not through any organised political parties but by peoples power.
Answer
So-called “people’s power”—which the document correctly glorifies as ‘not just a myth’—was, in the case of the collapse of the Soviet Union, essentially the prevailing capitalist consciousness that their social organisation for producing and distributing capital had failed the capitalist survival test.
A social organisation for producing and distributing capital more able to meet that test has been installed.
Assertion
So, yes, my definition of a socialist movement is elastic.
Response
In physics, elasticity starts out varying proportionally under pressure, but then the elastic object distorts and snaps, and ultimately is no longer recognisable as its former self.
All very interesting, TWC, but I will put to you the same question I left for those in the anarchist and left communist groups to answer.
“We no longer are communicating with our audience. We aren’t connecting with people. Tell me why. Tell me how we can.”
I’m not an economic determinist but believe that people make their own history, albeit “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” and “…conjure up the spirits of the past to their service…” and that “…the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue…”
We have all the objective material conditions for socialism. What is missing is the will to establish it and that has become even more remote even though the necessity for socialism has grown even more imperative, in fact some would say socialism is now an existential need for humanity.
All I am doing is searching for an answer to why the world socialist movement has not developed and progressed and is very likely disappearing.
I exclude no possibility and that includes that perhaps we have been mistaken in some particular aspects of our analyses.
Am I wrong in trying to identify the reasons for the very obvious failure of the Socialist Party to convince our fellow-workers of the need for socialism, and our failure to explain how capitalism’s innumerable contradictions as a socio-economic system has not produced a working class with the socialist consciousness required to end it.
Our D of P may well be an wonderfully worded document, but “The social revolution…cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The revolution…must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content.”
alanjjohnstone wrote: “We have all the objective material conditions for socialism. What is missing is the will to establish it…“. [my bold]
I’d argue that you’re being contradictory here, alan.
It’s only when democratic socialists (Marxists) realise that ‘the will’ is an ‘objective material condition’ for socialism, that we’ll make any progress.
Whilst those who regard ‘material’ as meaning ‘non-conscious stuff’, and that as the force behind ‘the will’, hold sway, we’ll continue to miss Marx’s point about ‘the active side’, and remain waiting.
It’s humanity that is consciously active, not ‘all the objective material conditions’ which exclude our conscious actions.
Yes, and Dietzgen and Pannekoek suggested much the same that ideas are as part of the material world as physical matter. Or am i mistaken?
But to stick to the point…we don’t have socialism because people don’t want it because they are imbued with the capitalist ideology, ruling class ideas prevailing …and so far the contradictions created by the capitalist system which TWC expects to break down this hegemony of ideas are not sufficiently experienced or expressed enough. So do we wait?
alanjjohnstone wrote: “Yes, and Dietzgen and Pannekoek suggested much the same that ideas are as part of the material world as physical matter. Or am i mistaken?“.
No, you’re not mistaken, you’re correct. Dietzgen and Pannekoek were simply following Marx, who himself said that he’d unified ‘idealism’ and ‘materialism’. That’s why it’s incomplete, to one-sidedly say “ideas are as part of the material world as physical matter” – it’s just as accurate to say “physical matter is as part of the ideal world as ideas“.
It’s probably best to say ‘ideas and physical matter are as part of the ideal-material world‘. Marx was interested in social production (‘idealism-materialism’), which requires conscious human action to change its objective world.
There is no subject without object, and no object without subject. If you want to term this ‘unity’ as ‘material’ alone, you’re likely to forget the other aspect, which is why I always suggest, if the term ‘material’ is insisted upon, that the term ‘ideal’ is also insisted upon.
It makes more sense to call this ‘social productionism’, but if ‘material’ must be a part of the phrase, then ‘idealism-materialism’ fits the bill better than ‘materialism’ alone.
We socially produce the ‘physical-for-us’ and the ‘idea-for us’. As Marx said, any part of a supposed ‘nature’ which is not for us, is a nothing for us.
alanjjohnstone wrote: “But to stick to the point…we don’t have socialism because people don’t want it because they are imbued with the capitalist ideology, ruling class ideas prevailing …and so far the contradictions created by the capitalist system which TWC expects to break down this hegemony of ideas are not sufficiently experienced or expressed enough. So do we wait?”
No ‘contradictions’ will ‘create’ anything, because, for Marx, humanity was the ‘creator’.
‘Waiting for contradictions’ will lead to, as it always has, ‘waiting’.
We’ll continue to ‘wait’, until we become ‘the active side’. And that won’t happen, whilst the ‘waiters’ are told to ‘wait’ for ‘contradictions’ (or its synonym ‘material conditions’), without which, it is argued, being ‘active’ is simply a waste of time.
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