From the Bottom Up: The First International and the Emergence of European Anarchist Movements

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Jon Bekken

by Robert Graham, ASR 63 (2015)

Robert Graham is the editor of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, a three-volume anthology of anarchist writings from ancient China to the present day. He is currently working on a history of the emergence of European anarchist movements from out of the First International.

September 2014 marked the 150th anniversary of the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA – in the Romance languages, the AIT – now commonly referred to as the First International). While much is often made of the dispute between Marx and Bakunin within the International, resulting in Bakunin’s expulsion in 1872, more important from an anarchist perspective is how anarchism as a distinct revolutionary movement emerged from the debates and conflicts within the International, not as the result of a personal conflict between Marx and Bakunin, but because of conflicting ideas regarding working class liberation.

Many members of the International, particularly in Italy, Spain and French-speaking Switzerland, but also in Belgium and France, took to heart the statement in the International’s Preamble that the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves. They envisioned the International as a fighting organization for the daily struggle of the workers against the capitalists for better working conditions, but also looked to the International as a federation of workers across national borders that would provide the impetus for revolutionary change and the creation of a post-revolutionary socialist society based on workers’ self-management and voluntary federation. It was from out of these elements in the International that the first European anarchist movements arose.

When the International was founded in September 1864 by French and British trade unionists, any anarchist tendencies were then very weak. The French delegates at the founding of the First International regarded themselves as “mutualists,” moderate followers of Proudhon, not anarchist revolutionaries. They supported free credit, workers’ control, small property holdings and equivalent exchange of products by the producers themselves. They wanted the International to become a mutualist organization that would pool the financial resources of European workers to provide free credit for the creation of a system of producer and consumer cooperatives that would ultimately displace the capitalist economic system.

The first full congress of the International was not held until September 1866, in Geneva, Switzerland, with delegates from England, France, Germany and Switzerland. Although the French delegates did not call for the immediate abolition of the state, partly because such radical talk would only result in the International being banned in France, then under the dictatorship of Napoleon III, they did express their rejection of the state as a “superior authority” that would think, direct and act in the name of all, stifling initiative. They shared Proudhon’s view that social, economic and political relations should be based on contracts providing reciprocal benefits, thereby preserving the independence and equality of the contracting parties. The French delegates distinguished this “mutualist federalism” from a communist government that would rule over society, regulating all social and economic functions.

At the next Congress of the International in Laussane, Switzerland, in September 1867, César De Paepe, one of the most influential Belgian delegates, debated the more conservative French mutualists on the collectivization of land, which he supported, arguing that if large industrial and commercial enterprises, such as railways, canals, mines and public services, should be considered collective property to be managed by companies of workers, as the mutualists agreed, then so should the land. The peasant and farmer, as much as the worker, should be entitled to the fruits of their labor, without part of that product being appropriated by either the capitalists or the landowners. De Paepe argued that this “collectivism” was consistent with Proudhon’s “mutualist program,” which demanded “that the whole product of labor shall belong to the producer.” However, it was not until the next congress in Brussels in September 1868 that a majority of delegates adopted a collectivist position that included land as well as industry.

At the Brussels Congress, De Paepe also argued that the workers’ “societies of resistance” and unions, through which they organized and coordinated their strike and other activities, constituted the “embryo” of those “great companies of workers” that would replace the “companies of the capitalists” by eventually taking control of collective enterprises. For, according to De Paepe, the purpose of unions and strike activity was not merely to improve existing working conditions but to abolish wage labor. This could not be accomplished in one country alone, but required a federation of workers in all countries, who would replace the capitalist system with the “universal organization of work and exchange.” Here we have the first public expression within the International of the basic tenets of revolutionary and anarchist syndicalism: that through their own union organizations, by which the workers waged their daily struggles against the capitalists, the workers were creating the very organizations through which they would bring about the social revolution and reconstitute society, replacing capitalist exploitation with workers’ self-management.

After the Brussels Congress, Bakunin and his associates applied for their group, the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, to be admitted into the International. The Alliance stood for “atheism, the abolition of cults and the replacement of faith by science, and divine by human justice.” The Alliance supported the collectivist position adopted at the Brussels Congress, seeking to transform “the land, the instruments of work and all other capital” into “the collective property of the whole of society,” to be “utilized only by the workers,” through their own “agricultural and industrial associations.”

In Bakunin’s contemporaneous program for an “International Brotherhood” of revolutionaries, he denounced the Blanquists and other like-minded revolutionaries who dreamt of “a powerfully centralized revolutionary state,” for such “would inevitably result in military dictatorship and a new master,” condemning the masses “to slavery and exploitation by a new pseudo-revolutionary aristocracy.” In contrast, Bakunin and his associates did “not fear anarchy, we invoke it.” Bakunin envisaged the “popular revolution” being organized

from the bottom up, from the circumference to the center, in accordance with the principle of liberty, and not from the top down or from the center to the circumference in the manner of all authority.

In the lead-up to the Basel Congress of the International in September 1869, Bakunin put forward the notion of the general strike as a means of revolutionary social transformation, observing that when “strikes spread out from one place to another, they come very close to turning into a general strike,” which could “result only in a great cataclysm which forces society to shed its old skin.” He also supported, as did the French Internationalists, the creation of

as many cooperatives for consumption, mutual credit, and production as we can, everywhere, for though they may be unable to emancipate us in earnest under present economic conditions, they prepare the precious seeds for the organization of the future, and through them the workers become accustomed to handling their own affairs.

Bakunin argued that the program of the International must “inevitably result in the abolition of classes (and hence of the bourgeoisie, which is the dominant class today), the abolition of all territorial States and political fatherlands, and the foundation, upon their ruins, of the great international federation of all national and local productive groups.” Bakunin was giving a more explicitly anarchist slant to the idea, first broached by De Paepe at the Brussels Congress, and then endorsed at the Basel Congress in September 1869, that it was through the International, conceived as a federation of trade unions and workers’ cooperatives, that capitalism would be abolished and replaced by a free federation of productive associations.

Jean-Louis Pindy, a delegate from the carpenters’ Chambre syndicale in Paris, expressed the views of many of the Internationalists at the Basel Congress when he argued that the means adopted by the unions must be shaped by the ends which they hoped to achieve. He saw the goal of the International as being the replacement of capitalism and the state with “councils of the trades bodies, and by a committee of their respective delegates, overseeing the labor relations which are to take the place of politics,” so that “wage slavery may be replaced by the free federation of free producers.” The Belgian Internationalists, such as De Paepe and Eugène Hins, put forward much the same position, with Hins looking to the International to create “the organization of free exchange, operating through a vast section of labor from one end of the world to another,” that would replace “the old political systems” with industrial organization – an idea which can be traced back to Proudhon, but which was now being given a more revolutionary emphasis.

The Basel Congress therefore declared that “all workers should strive to establish associations for resistance in their various trades,” forming an international alliance so that “the present wage system may be replaced by the federation of free producers.” This was the high water mark of the federalist, anti-authoritarian currents in the First International, and it was achieved at its most representative congress, with delegates from England, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Spain.

Bakunin attended the Congress, drawing out the anarchist implications of this position. He argued that because the state provided “the sanction and guarantee of the means by which a small number of men appropriate to themselves the product of the work of all the others,” the political, juridical, national and territorial state must be abolished. Bakunin emphasized the role of the state in creating and perpetuating class privilege and exploitation, arguing that “if some individuals in present-day society do acquire… great sums, it is not by their labor that they do so but by their privilege, that is, by a juridically legalized injustice.”

Bakunin expressed his antipathy, shared by other members of the International, to revolution from above through a coercive state apparatus. With respect to peasant small-holders, he argued that “if we tried to expropriate these millions of small farmers by decree after proclaiming the social liquidation, we would inevitably cast them into reaction, and we would have to use force against them to submit to the revolution.” Better to “carry out the social liquidation at the same time that you proclaim the political and juridical liquidation of the State,” such that the peasants will be left only with “possession de facto” of their land. Once “deprived of all legal sanction,” no longer being “shielded under the State’s powerful protection,” these small holdings “will be transformed easily under the pressure of revolutionary events and forces” into collective property.

The Basel Congress was the last truly representative congress of the International. The Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the Paris Commune in 1871 made it difficult to hold a congress, while the Hague Congress of 1872 was stacked by Marx and Engels with delegates with dubious credentials. One must therefore look at the activities of the various International sections themselves between 1869 and 1872 to see how the anti-authoritarian, revolutionary collectivist currents in the International eventually coalesced into a European anarchist movement.

In France, Eugène Varlin, one of the International’s outstanding militants, described the position adopted “almost unanimously” by the delegates at the Basel Congress as “collectivism, or non-authoritarian communism.” Varlin expressed the views of many of the French Internationalists when he wrote that the workers’ own organizations, the trade unions and societies of resistance and solidarity, “form the natural elements of the social structure of the future.” By March 1870, he was writing that short

of placing everything in the hands of a highly centralized, authoritarian state which would set up a hierarchic structure from top to bottom of the labor process… we must admit that the only alternative is for the workers themselves to have the free disposition and possession of the tools of production… through cooperative associations in various forms.

The revolutionary syndicalist ideas of the Belgians and Bakunin’s more explicitly anarchist views were also being spread in Spain. Echoing De Paepe’s comments from the Brussels Congress, the Spanish Internationalists described the International as containing “within itself the seeds of social regeneration… it holds the embryo of all future institutions.” They founded the Federación Regional Española (FRE – Spanish Regional Federation) in June 1870, which took an anarchist position. One of its militants, Rafael Farga Pellicer, declared that: “We want the end to the domination of capital, the state, and the church. Upon their ruins we will construct anarchy, and the free federation of free associations of workers.” In addition, the FRE adopted a form of organization based on anarchist principles.1

In French-speaking Switzerland, as a result of a split between the reformist minority supported by Marx and the anti-authoritarian collectivist majority allied with Bakunin, the Jura Federation was created in 1870. The Jura Federation adopted an anarchist stance, declaring that “all participation of the working class in the politics of bourgeois governments can result only in the consolidation and perpetuation of the existing order.”

On the eve of the Franco-Prussian War during the summer of 1870, the French Internationalists took an anti-war stance, arguing that the war could only be a “fratricidal war” that would divide the working class, leading to “the complete triumph of despotism.” The Belgian Internationalists issued similar declarations, denouncing the war as a war of “the despots against the people,” and calling on workers to respond with a “war of the people against the despots.”

This was a theme that Bakunin was soon to expand upon in his Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis, published in September 1870. Although many of the French Internationalists abandoned their anti-war stance, Bakunin argued that revolutionaries should seek to transform the war into a country-wide insurrection that would then spread the social revolution across Europe. With the French state in virtual collapse, it was time for the “people armed” to seize the means of production and overthrow their oppressors, whether the French bourgeoisie or the German invaders.

For the social revolution to succeed, Bakunin argued that it was essential that the peasants and workers band together, despite the mutual distrust between them. The peasants should be encouraged to “take the land and throw out those landlords who live by the labor of others,” and “to destroy, by direct action, every political, juridical, civil, and military institution,” establishing “anarchy through the whole countryside.” A social revolution in France, rejecting “all official organization” and “government centralization,” would lead to “the social emancipation of the proletariat” throughout Europe.

Shortly after completing his Letters, Bakunin tried to put his ideas into practice, traveling to Lyon, where he met up with some other Internationalists and revolutionaries. Bakunin and his associates issued a proclamation announcing the abolition of the “administrative and governmental machine of the State,” the replacement of the judicial apparatus by “the justice of the people,” the suspension of taxes and mortgages, with “the federated communes” to be funded by a levy on “the rich classes,” and ending with a call to arms. Bakunin and his confederates briefly took over City Hall, but eventually the National Guard recaptured it and Bakunin was arrested. He was freed by a small group of his associates and made his way to Marseilles, eventually returning to Switzerland. A week after Bakunin left Marseilles, there was an attempt to establish a revolutionary commune there and, at the end of October, in Paris.2

In Paris, the more radical Internationalists did not take an explicitly anarchist position, calling instead for the creation of a “Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic.” But this “republic” was to be none other than a “federation of socialist communes,” with “the land to go to the peasant who cultivates it, the mine to go to the miner who exploits it, the factory to go to the worker who makes it prosper,” a position very close to that of Bakunin and his associates.

After the proclamation of the Paris Commune on March 18, 1871, the Parisian Internationalists played a prominent role. On March 23, 1871, they issued a wall poster declaring the “principle of authority” as “incapable of re-establishing order in the streets or of getting factory work going again.” For them, “this incapacity constitutes [authority’s] negation.” They were confident that the people of Paris would “remember that the principle that governs groups and associations is the same as that which should govern society,” namely the principle of free federation.

The Communes’ program, mostly written by Pierre Denis, a Proudhonist member of the International, called for the “permanent intervention of citizens in communal affairs” and elections with “permanent right of control and revocation” as well as the “total autonomy of the Commune extended to every township in France,” with the “Commune’s autonomy to be restricted only by the right to an equal autonomy for all the other communes.” The Communards assured the people of France that the “political unity which Paris strives for is the voluntary union of all local initiative, the free and spontaneous cooperation of all individual energies towards a common goal: the well-being, freedom and security of all.” The Commune was to mark “the end of the old governmental and clerical world; of militarism, bureaucracy, exploitation, speculation, monopolies and privilege that have kept the proletariat in servitude and led the nation to disaster.”

For the federalist Internationalists, this did not mean state ownership of the economy, but collective or social ownership of the means of production, with the associated workers themselves running their own enterprises. As the Typographical Workers put it, the workers shall “abolish monopolies and employers through adoption of a system of workers’ cooperative associations. There will be no more exploiters and no more exploited.”

The social revolution was pushed forward by female Internationalists and radicals, such as Nathalie Lemel and Louise Michel. They belonged to the Association of Women for the Defence of Paris and Aid to the Wounded, which issued a declaration demanding “No more bosses. Work and security for all – The People to govern themselves – We want the Commune; we want to live in freedom or to die fighting for it!” They argued that the Commune should “consider all legitimate grievances of any section of the population without discrimination of sex, such discrimination having been made and enforced as a means of maintaining the privileges of the ruling classes.”

Nevertheless, the Internationalists were a minority within the Commune, and not all of them supported the socialist federalism espoused in varying degrees by Varlin, Pindy and the more militant Proudhonists. The federalist and anti-authoritarian Internationalists felt that the Commune represented “above all a social revolution,” not merely a change of rulers. They agreed with the Proudhonist journalist A. Vermorel that “there must not be a simple substitution of workers in the places occupied previously by bourgeois. … The entire governmental structure must be overthrown.”3

The Commune was savagely repressed by French state forces, with the connivance of the Prussians, leading to wholesale massacres that claimed the lives of some 30,000 Parisians, including leading Internationalists like Varlin, and the imprisonment and deportation of many others, including Nathalie Lemel and Louise Michel. A handful of Internationalists, including Pindy, went into hiding and eventually escaped to Switzerland.

For Bakunin, what made the Commune important was “not really the weak experiments which it had the power and time to make,” but

the ideas it has set in motion, the living light it has cast on the true nature and goal of revolution, the hopes it has raised, and the powerful stir it has produced among the popular masses everywhere, and especially in Italy, where the popular awakening dates from that insurrection, whose main feature was the revolt of the Commune and the workers’ associations against the State.

Bakunin’s defense of the Commune against the attacks of the veteran Italian revolutionary patriot Guiseppe Mazzini played an important role in the “popular awakening” in Italy, and the rapid spread of the International there, from which the Italian anarchist movement sprang.

The defeat of the Paris Commune led Marx and Engels to draw much different conclusions. For them, the defeat demonstrated the necessity for working class political parties whose purpose would be the “conquest of political power.” They rammed through the adoption of their position at the September 1871 London Conference of the International, and took further steps to force out of the International any groups with anarchist leanings, which by this time included almost all of the Italians and Spaniards, the Jura Federation, many of the Belgians and a significant proportion of the surviving French members of the International.

In response, the Jura Federation organized a congress in Sonvillier, Switzerland, in November 1871. Prominent Communards and other French refugees also attended. They issued a Circular to the other members of the International denouncing the General Council’s actions, taking the position that the International, “as the embryo of the human society of the future, is required in the here and now to faithfully mirror our principles of freedom and federation and shun any principle leaning towards authority and dictatorship,” which was much the same position as had been endorsed by a majority of the delegates to the 1869 Basel Congress.

The Belgian, Italian and Spanish Internationalists supported the Jura Federation’s position, with the Italian and Spanish Internationalists adopting explicitly anarchist positions. Even before the London Conference, the Spanish Internationalists had declared themselves in favor of “collective property, anarchy and economic federation,” by which they meant “the free universal federation of free agricultural and industrial workers’ associations.” The Italian Internationalists rejected participation in existing political systems and in August 1872 called on the federalist and anti-authoritarian sections of the International to boycott the upcoming Hague Congress and to hold a congress of their own. Marx and Engels manipulated the composition of the Hague Congress to ensure a majority that would affirm the London Conference resolution on political action, expel Bakunin and his associate James Guillaume of the Jura Federation from the International, and transfer the General Council to New York to prevent the anti-authoritarians from challenging their control.

Barely a week after the Hague Congress in September 1872, the anti-authoritarians held their own congress in St. Imier where they reconstituted the International along federalist lines. The St. Imier Congress was attended by delegates from Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland and Russia. For them, “the aspirations of the proletariat [could] have no purpose other than the establishment of an absolutely free economic organization and federation, founded upon the labor and equality of all and absolutely independent of all political government.” Consequently, turning the London Conference’s resolution on its head, they declared that “the destruction of all political power is the first duty of the proletariat.”

They regarded “the strike as a precious weapon in the struggle” for the liberation of the workers, preparing them “for the great and final revolutionary contest which, destroying all privilege and all class difference, will bestow upon the worker a right to the enjoyment of the gross product of his labors.” Here we have the subsequent program of anarcho-syndicalism: the organization of workers into unions and similar bodies, based on class struggle, through which the workers will become conscious of their class power, ultimately resulting in the destruction of capitalism and the state, to be replaced by the free federation of the workers based on the organizations they created themselves during their struggle for liberation.

The resolutions from the St. Imier Congress were ratified by the Italian, Spanish, Jura, Belgian and, ironically, the American federations of the International, with most of the French sections also approving them. The St. Imier Congress marks the true emergence of a European anarchist movement, with the Italian, Spanish and Jura Federations of the International following anarchist programs. While there were anarchist elements within the Belgian Federation, by 1874, under the influence of De Paepe, the Belgians had come out in favor of a “public administrative state” that the anarchist federations in the anti-authoritarian International opposed. The French Internationalists contained a prominent anarchist contingent, but it was not until 1881 that a distinctively anarchist movement arose there.

In his memoirs, Kropotkin wrote that if the Europe of the late 1870s “did not experience an incomparably more bitter reaction than it did” after the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Paris Commune, “Europe owes it… to the fact that the insurrectionary spirit of the International maintained itself fully intact in Spain, in Italy, in Belgium, in the Jura, and even in France itself.” One can say, with equal justification, that anarchism itself, as a revolutionary movement, owes its existence to that same revolutionary spirit of the International from which it was born in the working class struggles in Europe during the 1860s and early 1870s. It was from those struggles, and the struggles within the International itself regarding how best to conduct them, that a self-proclaimed anarchist movement emerged.

Notes

1. “There were no paid trade union officials or bureaucratic hierarchies, and power flowed from the bottom upward.” George R. Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868-1898, University of California Press, 1989, 21.

2. Despite attempts by Marxists and some historians to portray the Lyon uprising as a tragicomic farce, as Paul Avrich points out, news “of the Lyon Commune touched off a chain reaction up and down the Rhone valley and through Provence,” as well as in Marseilles and Paris. Anarchist Portraits, Princeton University Press, 1988, 236.

3. Proudhon’s 1848 “Election Manifesto of Le Peuple” expounded an identical vision of a social structure based on mandated and recallable delegates (“imperative mandate”) and an economy run by a “universal association” of workers’ cooperatives. Iain McKay, ed., Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology, AK Press, 2011, 371-381.

Bakunin & the Historians Revisited

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Jon Bekken

Review essay by Jon Bekken, ASR 63 (2015)

When I reviewed the English-language literature on the pioneering Russian-born anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in 1992, there was only one decent biography in print, and it focused almost exclusively on his (very productive) final years in Italy. As we conclude the Bakunin bicentenary two new histories have been published – Mark Leier’s excellent Bakunin (reviewed in ASR 47, which while sometimes overly casual is far and away the best comprehensive work in English – I still prefer Ravindranathan’s Bakunin and the Italians for the final years), and John Randolph’s intriguing study of the intellectual life that surrounded Bakunin as he came of age. PM Press will release in March an English translation of Wolfgang Eckhardt’s The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association. Eckhardt argues that this represented a schism between parliamentary party politics and social-revolutionary concepts that continues to resonate to the present day.

While the quality (if not the quantity) of this literature is far superior to that which inspired my original essay, Bakunin still has not received his due. English-readers have access to only a small sample of Bakunin’s writings. However, new English-language translations of Bakunin’s essays and letters are being regularly posted to Shawn Wilbur’s http://blog.bakuninlibrary.org (some are working drafts, others completed), even if one often wishes for more contextual information (which might well be provided when his eagerly awaited Bakunin Reader is published by PM Press).

There has also been a bit of a flurry of denunciations by academics (largely post-modernists), much of it part of a larger war on rationalism and social revolution. Exemplary in this regard is Saul Newman, who drags a largely imagined Bakunin into his postmodernist analysis of power. Brian Morris has issued a pamphlet for the bicentenary of Bakunin’s birth, Bakunin and the Human Subject (building upon his 1993 Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom), which succinctly refutes this post-modern school of falsification.

Randolph’s The House in the Garden is a richly documented account of the intellectual currents that swirled around the Bakunin family estate. We see here a young Bakunin, beginning to work out his philosophy (albeit already influential in introducing contemporary European philosophy to what was an intellectual and economic backwater) and like his peers somewhat inclined to interpret daily life through rather idealized lenses. Randolph offers a nuanced account of Bakunin’s effort to liberate his sister Varvara from her unhappy marriage, which makes it clear (though some reviewers argue otherwise) that throughout this episode he worked to support her in her efforts to realize her own destiny, even if he did not fully appreciate the social constraints which limited her ability to do so. Randolph offers a valuable exploration not only of the influences that shaped Bakunin, but of wider themes in Russian intellectual history in a period when it was increasingly clear that the old order could not be sustained.

Morris’ Bakunin and the Human Subject offers a spirited defense of its subject. “Harassed, denigrated, jailed, ridiculed and misunderstood in his own day, [Bakunin] was now being intellectually assaulted by liberal and Marxist scholars in the most appalling … fashion.” (3) Morris first responded with his 1993 book explicating Bakunin’s theory of social revolution, and now with this pamphlet which unfortunately must engage not only these longstanding detractors, but a new torrent of misrepresentation by writers who purport to be anarchists.

Much of the pamphlet is devoted to the assault on Bakunin by “post”-anarchists, who rather than embracing Bakunin’s sophisticated, humanist approach instead propose to build a denatured anarchism upon the bones of the sterile philosophy of the likes of Stirner. These professional theorists misrepresent Bakunin and the anarchist tradition so systematically that it is difficult to attribute the results to a failure of the intellect. They reject even the idea that human beings (to quote Todd May, a pioneer in this line of obfuscation) “possess characteristics that enable one to live justly with others in society.” (Morris, 8)

Morris (10), like Saltman, sees Bakunin as an evolutionary naturalist, who saw a world in a constant creative process of becoming, albeit within material constraints arising out of the past and the inter-relatedness of the natural world. While post-ies deny the fundamentally social character of humanity, instead suggesting “like Ayn Rand… that societies do not exist, but only individuals” (Morris, 20), Bakunin noted that we were so much social animals that is is impossible to think of humanity apart from society. Bakunin articulated both negative and positive conceptions of liberty – of the development and full enjoyment of our capacities – which he contrasted to the illusory freedoms extolled by the liberals of his day. “All his life,” Morris (27, 29) concludes, “Bakunin … [worked] to outline the kind of society that was conducive to human liberty and solidarity – a truly human society. It was one that was both socialist and libertarian, and no one as far as I am aware has improved on Bakunin’s essential ideas. … As a social theorist as well as a political thinker, Bakunin was well ahead of his time.”

So far ahead that the post-anarchists find themselves returning to concepts which Bakunin and the broader anarchist movement long ago rejected, finding their conception of human freedom too limited, and their reliance upon abstractions like nation and state too dangerous. Thus, Newman (one of many in this tradition) rejects class analysis, rationality, sociability, even humanity itself. (Instead we are urged to embrace the void and develop a “politics” of disruption and unpredictability – explicitly abandoning any notion of emancipation. It is an arid philosophy which has found no social base outside of the academy, where it appeals precisely because it poses no danger to established centers of power.)

Saltman’s book, not widely available and which escaped my notice in the original essay, argues that political theorists would do well to stop ignoring Bakunin; “his work can serve as a powerful corrective to the tendency of twentieth-century regimes to sink into bureaucratic and repressive forms of authority.” (xi) Saltman sets out to correct common misperceptions, to systematically present Bakunin’s political theory, and to explore Bakunin’s revolutionary strategy.

Many of their misconceptions appear to be based upon these critics’ unfamiliarity with Bakunin’s actual writing, attempts to impose life-long theoretical consistency (something rarely found in any serious thinker), and efforts to view his life and work through psycho-historical lenses. Saltman concludes (16), “these authors were [evidently] more interested in dismissing Bakunin’s arguments for political reasons than they were in assessing his thought…”

Saltman argues that Bakunin was a deeply materialist philosopher who made important contributions to our understanding of the nature of the state, bureaucracy, science, revolutionary vanguards and the potential of the peasantry as a revolutionary force. His thought was grounded in a materialist approach that challenged the abstractions imposed by actual and aspiring rulers (with often fatal consequences) with lived experience, a humanist orientation, and respect for the evolving constraints of our natural environment. Bakunin, he concludes, “provide[s] a theoretical grounding that places collectivist anarchism well within the mainstream of useful political analysis… With Bakunin’s work, … [anarchism] gained the stature of a full-fledged political philosophy, worthy of equal consideration among the various political perspectives on the modern world.” (170)

And yet, as Morris demonstrates, philosophers and political scientists have been unable to rise to the challenge, preferring to fall back on their shibboleths and epithets – on their fundamentally religious acceptance of the state, capitalism, and other authoritarian institutions – rather than confront the world as it is, as Bakunin sought to do.

Discussed in this essay:

Jon Bekken, “Bakunin and the Historians,” Libertarian Labor Review 13 (1992), pages 30-32.

Mark Leier, Bakunin: The Creative Passion. Thomas Dunne Books, 2006. Reviewed in ASR 47.

Brian Morris, Bakunin and the Human Subject. Published by the author for the Anarchist Federation, pamphlet, 2014.

Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power. Lexington Books, 2007.

John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism. Cornell University Press, 2007, 304 pages, hardcover.

Richard Saltman, The Social and Political Thought of Michael Bakunin. Greenwood Press, 1983.

Overcoming the Politics of Division & Fear

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Jon Bekken

review essay by Wayne Price, ASR 74 (2018)

William J. Barber with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear. Boston: Beacon Press, 2016.

“What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness [mercy], and to walk humbly with your God.” Micah (Quoted frequently by Rev. Barber)

The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber became nationally known in 2013 for his role in organizing massive demonstrations of African-American and white working class and poor people in North Carolina. “Tens of thousands of people came for thirteen consecutive Moral Mondays” to rally at the statehouse. “By the end of the legislative session, nearly a thousand people had been arrested in the largest wave of mass civil disobedience since the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960.” (x)

Now he is co-chair of the effort to re-build Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign, with demonstrations at state capitals across the country. Thousands of people have been going to their statehouses to take part in the largest coordinated civil disobedience action across states in U.S. history. This is an effort to mobilize a vast “fusion movement” of a wide range of working, poor, discriminated-against, oppressed and exploited women and men, together with people concerned about war and ecological destruction.

This book was written before Rev. Barber had begun to build the new Poor People’s Campaign. It is an excellent introduction to his strategic and ethical thinking and to the faith which motivates him. The book also covers parts of his family and personal history, including the physical ailment which has afflicted him for years but which did not stop his organizing efforts. However, I will focus on his overall thinking.

He calls for a “Third Reconstruction.” The first Reconstruction followed the Civil War, and was a time of unprecedented opportunities for the ex-slaves. It was destroyed in a violent conservative backlash which established Jim Crow. The “Second Reconstruction” was the result of the Civil Rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s, which ended Southern legal segregation. Now Rev. Barber is calling for a “Third” Reconstruction which will finally end racism and other forms of oppression.

The Fusion Coalition

Two things stand out in what Rev. Barber is doing. One is the kind of “fusion coalition” which he is working to build. The other is the moral/religious basis on which he is building it.

Consistent with the prophet’s instruction to “walk humbly with your God,” he prefers to call himself an “organizer” rather than a “leader.” From his first days organizing, he believed in a joint struggle of the African-American movement and of union organizing by workers (of all races and ethnicities), both supported by progressive forces in the church. “Civil rights could not be separated from workers’ rights.” (48) “Is the real issue today race or is it class? We answer: Yes, it’s race and class.” (128) But like his inspiration, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he came to expand this conception while building a “fusion coalition” movement in North Carolina.

We had folks who cared about education, folks who cared about living wages, and others who were passionate about the 1.2 million North Carolinians who didn’t have access to health care. We also had groups petitioning for redress for black and poor women who’d been forcibly sterilized in state institutions, organizations advocating for public financing in elections, and historically black colleges and universities petitioning for better state funding…. Groups concerned about discrimination in hiring, others concerned about affordable housing, and people opposed to the death penalty and other glaring injustices in our criminal justice system. Finally, I noted the movements for environmental justice, immigrant justice, civil rights enforcement, and an end to America’s “war on terror.” (49)

Over time, people with these varying concerns pulled together. “Moral Mondays… resulted from the efforts of 140 organizations that had worked together as a grassroots coalition for seven years.” (xi) Through conferences and joint actions, the groups came to realize some things: “We all recognized the same forces opposing us…. [But] there were more of us than there were of them.” (50)

At times, Rev. Barber had to finesse in order to be as inclusive as he wanted. For example, there was a state referendum on same-sex marriage, deliberately raised by the right to split the LGBTQ community from religious African-Americans. “It wasn’t our job to endorse same-sex marriage…. But the fundamental principle of equal protection under the law was a constitutional and moral principle which our movement had not only to endorse but also to defend…. The codification of hate is never righteous. Legalized discrimination is never just.” (91) This argument was persuasive in the Black community.

Another issue arose when discussing with Janet Cohn, the president of Planned Parenthood. “I’d told her that with our broad coalition we could not endorse abortion, so she asked, ‘Can you support women’s rights and access to health care?’ Absolutely, I told her.” In turn, he asked if she would “speak up for a black women’s right to vote?” (108) She was very willing to do so – and did. The coalition expanded.

However, this agreement seems unclear to me. The question of “abortion” should not be whether the movement calls for abortions, which it does not. It is whether to support women’s right to chose whether or not to have abortions or other procedures. It is not over what opinion anyone (in or out of church) has about abortion. It is over whether anti-choice people should use the courts, the legislatures and the police – the power of the state – to enforce their opinion on all women (which, among other things, violates the moral value of humility!).

How far this effort of coalition-building by Rev. Barber and his allies will go on a national level is yet to be seen. But it is a vitally important effort. In the time of Trump and the rising of the extreme right, this is a major effort at organizing a real resistance and fight-back by the oppressed, exploited and endangered. That has been described as “intersectionality” – understanding the ways in which different oppressions interact and overlap with each other, and the fights against them interact and overlap. This sort of fusion coalition building is essential.

However, a coalition can be too broad. He writes, “We needed to come together with banks and businesspeople.” (38) Of a unionizing drive, he states, “The factory owners could not simply be our enemy. The community needed them as much as they needed us.” (17) But what if the rich are the enemy? What if they benefit from poverty, weak or no unions, super-exploitation of the workers, the extra oppression and poverty of people of color, the divisions among whites and African-Americans and Latinos, and between straight and LGBTQ people, and among religions, and between genders? No doubt there are personally decent business people, but overall, as a class, it is in their interest to maintain all the evils which Rev. Barber and his coalition are fighting. And he says so:

The people most frightened by our fusion coalition were the elites who had inherited the spoils of white power and had run North Carolina by proxy for generations…. What they had on their side, they knew, was money. [They are] shrewd businessmen. (62)

In North Carolina, the coalition faced “an avalanche of corporate funded extremism.” (93)

It is one thing to reach out to racist white workers. It is really in their self-interest overall to work with African-American and Latino working people, and they can come to see it. But it is against the self-interest of the capitalists to join with their workers. Further, the view that “the community needs” businesspeople shows a lack of imagination, especially for someone who once discussed “establishing worker-owned co-ops.” (5) Under present conditions workers have to live with their bosses, but it is possible to think of an alternate, radically democratic and cooperative, way to organize an economy (see Price 2014).

Writing about the English Civil War (of Cromwell and others), Lawrence Stone concluded that a necessary prerequisite to any revolution was “polarization into two coherent groups or alliances of what are naturally and normally a series of fractional and shifting tensions and conflicts within a society.” (quoted in Foner 1980; 31). While not advocating a revolution, Rev. Barber is working at building a “coherent group or alliance” out of conflicted and fractionalized social forces. This is a deliberate effort, as stated in the book’s subtitle, to “overcome the politics of division and fear.” But people need to recognize that a “coherent alliance” of the people will necessarily be counterposed to another “coherent group” of the rich and powerful.

The Moral Movement

Central to Rev. Barber’s approach is a moral appeal. In the words of the prophet Micah, which Barber likes to quote, the aim is “to do justice [and] to love kindness” (often written as “mercy”). His views are rooted in the African-American prophetic tradition. Theologically, he presents himself as a Christian “conservative.” He jokes that his politically conservative opponents are theologically “liberal,” in the sense that they ignore or twist the large parts of the Christian Bible which speaks of doing justice and loving kindness, of helping the poor, of supporting the least among us, of rejecting riches and power, of being humble, and so on. Nor does he limit himself to Christianity. He specifically rejects the view that the Christian church should be the only champion of ethical values in society. He includes all religions, making a point of including Muslims. “My Holy Bible is not the only holy book.” (105)

The Rev. Barber rejects what he takes to be “the liberal consensus that suggests that faith is either divisive or inherently regressive.” Instead he advocates “a faith-rooted moral movement that welcomes people of all faiths, as well as those who struggle with faith.” (66) As a radical humanist, I too reject liberal condescension toward religious views or the belief that religion is “inherently regressive.” I respect all faiths. While some have used religion to justify the worst of oppressions (as Rev. Barber knows), religious faith has also motivated great struggles for freedom and justice.

However I find his last phrase somewhat condescending toward atheists, agnostics, secularists, humanists, etc., as well as similar references to“people of no particular faith.” (38) I do not feel that I am “struggling with faith” or have “no particular faith,” since I have particular views of my own. In general, I have not found that non-theistic people are any less moral or ethically motivated than are believers in particular religions. (See Price 2009.)

Rev. Barber describes how he came to understand the importance of a directly moral approach when supporting a union organizing drive at a North Carolina Smithfield hog-processing factory. “In the media as well as in the community, the story was simply one of workers’ interests versus business interests.” (69) It was difficult to develop community support. So they decided “to change the narrative by making the workers’ struggle a moral cause for our whole coalition.” (69) They exposed the hard work, the suffering, and the mistreatment of the workers and their families. “The public story was no longer one about workers versus bosses. It was about the moral challenge of people receiving the just fruit of the labor.” (70)

It is completely correct to point to the moral basis of a struggle, of the need to do the right thing, to do justice and love kindness in all our activities. However, this can lead to a certain kind of blindness. Morality (justice and kindness) should not be counterposed to the self-interest of the oppressed. The Smithfield workers’ moral cause only became clear because they were struggling for their self-interest against that of the bosses. It is far easier for workers to see the justice of “receiving the just fruit of their labor” than it is for the bosses, whose financial self-interest lie in not seeing it. And it is easier for the community to see that justice if they realize that the struggle is in all their interests – because “We all recognized the same forces opposing us.” (50)

Elections and the Democratic Party

Most U.S. left and “progressive” forces have a strategy of electing Democrats to replace the Republicans, especially Donald Trump. (I am not talking about how isolated individuals vote every few years, but about the strategy of a movement.) “Resistance” to Trumpism has become primarily a support for the Democratic Party. This party represents a liberal-to-moderate wing of the U.S. capitalist class. It supports capitalism, the attack on U.S. working people, the imperialist national state, and military aggression around the world. In words Democrats recognize the looming danger of global warming, but in practice they propose only mild and inadequate programs. As the failures of the Republicans have driven people to support the Democrats, so the repeated failures of the Democrats have driven people to support the Republicans. This includes the poverty, economic stagnation, low wages and industrial decline of much of the country. Over decades, liberals, union officials, African-American community leaders and other “progressives” have supported the Democrats as a “lesser evil.” The Republicans have consistently become more and more evil while the Democrats have become less and less good – that is, both parties have moved to their right. A minority of liberals have come to advocate a new, third, party as a strategy. This still relies on elections and the use of the government.

This is not Rev. Barber’s strategy. His coalition-building began “when Democrats were in power” in North Carolina. (52) The biased drawing of voting districts is something “which Democrats had engaged in as much as Republicans in the past.” (83) “No one was listening to poor people. Republicans and Democrats alike.” (88) He has worked for popular demonstrations and civil disobedience, rather than voting. Criticized for “not running… candidates who would champion our agenda. [He replied] … we will not win by starting a third party. We will win by changing the conversation for every candidate and party.” (124) He wants to raise “a clear agenda that doesn’t measure success only by electoral outcomes.” (129) He has opposed any effort to tie the coalition to political candidates or parties. He reports winning over working class and rural white people who had supported Republicans in the past, but were impressed that the movement was not a front for Democrats.

Yet his approach is not all that far from the pro-Democratic strategy. He and his co-workers focus on statehouses and electoral laws. They protest the unfairness of the Republicans’ gerrymandering of electoral districts and their voter suppression efforts. These things are worth protesting because they are unfair and repressive. But even the purest, cleanest, representative democracy would still be dominated by the corporate elite. And even the best democracy would still be vulnerable to forces outside of elections as such.

For example, after the Civil War, the Reconstruction era had a wide range of African-Americans elected to state offices, he writes. “More blacks were elected to public office during the period from 1868 to 1880 than at any other time in American history…. African-Americans wielded significant power in every statehouse.” (56) There was a coalition between African-Americans and many white Southerners. But this electoral power came to nothing. The Southern white upper class, former slave owners and businesspeople, mobilized racism among the poorer whites. They armed these people, built up the Klan, instigated “race riots,” murdered and lynched Black leaders, used “violence, intimidation, and the passage of laws that, together came to be called Jim Crow.”(116) They took away the right to vote and all other rights, by legal and illegal measures. The national government, led by Republicans, did nothing in the defense of democracy.

Could this happen again? Consider the history of fascist coups in democratic European countries in the ’20s and ’30s or in the military coup in democratic Chile in 1973. To a lesser extent, we have seen an African-American president be followed by a reactionary, racist, authoritarian president (who lost the popular vote), who has encouraged fascists, who has blatantly served the wealthy, and whose party has worked to suppress the votes of African-Americans and others.

It is dangerous to rely on elections and government power. The government is an instrument of the corporate rich and their agents and cannot be anything else. A mass movement has to be built outside of and against the government and its big business masters. Even reforms are most likely to be won if there is a militant and independent mass movement.

Along with every other issue, there needs to be a focus on workers and their unions. This is not because they are the most deserving but because they have enormous potential power. If the working people decided not to work for even a day, the whole system would grind to a halt. And they could potentially start things up in a different, democratic and cooperative, way. This would truly be a moral transformation of society.

Revolutionary Conclusions

Rev. Barber is aware that the racist capitalist system is facing a severe crisis. He quotes the radical economist Gar Alperowitz, “What we’re really beginning to experience is a process of slow decay, punctuated by a recurring economic crisis, one in which reforms achieve only sporadic gains.” (85) Barber adds, “Though we ended Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s… the wealth divide that is rooted in our history of race-based slavery is more extreme than it has ever been.” (xii-xiii) He warns that “anything less [than a Third Reconstruction], I fear, will mean the self-destruction of our nation.” (xv)

The implication of these statements is that the struggle for reforms can only go so far. Limited gains may be won, and have been won, but they are harder and harder to achieve. “Only sporadic gains” are the order of the day. This poses questions for any popular movement of opposition, such as the Poor People’s Campaign.

It is necessary to build a fusion coalition to fight for reforms, but this is not enough. What is needed is a moral vision of a new kind of society, based on justice and kindness, freedom and equality, radical democracy and cooperation, in all their political, social, and economic aspects. The wealth and power of the capitalist class must be taken from it. Ordinary people – the working class and all oppressed – must be empowered. The Third Reconstruction needs to be a new American Revolution.

This originally appeared on anarkismo.net, and has been slightly condensed for publication here.

References:

Barber, W.J. (2016). The Third Reconstruction. Beacon Press.

Foner, Eric (1980). Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. Oxford University Press.

Price, Wayne (2014). “Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises: A Revolutionary Program.” Anarkismo. https://www.anarkismo.net/article/26931?search_text=Way…Price

Price, Wayne (2009). “Religion and Revolution.” Anarkismo. http://www.anarkismo.net/article/12320?search_text=wayn…price

Notes on Anarchist Economics

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Jon Bekken

by Iain McKay, ASR 74 (2018)

Anarchism is generally not associated with economics. There is no “anarchist” school of economics as there are “Marxist,” “Keynesian” and so on ones. This does not mean there are no anarchist texts on economics. Proudhon springs to mind here, with his numerous works on the subject – the three volumes on property (most famous being the first, What is Property?) and the two volumes of System of Economic Contradictions (of which, only the first has been translated) – as does Kropotkin, with his Fields, Factories and Workshops. However, in spite of various important works, there is no well-established body of work which can be called anarchist economics.

There are various reasons for this. Partly, it is due to the typical isolation of the English-speaking movement: many works which could be used to create an anarchist economics have never been translated into English. Partly, it is due to an undeserved sense of inferiority: too many anarchists have followed Marxists by taking Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy as an accurate account and honest critique of Proudhon’s ideas (it is neither, as I show in “The Poverty of (Marx’s) Philosophy,” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 70). Partly, it is due to anarchists being – in the main – working-class people who often do not have the time or resources to do the necessary research – and more often, rightly, prefer to change the world than interpret it, particularly given we wish to end the exploitation and oppression we are subject to sooner rather than later.

What would anarchist economics be? There are two different – if somewhat interrelated – possibilities.

First, and least important, would be the economics of an anarchist society. As such a society does not exist, this explains why it is the least important. Adam Smith did not speculate about markets in theory, he described them by observing their workings (I write “markets” rather than “capitalism” as capitalism – wage labor – was not extensive when he was writing and so he was describing an economy marked by substantial self-employed artisans and farmers – an ideal which appealed to Smith). So, in this sense, any anarchist economics would develop as an actual anarchist society develops. Attempts to produce in detail now how a libertarian socialist economy would function are misplaced. All that systems like Parecon can show is that certain notions (such as detailed planning) cannot and will not work – even if its advocates do not seem to recognize this.

So all we can do if sketch general principles – self-management, socio-economic federalism, etc. – and discuss how tendencies within capitalism show their validity. This is important, as anarchists do not abstractly compare the grim reality of capitalism to ideal visions. Rather, as Proudhon stressed (and Kropotkin praised him for), we need to analyze capitalism to understand it and to explore its tendencies – including those tendencies which point beyond it.

Which brings us to the other, more relevant, form of anarchist economics, which would be the analysis and critique of capitalism. The two are interrelated, for what we oppose in capitalism would not exist within an anarchist economy. So, for example, Proudhon’s analysis of exploitation as occurring in production – because workers have sold their liberty to the boss who keeps the “collective force” and “surplus of labor” they create – points logically to workers’ cooperatives (self-management) as the basis of a free economy. Unsurprisingly, he and subsequent anarchists opposed associated labor to wage-labor.

Here we do have much to build on. Proudhon’s analysis of exploitation predates Marx’s nearly identical one by two decades – ironically in 1847 Marx mocked the Frenchman for advocating what he later came to advocate in 1867 (see my “Proudhon’s Constituted Value and the Myth of Labour Notes,” Anarchist Studies 25:1). Other insights, including methodological ones, can be drawn from his and Kropotkin’s contributions – although much of it may need to be translated first.

This does not mean we cannot useful draw upon other schools. Marx, for all his flaws, provided genuine insights into the workings of capitalism. Keynes may have sought to save capitalism from itself, but to do so he had to understand how it works and so is worth reading. The post-Keynesian school, likewise, has a substantial amount of work which would be of use in constructing an anarchist economics. (Steve Keen, author of the excellent Debunking Economics, is a post-Keynesian.) Those schools that have been developed – often explicitly so – to defend capitalism (such as neo-classicalism) have little to offer, except perhaps as examples of what not to do.

Which points to another key aspect of any anarchist economics: an understanding of the flaws of other schools – particularly the mainstream neo-classical school. It should help us see when we are being lied to or when certain conclusions are based on preposterous assumptions or models. The same applies to Marxist economics, which all too often woefully mixes up empirical reality and explanatory categories. As such, it would play a key role in intellectual self-defense.

The key issue, though, is not to confuse understanding how capitalism works from a libertarian perspective, an anarchist economics, with the economics of an anarchy. So an anarchist economics in this sense is still in its early days – even after over 150 years! – but there is a foundation there which can be usefully built upon. The real question is, how do we start? As Kropotkin suggests, by basing our analysis of empirical evidence rather than the abstract model building of neoclassical economics. We need to root our understanding of capitalism in the reality of capitalism – and our struggles against it.

This is no trivial task – but one which would be of benefit.

Israelis protest for African refugees

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Jon Bekken

By Raymond S. Solomon, ASR 74 (2018)

In the Spring 2018 Anarcho-Syndicalist Review (Issue 73) it was reported that “At least 222 planned expulsions of refugees were halted last year when [many] airline pilots refused” to fly planes with African and Middle Eastern refugees being expelled from Germany.

The same article reported that “In January, three pilots for Israel airline El Al announced that they would not operate flights that were deporting African refugees.” This is, as the saying goes, “the tip of the iceberg” of increasing opposition in Israel to governmental threats to deport African immigrants. On February 27, the Israeli newspaper Harretz reported that:

In an unusual show of defiance, the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency has taken a public stand against the government of Israel and its plans to deport African asylum seekers.

The Jewish Agency Board of Governors published a resolution … at the conclusion of a three-day meeting, urging the Israeli government to grant legal status to 500 African asylum seekers who arrived in the country years ago as unaccompanied minors and were housed, fed and educated in youth villages run by the Jewish Agency and the Ministry of Education.

Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery reports on his blog that many Israelis have committed to giving refuge to African immigrants facing deportation.

The issue of sanctuary for refugees facing death is a very deep one, cutting directly at the heart and soul of many people in Israel, because of the many Jews who were denied sanctuary before and during the Second World War. Anarchists Maria Louisa Berneri and her husband Vernon Richards, editor of the anarchist publication Freedom, wrote about this both during and after the war.

In introductory material to his late wife Berneri’s posthumous collection of some of her Freedom articles, Neither East Nor West, Richards wrote:

We know, for example, that the British government, knowing exactly what was happening in Nazi-occupied Europe, sought to close the last escape-route down the Danube. In 1943 Lord Cranbourne, the Colonial Secretary, wrote to the British ambassador in Turkey to stress that Jews in occupied Europe should not be encouraged to escape, nor should they be organized or helped.

Richards cites a BBC Channel 4 documentary, Raoul Wallenberg: Between the Lines, showing that “400,000 places within the [United States] quota” were not filled, leaving these people to be murdered. Richards stressed that “The United States gave refuge to only 10 percent of the number that they were allowed by law.”

Berneri had great empathy for the Jews faced with extermination during the Nazi horrors. In “Hell Ships for Refugees,” originally published in 1942, Maria Louisa Berneri cites the Italian-language American anarchist magazine L’Adunata about Jewish refugees in a coffin ship going from port to port with desperate passengers who would rather kill themselves than return to Nazi Europe. They were prevented from landing at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Also, “Ramon Castillo (President of Argentina) gave the order for them to leave,” after that they were re-embarked and went to a Brazilian port where they were again rejected.

After the Second World War many Nazi war criminals found a safe haven in Argentina and Brazil. Among the Nazis who found refuge was Joseph Mengele, the Auschwitz “angel of death” who performed gross medical experiments, including how long it would take a baby to die without food or water, and helped decide who would go to labor and who to the gas chambers. He died in Brazil in 1979. Mengele was also very involved with the murder of Gypsies’ children at Theresienstadt. Eichmann was in hiding in Argentina for many years before being captured.

The above incidents and others like them may well be in the minds of the German and Israeli pilots who have refused and will continue to refuse to fly refugees out of their countries. Today there are a growing number of people determined not to let such episodes of history be repeated.

Selected References

Anatoli (Kuznetsov), A. (1970) Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel (New, Complete, Uncensored Version). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Translated from the Russian into English by David Floyd.)

Berneri, Marie Louisa. (1988) Neither East Nor West: Selected Writing 1939-1948. Freedom Press.

Bettelheim, Bruno. (1943) “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 38, 417-452.

Bettelheim, Bruno. (1960) The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age. Glencoe, The Free Press. (Bettelheim was held in two concentration camps, and his research after the war explored the psychology of the doctors experimenting on the inmates.)

Morse, Arthur D. (1967) While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy. Random House.

Pelhe, John, Josiah DuBois, Jr. and Randolph Paul. (1943, 1944.) “A Report to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews.” Reprinted in A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust by David Wyman and Rafael Medoff, reissued by New Press, 2002.

Labor & the Climate Crisis

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Jon Bekken

by Jon Bekken, ASR 78 (Winter 2020)

Global warming is big business. Twenty giant oil companies are directly responsible for one-third of all carbon emissions since 1965. The U.S.’s largest banks have financed $1.9 trillion in fossil fuel projects since 2016. Those who run the global economy are not ignoring climate change – they are actively working to make it worse. Why? Because there are quick profits to be made, and the long-term costs will fall to the rest of us.

It’s not that nothing is being done. Wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles (the latter hardly harbingers of a green economy) are spreading quickly. But this growth in clean energy isn’t nearly fast enough to limit global warming according to the International Energy Agency’s annual World Energy Outlook. Despite the growth of renewables, the burning of fossil fuels is growing even faster and global greenhouse gas emissions are on track to continue rising for the next 20 years.

Ultimately the climate crisis is a workers’ issue. It is workers the whole world over who will pay the price if we allow the bosses to destroy our planet, and at least as importantly it is workers who have the ability to take decisive action to address the crisis.

Too often the business unions have bought into a false debate between saving the environment and saving jobs, instead of asking what sort of jobs we want and what sort of world we want to live in. It is true, of course, that there are in the short term jobs to be had clear cutting the world’s forests, strip mining the earth for coal, and burning fossil fuels. But once the devastation is complete these jobs will be gone, and only the profits will remain.

There could also be jobs in reforesting, converting to renewable energy, retrofitting inefficient buildings and industrial practices, rebuilding public transit systems, and cleaning up the industrial wastelands that litter the world. Unlike the jobs to be had destroying the planet, these jobs are not only useful – they have a future. (Of course, there would also be new jobs if we allow the planet wreckers to proceed on their merry way – jobs building dikes to hold the seas back, as mercenaries protecting the fat cats trying to hold the desperate hordes at bay, scavenging the submerged wreckage, fighting fires and cleaning up toxic debris.)

The politicians hold fancy conventions around the world while the planet burns. Meanwhile, the plutocrats plunder the planet as quickly as they can, raking in the profits while the looting is good. What do they care if they kill off millions and consign the rest of us to misery and privation for generations to come, so long as they can keep accumulating their blood-soaked money?

The question is not whether this vandalism of ecosystems across the planet will eventually be brought to a halt. It will. The question is how much destruction we will allow to be done in the meantime. There is still time to limit the scope of global warming and rising sea levels. Even if we are unsuccessful in winning the full decarbonization that is so urgently needed, we could still mitigate the devastation. We can afford neither to succumb to despair, nor to the hope (against the evidence of decades of dithering) that our rulers will act before it is too late.

What can workers do in the face of bosses and politicians determined to speed climate change? On the one hand, they rely on us to carry out the destruction from which they profit. They are only able to strip-mine the mountains, lay pipelines across our waterways, replace vibrant ecosystems with dying monocultures, and pollute our skies and water because workers not only carry out this destructive labor at their behest, but also supply a wide array of support services to make it possible. Power workers could refuse not only to operate facilities that worsen the climate emergency, they could refuse service to particularly egregious polluters. Transport workers could refuse to haul the means of mass destruction. Construction workers could refuse the demolition and building activity that makes this destruction possible. Workers could refuse to manufacture or service equipment that does not meet environmental standards or is destined for those who are destroying our future.

There are precedents for this sort of conscientious refusal of planet-killing and anti-social work. Building laborers in Melbourne implemented a series of Green Bans in the 1970s to prevent the destruction of wilderness areas and affordable housing. For many years Australian dockworkers refused to handle US warships that might be carrying nuclear weapons. British mechanics refused to repair aircraft engines for the Chilean military junta, grounding most of its air force. Just this year furniture workers in the United States engaged in a short strike to protest their employer’s sale of furniture to the ICE concentration camps. In Europe, dockworkers have refused to handle shipments of military equipment to Saudi Arabia for use in its brutal war in Yemen. As workers, we have enormous power in our hands, should we organize and resolve to use it.

We are told that we cannot address the climate crisis because it would hurt coal workers. (It’s hard to drum up sympathy for the coal barons.) But the coal miners have quite different interests than their bosses, who have proven time and again that they do not care whether the miners live or die.

In 1968, after a mine disaster that killed 78 coal miners, rank-and-file miner Jock Yablonski decided to challenge United Mine Workers President Tony Boyle. As Yablonski asked, “What good is a union that reduces coal dust in the mines only to have miners and their families breathe pollutants in the air, drink pollutants in the water, and eat contaminated commodities?” Yablonski lost a close election, and was murdered by Boyle’s hit men. A year later, tens of thousands of miners joined wildcat strikes for better safety and marched to demand protections against black lung disease.

Miners continue to be killed by coal mine collapses and explosions, and new cases of Black Lung Disease have skyrocketed in recent years. As coal consumption has declines, the mine owners have looted their companies, abandoning their commitments to workers’ pensions and health care (and, increasingly, even their wages). Coal miners have fought for a host of measures to protect themselves and their communities from the coal barons, and this is no time to be toadying to the bosses to keep them afloat.

In the 1980s, Tony Mazzocchi, a leader in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, argued for winding down industries that harmed workers, environment and society while taking steps to safeguard their workers – proposing a revived GI Bill for atomic workers who would be left unemployed by nuclear disarmament and a Superfund for fossil fuel workers. The Labor Network for Sustainability and others are pressing unions to take up these issues once again, but too many union officials are so accustomed to accepting “managerial rights” in all spheres of our existence that they can not even conceive of demanding a different kind of economy – one in which we are no longer offered a bitter choice between eating today or breathing tomorrow.

Solidarity for our Future

There have been countless examples over the years of workers honoring picket lines in solidarity with workers on strike or who were being denied the right to organize. Millions of workers have refused unsafe work, individually and through their unions. Logging workers have demanded sustainable forestry methods (which mean more jobs, as well as protecting ecosystems), farmworkers have fought agains pesticides which poison our food and the land (and the workers). Before pollution is spewed into the environment it is poisoning workers on the job.

In recent years there has been an upsurge in unions raising demands that not only benefit their own members, but also the broader public. Teachers have demanded support systems, improved facilities, and adequate school funding. Nurses have campaigned for safe staffing levels in the face of speed-ups that endanger hospital staff and patients alike. Public transit and other service workers have fought privatization schemes and service cutbacks, pointing out that these are an attack on the entire working class.

There is no reason that this approach could not be expanded. Coal miners and steelworkers have been ill-served by alliances with the bosses to preserve profits under the guise of protecting jobs. The jobs are vanishing, the workers have been stiffed, the number of black lung victims is rising, local communities are dying, and so are the rest of us. Would it not make more sense to negotiate for a rapid transition – one that would phase out coal production, secure and remediate the mines, support retirees and black lung victims, and help workers and their communities build sustainable local economies?

Instead of taking whatever work is on offer, no matter how destructive, building trades unions could demand that new construction be more sustainable and campaign for policies requiring environmental retrofitting of existing facilities. They could actively campaign for solar and other renewable energy projects, and organize those who are doing this work, often for significantly lower wages.

Just as Lucas Aerospace workers developed plans in the 1970s and 1980s to convert their facilities from manufacturing weapons to socially useful production, so too could workers engaged in manufacturing gas guzzling vehicles that destroy our planet while clogging our streets.

The Lucas workers developed their plans through their unions’ coordination committee, based on suggestions from the rank and file. They were not implemented because the company was unwilling to negotiate such matters, and the workers lacked the will (and likely the broader public support that would have been needed) to seize their factories, show the managers the door, and start running them themselves – working to meet urgent social needs instead of quarterly earnings targets. And so Lucas gradually disintegrated, some bits sold off to other companies, and most of the operations simply shut down.

The bosses lack the imagination and the sense of urgency needed to resolve this crisis. Leaving them in charge can only lead to mass unemployment, ecological catastrophe, abandoned facilities, and a landscape littered with toxic waste.

We need rapid action to slash greenhouse gases and remediate (to the extent possible) the damage that has already been done. Climate action shouldn’t mean lost jobs – done right, with unions and community organizations in the lead, it can mean better work for most people than what’s on offer today. A just transition to a sustainable economy would transform work more broadly, increasing the power of all workers.

We would decide what work needs to be done, drawing upon our experience and our knowledge of our workplaces and our communities to create solutions that slash pollution and waste – enriching our lives and our communities in the process.

But this will only happen if workers fight for it. The future that the bosses and politicians are stumbling toward is bleak indeed.

Global Warming: Get Rid of Capitalism!

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Jon Bekken

by Bangladesh Anarcho Syndicalist Federation, ASR 78 (Winter 2020)

As the climate warms, it changes the nature of global rainfall, evaporation, snow, stream flow and other factors that affect water supply and quality. Specific impacts include: Warmer water temperatures affect water quality and accelerate water pollution.

A World Bank report released a few months ago, “Shock Waves: Managing the Impact of Climate Change on Poverty,” predicts that global warming will push 100 million more people into extreme poverty over the next decade and a half. … This would add a hundred million to the roughly 700 million people earning $1.90 a day or less, or what the World Bank defines as “extreme poverty.”

The people of the poorest countries are the most threatened, especially the people of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. According to the report, climate change will have terrible consequences for agriculture and health of the poor parts of the world. Crop yields will be reduced by 5 percent by 2030. This will cause food costs to rise for the poorest people. Natural disasters, like flooding, will become more frequent. And diseases will become more widespread among the poorest parts of the world.

In 2015, 195 countries signed up to the Paris Agreement, a non-binding treaty aiming to keep the global average temperature rise to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.” The signatories commissioned the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce a report comparing the probable impacts of a 1.5°C global warming with 2°C and assessing what it would take to keep to the lower level. The report came out in October 2018 and synthesizes all published research to 15th May 2018. However, the official version is not as written by the scientists who authored it. The final wording is the outcome of political negotiations and is heavily redacted. We know from leaks that the US was one of the governments intent on watering it down.

The full report makes it clear that the consequences will be severe even if the 1.5°C target is met. It also states that, “there is a very high likelihood that under current emission trajectories and current national pledges the Earth will warm more than 1.5 degrees above targets set in Paris…” This was cut from the final report. Also omitted was the verdict that if countries make the cuts they say they will then the world is on course for a 3°C warming by 2100. And if they don’t, global warming could go as high as 7°C!

This latest IPCC report only confirms the complete inadequacy of the Paris Agreement and the huge gap between words and necessary action if the planet is going to be able to sustain human civilization or any life at all. That Agreement fails on all four counts that scientists and environmental groups agree need to be met, namely:

1. Catalyze immediate, urgent and drastic emission reductions

These cuts, or “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs) were drawn up by governments, based on what they were prepared to deliver, not on what scientists think is needed. They go nowhere near far enough. For instance, aviation and shipping emissions, which are as large as the emissions of Britain and Germany combined, were not even included. Meanwhile, Australia’s blatant refusal to phase out coal by 2050 to keep emissions within the Paris target highlights the absurdity of expecting each capitalist power to put the survival of the globe before its own national (profit-making) interest. The world’s biggest coal exporter said it would be “irresponsible” to comply with the IPCC recommendation to stop using coal to generate electricity. Instead the government’s priority is to cut domestic electricity prices, not greenhouse gas emissions, which have risen for four consecutive years! Coal generates two-thirds of Australia’s electricity and earned it a record A$61bn in exports in the 2017-18 financial year. In China, slowing ‘economic growth’ has led the government to withdraw emission curbs on heavy industries only recently introduced to reduce disastrous levels of air pollution. Can’t let difficulty breathing affect profit-making.

2. Provide adequate support to “developing nations” for transformation

According to the International Energy Agency, transformation to a fossil-free world will require $1,000bn per year by 2020. Around two-thirds of this, $670bn, will need to be spent in “developing nations,” requiring a significant transfer of finance from North to South. The big capitalist countries hold just 10% of the world’s population but produce around 60% of the greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere.

However, the Paris Agreement only commits to “mobilizing” $100bn per year by 2020, to cover not just emission cuts but also adaptation. The definition of “mobilize” is deliberately broad, to include loans, private finance, grants with strings attached, and re-allocation of aid budgets. There is even talk of calling money sent home by migrants working in richer countries a form of climate finance, and counting it in the total “mobilized” by the US, France, Germany, etc. In short, the proposed funding is totally inadequate, when it’s not a complete fiction. It is totally dwarfed by the estimated $5,300bn a year governments spend on direct and indirect subsidies to fossil fuels.

3. Deliver justice for impacted people

According to the UN Environment Programme, on top of an annual $670bn needed for emissions cuts by 2020, vulnerable countries will need another $150bn per year for adaptation measures to protect them from the worst impact of climate change. The UN’s $100 billion put forward represents less than 15% of what is formally needed!

The large capitalist powers are the biggest polluters but the idea that they should make a commensurate contribution to a solution has been watered down at the behest of the US and others. The Paris deal just says that “developed countries” should “take the lead” on providing finance, as part of a “shared effort” by all parties.

4. Focus on genuine, effective action rather than false solutions

The Paris agreement aims to reduce anthropogenic emissions by the second half of this century, yet a 1.5° target requires a definitive end to fossil fuel use by 2050! Plus, the deal allows for continued fossil-fuel burning “offset” by “removals” via dubious carbon capture, geo-engineering or forestry schemes. Regulations to rein in destructive industries, halt deforestation and stop mining fossil fuels are not even hinted at. And the agreement has no precedence over existing or new trade agreements, allowing firms to overturn environmental regulations when profits are threatened. In short, it is more a PR exercise than a serious plan to reduce emissions. When Trump withdrew the United States from the ‘deal’ just over a year ago, it was of little consequence. Its goals are far too little too late.

Capitalism is killing the planet. Even where a price might be put on it, the cost of cleaning up the environment is greater than the value of economic growth as measured by GDP. (Hence the agreement’s blurring over how to pay for its feeble recommendations.) The disappearance of species, toxins in food, water, air, land, indicate capitalism’s ravaging of the planet. The profits capitalism makes from exploiting the working class would be negated if they had to include environmental cost in their production. No amount of climate accords, spurious recycling schemes, or whatever can reconcile capitalism’s pursuit of profit with Marx’s insight on the need to hand the globe down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. The answer should be staring every environmentalist in the face: Get rid of capitalism!

Interestingly, a recent poll showed that concern about climate change reflects the global class structure. The poorer countries, with Africa and Latin America leading the pack, say climate change is of “grave concern.” By contrast, even though climate change is recognize as a real problem by international institutions of Empire, less than half of the people polled in the United States see climate change as a serious problem. …

Revolution [is not] the [inevitable] consequence of class struggle. There is another possibility: our common ruin. This is the reality that humanity faces. Global capitalism is pushing our planet, our common home, to its limits. The First World culture of consumption and waste is pushing the environment to a breaking point. The majority of humanity, the global poor, the proletariat suffers. A minority, the global rich, the bourgeoisie consume more and more, waste more and more.

If we are to avoid our common ruin, if there is to be a future for our children and their children, we must awaken. We are the vast majority. We are the only ones who can stop this madness. Time is running out. Now is the time to raise the banner of the Global People’s Struggle for Anarcho-Syndicalism. Ruin or revolution?

Outlaw Unions, Illegal Strikes

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Jon Bekken

by Jon Bekken, ASR 79 (Spring 2020)

The 1970 wildcat postal strike quickly threatened to expand to other federal government workers, forcing the federal government to seriously negotiate with public workers for the first time.

Public sector workers had been organizing for more than 150 years, fighting poverty wages, unsafe working conditions, shakedowns by party bosses, and abusive treatment more generally. But even where their unions were not outlawed, the right to strike almost always was – and the government proved as vicious in fighting strikes as did any private sector boss. Aside from building trades workers, who carried their unions (and their working conditions) with them when they took public sector jobs, most early public sector labor organizations might be better described as associations than unions, offering insurance, lobbying and other benefits.

There were exceptions, including the Boston policemen, who struck in 1919 after union officials were suspended and threatened with firing if they did not dissolve the union. The largest teachers’ union was formed as a loose federation that officially rejected strikes. More militant teachers’ organizations, such as those in the Chicago Teachers Federation, which began organizing in the 1890s, scared the Board of Education so much that membership was made a fireable offense. Fed up with low wages, no job security and enormous class sizes, and inspired by a resurgent labor movement, teachers’ unions conducted dozens of strikes in the 1940s, and have continued striking to the present day. Most of these strikes were illegal and hundreds of union leaders and strike activists were imprisoned, but by the 1970s most states were forced to tolerate teacher (and other public sector) unions, and many legalized strikes rather than suffer the indignity of workers successfully thumbing their noses at the law.

By the 1950s a handful of states, including Wisconsin (which more recently has imposed draconian restrictions) accepted collective bargaining. But the absence of such rights did not stop workers from organizing unions (California recognized public employee unions only in 1978, but rank-and-file unions had long had a strong presence) or from striking. The famous 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while in Memphis to support the workers) was illegal and local officials long refused to recognize or negotiate with the union.

Even today, only 12 states recognize public employees’ right to strike – just as many completely bar them from union recognition or collective bargaining. But workers have organized in every state, whether or not they have legal rights, and have won better conditions through their struggles. Some of the massive state-wide teachers strikes in recent years were in states that officially ban collective bargaining (strikes were illegal in all but Colorado), and New York City transit workers struck in 1966, 1980 and again in 2005 despite a state law prohibiting strikes and providing for massive fines and imprisonment of union officials. (More than a thousand workers marched with TWU Local 100 President Roger Toussaint when he surrendered to serve three days in jail; the union was also fined $2.5 million – far less than workers gained in the final contract.)

In 1970, U.S. postal workers belonged to eight separate craft unions, including the National Association of Letter Carriers, which lobbied Congress for better pay, assisted workers with grievances, and managed union benefit plans. There was no collective bargaining and strikes were illegal. A 1968 study reported “widespread disquiet” as a result of “antiquated personnel practices … [and] appalling working conditions.” In New York City, high living costs had forced many postal workers onto welfare to supplement incomes eroded by surging inflation. There had been several small wildcats, such as a 1969 “sick-out” by 72 workers at the Kingsbridge Station in the Bronx. So when the Letter Carriers’ Bronx-Manhattan local voted to strike and set up picket lines around New York City post offices, 25,000 drivers and clerks joined the strike, shutting down postal operations in the city. The strike quickly spread to workers throughout New York state, New Jersey and Connecticut despite union statements discouraging strike action. The strike shut down New York’s financial industry, kept 9,000 people from receiving draft notices, delayed the mailing of census forms and tax refunds, and generally disrupted the country’s communications. By March 21, the strike had spread to more than 200 cities and towns across the country, including Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Denver and Boston.

Ultimately, more than 200,000 postal workers in 15 states joined the wildcat. Government and union officials moved quickly against the strike. The courts quickly issued an injunction against the New York strikers, and the head of the Letter Carriers said the union’s executive council was considering expelling the New York City local because of the strike. Chicago postal workers voted to strike the same day postal union leaders called upon workers to end the strike in exchange for a government promise to consider workers’ demands. The next day, New York City postal workers voted almost unanimously to defy the back-to-work agreement.

The government had to act, as the strike was on the verge of spreading to other government employees. The head of the American Federation of Government Employees reported that he had to intervene personally to prevent several strikes. National Federation of Federal Employees locals throughout the country indicated that they wanted to strike in support of the postal workers. The National Association of Government Employees similarly heard from union members across the country who wanted to strike, looking to the postal workers as examples. Injunctions and heavy fines were levied on union leaders; but the workers paid no attention. President Richard Nixon took time off from bombing Cambodia to dispatch 24,000 soldiers to distribute the mail in New York City, but they were ineffective. While Nixon insisted there would be no negotiations until workers abandoned the strike, Secretary of Labor William Usery quietly began negotiations that brought the strike to an end.

Postal workers won improved conditions and a 6 percent wage increase retroactive to 1969, with another 8 percent to follow. But while the government agreed to collective bargaining, the Postal Reorganization Act passed in April 1970 continued the ban on postal strikes, instead providing for binding arbitration.

Following the strike, five unions representing postal clerks, mail processors, maintenance and motor vehicle workers merged into a new American Postal Workers Union, and several strike activists were elected to local and national union office.

This was the first nation-wide strike of government employees, and the first nation-wide strike in recent decades to be carried on not only independently of, but in opposition to, national union officials. The strikers did not play by the rules of the game. The risks they took were considerable. Striking against the government is a felony, punishable by a year and a day in jail and a $1,000 fine.

The Great Postal Strike of 1970 was the moment they were “standing 10 feet tall instead of groveling in the dust,” as a Manhattan letter carrier put it. They got fed up, joined together, and transformed both the Postal Service and their own lives forever.

Sources: Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Revised edition), PM Press, 2014. Philip F. Rubio,There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality, University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Revolt of the Good Guys: Remembering the 1970 US Postal Strike

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Jon Bekken

By David Feldmann, ASR 79 (Spring 2020)

This March marks the 50th anniversary of the 1970 postal strike. Postal workers across the country struck the federal government for better pay and working conditions after years of stagnating wages, mistreatment by postal management, and an indifferent Congress which refused to address and resolve any of the key grievances of the nation’s letter carriers employed by the U.S. Post Office Department (the predecessor to today’s U.S. Postal Service). Until 1970, this dynamic seemed unlikely to change – indeed, it took the largest wildcat strike in U.S. history to make it change.

In New York City, where the strike began, despite opposition from postal management and union leaders alike, most postal workers were eligible for welfare benefits, yet Congress would not vote in favor of granting raises to the postal workforce.

Year after year, letter carriers worked for low pay in increasingly decrepit postal installations. At that time, a carrier started at an annual salary of $6,176 and didn’t reach peak pay of $8,442 until they had twenty years on the job. In areas with high costs of living, even peak pay put postal workers below the poverty line. Beginning with carriers represented by Branch 36 in New York City, the strike soon included over 200,000 workers in multiple postal crafts – mail handlers, clerks, and ancillary employees. As federal workers, every one of these strikers was engaged in an illegal labor stoppage and faced termination and possible imprisonment, which begs the question: Why did these workers risk everything?

This very question was asked of a letter carrier walking a picket line by a news reporter in the midst of the strike (a video clip of which can be seen in the AFL-CIO produced documentary, “The Strike At 40,” available on YouTube):

“What if what you’re doing is illegal?”

“I don’t care. Now, I know it’s against the law…if they want to put me in jail, put me in jail. But they haven’t got a jail big enough to put all of us in!”

While these straightforward words of defiance were common among the rank-and-file, union leadership was much more cautious and diplomatic. In fact, the NALC never openly called for a strike and made a point of ordering strikers back to work after the initial strike vote in NYC. Eventually, as carriers in city after city followed suit and went out on strike themselves, the real leaders of the NALC proved to be carriers themselves.

Following successful strike votes in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, Postmaster General Blount promised the heads of the NALC that demands would be considered but only if workers went back to their stations and resumed mail delivery. The response from Branch 9 workers in Minneapolis seemed to reflect the sentiment of posties nationwide: “Congress has consistently given us promises. We’re not going to work merely for more promises.”

The strike continued. More strike votes passed throughout Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, and Massachusetts. There were even rumors of strikes among other federal workers represented by AFGE and NFFE, no doubt inspired by the resolve of the postal workers. Over the next several days, workers set up picket lines at numerous post offices. Most of these were reportedly “hard” picket lines, with non-striking workers forcefully prevented from crossing.

President Nixon told the nation that no further negotiation would occur until strikers returned to work. He even declared a national emergency and called in National Guard troops to work as scab labor at mail sorting facilities in New York. By all accounts, this was a disastrous move. Lacking basic training in mail sorting, troops were unable to process even a small fraction of mail which had accumulated in previous days. For all intents and purposes, mail delivery was halted nationwide. The stock exchange was closed.

In the face of a crippled economy and continued public support for the strikers, the striking federal workers appeared to have all the bargaining power in the world. Despite threats that union officials and shop stewards were in danger of being jailed, the official NALC leadership relented and began talks with federal authorities and postal management, even going as far as to acknowledge the legitimacy of the strikers’ demands. Herman Sandbank, Executive Vice President of NALC Branch 36, told the NY Times, “the membership insisted on us leading them in a strike and there was no way we could hold them back because they were right.” Eight days after it began, the federal government conceded and the postal strike ended in victory for America’s postal workers.

Soon, Congress passed the Postal Reorganization Act which transformed the Post Office Department into the semi-independent United States Postal Service, ensuring the continuation of universal service to postal customers throughout the country. The postal unions gained stronger bargaining rights though the right to strike, the very tactic which had won these gains, remained illegal. Wages and working conditions improved. Several unions consolidated to become the American Postal Workers Union but the NALC and the Mail Handlers union remained separate.

No union leaders or members were jailed for their participation in the historic and unprecedented strike. The improvements in pay, conditions and dignity on the job for postal workers in subsequent years are incalculable. Despite a massive decrease in first-class mail volume the last twenty years, the USPS continues to handle billions of packages a year in addition to letters, cards, magazines, etc. The current number of postal employees remains more than half a million strong. Were another postal strike to occur today, we can only surmise the level of public support and economic impact it would have but it’s probably safe to assume that, as in 1970, it would be led by postal workers themselves.

One would hope that the militancy of yesteryear would recur, exemplified by these words spoken by a letter carrier on the picket line, “We can not take it any longer. Either they give us what we should have or we will stay out on strike until hell freezes over.”

An earlier version appeared in the March 2019 NALC Branch 9 newsletter.

An Election in Hell

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Jon Bekken

by Wayne Price, ASR #80 (Summer 2020)

The United States is moving toward a national election in the midst of a collapse of world civilization. It is a disaster of an unknown duration, consisting of the covid-19 plague and the economic collapse it has triggered. Meanwhile the catastrophe of climate change continues to loom over everything. Whatever issues were previously important, the overwhelming concern now is how President Trump and his Republican Party have been dealing with the crisis. As any fair-minded observer will agree, their response has been disastrous.

The reaction of people on the Left has varied. Liberals take it for granted that they will vote for Democrat Joseph Biden for president to defeat the vile Donald Trump. Many, perhaps most, former supporters of Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist,” agree. Holding their noses, they will vote for Biden, although they will not “endorse” or “campaign” for him, they say. Others will not choose between Biden and Trump. Of these radicals, some (particularly those close to anarchism) will not vote at all, while others will cast a protest ballot for Howie Hawkins of the Green Party.

I am not going to argue here about what individual leftists should do about voting. I do not much care. The votes of a small number of radicals, out of millions, will not have an effect either way. This is especially true for most voters who live in “safe states,” where the outcome is foreordained. (I live in New York State, where the electoral college votes are guaranteed for the Democrats.)

The real question is what radicals should advocate be done by progressive voters and organizations. What should the unions be doing about this and other elections? How do we suggest the African-American community should act? Latinx communities? other communities of color? LGBTQ groups? environmental organizations? feminist groupings? These forces are the base of the Democratic Party (which, like the Republicans, does not have a membership as such). Their organizing, mobilizing, get-out-the-vote activities, phone banking and donations of money have been essential to the functioning of the Democrats. Should they continue this strategy? Should they attempt to build a new, third, party? Or should they quit the electoral process altogether for a strategy of demonstrating, organizing, occupying and striking? As a revolutionary anarchist, I advocate the last.

President Trump

The United States is the richest and most powerful nation on earth, even if its relative power has been declining over the past decades. Its economy was highly profitable during the decade-long recovery from the Great Recession. It was “profitable” for the upper classes, not so much for most people; but there was a relatively high employment rate, even if jobs were shaky and low-paid. Economists, both conventional and radical, had been saying for years that the prosperity was brittle and vulnerable to a shock. Now we have had the shock and the capitalist economy has collapsed.

Worst of all, public health and the economy have been in the hands of a completely incompetent government – ruled by Donald Trump, a narcissistic, ignorant, fool, lacking all empathy let alone common sense. His stupidity and weak self-confidence make him disdain all scientific advisors. Vast numbers of people have died due to his inability to organize an appropriate response to the plague.

It is tempting to see Trump as an accidental freak. Then, when he is voted out, things will return to “normal.” This is exactly how Biden presents matters, but it is dangerously misleading. Trump is solidly supported by his party despite his compulsive lying. Republican governors are as dangerously ignorant as Trump in regard to health care and other issues. About 40% of voters support Trump no matter what he does. Big business, while never wild about Trump, likes much of his, and his party’s, policies: enormous tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, reactionary judges, etc. These “conservative” forces will not go away, even if the Democrats take over the White House and both houses of Congress. They will be a constant threat – and a temptation for the Democrats to compromise with, as they have repeatedly done in the past.

This is not to say that Trump or Trumpism is “fascist” (or “neo-fascist”) as many do. Undoubtedly, there are fascist traits in this administration and its supporters (including a crazed minority which does identify as Nazis). Trump is authoritarian, refuses oversight by the legislative branch, sneers at the courts, attacks and denigrates most of the media, and undermines the professionalism of the executive branch. Against the states, he declares that he has “total” power. He whips up his supporters with nativist and racist rants. He panders to the most right wing and hysterical part of his base and refuses to directly criticize the outright fascists.

For all that, he does not have an independent organization of violent gangs, such as Hitler’s stormtroopers or Mussolini’s fascisti. And he can be voted out of office, which no fascist would let happen. He might wish to be president-for-life, but the military, political and business establishments will not let him. They are not (yet?) at a crisis where they might accept this, nor would they want such a ditzy incompetent as ruler.

Sanders the “Socialist”

Many radicals had high hopes for the Bernie Sanders campaign. He called himself a democratic socialist and advocated a “political revolution.” The Democratic Socialists of America went all out for him. And Sanders did astonishing well for a “socialist.” He won in a number of states, getting a great deal of support from young people, from workers, and from Latinx. However he was never going to be allowed to win the nomination (let alone the presidency). The Democratic establishment pulled together all the “moderate” candidates and made a bloc behind Biden. Sanders was never able to win the African-American vote (especially older people). A similar steamroller ran over the other “progressive” candidate, Elizabeth Warren. The capitalists were, if anything, even more hostile to her than to Bernie, due to her history of backing strong regulation of banks and other businesses. She had to go.

In any case, Sanders was never much of a “socialist.” He did not call for the expropriation of any section of big business. He did not propose to replace corporations with a non-profit cooperative system of production. His model of “socialism,” he repeatedly stated, was the Nordic (Scandinavian) countries or the U.S. New Deal. That is, capitalist, market-driven, profit-oriented economies with government regulation and a high level of social welfare. Whatever the virtues of this program, it is inadequate to deal with the fundamental crises which the system is facing.

None of the socialist leaders who backed Bernie discussed the dismal history of socialist governments that were elected to office. There was Mitterand in France, Allende in Chile, and recently Syriza in Greece, Lula’s Workers’ Party in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia, not to mention the current woes in Venezuela. These and many other examples (the various Labour Party governments in Britain) show that it doesn’t end well for socialists to be elected to take over a capitalist state and its capitalist economy. The socialist regime may be undermined by the established state bureaucracy or by the ruling rich’s control of the economy (such as an investment “strike”), causing enough chaos that the regime is voted out, or the regime is intimidated into accepting the capitalists’ demands (Syriza), or, if “necessary,” the socialists are overthrown by the military or fascist forces (Allende). Even if Bernie had been elected, very likely he would have been stymied in his progressive programs, making him ineffectual. As anarchists have long argued, we cannot reach socialism (however defined) by using the state.

What is significant is that a large minority of the U.S. population is attracted to “socialism,” while others were willing to support a “socialist,” whether or not they agreed with the label. To the extent that young people put a clear meaning to the term, they have been taught to mean reformist state socialism. But the possibility of attracting them to revolutionary anarchist-socialism is there.

Joe Biden

Joseph Biden was an uninspiring politician who lost two earlier tries at the presidential nomination. His memory was poor and he was prone to “gaffes,” which are worse now in his seventies. He told lies to look good (such as claiming to have been arrested for trying to see Mandela in South Africa). For such reasons, he did poorly in the early stages of the nomination process and was outshone by younger, more inspiring “moderate” candidates. His only strengths were his name recognition, the image (true or not) that he had the best chance of beating Trump, and that he had been Barack Obama’s vice president. But the Democratic establishment decided that the “moderates” had to rally around one person in order to keep Bernie out. They decided that Biden was good enough. All the other “moderates” capitulated to him. Eventually even Warren, the “progressive,” and Sanders, the “socialist,” did so too.

Supporting a “lesser evil” means admitting to yourself that you are supporting an “evil,” which is psychologically hard to do. So many liberals are trying to persuade themselves that Biden is really not so bad, even pretty good. They note his progressive words, his appeals to Sanders’ and Warren’s bases, his admitted changes in political stances. As he had once made friends with segregationist Democrats and reactionary Republicans, now he was trying to make up to liberals. How sincere any of this is is impossible to say. After all, an opportunist may swing left as well as right, so long as it is not too far left.

I am not going to go over the record of Biden as pro-corporate business, pro-military intervention, pro-racial inequality, misogyny, and generally pro-status quo. (For a full record, see Nathan Robinson’s Current Affairs article, “Democrats, You Really Do Not Want To Nominate Joe Biden.”) Just for example, after pushing Bill Clinton’s repressive crime bill through the Senate in 1994, Biden cheered, “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties [and] … 125,000 new prison cells”! While Biden talks a good game about the climate crisis, he was part of an Obama administration which vastly increased fracking and other forms of carbon energy production. As the radical Kevin Zeese says,

Biden is someone who has been on the opposite side of every issue I have worked on for 40 years – the drug war, mass incarceration, racist police enforcement, marijuana prohibition, the Iraq War, militarism and every war of my lifetime, student debt, climate change, energy policy, racism, and desegregation, shrinking Social Security, corporatism… I can’t think of anything significant that I agree with him on. (April 17, 2020; Actiongreens email discussion)

Zeese said he will vote for the Green Party candidate.

The only real argument for electing Biden is that he is not Trump. It is that Trump, while not a fascist, is not simply another bad Republican. That he is something way outside the box, whose politics intersect with a freakish personality to be exceptionally dangerous in a time of extreme crisis. Many respected radicals have made this claim.

However, it is also true that the Democrats have had their part in creating Trump and Trumpism. Look again at the historical record. Reactionary Republican presidents have repeatedly been followed by moderate Democrats, who have been followed by an even worse reactionary Republican. Again and again. Nixon by Carter by Reagan-Bush by Clinton by Bush by Obama by Trump. In no case has electing Democrats led to the end of the right-wing Republican threat. The Democrats play the “good cop” and the Republicans play the “bad cop.” Neither party is able to cure the ills of capitalism, which has repeatedly driven sections of the population toward the only other alternative offered by our two-party political system.

The Way Out

The pandemic was created by global semi-monopoly capitalism, with its intersection of urbanism, industrial agriculture and wild nature; its global production chains and travel; its weakened public health services; and its nation-states. With its unrelenting drive for quantitative growth, profit and accumulation, capitalism had to upset the ecological balance between humans and the rest of nature. Capitalism is the virus. Continuation of capitalism will only lead to more pandemics, climate catastrophes, economic crashes and disastrous wars. What strategy leads to a revolution for a non-capitalist, cooperative, participatory-democratic and ecologically balanced society?

Historically, the main progressive advances in politics have come from direct action outside the electoral system. The great strikes of the thirties gave us unions and won the benefits of the New Deal. African-Americans destroyed racial segregation and gained other benefits through massive civil disobedience and “riots.” The war in Vietnam was opposed through huge demonstrations, draft resistance and rebellion in the military. Gay liberation was fought by the Stonewall “riots” and Act Up civil disobedience. Women’s liberation developed in the context of all these popular struggles. And in every case, the movements died down or were tamed when they turned to working through the Democratic Party in elections.

Even under conditions of the plague, people have been self-organizing. There have been strikes by Whole Foods, Instacart and Amazon workers to demand better health protection and more time off. There have been labor actions by poultry, auto, sanitation and warehouse workers. Unionized nurses have been forceful in protesting shortages. Bus workers in Detroit bargained for fare-free bus service. Workers at GE demanded repurposing jet engine factories to make ventilators. Car caravans demanded a moratorium on rent. There has also been mutual aid organizing for people to help themselves and each other, given the failures of the government and big business.

How long the coronavirus plague will last, of course I do not know. I expect the economic collapse to last a good deal longer and the climate crisis to worsen whoever gets elected. Whatever happens in this election (and it would say something positive about the U.S. people if they reject Trump), progress depends on more mass action in the streets, the schools, the offices and the workshops. Only this could lead to a revolutionary reorganization of society.

Reference: Robinson, Nathan J. (2020). “Democrats, You Really Do Not Want To Nominate Joe Biden.” Current Affairs. www.currentaffairs.org/2020/03/democrats-you-really-do-not-want-to-nominate-joe-biden

Anarcho-Syndicalist Review

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Category Archives: Uncategorized

From the Bottom Up: The First International and the Emergence of European Anarchist Movements

Notes

Bakunin & the Historians Revisited

Discussed in this essay:

Overcoming the Politics of Division & Fear

The Moral Movement

Elections and the Democratic Party

Revolutionary Conclusions

References:

Notes on Anarchist Economics

Israelis protest for African refugees

Selected References

Labor & the Climate Crisis

Solidarity for our Future

Global Warming: Get Rid of Capitalism!

Outlaw Unions, Illegal Strikes

Revolt of the Good Guys: Remembering the 1970 US Postal Strike

An Election in Hell