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% Filename:    articles/chomsky.notes-on-anarchism
% Title:       Notes on Anarchism
% Author:      Noam Chomsky
% Appeared-in: _For Reasons of State_ (Pantheon, 1973)
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                       NOTES ON ANARCHISM
                          Noam Chomsky


[This essay is a revised version of the introduction to Daniel
Gu\'erin's _Anarchism: From Theory to Practice_. In a slightly
different version, it appeared in the _New York Review of Books_,
May 21, 1970.]


A French writer, sympathetic to anarchism, wrote in the 1890s
that ``anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures
anything''---including, he noted, those whose acts are such that
``a mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better.''
{note: Octave Mirbeau, quoted in James Joll, _The Anarchists_,
pp. 145--6.} There have been many styles of thought and action
that have been referred to as ``anarchist.'' It would be hopeless
to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some
general theory or ideology. And even if we proceed to extract
from the history of libertarian thought a living, evolving
tradition, as Daniel Gu\'erin does in _Anarchism_, it remains
difficult to formulate its doctrines as a specific and
determinate theory of society and social change. The anarchist
historian Rudolph Rocker, who presents a systematic conception of
the development of anarchist thought towards anarchosyndicalism,
along lines that bear comparison to Gu\'erins work, puts the
matter well when he writes that anarchism is not

   a fixed, self-enclosed social system but rather a definite trend
   in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with
   the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental
   institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all
   the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a
   relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to
   become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways.
   For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical
   concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being
   to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and
   talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to
   social account. The less this natural development of man is
   influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more
   efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more
   will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the
   society in which it has grown. {note: Rudolf Rocker,
   _Anarchosyndicalism_, p. 31.}

One might ask what value there is in studying a ``definite trend
in the historic development of mankind'' that does not articulate
a specific and detailed social theory. Indeed, many commentators
dismiss anarchism as utopian, formless, primitive, or otherwise
incompatible with the realities of a complex society. One might,
however, argue rather differently: that at every stage of history
our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and
oppression that survive from an era when they might have been
justified in terms of the need for security or survival or
economic development, but that now contribute to---rather than
alleviate---material and cultural deficit. If so, there will be
no doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future,
nor even, necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the
goals towards which social change should tend. Surely our
understanding of the nature of man or of the range of viable
social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching doctrine
must be treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in
order when we hear that ``human nature'' or ``the demands of
efficiency'' or ``the complexity of modern life'' requires this
or that form of oppression and autocratic rule.

Nevertheless, at a particular time there is every reason to
develop, insofar as our understanding permits, a specific
realization of this definite trend in the historic development of
mankind, appropriate to the tasks of the moment. For Rocker,
``the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man
from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social
enslavement''; and the method is not the conquest and exercise of
state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but rather ``to
reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up
and build it up in the spirit of Socialism.''

   But only the producers themselves are fitted for this task, since
   they are the only value-creating element in society out of which
   a new future can arise. Theirs must be the task of freeing labor
   from all the fetters which economic exploitation has fastened on
   it, of freeing society from all the institutions and procedure of
   political power, and of opening the way to an alliance of free
   groups of men and women based on co-operative labor and a planned
   administration of things in the interest of the community. To
   prepare the toiling masses in the city and country for this great
   goal and to bind them together as a militant force is the
   objective of modern Anarcho-syndicalism, and in this its whole
   purpose is exhausted. [P. 108]

As a socialist, Rocker would take for granted ``that the serious,
final, complete liberation of the workers is possible only upon
one condition: that of the appropriation of capital, that is, of
raw material and all the tools of labor, including land, by the
whole body of the workers.'' {note: Cited by Rocker, _ibid_., p.
77. This quotation and that in the next sentence are from
Michael Bakunin, ``The Program of the Alliance,'' in Sam Dolgoff,
ed. and trans., _Bakunin on Anarchy_, p. 255.} As an
anarchosyndicalist, he insists, further, that the workers'
organizations create ``not only the ideas, but also the facts of
the future itself'' in the prerevolutionary period, that they
embody in themselves the structure of the future society---and he
looks forward to a social revolution that will dismantle the
state apparatus as well as expropriate the expropriators. ``What
we put in place of the government is industrial organization.''

   Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic
   order cannot be created by the decrees and statutes of a
   government, but only by the solidaric collaboration of the
   workers with hand and brain in each special branch of production;
   that is, through the taking over of the management of all plants
   by the producers themselves under such form that the separate
   groups, plants, and branches of industry are independent members
   of the general economic organism and systematically carry on
   production and the distribution of the products in the interest
   of the community on the basis of free mutual agreements. [p. 94]

Rocker was writing at a moment when such ideas had been put into
practice in a dramatic way in the Spanish Revolution. Just prior
to the outbreak of the revolution, the anarchosyndicalist
economist Diego Abad de Santillan had written:

   . . . in facing the problem of social transformation, the
   Revolution cannot consider the state as a medium, but must depend
   on the organization of producers. We have followed this norm and
   we find no need for the hypothesis of a superior power to
   organized labor, in order to establish a new order of things. We
   would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the
   State can have in an economic organization, where private
   property has been abolished and in which parasitism and special
   privilege have no place. The suppression of the State cannot be a
   languid affair; it must be the task of the Revolution to finish
   with the State. Either the Revolution gives social wealth to the
   producers in which case the producers organize themselves for due
   collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the
   Revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which
   case the Revolution has been a lie and the State would continue.
   Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an
   economic and administrative regulating power. It receives its
   orientation from below and operates in accordance with the
   resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a
   liaison corps and nothing else. {note: Diego Abad de Santillan,
   _After the Revolution_, p. 86. In the last chapter, written
   several months after the revolution had begun, he expresses his
   dissatisfaction with what had so far been achieved along these
   lines. On the accomplishments of the social revolution in Spain,
   see my _American Power and the New Mandarins_, chap. 1, and
   references cited there; the important study by Brou\'e and
   T\'emime has since been translated into English. Several other
   important studies have appeared since, in particular: Frank
   Mintz, _L'Autogestion dans l'Espagne r\'evolutionaire_ (Paris:
   Editions B\'elibaste, 1971); C\'esar M. Lorenzo, _Les
   Anarchistes espagnols et le pouvoir, 1868--1969_ (Paris: Editions
   du Seuil, 1969); Gaston Leval, _Espagne libertaire, 1936--1939:
   L'Oeuvre constructive de la R\'evolution espagnole_ (Paris:
   Editions du Cercle, 1971). See also Vernon Richards, _Lessons of
   the Spanish Revolution_, enlarged 1972 edition.}

Engels, in a letter of 1883, expressed his disagreement with this
conception as follows:

   The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the
   proletarian revolution must _begin_ by doing away with the
   political organization of the state. . . . But to destroy it at
   such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of
   which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered
   power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that
   economic revolution of society without which the whole victory
   must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers
   similar to those after the Paris commune. {note: Cited by Robert
   C. Tucker, _The Marxian Revolutionary Idea_, in his discussion
   of Marxism and anarchism.}

In contrast, the anarchists---most eloquently Bakunin---warned of
the dangers of the ``red bureaucracy,'' which would prove to be
``the most vile and terrible lie that our century has created.''
{note: Bakunin, in a letter to Herzen and Ogareff, 1866. Cited by
Daniel Gu\'erin, _Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire_, p. 119.}
The anarchosyndicalist Fernand Pelloutier asked: ``Must even the
transitory state to which we have to submit necessarily and
fatally be a collectivist jail? Can't it consist in a free
organization limited exclusively by the needs of production and
consumption, all political institutions having disappeared?''
{note: Fernand Pelloutier, cited in Joll, _Anarchists_. The
source is ``L'Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers,'' _Les Temps
nouveaux_, 1895. The full text appears in Daniel Gu\'erin, ed.,
_Ni Dieu, ni Ma\^itre_, an excellent historical anthology of
anarchism.}

I do not pretend to know the answers to this question. But it
seems clear that unless there is, in some form, a positive
answer, the chances for a truly democratic revolution that will
achieve the humanistic ideals of the left are not great. Martin
Buber put the problem succinctly when he wrote: ``One cannot in
the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned
into a club to put forth leaves.'' {note: Martin Buber, _Paths in
Utopia_, p. 127.} The question of conquest or destruction of
state power is what Bakunin regarded as the primary issue
dividing him from Marx. {note: ``No state, however democratic,''
Bakunin wrote, ``not even the reddest republic---can ever give
the people what they really want, i.e., the free
self-organization and administration of their own affairs from
the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from
above, because every state, even the pseudo-People's State
concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the
masses from above, from a privileged minority of conceited
intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need
and want better than do the people themselves. . . .'' ``But the
people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being
beaten is labeled `the people's stick' '' (_Statism and Anarchy_
[1873], in Dolgoff, _Bakunin on Anarchy_, p. 338)---``the
people's stick'' being the democratic Republic. \\ Marx, of
course, saw the matter differently. \\ For discussion of the
impact of the Paris Commune on this dispute, see Daniel
Gu\'erin's comments in _Ni Dieu, ni Ma\^itre_; these also appear,
slightly extended, in his _Pour un marxisme libertaire_. See also
note 24.} In one form or another, the problem has arisen
repeatedly in the century since, dividing ``libertarian'' from
``authoritarian'' socialists.

Despite Bakunin's warnings about the red bureaucracy, and their
fulfillment under Stalin's dictatorship, it would obviously be a
gross error in interpreting the debates of a century ago to rely
on the claims of contemporary social movements as to their
historical origins. In particular, it is perverse to regard
Bolshevism as ``Marxism in practice.'' Rather, the left-wing
critique of Bolshevism, taking account of the historical
circumstances surrounding the Russian Revolution, is far more to
the point. {note: On Lenin's ``intellectual deviation'' to the
left during 1917, see Robert Vincent Daniels, ``The State and
Revolution: a Case Study in the Genesis and Transformation of
Communist Ideology,'' _American Slavic and East European Review_,
vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).}

   The anti-Bolshevik, left-wing labor movement opposed the
   Leninists because they did not go far enough in exploiting the
   Russian upheavals for strictly proletarian ends. They became
   prisoners of their environment and used the international radical
   movement to satisfy specifically Russian needs, which soon became
   synonymous with the needs of the Bolshevik Party-State. The
   ``bourgeois'' aspects of the Russian Revolution were now
   discovered in Bolshevism itself: Leninism was adjudged a part of
   international social-democracy, differing from the latter only on
   tactical issues. {note: Paul Mattick, _Marx and Keynes_, p. 295.}

If one were to seek a single leading idea within the anarchist
tradition, it should, I believe, be that expressed by Bakunin
when, in writing on the Paris Commune, he identified himself as
follows:

   I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique
   condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness
   can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded,
   measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in
   reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some
   founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic,
   egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School
   of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism,
   which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by
   the State which limits the rights of each---an idea that leads
   inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I
   mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty
   that consists in the full development of all the material,
   intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person;
   liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those
   determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot
   properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not
   imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are
   immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material,
   intellectual and moral being---they do not limit us but are the
   real and immediate conditions of our freedom. {note: Michael
   Bakunin, ``La Commune de Paris et la notion de l'\'etat,''
   reprinted in Gu\'erin, _Ni Dieu, ni Ma\^itre_. Bakunin's final
   remark on the laws of individual nature as the condition of
   freedom can be compared to the creative thought developed in the
   rationalist and romantic traditions. See my _Cartesian
   Linguistics_ and _Language and Mind_.}

These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in
Rousseau's _Discourse on Inequality_, Humboldt's _Limits of State
Action_, Kant's insistence, in his defense of the French
Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the
maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity
is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new
and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian
socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist
message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals
that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging
social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led
classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in
social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable.
This is clear, for example, from the classic work of Humboldt,
_The Limits of State Action_, which anticipated and perhaps
inspired Mill. This classic of liberal thought, completed in
1792, is in its essence profoundly, though prematurely,
anticapitalist. Its ideas must be attenuated beyond recognition
to be transmuted into an ideology of industrial capitalism.

Humboldt's vision of a society in which social fetters are
replaced by social bonds and labor is freely undertaken suggests
the early Marx., with his discussion of the ``alienation of labor
when work is external to the worker . . . not part of his nature
. . . [so that] he does not fulfill himself in his work but
denies himself . . . [and is] physically exhausted and mentally
debased,'' alienated labor that ``casts some of the workers back
into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines,''
thus depriving man of his ``species character'' of ``free
conscious activity'' and ``productive life.'' Similarly, Marx
conceives of ``a new type of human being who _needs_ his fellow
men. . . . [The workers' association becomes] the real
constructive effort to create the social texture of future human
relations.'' {note: Shlomo Avineri, _The Social and Political
Thought of Karl Marx_, p. 142, referring to comments in _The
Holy Family_. Avineri states that within the socialist movement
only the Israeli _kibbutzim_ ``have perceived that the modes and
forms of present social organization will determine the structure
of future society.'' This, however, was a characteristic
position of anarchosyndicalism, as noted earlier.} It is true
that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state
intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper
assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free
association. On the same assumptions, capitalist relations of
production, wage labor, competitiveness, the ideology of
``possessive individualism''---all must be regarded as
fundamentally antihuman. Libertarian socialism is properly to be
regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the
Enlightenment.

Rudolf Rocker describes modern anarchism as ``the confluence of
the two great currents which during and since the French
revolution have found such characteristic expression in the
intellectual life of Europe: Socialism and Liberalism.'' The
classical liberal ideals, he argues, were wrecked on the
realities of capitalist economic forms. Anarchism is necessarily
anticapitalist in that it ``opposes the exploitation of man by
man.'' But anarchism also opposes ``the dominion of man over
man.'' It insists that ``_socialism will be free or it will not
be at all_. In its recognition of this lies the genuine and
profound justification for the existence of anarchism.'' {note:
Rocker, _Anarchosyndicalism_, p. 28.} From this point of view,
anarchism may be regarded as the libertarian wing of socialism.
It is in this spirit that Daniel Gu\'erin has approached the
study of anarchism in _Anarchism_ and other works. {note: See
Gu\'erin's works cited earlier.} Gu\'erin quotes Adolph Fischer,
who said that ``every anarchist is a socialist but not every
socialist is necessarily an anarchist.'' Similarly Bakunin, in
his ``anarchist manifesto'' of 1865, the program of his projected
international revolutionary fraternity, laid down the principle
that each member must be, to begin with, a socialist.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means
of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this
system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be
freely undertaken and under the control of the producer. As Marx
put it, socialists look forward to a society in which labor will
``become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in
life,'' {note: Karl Marx, _Critique of the Gotha Programme_.} an
impossibility when the worker is driven by external authority or
need rather than inner impulse: ``no form of wage-labor, even
though one may be less obnoxious that another, can do away with
the misery of wage-labor itself.'' {note: Karl Marx, _Grundrisse
der Kritik der Politischen \"Okonomie_, cited by Mattick, _Marx
and Keynes_, p. 306. In this connection, see also Mattick's essay
``Workers' Control,'' in Priscilla Long, ed., _The New Left_; and
Avineri, _Social and Political Thought of Marx_.} A consistent
anarchist must oppose not only alienated labor but also the
stupefying specialization of labor that takes place when the
means for developing production

   mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him
   to become a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such
   a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed; estrange from
   him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in very
   proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it
   as an independent power. . . . {note: Karl Marx, _Capital_,
   quoted by Robert Tucker, who rightly emphasizes that Marx sees
   the revolutionary more as a ``frustrated producer'' than a
   ``dissatisfied consumer'' (_The Marxian Revolutionary Idea_) This
   more radical critique of capitalist relations of production is a
   direct outgrowth of the libertarian thought of the
   Enlightenment.}

Marx saw this not as an inevitable concomitant of
industrialization, but rather as a feature of capitalist
relations of production. The society of the future must be
concerned to ``replace the detail-worker of today . . . reduced
to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual,
fit for a variety of labours . . . to whom the different social
functions . . . are but so many modes of giving free scope to his
own natural powers.'' {note: Marx, _Capital_, cited by Avineri,
_Social and Political Thought of Marx_, p. 83.} The prerequisite
is the abolition of capital and wage labor as social categories
(not to speak of the industrial armies of the ``labor state'' or
the various modern forms of totalitarianism since capitalism).
The reduction of man to an appurtenance of the machine, a
specialized tool of production, might in principle be overcome,
rather than enhanced, with the proper development and use of
technology, but not under the conditions of autocratic control of
production by those who make man an instrument to serve their
ends, overlooking his individual purposes, in Humboldt's phrase.

Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under capitalism, to create
``free associations of free producers'' that would engage in
militant struggle and prepare to take over the organization of
production on a democratic basis. These associations would serve
as ``a practical school of anarchism.'' {note: Pelloutier,
``L'Anarchisme.''} If private ownership of the means of
production is, in Proudhon's often quoted phrase, merely a form
of ``theft''---``the exploitation of the weak by the strong''
{note: ``Qu'est-ce que la propri\'et\'e?'' The phrase ``property
is theft'' displeased Marx, who saw in its use a logical problem,
theft presupposing the legitimate existence of property. See
Avineri, _Social and Political Thought of Marx_.}---control of
production by a state bureaucracy, no matter how benevolent its
intentions, also does not create the conditions under which
labor, manual and intellectual, can become the highest want in
life. Both, then, must be overcome.

In his attack on the right of private or bureaucratic control
over the means of production,, the anarchist takes his stand with
those who struggle to bring about ``the third and last
emancipatory phase of history,'' the first having made serfs out
of slaves, the second having made wage earners out of serfs, and
the third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act of
liberation that places control over the economy in the hands of
free and voluntary associations of producers (Fourier, 1848).
{note: Cited in Buber's _Paths in Utopia_, p. 19.} The imminent
danger to ``civilization'' was noted by de Tocqueville, also in
1848:

   As long as the right of property was the origin and groundwork of
   many other rights, it was easily defended---or rather it was not
   attacked; it was then the citadel of society while all the other
   rights were its outworks; it did not bear the brunt of attack
   and, indeed, there was no serious attempt to assail it. but
   today, when the right of property is regarded as the last
   undestroyed remnant of the aristocratic world, when it alone is
   left standing, the sole privilege in an equalized society, it is
   a different matter. Consider what is happening in the hearts of
   the working-classes, although I admit they are quiet as yet. It
   is true that they are less inflamed than formerly by political
   passions properly speaking; but do you not see that their
   passions, far from being political, have become social? Do you
   not see that, little by little, ideas and opinions are spreading
   amongst them which aim not merely at removing such and such laws,
   such a ministry or such a government, but at breaking up the very
   foundations of society itself? {note: Cited in J. Hampden
   Jackson, _Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism_, p. 60.}

The workers of Paris, in 1871, broke the silence, and proceeded

   to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes,
   gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property
   which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed
   at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make
   individual property a truth by transforming the means of
   production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving
   and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and
   associated labor. {note: Karl Marx, _The Civil War in France_, p.
   24. Avineri observes that this and other comments of Marx about
   the Commune refer pointedly to intentions and plans. As Marx made
   plain elsewhere, his considered assessment was more critical than
   in this address.}

The Commune, of course, was drowned in blood. The nature of the
``civilization'' that the workers of Paris sought to overcome in
their attack on ``the very foundations of society itself'' was
revealed, once again, when the troops of the Versailles
government reconquered Paris from its population. As Marx wrote,
bitterly but accurately:

   The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its
   lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise
   against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand
   forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge . . . the
   infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate spirit of that
   civilization of which they are the mercenary vindicators. . . .
   The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon
   the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror
   at the destruction of brick and mortar. [_Ibid_., pp. 74, 77]

Despite the violent destruction of the Commune, Bakunin wrote
that Paris opens a new era, ``that of the definitive and complete
emancipation of the popular masses and their future true
solidarity, across and despite state boundaries . . . the next
revolution of man, international in solidarity, will be the
resurrection of Paris''---a revolution that the world still
awaits.

The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a
socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose
alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the
appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he
will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised
by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. He
will, in short, oppose

   the organization of production by the Government. It means
   State-socialism, the command of the State officials over
   production and the command of managers, scientists,
   shop-officials in the shop. . . . The goal of the working class
   is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and
   cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class
   substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by
   the workers themselves being master over production.

These remarks are taken from ``Five Theses on the Class
Struggle'' by the left-wing Marxist Anton Pannekoek, one of the
outstanding left theorists of the council communist movement. And
in fact, radical Marxism merges with anarchist currents.

As a further illustration, consider the following
characterization of ``revolutionary Socialism'':

   The revolutionary Socialist denies that State ownership can end
   in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen why
   the State cannot democratically control industry. Industry can
   only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers
   electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative
   committees. Socialism will be fundamentally an industrial system;
   its constituencies will be of an industrial character. Thus those
   carrying on the social activities and industries of society will
   be directly represented in the local and central councils of
   social administration. In this way the powers of such delegates
   will flow upwards from those carrying on the work and conversant
   with the needs of the community. When the central administrative
   industrial committee meets it will represent every phase of
   social activity. Hence the capitalist political or geographical
   state will be replaced by the industrial administrative committee
   of Socialism. The transition from the one social system to the
   other will be the _social revolution._ The political State
   throughout history has meant the government _of men_ by ruling
   classes; the Republic of Socialism will be the government _of
   industry_ administered on behalf of the whole community. The
   former meant the economic and political subjection of the many;
   the latter will mean the economic freedom of all---it will be,
   therefore, a true democracy.

This programmatic statement appears in William Paul's _The State,
its Origins and Functions_, written in early 1917---shortly
before Lenin's _State and Revolution_, perhaps his most
libertarian work (see note 9). Paul was a member of the
Marxist-De Leonist Socialist Labor Party and later one of the
founders of the British Communist Party. {note: For some
background, see Walter Kendall, _The Revolutionary Movement in
Britain_.} His critique of state socialism resembles the
libertarian doctrine of the anarchists in its principle that
since state ownership and management will lead to bureaucratic
despotism, the social revolution must replace it by the
industrial organization of society with direct workers' control.
Many similar statements can be cited.

What is far more important is that these ideas have been realized
in spontaneous revolutionary action, for example in Germany and
Italy after World War I and in Spain (not only in the
agricultural countryside, but also in industrial Barcelona) in
1936. One might argue that some form of council communism is the
natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society.
It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is
severely limited when the industrial system is controlled by any
form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers and
technocrats, a ``vanguard'' party, or a state bureaucracy. Under
these conditions of authoritarian domination the classical
libertarian ideals developed further by Marx and Bakunin and all
true revolutionaries cannot be realized; man will not be free to
develop his own potentialities to their fullest, and the producer
will remain ``a fragment of a human being,'' degraded, a tool in
the productive process directed from above.

The phrase ``spontaneous revolutionary action'' can be
misleading. The anarchosyndicalists, at least, took very
seriously Bakunin's remark that the workers' organizations must
create ``not only the ideas but also the facts of the future
itself'' in the prerevolutionary period. The accomplishments of
the popular revolution in Spain, in particular, were based on the
patient work of many years of organization and education, one
component of a long tradition of commitment and militancy. The
resolutions of the Madrid Congress of June 1931 and the Saragossa
Congress in May 1936 foreshadowed in many ways the acts of the
revolution, as did the somewhat different ideas sketched by
Santillan (see note 4) in his fairly specific account of the
social and economic organization to be instituted by the
revolution. Gu\'erin writes ``The Spanish revolution was
relatively mature in the minds of libertarian thinkers, as in the
popular consciousness.'' And workers' organizations existed with
the structure, the experience, and the understanding to undertake
the task of social reconstruction when, with the Franco coup, the
turmoil of early 1936 exploded into social revolution. In his
introduction to a collection of documents on collectivization in
Spain, the anarchist Augustin Souchy writes:

   For many years, the anarchists and the syndicalists of Spain
   considered their supreme task to be the social transformation of
   the society. In their assemblies of Syndicates and groups, in
   their journals, their brochures and books, the problem of the
   social revolution was discussed incessantly and in a systematic
   fashion. {note: _Collectivisations: L'Oeuvre constructive de la
   R\'evolution espagnole_, p. 8.}

All of this lies behind the spontaneous achievements, the
constructive work of the Spanish Revolution.

The ideas of libertarian socialism, in the sense described, have
been submerged in the industrial societies of the past
half-century. The dominant ideologies have been those of state
socialism or state capitalism (of increasingly militarized
character in the United States, for reasons that are not
obscure). {note: For discussion, see Mattick, _Marx and Keynes_,
and Michael Kidron, _Western Capitalism Since the War_. See also
discussion and references cited in my _At War With Asia_, chap.
1, pp. 23--6.} But there has been a rekindling of interest in
the past few years. The theses I quoted by Anton Pannekoek were
taken from a recent pamphlet of a radical French workers' group
(_Informations Correspondance Ouvri\`ere_). The remarks by
William Paul on revolutionary socialism are cited in a paper by
Walter Kendall given at the National Conference on Workers'
Control in Sheffield, England, in March 1969. The workers'
control movement has become a significant force in England in the
past few years. It has organized several conferences and has
produced a substantial pamphlet literature, and counts among its
active adherents representatives of some of the most important
trade unions. The Amalgamated Engineering and Foundryworkers'
Union, for example, has adopted, as official policy, the program
of nationalization of basic industries under ``workers' control
at all levels.'' {note: See Hugh Scanlon, _The Way Forward for
Workers' Control_. Scanlon is the president of the AEF, one of
Britain's largest trade unions. \\ The institute was established
as a result of the sixth Conference on Workers' Control, March
1968, and serves as a center for disseminating information and
encouraging research.} On the Continent, there are similar
developments. May 1968 of course accelerated the growing
interest in council communism and related ideas in France and
Germany, as it did in England.

Given the highly conservative cast of our highly ideological
society, it is not too surprising that the United States has been
relatively untouched by these developments. But that too may
change. The erosion of cold-war mythology at least makes it
possible to raise these questions in fairly broad circles. If the
present wave of repression can be beaten back, if the left can
overcome its more suicidal tendencies and build upon what has
been accomplished in the past decade, then the problem of how to
organize industrial society on truly democratic lines, with
democratic control in the workplace and in the community, should
become a dominant intellectual issue for those who are alive to
the problems of contemporary society, and, as a mass movement for
libertarian socialism develops, speculation should proceed to
action.

In his manifesto of 1865, Bakunin predicted that one element in
the social revolution will be ``that intelligent and truly noble
part of youth which, though belonging by birth to the privileged
classes, in its generous convictions and ardent aspirations,
adopts the cause of the people.'' Perhaps in the rise of the
student movement of the 1960s one sees steps towards a
fulfillment of this prophecy.

Daniel Gu\'erin has undertaken what he has described as a
``process of rehabilitation'' of anarchism. He argues,
convincingly I believe, that ``the constructive ideas of
anarchism retain their vitality, that they may, when re-examined
and sifted, assist contemporary socialist thought to undertake a
new departure . . . [and] contribute to enriching Marxism.''
{note: Gu\'erin, _Ni Dieu, ni Ma\^itre_, introduction.} >From the
``broad back'' of anarchism he has selected for more intensive
scrutiny those ideas and actions that can be described as
libertarian socialist. This is natural and proper. This
framework accommodates the major anarchist spokesmen as well as
the mass actions that have been animated by anarchist sentiments
and ideals. Gu\'erin is concerned not only with anarchist thought
but also with the spontaneous actions of popular revolutionary
struggle. He is concerned with social as well as intellectual
creativity. Furthermore, he attempts to draw from the
constructive achievements of the past lessons that will enrich
the theory of social liberation. For those who wish not only to
understand the world, but also to change it, this is the proper
way to study the history of anarchism.

Gu\'erin describes the anarchism of the nineteenth century as
essentially doctrinal, while the twentieth century, for the
anarchists, has been a time of ``revolutionary practice.'' {note:
_Ibid._} _Anarchism_ reflects that judgment. His interpretation
of anarchism consciously points toward the future. Arthur
Rosenberg once pointed out that popular revolutions
characteristically seek to replace ``a feudal or centralized
authority ruling by force'' with some form of communal system
which ``implies the destruction and disappearance of the old form
of State.'' Such a system will be either socialist or an
``extreme form of democracy . . . [which is] the preliminary
condition for Socialism inasmuch as Socialism can only be
realized in a world enjoying the highest possible measure of
individual freedom.'' This ideal, he notes, was common to Marx
and the anarchists. {note: Arthur Rosenberg, _A History of
Bolshevism_, p. 88.} This natural struggle for liberation runs
counter to the prevailing tendency towards centralization in
economic and political life.

A century ago Marx wrote that the workers of Paris ``felt there
was but one alternative---the Commune, or the empire---under
whatever name it might reappear.''

   The empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of
   public wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered,
   by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated
   centralization of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of
   their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had
   shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their
   Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to
   the _fr\`eres Ignorantins_, it had revolted their national
   feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war
   which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made---the
   disappearance of the empire. {note: Marx, _Civil War in France_,
   pp. 62--3.}

The miserable Second Empire ``was the only form of government
possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the
working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the
nation.''

It is not very difficult to rephrase these remarks so that they
become appropriate to the imperial systems of 1970. The problem
of ``freeing man >from the curse of economic exploitation and
political and social enslavement'' remains the problem of our
time. As long as this is so, the doctrines and the revolutionary
practice of libertarian socialism will serve as an inspiration
and guide.


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