Preface

This is an essay based on a presentation that I recently gave at the Anarchist Bookfair in NYC. I welcome feedback and constructive critique, as I hope to use much of this as a basis for my part in an IOPS panel at the NYC Left Forum on June 7-8, 2013. Much of this information and all the page citations are based on the analysis and history in the book “Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism” by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt (AK Press, 2009).

1) Introduction

This essay briefly introduces a global history of last century’s Anarchist movement and some of the challenges faced by that global movement. It then argues that IOPS (International Organization For A Participatory Society) solves some of those problems and proposes that the political and economic vision of IOPS is deeply compatible with global mass Anarchism. It hopes to show that IOPS brings important new organizational vision, strategy and unity to the global Anarchist movement. Because of this IOPS should be embraced by mass, organizational and class struggle Anarchists as well as non-sectarian Socialists. It briefly introduces IOPS’s economic visions and practice arguing that IOPS adds critical visionary and intersectional element to anarchist revolutionary strategy.

2) What is Anarchism: The broad back of a 150-year-old global movement.

The definition of Anarchism used in “Black Flame” by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt (AK Press, 2009) focuses on the Anarchist’s global movements beginning in the 1860’s and relates most specifically to syndicalism. These were working class based movements for democracy, socialism and workers dignity that spanned the globe and lasted approximately from the 1860’s to the 1930’s . Two well known figures in the intellectual development of anarchism and syndicalism were

Bakunin, and Kropotkin. Other equally important but lesser known figures were Pyotr Arshinov(1887-1937) , De Leon, Praxedis Guerrero(1882-1910) Emma Goldman (1869-1940) He Zhen, Petronila Infantes (1920), Li Pei Kan (1904-2005), Maria Lacerda De Moura (1887-1944), Liu Sifu (1884-1915), Errico Malatesta (1953-1932), Ricardo Flores Magon (1874-1922), Nestor Ivanovich Makhno (1889-1934), Louis Michel (1830-1905), Albert Parsons (1848-1887), Lucy Parsons (1853-1942), Rodolph Rocker (1873- 1958), Lucia Sanchez Saornil (1895-1970), Shin Ch’aeho(1880-1936) . (pg. 20) .

These organizers and revolutionaries created the ideas and organization of some the most significant global movements of workers in human history. During the period from the 1880-1930’s Syndicalists were the dominant influence among organized workers in more then a dozen countries. The most well know Anarchist formation is the Spanish CNT. The CNT, which in 1936 had 1.7 million members, was the biggest syndicalist union ever in numerical terms. However, it only represented half of the unionized workforce in Spain, with moderate UGT union representing the rest of the workers. But, in Portugal for example, the sole union from 1919 to 1924 was the anarchist CGT, with 100,000 members and no other organized labor force. In fact, Syndicalists were either the only union or most organized influence among workers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, France, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Uruguay. In China, Anarchists founded the first modern labor unions and there were at least 40 anarchist unions in the Canton area in 1921. (pg 275). Also, Anarchists had a huge influence on peasants, with large scale Anarchist peasant movements in Bulgaria, Manchuria, Mexico, Spain, and the Ukraine. (pg. 271).

3) Ok Grampa, thanks for the bedtime story! (or why is this relevant for organization today?)

Today, especially in the “west”, Anarchists often seem like a marginal movement that is not representative of the working class. Also, anarchists are often viewed as overly focused on the history of Spain or Western Europe. This perception makes it seem like conscious activists have never been capable of building global mass organizations of working people demanding revolutionary transformation. However, historically and factually this is not the case. The ideas of anarchist organization, vision and strategy have deep historical roots in mass movements globally. They have a broad base among working class organizations and have been adopted by millions of working people and peasants in diverse, “western”, “non-western”, “Northern” and “Southern” countries.

4) Anarchist Visions:

These anarchist movements realized the importance of vision and organization and articulated similar types of organizational vision. For example, Bakunin’s vision of the First international (1868) was to unify workers into one organization, making sure all unions involved were democratic participatory and accountable to the membership. This was designed to prevent hierarchies from emerging and promote self-management. ( pg. 154) .

Bakunin wrote of the need to work to erect a free federation between “workers of all occupation in all lands”. This would be an organization that when the “revolution, ripened by the force of events, breaks out, there will be a real force ready which knows what to do and is capable of guiding the revolution in the direction marked out by it by the aspirations of the people: a serious international organization of workers associations of all lands capable of replacing this departing world of states.”

Another example of detailed nature of some Anarchist visions for society can be found in “How we shall bring about the revolution: syndicalism and the cooperative commonwealth.” (1909) This was visionary novel written by Pouget and Emile Pataud that showed that “the new society is decentralized and federalist…production is coordinated and planned through democratic union congresses and distribution is organized (according to need) along communist principals.” (pg. 196).

5) Mass Movements Struggles with Vision:

However these Anarchists visions and ideals were often not widely understood and not always translated in to political principals or clear visionary aim. Even during some of the biggest political success of the anarchist movement, for example, the CNT in Spain in 1936, many CNT members felt that the CNT lacked widely held political goals and vision. During this time, one faction within the CNT wrote a pamphlet that put forward these concerns. The “Friends of Durriti” wrote “Towards a Fresh Revolution” where they reflect that “The CNT was utterly devoid of revolutionary theory. We did not have a concrete program. We had no idea where we were going. We had lyricism aplenty; but when all is said and done, we did not know what to do with our masses of workers or how to give substance to the popular effusion that erupted inside our organizations. By not knowing what to do, we handed the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the Marxists who supported the farce of yesteryear.” (pg 201). In other words, the CNT knew what they were against, but were less clear as to what they were fighting for.

Another successful Anarchist movement that found itself lacking clear political answers to difficult questions of vision was the massive Ukraine Peasants movement that emerged from the revolution in Russia and to create a revolution in the Ukraine in the late 1910s. The Ukrainian revolution was based in the Union of Peasants with support from the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine and two of its key figures were Makhno and Arshinov. After being forced into exile when the Bolshevik’s Red Army crushed the revolution, they worked together to reflect on their experiences and wrote the “Organizational Platform of Libertarian Communism” (1926). In “The Platform” Makhno and Arshinov argue that instead of brushing off questions of the vision of a new society Anarchists must engage with these questions, stating, “From the moment when Anarchists demand a conception of the revolution and the structure of society, they are obliged to give all those questions a clear response, to relate the solution of these problems to the general conception of libertarian communism and to devote all their forces to the realization of these.” (pg 254) .

6) Network vs. Organization?

Many of these close knit union groups and most Insurrectionist Anarchists attempted to form international solidarity networks to coordinate global work (as have many Anarchists and Occupy activists, today). They often rejected “formal” organization as necessarily requiring class domination and undemocratic power. However, many Anarchists also found that although a network is an organization, it is an organization that is very susceptible to the unaccountable power of cliques, informal or unclear power dynamics and the “tyranny of structurelessness.” (pg 239)

To avoid some of these difficulties other early Anarchists attempted to create more coherent international organizations that still challenged class domination and undemocratic power internally. An early attempt by Anarchists to create a clear global organization was The Alliance, who’s key organizer was Bakunin. The Alliance was formed in 1868 and applied to join the first international, but was rejected by Marx. Bakunin saw the alliance as an organization that “has a shared analysis of the situation as well as agreement on strategic and tactical issues expressed in a shared programme and its members agree to carry out the programme and agree to be held accountable for doing so.” (pg 247, see also pg 252).

In relation to the need to form clear international organizations Kropotkin also felt that “the Formation of an anarchist organization…far from being prejudicial to the common revolutionary task… is desirable and useful to the very greatest degree” (pg 256).

7) What is IOPS and why it matters:

IOPS is a new international organization founded in 2011. It was founded with a lot of inspiration from Anarchists and the Occupy movements, but was specifically developed through a poll of more then 4000 activists, intellectuals and organizers that was hosted on the Z communications website. Currently, IOPS is an interim organization with more then 3000 members in 90 countries, communicating in 10 languages. IOPS has articulated long term aims to bring people together who wish to organize around a shared vision for the future based on self-management, equity, diversity and solidarity. Members include communists, anarchists, socialists and people who are not clearly defined by labels. Noam Chomsky, Stanley Aronowitz, David Harvey, John Pilger, Vandana Shiva, Michael Albert, David Graber, are some well known members.

The vision that IOPS aims for includes a intersectional analysis of current oppression, and specifies the need for the organization to be anti-racist, feminist, anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist.

In the economic realm IOPS seeks a vision that is informed by and very similar to the Anarchist movement of the last century. IOPS seeks to transcend 20th Century market and centrally planned socialism with a new participatory society – or participatory socialism – that combines classless economy, feminist kinship, anti-racist/multiracial culture, and self managing politics

IOPS seeks a true economic democracy where each individual should be empowered to participate in economic and political decision making through workers and inhabitants councils, where everyone is granted decision making influence in proportion to the degree one is affected by a decision. This system of councils would coordinate in a participatory society where the workers and inhabitants councils link up in voluntary directly democratic federations, which invites everyone to participate in a process of participatory planning: A continuous, interactive process, where we in a democratic, rational and ecological way, together decide what we are going to produce and consume.

This process must take place in a society where there are good jobs for all. The workers councils must offer holistic jobs, which are composed of a combination of theoretical and practical, concrete and abstract, special and general, tasks. In this way, the division between high and low status jobs will be minimized, and work and spare time will approach each other: workers will have the dignity to be a full human being, with a complete job, belonging to a co-operative, in a safe and inclusive workplace.

These workplace’s must also pay fair wages. This means that each person is also able to develop their professional capacities to their fullest, deciding for themselves how they’d like to balance work and spare time, and choose from a wide range of diverse, ecological, and socially responsible products, which the federations of workers and inhabitants councils cooperate on making available. IOPS believes that the inhabitants and workers councils should set fair wages, exclusively based on both the individuals care needs/caregiving responsibilities and on the intensity, strenuousness and duration of a persons actual work*. (*much of this description is copied from an IOPS pamphlet written by IOPS-UK members)

There is significantly more to the vision that IOPS is struggling for, including visions of new gender relations, political systems, and cultural ideals. There are also the important questions concerning a global founding convention and next local steps. Thankfully (for me), those topics are beyond the scope of this essay.

8) Conclusion:

We should organize IOPS, and encourage people to join, with this history in mind. This history proves that working people can organize globally in an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist way to win massive change (For example, the 8 hour work day). IOPS has a vision and proposes an organization built on the history of a truly global participatory Anarchist movement. IOPS should be built with this strong historical foundation in mind. However, IOPS should also learn from this history and attempt to adopt the best aspects of the global Anarchist tradition while avoiding many of the mistakes and pitfalls of the past.

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PS: But IOPS doesn’t call itself anarchist?!!! (or the problem with political labels) :

“We prefer intelligent workers, even if they are our opponents, to anarchists who are such only in order to follow us like sheep. We want freedom for everybody; we want the masses to make the revolution, for the masses. The person who thinks with his own brain is to be preferred to the one who blindly approves everything…better an error consciously committed and in good faith, then an action performed in a servile manor” Errico Malatesta ( pg 184)

Political Labels (anarchist, communist, libertarian, feminist, syndicalist, or progressive) are shorthand that often tell us little and get us to assume a lot. Most often they are used in a negative or pejorative manner. Even when used positively, to attempt to define a political label often ends up leading into overly sectarian arguments focused on obscure history or idealized, heroic persons or actions that are used to limit critical thinking about current goals, strategy and visions.

Another way to consider this question is to be honest about the fact that in the global Anarchists movements of the past 150 years, anarchists have at times made mistakes. To use one example, during the Mexican Revolution in 1915 the House of the Workers of the World, (the COM) a Syndicalist Union, sided with the constitutionalist forces of Obregon and Carranza and raised “red battalions” to fight militarily against the oncoming Zapatista forces. The Zapatistas eventually defeated the COM and made a very impressive revolution that still has important meaning for thousands of Mexican peasants today. (pg. 315). The COM was operating under the mistaken assumption that only urban workers could be a revolutionary force and that peasants would be incapable of making revolution. Why would IOPS organizers in Mexico want to have to answer to this historic mistake of the Anarchist COM? Doesn’t it make more sense to drop the label and focus on the vision?

Another reason to embrace the history while avoiding the Anarchist label is because there has been over 100 years of corporate propaganda portraying Anarchists as violent, bomb throwing loony-toons. This propaganda has been effective. Anarchists have rarely controlled mass media and our political opponents have gone through great lengths discredit the term Anarchist. Because of this it is understandable that many working people are skeptical or confused about Anarchism. The solution to this misperception is not to pick a losing fight with a mass media that we don’t control, but instead for Anarchists to clarify their visions and goals to respond to working peoples concerns. I would argue that IOPS does this by keeping the visions and values of anarchists, putting them in simple understandable language but dropping the propaganda-laden labels that have been forced upon us by our enemies.

Despite these problems with labels, they can at times be useful for building unity. It is often the case that a person will share many political points in common with someone who shares their political label. However, shared vision is a better way to achieve this unity. By focusing on clarifying vision we are creating a way to build unity, while avoiding the pitfalls of political labels. To often label are also a short hand that defines strategy (ie Syndicalist, Insurectionist, ect) and strategy is something that is so situation specific that defining ones self because of a chosen strategic preference encourages dogmatism and tactical inflexibility. Vision allows productive debate about strategy and accountability to both long term and short term goals. Vision allows us to reclaim the term “revolution” with out sounding too authoritarian or crazy. It allows the possibility of proving to masses of people that we are organizing a revolutionary movement while making it clear that we are anti-authoritarian and demonstrably not calling for any kind of authoritarianism. In organizing IOPS, the choice has been to lose the labels and focus on the vision.