SGS

Epilogue

2010-03-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

This blog is complete. There will be no more entries.
From November 2009 to February 2010, I summarized the first section in volume one of Self-Governing Socialism, edited by Branko Horvat, Mihailo Marković and Rudi Supek. The entries correspond to readings in the book, and each entry gives some background information on the piece summarized. I hope that it gives some guidance to anyone else who starts reading the book.

Self-Governing Socialism: Boimondau

2010-02-27T11:02:00.001-08:00

The name “Boimondau” comes from three words, “boîter” (watchcase), “montre” (watch) and Dauphiné, the French province. Boimondau was a company founded, owned and managed by workers. More specifically it was founded by watchcase makers Marcel Barbu and his wife with the intention of liberating themselves and their fellow workers from economic exploitation and social inferiority. Since they intended to create a new way of working, they wanted to start with as little prejudice from the current system as possible. For that reason, they hired anyone who was not a specialized industrial worker. As the story goes, the group included a barber, a sausage maker, a waiter and others. They were all just ordinary workers who had left school at around 13 years old. All were under 30. He offered to teach them watch case making if they would search with him for a setup in which the distinction between employer and employee would be abolished. They set up shop in a barn with only two skilled workers: Marcel Barbu and his wife. Suppliers refused to sell them anything on credit. Still, the company began selling after two months.
According to children’s novelist and Boimondau expert Claire Huchet Bishop, one of the first things the group had to deal with was finding a common ethical system. In “The Work Community of Boimondau,” published in All Things Common (1950), She writes:

To find this ethical concern at the very start of their search for a setup in which the “distinction between employer and employee would be abolished" may seem surprising. It may even appear out of place and, to some people, almost clerical or Sunday-schoolish. Yet, history teaches us that one of the causes of failure of previous communitarian colonies developed out of disagreements which could not be ironed out because no common ethical basis had been originally established. And it seems that one of the reasons for the survival of the early religious communities was precisely because they had a common spiritual basis.

To this end, the group found their “ethical minimum.” It was formed from points the workers found they had in common that everyone could agree with unanimously. They agreed that no one had the right to infringe on anyone else’s liberties, and they all agreed not to make jokes about each other’s moral beliefs or lack thereof. The ethical minimum, whatever it turned out to be, was called the Rule. Eventually, the Rule became important enough to require new workers to study it for the first three months. Then, after a new members’ first full year, the member had to pass certain inquiries, including questions on the Rule.
Perhaps oddly, the second thing they wanted was to sing well together. They also wanted more general education and wanted to learn more about Marxism and basketball. In order to find time for this additional education, they tried to find ways to work more efficiently. Within three months, they gained nine hours a week, and they used this nine hours for education. They earned that extra time as a group, and thus they figured that extra time belonged to the group, not to each worker individually. They worked faster, but instead of working the same amount, they quit early and educated themselves. Note that their first inclination when they had extra time was not to better their standard of living with more material consumption but with intellectual pursuits. They still paid themselves for the same number of hours, however. In this way, they were paying themselves for learning. And why should'nt they? Bishop asks, “Since to them, all human activity is work.”
“So it was that, instead of working to make extra money or profit, they worked in order to better themselves,” Bishop writes. “Don’t we all do it, in one way or another?”
In two years, the company had reached 90 workers. At that time, Barbu turned over all machinery to them, and they in turn set up a payment plan to reimburse Barbu for his original investment. They also agreed at that time that if Barbu wanted to go elsewhere later and start another similar company, that certain machines would go with him.
The industry was divided up into technical teams of no more than ten workers. Several of these technical teams joined together to make a section or a shop. Several of the shops joined together to make a service.
From the start, workers realized they needed to meet once a week to hash out personal differences. Later, they met in an Assembly of Contact in order to stay on top of what was going on and to keep in touch. There were also weekly Neighbor Group meetings, which were meetings of groups of five or six families living close to each other. During each meeting, the chief would give them a theme to discuss. In these groups, workers were encouraged to voice their opinions about certain issues that were raised and to keep notes of any concerns. These notes were then forwarded to the chief who would respond if necessary. The workers acting as the governing body only met twice a year in a General Assembly. Not only the workers, but the workers’ spouses voted in this assembly, providing the spouses had gone through the same 15-month-long initiation process that all the workers went through. And anyone, even children, could voice their opinion during General Assembly if they were in the family of a worker, but they could not vote. In addition, workers elected a “chief of community” who would serve for three years. The chief could veto any decision made by the General Assembly, but if the General Assembly would not accept the veto, the General Assembly could vote to decide the competence of the chief, which could lead to the chief’s removal. In this way, the General Assembly had ultimate power, but only those proposals which earned consensus among all workers were binding. The General Assembly also elected a General Council with seven members and foremen from each department (all foremen were elected) who would serve for one year to counsel the chief. The Council met every four months and all decisions had to be unanimous. From the General Council came the Council of Direction, and this council met every week. There was also a Court, composed of eight members who had been elected during the General Assembly. They hashed out any problems that arose by using the Rule and by common sense. They also ruled according to the person and that person’s spouse! so that the verdict may be different depending on who was being judged. Any decision must be agreed to unanimously by all, even by the culprit!
Though Boimondau was not a capitalist enterprise per se, it was also not a system whereby property was appropriated from its owners without reimbursement. However, stockholders did not receive any interest or dividends on their investment. All members were required to pledge that they would never charge interest.

Self-Governing Socialism: Malta

2010-02-26T19:27:00.001-08:00

In Malta, worker self-management dates back to the 1970s when the government took a direction toward self-governing socialism. The original concept, involving board-level employee representatives, was inspired by the socialism of Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Workers managed themselves at enterprises by way of elected representatives serving on a board of worker-directors, each board having 12 elected members. Where the board controlled management, the right of workers to manage was based either on legislation or on agreement. Only company employees were entitled to become board-level employee representatives.
Malta’s largest employer by far, the Malta Drydocks, became the property of the Maltese government in 1971. The first board of directors to run Malta Drydocks had three trade union officials and three members appointed by the government. Soon thereafter, the government decided that the Drydocks should be run entirely by a board directly elected by the workers. The system made Drydocks run efficiently enough to make a profit for the first time since the U.K had privatized the business. Successful self-management at the Drydocks was a sign to many Maltese that they could govern themselves, as against their century-long reliance on foreign experts.
Today, 10 companies provide for worker board-level participation, of which six are state owned. The remaining four companies are privately owned. Three of them are owned by the General Workers’ Union, the largest trade union on the island, and the other by the Labor Party.
Gérard Kester studied worker self-management in Malta during the 1970s and reports that the experience at the Drydocks encouraged a climate for more worker participation throughout Malta. He describes what happened at a textile plant in Malta when factory owners gave up and left:
“In Autumn 1971, a textile factory was in a state of liquidation and threatened with closure. The factory was a branch of a larger foreign company and had been in operation for only one year. It had 200 employees and a fairly large foreign managerial staff. The latter enjoyed high salaries—by Maltese standards—and emoluments such as free company cars and housing facilities.”
The union tried to keep the company going, but company management left one Friday telling the workers that they no longer had jobs. The only solution the union could come up with was to keep the doors open for workers to continue doing whatever they could for work. They asked the workers if they would like to try taking available resources and providing for the local market. The workers agreed. They took wage cuts and gave up bonuses and piece rates and started back to work on Monday without any management. Thanks to getting rid of bloated management pay and benefits, workers were still able to take home some pay. The workers handpicked the people they wanted as their own supervisors. Soon thereafter, the business started to turn a profit. All remnants of even distant authority over the factory were fired or else resigned, and the shareholders decided to give all management authority to two people, neither of which were professional managers for any capitalist enterprise: one was a member of the Malta Development Corporation and the other was an officer of the trade union. Thus, the union was directly involved in the enterprise as its labor director. Soon thereafter, wages were back up to their previous levels, but with much lower absenteeism. Unfortunately for the workers, the stocks remained in private hands, and the new profitable system meant profits for the idle stockholders.

Self-Governing Socialism: Glacier Metal Co.

2010-02-25T21:54:00.000-08:00

Glacier Metal Company began in north London in 1899 as a producer of white metal. In 1935, the company had grown a relatively large engineering department. By 1940, the company was almost entirely engineering with only minor white metal work. The company moved to Kilmarnock in 1942 and then joined Associated Engineering, Ltd., in 1964. Associated Engineering was then taken over by Turner & Newall of Manchester in the 1980s. Vandervell Products and Glacier merged in 1988. Glacier Metal workers in Glasgow won a victory after a seven-week occupation in November-December, 1996. As of the time of writing this, Glacier Vandervell North America has two operations in Ohio and Iowa. Glacier Vandervell Europe has six operations in the UK, France, Italy, Slovakia and another in Brazil. Overall, Glacier Vandervell engine bearing's original equipment and aftermarket operations employ over 3,000 people worldwide.
Wilfred Banks Duncan Brown (1908-1985) was Chairman and Managing Director of Glacier Metal Company from 1939 to 1965. Elliot Jaques (1917-2003) was a Canadian psychoanalyst and organizational psychologist who is probably best remembered for identifying the phenomenon of the mid-life crisis. Glacier hired Jaques to help them improve management-workforce relations. Jaques and Brown collaborated on the Glacier Project from 1948-1965. At the time, the Glacier Metal Company was the largest manufacturer of plain ball bearings in Europe and employed about 4,500 people in six factories. The project began with the assistance of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and sought to understand why once workers get a job, they tend to start losing interest in their work and begin to set themselves against the authority of their employer. The workers’ elected representatives served on a works council to co-manage Glacier. The works council’s constitution stated, “The function of the Council shall be: …to carry the responsibility of deciding the principles and policies which shall govern the management of the factory in the light of the opinion of producers and managers, in the light of the interest of consumers, shareholders and the nation at large, and in the light of total company policy.” In seeking to achieve this aim, management and workers had to find new ways of thinking about how a factory operates.
The Changing Culture of a Factory, 1951, is a 341-page account of the Glacier Project, a sociological study between April, 1948 and November, 1950. In the book, Jaques describes the “problem” of workers effectively dispensing with middle management by electing their own representatives to communicate directly with upper management. The workers started doing this during a time of worker-owner co-management at the factories. During this time, a works committee interfaced with union activities and information, and a works council interfaced with shop floor activities and information. The works council and the board of directors together affected management and set policy at the factories. This change toward a more democratic structure occurred during a time when there was a “national emphasis on joint consultation in the engineering industry.” Middle management had always been strongly against a council system, but upper management often preferred to talk with shop floor delegates rather than face the stress of dealing with their unhappy subordinates. Not only were those elected to council not upper management’s direct underlings, they were also generally far more knowledgeable about what was happening on the shop floor. At one point, the council system at Glacier had become a system where the council’s proposals about how management should operate went directly to the general manager, and the general manager in turn decided when to implement the council’s proposals on how management needed to do their job. Then, the council system evolved into a three-part structure with each part needing to consent to any proposals. When it came to company policy, the works council at the London factory and the council at the Kilmarnock factory had to agree to it. The board of directors also had to agree. This rarely led to a situation of stalemate, Jaques notes. Instead, “experience is that so far as group relations remain satisfactory, no stalemate occurs. People show themselves to be flexible enough to modify their views.” Though no business policy superseded the legal right for the board of directors to override any agreed arrangement regarding unanimous consent among all three bodies, conditions at the factory were such that decisions forced upon the workers would usually be impossible to carry out successfully, according to Jaques. Still, at one place, he implies that it is possible for unanimous consent to rest upon the workers’ position of power at any given time. He states that since laborers were organized, the laborers could coerce, but their coercion depended on the strength of the organization. Thus, workers seemed to have more confidence in blocking in times when the union was in a good position and able to leverage authority for the councils.

Self-Governing Socialism: The Kibbutz

2010-02-21T15:57:00.001-08:00

Jews were buying land and moving to what is now Israel as early as 1882 in an attempt to escape persecution. Initial movements were mostly by Jews from Eastern Europe who wanted to return to what they believed was their ancestral homeland, which was then Palestine, which was also then part of Syria, which in turn was part of the Ottoman Empire. It was the intention of these settlers from the beginning to displace Arab authority in the region with their own and eventually claim a Jewish state.
At the same time, Jews in Europe were becoming attracted to leftist politics, and some nationalist Jews were beginning to combine socialist ideas with Zionist nationalism. In 1905, Ber Borochov published “The National Question and the Class Struggle,” in which he argued that the nation in which citizens control the economic infrastructure was the best institution through which to conduct the class struggle.
The result was the formation of Poale Zion, the Workers of Zion. Similar labor-centric Zionist organizations followed in New York, London and elsewhere. The Workers of Zion supported a Jewish migration to Israel where Jewish workers would fight in the class struggle.
Labor Zionists joining the enterprises in Palestine were disappointed with what they saw. The first attempts at creating a Jewish village succeeded only with the funding of banker Baron Edmond James de Rothschild and with Arab laborers working for Jewish bosses. The enterprises were purely capitalist. This sort of business arrangement did not appeal to the Labor Zionists.
In 1909, Aaron David Gordon and a dozen teenagers founded the first Zionist-socialist community in Palestine, the Degania Alef kibbutz, on land the World Zionist Organization purchased from a Persian family. Gordon had arrived in Palestine in 1905 at the age of 47 with the philosophy that only by physical labor and by returning to the land could the Jewish people form a new nation in Palestine.
Organizers founded Degania Alef after a strike at one of the Jewish-owned agricultural enterprises in Palestine that was funded by Rothschild. From the start, Degania Alef was intended to operate without bosses. Everyone lived communally and received equal pay. All production, consumption, and service decisions were handled collectively. Soon, more kibbutzim were started nearby. Gordon also helped to collectivize existing settlements in Palestine.
In 1906, the man who would become the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, arrived in Palestine. Throughout the 1920s, Gurion worked to create a Hebrew-speaking working class with political power coming from a strong economic base.
After WWI, the Ottoman Empire paid a price for siding with Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria. The 1922 Palestine Mandate stipulated that Britain would take control of Palestine. Under British command, the kibbutz movement expanded. Today, the Kibbutz Movement is the largest communitarian movement in the world. By the end of 1997, there were 270 kibbutzim with a population of 120,000.
In “Principles, Types and Problems of Direct Democracy in the Kibbutz,” Menachem Rosner examines democratic order in the kibbutz. Rosner was Professor of Sociology at the University of Haifa and Senior Researcher and Chairmen of the Research Committee for the Institute for Research of the Kibbutz. Democracy in the kibbutz is not necessarily the same thing as consensus, Rosner explains. The important thing is that every single person in the kibbutz remains committed to the kibbutz, even when a decision is not unanimous. The commitment of each member to the kibbutz, therefore, is complete consensus. There are, then, two aspects of kibbutz democracy, and only one of these aspects requires consensus. Since consensus means that no one member wills to do otherwise, the kibbutz is a social organization with no necessary administrative function for enforcing the majority will. There are different administrative bodies, but none are balanced in their power by competition and none are seen as being separate from the kibbutz workers. During the general meeting, kibbutz members must strike a balance with all aspects of kibbutz life, like economic, social and educational considerations or with all interests, like budget considerations for different working groups, but there are no separate bodies of administration that keep each other in check. No such balance of power is necessary since all power is unified in all kibbutz members sitting in general meetings and since about half of the members serve as elected administrators at any given time. Further, individual specializations in the kibbutz are impossible, since a person serving in one capacity may often need to aptly serve in some other capacity later or at the same time. Decisions relegated to working groups are decided by those with practical knowledge and will act on their own decisions. Decisions relegated to a secretariat, or a board of elected secretaries representing the various departments of kibbutz life, can serve as the central plan for departments that remain decentralized bodies within the kibbutz. Though not everyone in the kibbutz might have wished the same outcome after a vote, conformity is ensured because everyone in the kibbutz, by the very voluntary nature of being part of the kibbutz, is unanimously cooperative and therefore all consent to acting according to majority will. “Kibbutz democracy,” Rosner states, “is not based on constitutional rules, but is a result of the members’ will to identify with the kibbutz.” However, decisions are never final. Even after decisions have been acted upon, there never comes a time when decisions cannot be reopened for more discussion during general meetings. Public opinion is the constant arbitrator. “There is a complete absence of formal judicial power in the kibbutz,” Rosner states. This means there are not necessarily rules defining norms of behavior in the ideal kibbutz. Decisions may very well be based on previous decisions or on principles or specific codes, but considering circumstantial aspects of any particular instance serves a judiciary function during the general meeting. Group decisions continue as situations arise and should be based upon public opinion about the situations. This is the way direct democracy works, according to Rosner.
This is possible, Rosner believes, because of five characteristics: First, size is intentionally limited so as to stay aware of the community without having to rely on mass communication and the inherent prejudices that come with it. Nothing is filtered or abbreviated or prioritized or bought. Second, members must actively observe how the kibbutz functions in order to know what is important for them. This level of awareness is maintained in the kibbutz easier when there is a low level of diversity among the members and when everyone has the same problems and the same habits of consumption. Diversity, he states, can sometimes factionalize and individualize members in the kibbutz. Third, public opinion governs the body rather than any formal legislation or legislators. Fourth, members of the kibbutz should generally be capable of doing whatever is necessary and capable of doing everything that is necessary for running the kibbutz. Fifth, there cannot be any advantage to holding any elected office. The goal of these rules regarding kibbutz organization is to make sure no one remains permanently in any office and to ensure that no one is ever nominated to any position. Personal qualities are to be as important to voters as objective qualifications, and everyone in the kibbutz should assume from the start that no formal hierarchy of authority exists.
The general meeting, Rosner states, is the crucial, but not the only, expression of direct democracy. “In its regular meeting (at least once a week) it reflects, in its multisided discussions and its variegated agenda, the integral quality of kibbutz life,” Rosner explains. During the general meeting, members vote to ratify proposals, decide which principles to follow in its decisions and determine budgets. In the process, they will set precedents regarding how to deal with various problems.
The kibbutz organization works, Rosner believes, because it serves the needs of the enterprise better than the typical company organization. In the typical business world, informal and personal relations between the citizen and the official constitute a possible threat to the smooth and efficient operation of the organization. In the kibbutz, it is precisely personal relations, diffused and many-sided, which contribute to its most efficient functioning. In the typical company, strict supervision and adequate personal rewards are used to secure services from officials, which means the structure is set up to reward certain people to do nothing more than to keep other people on the ball. Such reward is usually better pay or an official title or a bigger office. In contrast, in the kibbutz, supervision is a function of public opinion. “The difference between the two types of organization,” Rosner states, “is due to the fact that the kibbutz is based on principles of economic equality, while bureaucratic organization is an outcome of the economic relations in the market.”

Self-Governing Socialism: Eduardo Frei and Chile's Workers' Brigades

2010-02-13T11:35:00.000-08:00

Eduardo Frei served as president of Chile from 1964 to 1970. Frei, running as the Christian Democratic Party (formerly the National Falange) candidate, beat Socialist Party candidate Salvador Allende. The U.S. supported Frei as the lesser of the two evils. Critics from the Chilean left accused Frei of being a puppet for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Frei’s administration began reforms in 1965 when the Christian Democrats took a majority of seats in Congress. The administration nationalized copper mining and initiated reforms in housing, education and land. Copper interests belonged to U.S. companies when Frei nationalized them, and Frei’s administration nationalized them by taking 51 percent ownership. Leftist critics said the government had been suspiciously generous in their buy-outs. In 1967, Frei’s government declared peasants had the right to unionize and strike. Agrarian reform included government seizures of land and then dividing the land between workers’ cooperatives and family farms. Ramón Downey, the Christian Democratic rural strategist during the Frei government, was a specialist in agrarian reform and a former economist with Pontifico Catholic University in Santiago. In “Experiences of the Agrarian Reform: 1964-1970,” published in 1971, Downey recounts the land reforms under Frei’s administration. Downey begins the essay by defining specific characteristics of Chile’s worker-owner system in land reform, a system he calls “communal socialism.” He states that Chile’s experiences transitioning toward self-governing socialism, albeit slow, worked without causing crises. In Chile, the transition from the old society toward a worker-controlled society did not shock the economic and social systems, Downey maintains. Downey states that “…we should bear in mind that it involved the introduction of an extraordinarily profound conflict-laden structural change that normally should have unleashed grave economic and social consequences.” Leftist critics of the agrarian reform system maintain that the transitional program had promised more than it delivered and had given too little too late.
Two particular characteristics of self-governing socialism have kept economic and social crises minimal, Downey states. First, capitalist enterprises continue to exist alongside communal enterprises during the transition, since economic incentives, not state planners, essentially motivate both types of enterprises. In the process of transitioning to a complete socialist society, businesses plan for themselves the way most beneficial to transition or how they plan to close.
The second characteristic, Downey states, is that transition rides on a wave of democratic action. The workers themselves are in charge of deciding how their own enterprises will meet centrally planned goals, and this entails the ongoing vigilance of workers who are involved in a radically free arena for dialogue on how best to meet enterprise-specific challenges. He states, “The inherent necessity of communal socialism to move along profoundly democratic lines creates an environment in which social tensions are reduced and unnecessary economic setbacks are avoided during the transition.”
Downey describes how the workers managed themselves:

In the first place, supreme authority is invested in the peasants’ assembly, where all members of the settlement or cooperative have the right to a voice and vote (the sole condition of “membership” is that one be a permanent worker in the settlement or cooperative.) Besides deciding the general guidelines for operations, investment, social welfare, etc., this assembly appoints the permanent executive authority—the administrative council—from among its members. This administrative council is composed of five peasants, elected by free and secret ballot, and is encharged with the administration of the enterprise. The directors (members of the council) divide the responsibilities among themselves, each one taking charge of organizing individual specific tasks bearing on production as well as on the sales and manufacturing of products and the financing and stocking of raw materials necessary for production. … The main advantage they have over other producers is low-interest, long-term credits for purchasing land, creating an infrastructure and acquiring working capital.

Downey explains that all land expropriated for the purpose of communal socialism will be of two kinds: settlements and cooperatives. In the cooperative, the peasants own the land collectively. In the settlement, the land is legally the property of CORA, the Agrarian Reform Corporation, which is a State agency, but management belongs to the peasants. The peasants decide which form they want. After some time, the peasants began to organize a federation of cooperatives. This federation served to organize the peasant economy at local, regional and national levels. This not only helped them provide for their own kind, it also empowered peasants when their enterprises needed raw materials in order to function.
Frei had introduced the idea of self-governing socialism, but his administration failed to make socio-economic changes at the pace and scope demanded by working people. Since agrarian reforms had been so slow and had only limited success, peasants and Mapuche Indians began to move their land boundaries little by little under cover of night to take private land.
The people of Chile elected Marxist Salvador Allende as president in 1970. It was under Allende that the popular movement toward real proletarian power in Chile came into being. Mass movements occurred particularly during the election period, since politicians couldn’t afford to support violence against strikes and occupations while they are running for office. From then until 1972, Chilean peasants and workers started to act spontaneously rather than wait for bureaucrats and civil servants to act on their behalf.
In July 1972, workers established the first area assembly of factories in west Santiago. Area assemblies were responsible for production, distribution and housing. They formed armed militias and established organs of propaganda. Their goal was to take over not only the means of production, but the entire economy, so that it would be impossible for anyone but them to affect their lives. Further, they intended to police themselves in order to hamstring the State’s police. Workers immediately started to organize area assemblies for self-defense and power. In order to control the means of their own livelihoods, they established workers’ brigades. In order to get the goods, they established popular organs of distribution.
On October 9, 1972, truck owners began striking in an attempt to paralyze distribution and starve the working class into submission. Anti-communist, middle class student groups and small business owners joined the strike. Then, bourgeois and fascist elements founded neighborhood advice centers, mothers’ clubs and co-ops, and through these organizations attempted to ferment popular discontent towards shortages of goods and supplies that they were creating by their own sabotage of the economy. They spoke of grassroots efforts and community involvement in an attempt to appear to be a proponent of the people. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency probably funded these projects, since the agency also funded Allende’s opponent during the election and then funded the coup after Allende won election. In response to this early Chilean Tea Party, area assemblies arranged alternative transport for distribution and took over supermarkets and factories. In the months after the strike, it was obvious to the ruling class that the assemblies as organs of autonomous popular power were a direct threat. Workers from all sectors of the economy made up these assemblies, making it impossible for the bourgeoisie to use their traditional tactic of attacking the working class where it is least organized and of pitting one sector against another. These autonomous organs of power that grew in strength and successfully challenged the power of the bourgeoisie and parliament. Allende’s government tried to snatch power back from these autonomous workers’ assemblies and instill an economic order under parliamentary authority. Just weeks before the C.I.A. backed coup overthrew the Allende government, Allende ordered the disarming of the workers’ militias in Santiago and Valparaiso. This left the workers defenseless against the coup.
In “Experiences of the Federation of Workers’ Brigades and Enterprises,” 1972, Victor Arroyo, a member of the Chilean workers’ brigades during this time, writes about the origin and challenges of this particular manifestation of self-governing socialism. I have transcribed the entire piece, since I think it is well worth considering in full:

I would like to speak about the question of participation by relating the experience of those of us who now constitute the so-called Federation of Workers’ Brigades and Enterprises. This experience has the virtue of being precisely that—experience—rather than merely a pure product of the imagination. For those who do not know of us, our adventure began four years ago when we took over the factory in which we worked. That was our reaction to the merciless exploitation to which we were subjected in this small enterprise. Although many may find it hard to believe, it is in the small and medium sized industries that the most flagrant instances of injustice are found.
We have traveled a hazardous road, but we have come out ahead. We have lived through a hard and painful experience. And we believe that hard and painful experience is a far better teacher than any model analysis designed by theoreticians who know workers only by their external characteristics.
To us it is very clear that an alternative form of participation exists in which the essential aspects of the exploitative conditions under which we have suffered so far would be maintained. To make it appear more attractive, it might be disguised in novel wrappings: for example, the distribution of company shares to the workers and employees or the participation of the workers in the ownership of the company, without any actual transfer of power into their hands. We are all too well acquainted with this alternative; in our arduous pilgrimage, we have received many such offers.
When we took possession of the factory, we confess we were guided by a purely economic motive. We declared, “The ownership of the enterprise should be in the hands of its workers.” A year later, we discovered that this proprietary attitude caused a grave problem. The new comrades coming into the enterprise automatically became second-class workers, wage laborers for the group who had begun the experiment. We were therefore forced to rethink our entire model, not according to the latest book of some bleary-eyed theoretician, but in direct response to a concrete challenge that faced us.
In this way, we came to understand that participation is not maintaining the existing system, in which one person acquires the labor power that others must sell. To continue within that framework was leading us inexorably into a travesty of participation.
Our conception matured within a very hostile environment. The Mobile Group of Carbineros (Special Police Force) kept tabs on us as though we were delinquents. And when we went to banks to apply for credit assistance, they consistently denied it because we had nothing but our hands as collateral. It was a deeply instructive lesson about the reality of the capitalist system. We shall never forget it.
We also learned that a single productive unit, a single enterprise managed by its workers, was meaningless in isolation from the rest of the class. That is why we began to create and acquire other productive units. And gradually, we discovered that participation has to evolve from below. Along the way, we had to create popular democratic slogans and guidelines to eradicate once and for all certain bureaucratic attitudes in comrades who had been placed in charge of administrative functions.
We also had run-ins with the political party structure. Chileans who actively participate in parties constitute a minority. People sympathize with parties and cluster around them. They identify with certain groups but do not actively enter into them. This “independent” sector—in quotes because we know they are not neutral—is very important in our country. Political groups do not seem to have understood this—not even those of a popular character. That is why even these latter groups fall into the vices typical of the capitalist system within which they operate. They think of themselves as the masters over the people. The party is an enterprise, the people the workers; and the Administrative Council is the Central Committee or the National Council of the commonwealth that issues communiqués and orders to its base. These were facts that clashed head-on with that reality. We were determined that we would not fall into the simplistic error that confuses a political party with the working class, because that party is only one of the organizations of the class.
In our concern with having even the most uneducated of our comrades participate, we discovered that self-management as such does not exist. It does not exist because we depend on something called a market, on something else called the provisions of raw materials, and third, on something called credit. We then came to understand that it was essential to alter radically the Chilean sociopolitical system to allow workers gradually to assume decision-making positions. We realized, on the other hand, that state ownership is not necessarily synonymous with social ownership. The United States, comrades, has state enterprises, yet no one would think of calling it a socialist nation.
Our experience has also shown us that central planning is essential. Without it, the risk of precipitating untrammeled competition among various workers’ collectives is enormous. We could say, then, that self-management requires central planning.
We discovered something else, too: that the agencies of participation cannot be confused with unions. A union represents class interests. The production committee basically represents efficiency indices. A union, therefore, must always remain autonomous, no matter what system of participation is put into effect.
There are many other things we have discovered along the way over these four years, questions which may seem ridiculous to the technicians, but which have concerned us. I can mention, for example the problem of including our women in the experiment. Those of us workers who embarked on this venture are enthusiastic about it. We often decided to sacrifice distribution of useful goods in order to reinvest; at other times, we have decided to absorb higher costs through greater productivity. How important it was to be able to count on the support and understanding of our women comrades in making decisions of this kind, which have such a direct bearing on the life and well being of the family.
I believe our experience is especially useful to those who work in the thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises. I wonder if it would not be possible to form complexes of interrelated production units of this kind. There are enterprises that have been abandoned or are poorly administered by their owners. Perhaps they could be used to expand a system whose viability we have proven despite the many difficulties we have had to overcome.
Let me finish this unorganized exposition—for which I excuse myself, since I am a simple worker—with a comment on what Comrade Huepe says. He defined capital as the sacrifice of present consumption and declared himself in favor of society’s assuming the responsibility of compensation for that sacrifice. I have my doubts; I do not think that the capital accumulated by Señor Yarur represents that gentleman’s sacrifice of much personal consumption. On the other hand, it is truly a sacrifice of consumption for me when I must save so that I can pay my tax quotas. That much I can say with certainty!

Self-Governing Socialism: Juan Velasco

2010-02-08T17:20:00.001-08:00

Juan Velasco (1910-1977) was a left-leaning Peruvian General who ruled Peru from 1968 to 1975 under the title of “President of the Revolutionary Government.” The armed forces seized power on Oct. 3, 1968 in a bloodless coup and shut down Peru’s Congress. Valasco nationalized entire industries, including the petroleum industry, which included a subsidiary company of Standard Oil; the mining industry, which included a U.S. copper mining company; and the fishing industry, which included several U.S. commercial fishing boats. Ownership and management of these industries were then turned over to the workers in these enterprises. Firms were required to distribute part of their profits to workers in the form of dividends constituting ownership shares. A review process was established to handle disputes between employees and employers.
Under Title VIII of the General Law of Industries—Decree-Law № 18350 of July 1970, article 23 decrees the status of personhood to the whole community of full-time workers employed in any enterprise. Article 24 states that 15 percent of net profits at every enterprise must be reinvested into the enterprise, tax free, as a gradual purchase of the enterprise by its workers. Article 25 states that once the workers have purchased 50 percent of the value of the enterprise, the enterprise will be run as a workers’ cooperative. Alternatively, Article 26 states that enterprises can choose to issue bonds or stocks to their workers equating to 15 percent annually of net profits. Article 27 states that whatever interest accumulates on the workers’ investments will be distributed to all workers who have been at the enterprise for one year, working full time. Article 28 dictates that all private industries must include at least one representative elected by the workers to sit on its management board. All public industries must have two. Article 29 was supposed to ensure that companies will not cheat the workers, but companies still often found ways around these laws.

Self-Governing Socialism: Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers

2010-02-08T14:54:00.000-08:00

The Great Depression wasn’t just a western phenomenon. Its effects reached all the way to Bolivia. Bolivia’s troubles multiplied in 1932 when it went to war with Paraguay. Bolivia lost the war in 1935.
David Toro came to power by way of military coup. He served as president of Bolivia from 1936 to 1937 and nationalized all holdings by Standard Oil company. Toro initiated a social reform experiment he called “military socialism,” which included more rights for working men and women, but which also seemed to mimic fascist governments in Europe. Toro resigned among controversy regarding his personal history. Germán Busch assumed presidency in 1937 and served until 1939. Busch was part German and employed thousands of German advisors and German-trained soldiers in Bolivia. For this reason, he was accused by the United States of being a Nazi. He continued the program of military socialism, passing some reform, but could never gain enough support to pass any radical reform. He committed suicide on August 23, 1939. The military next proclaimed Chief of Staff Carlos Quintanilla provisional president. After a few months under his authority (1939-40) the government changed hands again. Anti-reformists with differing ideals joined forces in a popular movement to elect Enrique Peñaranda, a supporter of the Allied forces. He served from 1940 to 1943.
Reformist parties like the Revolutionary Workers Party, the Leftist Revolutionary Party and the fascist Bolivian Socialist Falange, a right-wing party that still supported labor reform, gained control of Congress, but the most important political opposition came from the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR). The MNR had some ties to fascist movements in Europe and to anti-Semitic publications, but it was an organization that supported workers’ rights in Bolivia. The movement’s program also included supporting the Axis powers and nationalizing all Bolivian resources. Opening investigations into a massacre of striking miners at Catavi and criticizing Peñaranda’s plan to compensate Standard Oil for nationalizing their facilities in Bolivia were among the MNR’s first congressional actions. The MNR formed an alliance with a secret organization within the military, the Radepa, which sought to prevent foreign control of their country’s natural resources. In 1943, the the Radepa-MNR alliance took control from Peñaranda and installed Gualberto Villarroel as president, who served from 1943 to 1946. Critics continued to accuse Villarroel and top MNR officials of fascist sympathies, but Villarroel enacted a number of far-reaching reforms, including official recognition of worker unions and the right to retire voluntary with a pension. Workers decided to exercise their newly-won rights and demanded further concessions, including complete worker control. On Nov. 8, 1946, miners adopted, at the request of Trotskyist delegates, the Theses of Pulacayo, in which they called for self-governing socialism, absolute class independence and armed resistance against the owning and employing class. The theses also reference Trotsky’s conception of permanent revolution and the Transitional Program of the Fourth International. The Pulacayo Theses adopted by the Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (FSTBM) represent the most important political triumph for Trotskyists within a trade union. However, it was approved by the union largely because it came as a surprise. Though the theses were to remain secret, a private mining company came into possession of a copy and published them in full hoping to expose the red plot, but miners espoused the document all the more after its publication. The Pulacayo Theses remains one of the most advanced programs ever adopted by workers in Latin America.
It was the first political theses of the FSTMB, and it shows a keen awareness of the dangers of the labor movement being dominated by the government and the bourgeoisie.
Under its “Transitional Demands,” the document specifies:

6. Workers' control of the mines

The FSTMB supports every measure which takes the unions on the path towards the achievement of real workers' control over all aspects of mine work. We must disclose the bosses' business secrets, their secret accounting, their technological secrets, the processing of minerals, etc, in order to organise direct intervention into these secret plans by the workers themselves. Because our objective is the occupation of the mines, we must turn our attention to throwing the light of day onto the bosses' secrets.

The workers must control the technical management of the mines, the accounts books, must intervene in the assignment of the different categories of work and, especially, they must make known publicly the profits drawn by the big mining companies and the fraud they perpetrate when it comes to paying taxes or contributions to the workers' Insurance and Savings Fund.

To the reformists who talk of the sacred rights of the bosses, we oppose the slogan of WORKERS' CONTROL OF THE MINES.

When the National Revolution came in 1952, workers played a leading role in the new government. In July, 1952, the MNR-led government nationalized all mines belonging to the three biggest tin companies. On October 31, the government nationalized the three biggest tin companies themselves, leaving the medium-sized mines private, and promising compensation to the previous private owners of the biggest mines. The head of the mining union was named minister of mining and petroleum in the new government, and workers were given two of the seven seats on the board managing the newly nationalized mines. This had been one of the demands stipulated in the Pulacayo Theses. The new government also ensured voting rights to all adults, including natives and those who were illiterate and who didn’t own property. In August 1954, MNR government officials decreed the Agrarian Reform Law, which abolished forced labor and established a program of expropriation and distribution of rural property to Indian peasants. The Agrarian Reform Law also provided for compensation for landlords to be paid in the form of twenty-five-year government bonds.
From 1956 to 1960, the MNR started to break apart into conservative and leftist wings, with the left wing being backed by workers’ militias, which had started to suffer rifts between leadership. Conflicts within the MNR increased during Paz Estenssoro's second term (1960-64). Together with the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), Estenssoro endorsed the “Triangular Plan,” which called for a restructuring of the tin-mining industry. The plan demanded the end of the workers’ control over the mines, the firing of workers, and a reduction in their salaries and benefits. This was supposed to “re-rationalize” the mining industry.
At the 12th Congress of the FSTMB in 1963 in Colquiri, the miners had had enough of the MNR government. Among the theses adopted that year, the union stated, “Imperialism has imposed its designs on the government of the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, and through it openly exploits the country.
“We suffer from the fact that all social functions of education and the army have been confided to the hands of the Yankees. The fate of official policy is decided by the ambassador of the United States.” They further stated, “We say to the country that we are struggling firmly in order to impose workers’ management as the unique means of putting the mines in the service of the national majority. Workers’ management signifies that the class, acting collectively, takes into its hands the destiny of our basic industry.”
In late 1963, about 1,000 miners at the Catavi-Siglo XX mines got lay-off notices. Organized attempts to resist the lay-offs led to arrests. In response, miners kidnapped the mine manager, a Dutchman, and four American technicians.
As self-governing socialism started to come to an end in Bolivia, the President amended the constitution to give himself the right to extend his stay in office. This, along with the MNR rift, eventually led to another military coup on Nov. 4, 1964. This time, the coup came with aid from the Central Intelligence Agency. Coup leaders took mining operations away from MNR co-management and got rid of the MNR’s right to veto management decisions regarding the mines. They cut miner pay to about 80¢ USD a day. Eventually, they completely got rid of the miners’ union. This marked the end of the era for self-governing socialism in Bolivia, but for ten years, the workers controlled their own society.

Self-Governing Socialism: Yugoslavia

2010-02-02T18:41:00.001-08:00

In March 1948, leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union suggested that Yugoslav Marshal Josip Tito (1892-1980) purge non-Leninist communists in Yugoslavia, but Tito did not take their advice. In April, Tito spoke in favor of his country’s independence from the Soviet Union, stating, “We are not going to pay the balance on others’ accounts. We are not going to serve as pocket money in anyone’s currency exchange. We are not going to allow ourselves to become entangled in political spheres of interest. Why should it be held against our people that they want to be completely independent? And why should autonomy be restricted, or the subject of dispute? We will not be dependent on anyone ever again!”
Nikita Khrushchev has claimed that Stalin had then prepared to bring Yugoslavia under Soviet authority by force, but his plans were foiled when Tito claimed non-alignment with any superpower and started trade talks with the United States. The Tito-Stalin Split resulted in Yugoslavia's 1948 expulsion from the Communist Information Bureau, or the Cominform, an organization that had taken the place of the Comintern. Cominform delegates cited nationalism as their reason for expelling Yugoslavia. In 1949, Yugoslav officials turned the entire island of Goli Otok into a high-security prison, and after the falling out between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, prisoners incarcerated at Goli Otok often included those with Cominform sympathies. There, prisoners were put to work in a stone quarry.
Tito has a bad name among certain historians for this and for different massacres here and there, but there are caveats that anyone should consider before passing final judgment on Tito. First of all, Tito did not lead the whole nation by himself, and thus historians should not consider Tito a dictator in the absolute sense. Aleksandar Rankovic was head of all public and secret police forces, and should be considered directly responsible for what has been called a “Stalinist de-Stalinization” in Yugoslavia. Further, there were factions and movements in Yugoslavia and among Soviet-backed satellites at that time that were hardly benign for Yugoslavia’s program of self-governing socialism.
In March 1945, a group of Slovene partisans, who some say were under Tito’s direction, executed between 300 to 1,000 Nazis in a mine with poison gas. Other people have said partisan Ricek Anton Toni, member of the First Slovene Division of the People’s Defense, was responsible for the executions. However, many atrocities during WWII were perpetrated by Nazis living in Croatia, and their fate may have been the sentence of the courts. During World War II, Croatia had been a pro-Nazi state led by Ante Pavelic and his fascist Ustasha Party. Serbs living in Croatia as well as Jews had been the targets of widespread Ustasha massacres. In the concentration camp at Jasenovac, they had been slaughtered by the tens of thousands. Between 1941 and 1945, Croat Nazis exterminated about 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 26,000 Gypsies. For this reason, it would be difficult to criticize the execution of these Nazis found in the mine if these were in fact members of the Ustasha. About 2,700 of these Ustasha Party members may also have been executed along with Serbian and Montenegrin members of the monarchist Chetnik movement in 1945 during the last days of WWII in the town of Bleiburg. However, the Bleiburg massacre is not officially documented anywhere, and Tito did not order any executions there regardless.
While Tito was in office, he often tried to balance power between the different states of Yugoslavia in order to keep any state from gaining an upper hand on any other. To this end, Tito often repressed nationalistic tendencies, particularly in Serbia and Albania. This, too, has given him a bad reputation, but the repression was hardly severe in the greater scheme of things. For example, in 1968, Tito gave in to Albanian students’ demands for Albanian representative power on both Serbian and Yugoslav state bodies, and better recognition of the Albanian language. Serbian nationalists always remained powerful and eventually worked to dismember Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. Then, there was the Croat Spring of 1971. No one was killed, but some people were sentenced to prison for a few years. In 1974, Croats basically got what they had wanted anyway with a new Yugoslav constitution. The political power of Albanians likewise increased under the 1974 constitution by granting Kosovo an expanded set of political rights, when it was declared a province and gained many of the powers of a fully-fledged republic.
After the Tito-Stalin split, Yugoslav economic planners took a route toward self-governing socialism, though a lot of it was initially funded with loans from the United States. On June 27, 1950, the National Assembly supported a bill written by Milovan Ðilas and Tito on a type of self-governing socialism that featured workers’ councils and profit sharing with workers in state-run enterprises. They called it “self-management.” Other people have called it Titoism and “national communism,” not to be confused with the fascist movements of national bolshevism or with National Socialism. The bill, titled “Basic Law on the Management of State Enterprises and Holding Companies by Work Collectives,” stated that all factories, mines, communication enterprises, transportation systems, agriculture and forestry enterprises, as public property, are to be managed by work collectives, and that they carry out this management via workers’ councils and management boards, the management boards being elected by the workers’ councils. Members of the workers’ councils serve for one year, and they are subject to recall at any time. Members of the management board are also elected for one year, and only one-third can be re-elected to a second term. These members must continue to do their regular jobs at the enterprise they manage, and they are not paid for their service to the management board. But in return, the member of the management board gets job security for the time he or she serves. Each enterprise has a director. Each director is appointed by the management board and then becomes one of the members of the management board. A workers’ council and a management board have the right to get rid of their director and find a replacement, according to the law.
In the "Constitutional Law of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia," adopted on January 13, 1953, Ðilas and Tito established that self-governing socialism was the basis of the entire social order in Yugoslavia. Yugoslav officials organized the economy as a mixed planned socialist economy and a decentralized, worker managed market socialist economy. They nationalized factories and decreed that workers in nationalized factories were entitled to a share of the profits. Privately owned workshops could have up to four employees per owner. They allowed family farms to own up to 10 hectares of land per person. All other farmland was distributed to co-ops and local communities. Managers of nationalized companies were supervised by workers’ councils, and each of these workers’ councils included all employees at each company. The worker councils also appointed management, often by secret ballot.
At the Seventh Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, 1958, the League officially declared that the State is always transitory in self-governing socialist societies. The League states, “The producer becomes the bearer of the social function of managing production and at the same time, an active participant in the function of distribution of the national product. The state appears less and less in direct production as political authority.” The State is a living organization that develops according to the evolution of people as they are involved in economic production and distribution. The ever-changing State develops around economic territories of producers and consumers as it fosters the evolution of decentered governance (and eventually completely self-governing socialism). In this way, the State is defined in great part by its function as the plan and practice of economic coordination that arises from the collection of the capabilities and demands of individual societies as determined by those individual societies. The State doesn’t exist apart from the self-governing socialism taking place between workers’ councils and consumer councils, but it exists as the overarching connections uniting the entire system of this self-governing socialism. According to the “Program of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia,” the only way the State can function effectively is to ensure the greatest amount of personal freedom to the workers when determining how best to run their own enterprises and production. This, they state, is the best way to free labor from prejudicial assumptions regarding working only for a wage. It is by way of socialized production that the workers will assume responsibility for making the economy work and recognize every producer’s right to enjoy the fruits of their labor. It is by way of self-governing socialism that a free society can overcome the contradictions inherent to social differences, and it does this by the means just described, not through antagonism between different groups of society within the same economy. It is for this reason that the State in a self-governing socialist society must walk a fine line between micromanaging the economy on the one hand and letting contradictions turn into antagonism, chaos and individualism on the other. The League states, “Precisely from such contradictions emerges the necessity of limiting the producers’ independence by certain centralized economic institutions and functions of society and the state, and of limiting the power and economic function of the central social and state organs by the independence and self-management of the producers and basic factors of socialist material development.” Communal societies establish the first steps toward this project by making social activity of primary importance. In this way, a society’s social questions, the economy, the culture, etc., come from the bottom up, rather than from political leadership. This system of decentralized and direct involvement in self-determination doesn’t have any need for political parties per se, since politics become an ongoing, directly lived affair. Thus, the nation as a whole also has no need for any other political party than the one that ensures this system, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia.
On April 7, 1963, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia adopted a new constitution, which proclaims under its second part, article six, “The basis of the socioeconomic system of Yugoslavia is free, associated labor with socially owned means of production and self-management of the working people in production and distribution of the national product in the work organization and social community.” Article seven states, “Only work and the results of work shall determine a person’s material and social position.” Further, “No one may directly or indirectly gain material or other advantages by exploiting the work of others.”
Under article nine, the Constitution clearly states, “Any act violating the right of self-management of the working people is unconstitutional.” Among the rights and duties of self-governed workers, they will manage how most efficiently to use capital and equipment at their own enterprises, manage wage distributions at their own enterprises, decide who and when to hire and fire, determine how much to work, determine when to merge with other enterprises and when to break away to form a separate enterprise, and all in accordance with their “obligations to the social community.” They will also be responsible for working toward improvements in their own standard of living and in everyone’s general standard of living, including improving education and providing suitable recreation. Article 10 states, “The working people of an organization, as members of the working community, shall establish mutual work relations and shall be equals in self-management.”
Yugoslavia's economy prospered and suffered only one recession within its first 20 years. It was the first established economic system to officially codify workers’ councils after the Weimar Republic in 1919. (Though the Trade Union Federation of the Miners of Bolivia codified their program in 1946, their program did not materialize until the revolution of 1953.) Under Tito’s direction, Yugoslavia instituted the most democratic economic system up to that time and fostered the first established economic system of self-governing socialism anywhere.

Self-Governing Socialism: The Weimar Constitution

2010-01-25T11:28:00.000-08:00

The 1919 Constitution of the German Reich governed the Weimar Republic until 1933. The Weimar Republic, a name given to this period only after its destruction by Hitler and the Third Reich, followed the period of what Nazis refer to as the second Reich, which began in 1871. The “old Reich” existed from 911 to 1806, as part of the Holy Roman Empire. However, the terms “first Reich” and “second Reich” are rarely used outside Nazi propaganda when trying to establish the self-proclaimed Third Reich’s legitimacy as heirs to German power. Also, the German people kept using the word “Reich” when referring to their nation after 1919, all through the Weimar Republic and up until Germany’s defeat in WWII. Under the period of what Nazis refer to as the second Reich, the German government guaranteed social welfare for its workers, including pensions and benefits for sickness and accidents and for maternity leave. But some employees worked 80 hours a week, and holidays were not guaranteed. Poverty still existed as well.
Germany entered WWI in 1914 with broad support from pretty much all social, political and religious groups. Historians know this idiotic wave of euphoria as the Spirit of 1914. The leadership of German labor unions generally backed the nation. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) likewise backed the nation, despite the agreement of the Second International to oppose the war. When the war dragged on longer than expected, and when rank-and-file workers began to learn of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and of the horrors on the frontline, they were left without the power of organized labor or of a political voice to oppose being sent to war. Richard Müller and the revolutionary stewards of union shops organized wildcat strikes beginning in 1916 and crippled political support for the war. This brought the wrath of the German government down on the anti-war movement, but it was too late. The German people had already started to realize Germany would lose WWI, and they were not in the mood for patriotic nonsense. On August 8, 1918, military forces of the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Australia and Canada began a united effort against the German military that would become known as the Hundred Days Offensive. By October, the offensive proved to be too much for German forces. The Reichstag amended the German constitution on October 29, giving them the right to dismiss the elderly and conservative Chancellor Georg von Hertling and appoint the more liberal Prince Maximilian of Baden as his replacement. The Reichstag wanted Maximilian to calm growing restlessness among the German workers and to negotiate an armistice with allied forces. Maximilian immediately appointed a coalition of representatives to serve as a provisional government. The provisional government included SPD politician Friedrich Ebert and SPD Deputy Chair Philipp Scheidemann as the party's representatives. Ebert and Maximilian knew that German Emperor Wilhelm II (Kaiser Wilhelm) would not be able to retain his throne much longer and urged him to abdicate his thrones in time to save the monarchy itself. On July 17, Bolshevik forces had executed the Kaiser’s first cousin, Czar Nicholas II, in Russia, along with the Czar’s wife, children and servants. On November 6, Ebert demanded the Kaiser leave his throne. When the Kaiser refused, Maximilian announced anyway on November 9 that the Kaiser had abdicated his thrones as emperor of the Reich and emperor of the Kingdom of Prussia. Then, Maximilian immediately resigned, handing his authority over to Ebert that afternoon, per Ebert’s demands.
At the same time, Müller and his revolutionary stewards had been meeting with the Spartacus League (not to be confused with the Spartacists League) and representatives of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) to organize an armed insurrection. Upon hearing of the Oct. 29 Kaiserliche Marine mutinies at the ports of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, the revolutionary stewards called for a general strike. On noon, November 9, the same day that Maximilian resigned and left Ebert in command, Scheidemann learned that Karl Liebknecht, a communist revolutionary released from prison just a few days earlier, planned to proclaim Germany as a Socialist Republic. Scheidemann did not want to leave the initiative to the revolutionaries, and he immediately stepped out onto a balcony of the Reichstag. From there, above a crowd of demonstrators, he proclaimed on his own authority that Germany was a republic. At that moment, the monarchy was abolished.

The German Revolution
That evening, armed demonstrators entered Berlin. Müller's revolutionary stewards, the Spartacus League and members of the USPD occupied buildings and took control of the government, announcing a new German Revolutionary Parliament with elections to be held the following day, Sunday. They planned for workers in every Berlin factory to choose from their own ranks their own workers’ and soldiers’ councils to represent them. These councils were then to elect representatives to serve on the Council of the People's Deputies, which would replace Ebert’s function as chancellor.
That same evening, Ebert’s supporters from the SPD started to lobby workers and soldiers to choose SPD workers and soldiers to serve as representatives on the Council. If the SPD dominated in the council, Ebert hoped he could still command the Council through SPD representatives. When Müller heard of their lobbying, he countered with an idea of an entirely SPD-free Executive Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, which would serve to coordinate the activities of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. However, during debates between Müller and Ebert, the Executive Council ended up with both USPD and SPD members and jointly chaired by Müller and SPD member Brutus Molkenbuhr. Ebert was to serve as co-chair of the Council of the People's Delegates, along with Hugo Haase of the USPD.
That same day, Ebert and General Wilhelm Groener formed a pact stipulating that Ebert would attempt to keep soldiers’ councils from taking authority away from top brass and the general assured Ebert of military support against the Councils. This pact was undermined later during the Imperial Council Convention of December 16-19, causing military commanders to turn their attention to the freikorps as a potential force against the “Bolshevik menace.”
On November 12, the Council of the People’s Deputies published its programme, lifting censorship laws, abolishing rules governing relations between servant and master and introduced the right to vote for everyone over 19. It decreed amnesty for all political prisoners and guaranteed an eight-hour workday, benefits for unemployment, social insurance and workers' compensation. They appointed a Nationalization Committee to examine which industries were ripe for nationalization and to prepare the coal and steel industries to be nationalized. In Leipzig, Hamburg, Bremen, Chemnitz and Gotha, workers’ and soldiers’ councils put city administration under their control. In Brunswick, Düsseldorf, Mülheim-Ruhr and Zwickau, all civil servants true to the Kaiser were arrested. In Hamburg and Bremen, red guards protected the revolution. Councils took over the distribution of food and over accommodations and provisions for soldiers returning from the front.
The Council of the People's Deputies and the Executive Council had replaced the old government, but the previous administrative machinery remained unchanged. Public servants from the Imperial administration continued their jobs as before, and SPD leadership in the Executive Council started to deal directly with these administrators rather than go through the Council of the People’s Deputies. Top administration often dealt only with Ebert. By mid-November, the Executive Council had started to split between the SPD and the USPD.
Because of the Ebert-Groener pact and because of a December 24 military attack on sailors in Berlin who were loyal to revolutionary forces, the USPD left the Council of the People's Deputies on December 29.
On December 31, Rosa Luxemburg presented the founding programme of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Karl Liebknecht was one of the party’s chairs. Members of the Spartacus League joined, but the revolutionary stewards stayed with the USPD.
On January 4, the chief of police in Berlin was fired for being loyal to revolutionary forces, and some anti-revolutionary newspapers had published editorials calling for the deaths of the spartacists and for joining the freikorps. The next day, armed demonstrators poured into the streets of Berlin, occupied train stations and the offices of newspapers that had published anti-revolutionary propaganda. The following day, organizers called for an overthrow of Ebert’s government, but they found out the troops they needed for such an overthrow were either neutral or else loyal to Ebert at that time. In response, Ebert ordered troops into Berlin to take back buildings that were occupied by the demonstrators. The head of the Army and Navy also rallied the freikorps into Berlin to violently finish off any resistance. On January 15, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were discovered in an apartment, taken away and killed by the freikorps. Throughout the following few months, similar armed resistance in other German cities met with more freikorps violence, all with the approval of Ebert.

The Weimar Republic and its constitution
On January 19, the German people elected representatives to the Constituent National Assembly. On February 6, the Assembly met in Weimar and elected Ebert president. The new political arrangements eventually became known as the Weimar Republic. The Assembly approved the Weimar Constitution on August 11. Its first article stated that “the power of the state emanates from the people.” The constitution decreed the right to vote for anyone over the age of 19. It declared an eight-hour workday, domestic and agricultural labor reform, welfare, health insurance, workers’ rights and regulated wages.
Article 165 of the Constitution states:

Workers and employees are called upon to cooperate on an equal basis in association with employers in the regulation of wages and working conditions as well as in the overall economic development of the forces of production. The mutual organizations and their agreements will be recognized.
To look out for their social and economic interests, workers and employees maintain legal representation in factory workers’ councils as well as in district workers’ councils according to economic regions and in a national workers’ council.
The regional workers’ councils and the national workers’ council meet with representatives of the participating popular circles in district economic councils and a national economic council to perform common economic tasks and to cooperate in carrying out the nationalization decrees. The district economic councils and the national economic council are to be composed of representatives of the most important vocational groups according to their national economic and social significance.
Legislative proposals concerning sociopolitical an economic policy of fundamental importance shall be presented by the cabinet to the national economic council for its opinion before introduction to the Parliament. The national economic council itself has the right to propose such laws to the Parliament, and they are to receive equal treatment with bills of the cabinet or of the Council of State. The council can delegate representatives who can participate in parliamentary discussions on and equal basis with representatives of the regions.
Control and administrative powers in the spheres assigned to them can be transmitted to the workers’ councils and economic councils.

Self-Governing Socialism: Aleksander Lozovsky

2010-01-22T19:33:00.000-08:00

Solomon Abramovich (Alexandr or Aleksander) Lozovsky (1878-1952) held a number of important offices in the Soviet Union before being executed for “bourgeois nationalism.” As the only General Secretary of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) from 1921-1937, he was responsible for coordinating Communist activities within trade unions to try to balance social democratic influence on the international labor movement. In Program of Action of the Red International of Labour Unions, written between August and October 1921, Losovsky explains why class collaboration is useless. Class struggle is the only hope for the working class, and that means an actual fight against the owning and employing class. It isn’t possible to civilize capitalism, he writes, and for this reason, the labor movement needs revolutionary leadership.
In chapter 14, “Control of Production,” Losovsky begins by explaining there can be no common ground between employer and employed. The most dire issue we face as working people is getting control of production, he writes. Only then can workers solve the problem of unemployment, closed factories, the “waste of productive forces and values,” etc. And this control over production has to be more than just a committee controlling the purse strings of enterprises. He calls for direct, across-the-board workers’ control of industry, the technical and commercial spheres as well as the financial.
Toward this end, the First Congress of the Profintern issued recommendations for complete worker control to all capitalist nations. Workers’ control is key to preparing workers to manage their own societies. Workers must pry commercial and financial secrets from employers. The call for workers’ control must radicalize the labor union movement. Employers will not think workers’ control is fair, but that is too bad, Losovsky states. Official authorization to control the means of production will never come in a bourgeois society. When workers occupy the enterprise facilities, they must purposely draw in all workers, including those workers who are backward. One early project for workers when they start to take control of production is to conduct a census, so that they will have a record of who can offer what in a self-governed socialist society. Another early push toward workers’ control must put factory committees under the authority of trade unions, trade unions being radicalized. This, Losovsky states, helps to organize along industrial lines rather than geographic lines, and prevents workers from only concerning themselves with local needs. The newly radicalized trade unions must engage issues in the press, Losovsky writes, and they must agitate on a wide scale.

Self-Governing Socialism: The Comintern

2010-01-22T16:07:00.000-08:00

The Comintern (1919-1943) was the shortened name for The Communist International, an organization that helped to unite and organize communist movements throughout the world. Lenin helped originate the Comintern in order to protect the newly formed communist government in Russia from capitalist nations’ interference by fostering proletarian revolutions in those and other nations. Stalin dissolved the organization in order to keep his World War II allies from suspecting the Soviet Union of trying to stir up trouble in other countries.
The task of the Comintern included defining appropriate goals and strategies for worldwide communist revolution and supporting those goals and strategies internationally. Delegates from all over Europe, from the U.S. Socialist Labor Party, from Korea and China, all attended its founding. Lenin, Trotsky and the left-wing Workers’ Opposition member Alexandra Kollontai also attended. The Comintern was more precisely the shortened name for The Third International only, the Comintern being the third such international organization. The first was the International Workingmen’s Association (1866-1876). The first organization included socialists of differing social philosophies, including Marxists and anarcho-syndicalists. The two groups did not coincide peacefully. For this reason, organizers of the Second International (1889-1916) did not invite anarcho-syndicalists to join. Lenin became a member of the Second International in 1905. Some anarcho-syndicalists claim to have re-founded the original International in 1922 in Berlin, as the International Workers Association, which still exists. The Fourth International (founded 1938) also still exists, but barely. Followers of Trotsky founded the Fourth International after having been ostracized from the Comintern, but official communist parties have rarely recognized the Fourth International as legitimate. Trotsky considered the Comintern to have crossed over to counter-revolution under the control of bureaucratic Soviet Union elite. Some left-wing groups have been trying to organize a Fifth International as well. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called for founding the Fifth Socialist International in April 2010 in Venezuela.
At the Second Congress of the Communist International, held in Petrograd from July 19 to August 7, 1920, delegates issued a joint statement titled “Factory Committees and Workers’ Control.” It starts with a criticism of workers’ attempts theretofore at controlling the economy: “The economic struggle of the proletariat for the increase of wages and for the general improvement of the living conditions of the masses constantly accentuates its nature as a dead-end struggle.” What they mean is, the proletariat without the wisdom of Communist Party officials guiding them. They state that “one errs when one seeks to form only councils of workers committed to the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Why? Because, they say, a political party in power guarantees that society will not slip back into capitalism after so much effort by workers at the ground level. Workers’ councils may be able to control a factory or raw materials needed for production in a factory, but once councils try to control the whole industry, they will meet with resistance unless a Party is in place.
They state:

The trade unions organized the working masses with the goal of struggling for the increase of wages and for the reduction of the working day and carried out the struggle on a large scale. The industrial workers’ councils are organized to establish worker control of industry and to struggle against economic disorganization; they encompass all the worker enterprises, but the struggle they undertake can only very slowly assume a general political character.

Thus, the Party must guide the workers councils in addition to the unions, toward the same vision, infusing in them all a “communist spirit.” The paternalism continues: “In order to carry out this task, communists must, in fact, subordinate the trade unions and the workers’ committees to the Communist Party…making them all march on the path that leads to the victory of the working class….” If, as they conclude, the workers’ councils are to “make the most advanced workers enterprise directors,” and if the councils are under the authority of the Party, then the Party is ultimately in charge of appointing bosses to command the workers. So much for self-governing socialism.

Self-Governing Socialism: Poznań June

2010-01-20T19:24:00.000-08:00

Nazi Germany attacked the Second Polish Republic in 1939 following alleged Polish attacks on German homes along their border. The Soviet Union attacked Poland 17 days later, stating they needed to protect from violence the Ukrainians and Belarusians living in eastern Poland. Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland for about a year and a half and then retreated from German forces. The Soviet Union officially entered the war, and then soviet forces re-conquered the eastern part of Poland after three years under complete German occupation. The war ended shortly thereafter, and Prime Minister Clement Attlee and President Truman awarded to the Soviet Union the eastern part of Poland and the right to support a communist government in Poland without interference. This had been the agreement established during the Tehran Conference of 1943 in order to get Soviet support in the war. The Soviets helped build industry in Poland via Poland’s communist government and incorporated Poland’s economy into their own.
With Nikita Khrushchev leading the communist world after Stalin, the Eastern Bloc experienced a mild liberalization of political life, which in Poland brought about different industrial norms but no better worklife. This mild liberalization meant more freedom to criticize the system, and by 1955, leftists were starting to publish criticism of Poland’s communism. The system had not brought about a socialist society where workers govern themselves. If it had, workers would not be living in a society where they had to pay taxes that keep increasing, work harder as production norms keep rising, get paid less as wages keep falling and as overtime pay shrinks.
When conditions at a steam engine manufacturing facility, the W-3 division of the Joseph Stalin Metal Works of Poznań (ZISPO, formerly and currently known as Cegielski), started to become unbearable, 17 delegates complained to the Ministry of Engineering and the Central Union Council in Warsaw. They went to demand better working conditions and better pay, but they also demanded more control because they were tired of being micromanaged by the Polish State. Government officials expected workers to complain about pay and conditions, but they were unprepared for their demand to manage the factory themselves. When their demands were ignored, workers formed a council. They defined their demands and occupied the factory. Many other factories called wildcat strikes, and about 100,000 people filled the city streets. Delegates went to government offices to make demands. Next, groups started to occupy the administrative buildings. They let loose prisoners, grabbed guns and burned files. The Polish military attacked insurgents and crushed the uprising within a couple of days, but left-wing movements continued. In September and October 1955, workers started forming councils. As a concession to this movement, workers’ councils were acknowledged by the Polish United Workers’ Party as official bodies within the workplaces.
In the Nov. 20, 1956 “Law on Workers’ Councils,” Polish officials “ordered” employees to form workers’ councils in state industrial and construction enterprises as well as on state farms if the majority of workers employed there want one. It further states, “The workers’ council, in the name of the collective, manages the enterprise, which represents national property.” However, the decree states that workers should continue to honor national economic plans, which includes increasing production when necessary, lowering the price of products, improving quality and aesthetics of the products and improving conditions at the facility. In addition, each workers’ council will set goals to meet the national economic plan and will decide how best to meet those goals. Each council will determine who gets paid what and will determine how to spend profits on improving the enterprise they govern. Each council will decide how their enterprise will be organized and will decide how and when to sell machines and tools they no longer need. Two-thirds of each workers’ council will be made up of elected rank-and-file employees, and the rest will be engineers, technicians and economists. However, the decree also specifies that the director of the enterprise will be in the council, and that this director will be appointed by the “authorized state organ,” but only “after agreement is reached with the workers’ council.” The state will also appoint the director’s “deputy.” The agreement probably entails the second point under article 13: “The workers’ council has the right to make proposals with respect to appointing and replacing the director and his deputy.”

Self-Governing Socialism: The Catalan Collectives

2010-01-13T11:31:00.000-08:00

In the 19th Century, the Spanish State had little stability. It started to fall apart in 1898 when Spain lost territories in the Caribbean and Morocco, making Spaniards doubt their nation’s health and future. Military officials felt as though they had been made scapegoats unfairly, and working class families of most soldiers felt as though they had been used as fodder in senseless destruction.
A lot of Spanish people had anarchist tendencies. Anarchism had taken hold in Spain among middle class students and professionals who had grown up under a powerful, unstable and corrupt government and among southern peasants who had grown up with a strong tradition of communal spirit and a distrust of urban society. So, Spanish anarchism emerged as a combination of peasant communalism, petty-bourgeois individualism and radical trade unionism. Yet they shared in common the basic principles of anarchism: opposition to elections and parliamentary activity, and opposition to all forms of hierarchy and centralism.
While anarchist tendencies developed in Spain, so did fascist tendencies. Fascism had its roots in that part of the Spanish military stationed in Morocco where troops had been fighting a long and bloody battle and had recently lost ground, in the state of Navarre, (which is the state just northeast of Aragon) and among Spain's top brass. Fascism was growing outside of Spain as well. President Hindenburg appointede Hitler to the office of Germany's chancellor on January 30, 1933 and in March, Mussolini's cohort Engelbert Dollfuß assumed dictatorial control of Austria.
Among Spain's anarchists, unionized workers expressed these anarchist tendencies in their activism and in their debates, often analyzing anarchist strategies in trade union publications. Under these uncertain times, the more “successful” citizens grew wary of an anarchist uprising, and in 1923, part of the military, led by Captain General Miguel Primo de Rivera, grabbed power from parliament to try to stabilize the country by force.
De Rivera echoed most Spaniards’ sentiment that Spain's problem could be found in the politicians. Politicians had failed to address growing economic problems, and no one in office represented the average citizen. The constitution and the entire political system of Spain at that time had been the invention of a prime minister only 50 years earlier. The system had two parties, but neither party represented anyone other than the Spanish elite. Though the two parties would take turns in office, the system of The Peaceful Turn didn’t even give most working class people the right to vote. De Rivera promised to address the problems of the working class that the politicians ignored, but he said he could only do this by keeping his dictatorship in place long enough to sweep away the mess created by the politicians.
When de Rivera grabbed power, the king decided that military authority would be preferable to an anarchist revolution, and so he made de Rivera the Prime Minister of Spain. However, de Rivera bit off more than he could chew. He started spending money hand over fist, and the Spanish government went bankrupt. When this happened, the military and the king lost faith in him. In the minds of the citizens, the king had also caused these problems because he had backed de Rivera at first. Because of this, the king was unpopular when De Rivera resigned in 1930. An admiral assumed leadership next, and he decided it would be best to organize a governmental reboot by calling for democratic elections. When the people voted, they voted for a socialist government, and the king fled the country. This inspired calls for a new constitution. This established the Second Spanish Republic, and the political left and center led this new Republic. They changed the flag, and they changed the national anthem.
The new constitution guaranteed new freedoms. The citizens were guaranteed the right to free speech and freedom of association. The constitution guaranteed the separation of Church and State and a right to divorce. The constitution gave women the right to vote. The constitution guaranteed the provinces the right to full autonomy if they wanted it. The constitution also instituted the nationalization of land, banks, railways and public services. Obviously, nationalization didn’t make “successful” people happy. The successful people had risked so very much trying to keep working class people in subservient positions. Now, the successful might actually have to work for what they have instead of using wealth created by the working class.
In 1932, the new legislators passed agrarian reform, which took land from the idle landowners and distributed it among peasants. This made the idle class even less happy. Religious people were also unhappy because the constitution took away public education from Church authority. Other laws prohibited the Church from private school education as well, and allowed the government to confiscate Church property. In addition to these new laws, officials often turned a blind eye to anti-clerical hate crimes. For many years, the Church had taken public funds to run schools and had enjoyed a position of power while the working class couldn’t even vote. The Church had spent many years doing absolutely nothing for economic justice for the poor, while their own buildings were trimmed in gold. The newly empowered proletariat figured they deserved to have their churches burned to the ground, and that’s exactly what they got. During this time, 160 churches were burned.
The new constitution and the destruction of the Church’s position were great victories for the left, but they lost the very next election, the election of 1934, to the right wing. The newly elected right wing officials immediately put a stop to all land reforms. The socialists were unhappy about this turn, and they initiated a violent strike. The military responded with force.
The very next election, the election of 1936, was a win for the left again. Of those elected, virtually no one represented middle ground between right and left. Tensions in the nation reflected the large gap between the two sides, and the two became more militant. The right turned to paramilitary and vigilante actions. Parliament angered the right further when they removed the president and replaced him with a leftist who the right hated and who did not support a strong military. The right wing criticized the replacement as being unconstitutional. Assassinations ensued, mostly between the police and fascist militants in Madrid.
On July 17, 1936, the right, led by Spain's top military brass, attempted a coup that had only partial success. Garrisons revolted in most major cities. From the beginning it was clear that this was an attack not only on the Popular Front government, but also on the working-class organizations that had brought it to power. After seizing control of the Seville garrison on July 17, General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano signed a proclamation declaring that the leaders of any labor union on strike would "immediately be shot" as well as "an equal number of members selected discretionally."
Strong resistance kept the military and its right-wing leadership at bay, which prolonged fighting. The battles became known as the Spanish Civil War. The left was generally recognized as the "Republicans" or "Loyalists." The right was generally recognized as the "Nationalists." Only the Soviet Union, Mexico and at first France supported the republicans. Italy, Germany and Portugal supported the nationalists, as did Texaco, General Motors, Ford Motors and the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Upon hearing of the coup, workers and police immediately repelled fascist and monarchist forces back to all but one third of the country, in the northeast to the mid-north, excluding most of the north coast, and then westward along the border of Portugal. Beyond the peninsula, fascists also controlled Morocco where the rebellion originated, the Canary Islands off the southern coast of Morocco and the islands of Mallorca and Ibiza to the west of Spain. Soon, fascist forces extended southward all the way to Morocco and then north to the coast.
When Spain’s generals attempted their coup, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), which represented the non-political syndicalist unions, had about a million and a half members throughout Spain, and the General Union of Workers (UGT), another non-political but Marxian organization, had almost as many. They generally held their strengths in separate parts of Spain. The UGT had strong worker support in the state of Asturias (a far northern, mid-coastal community), in Andalusia (a southernmost state just above Morocco) and in the Levante region, which is the entire eastern coast of Spain and its islands. The UGT also had a strong following in the Castile region, the upper-mid territory of Spain. The UGT had members in Catalonia as well, but the CNT held most of its strength in this single state. When the generals attempted their coup, about 70 percent of all non-agrarian industrial workers in Spain resided in the state of Catalonia. The political theories of anarcho-syndicalism enjoyed popular support in this state and particularly in its biggest city, Barcelona. In Barcelona, workers militias disarmed 12,000 rebel soldiers. The UGT had very weak representation in this city. Catalan workers represented by the UGT eventually came to be guided by the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), which was a purely communist organization.
On October 24, 1936, the government of Catalonia, which was referred to as Catalonia’s General Council, slowly reviving as a separate institution, now dominated by workers' organizations, legalized the de facto seizure of the shops and factories by its “Decree on the Collectivization and Control of Industry and Trade in Catalonia.”
The decree demands the abolition of incomes that do not correspond to work, and that the entire economy of the state of Catalonia belongs to the workers. Upon inspecting the report of the Economic Council, on the proposal of the Minister of the Economy, the General Council ruled first that all industry and trade in Catalonia will heretofore be of only two kinds: 1.) Formerly private enterprises that have been collectivized, becoming workers’ cooperatives, each managed by a works council; and 2.) Private enterprises managed by an owner or by a boss appointed by the owner(s), but with a workers’ control board holding the purse strings for the enterprise and cooperating in management.
Any enterprise with 100 workers or more are to be immediately collectivized into workers’ cooperatives. Any enterprise owned by a supporter of the coup will also be immediately collectivized, as will any enterprise owned by someone who has left Catalonia. If there are fewer than 100 employees, the workers and the owner can vote. If the owner agrees to collectivize, and if a majority of workers want to collectivize, then the enterprise will be collectivized. If not, bosses and a workers’ control board, as per the second option above, will manage that enterprise. Enterprises with more than 50 employees but with fewer than 100 employees can collectivize the same way, but must get approval from three-fourths of the workers.
The decree states that workers in each enterprise remaining private will elect a workers’ control board. The workers at each enterprise determine the number of workers appointed to their board. This board decides who gets paid what, how many hours to work and safety measures. They will determine work discipline, and they will be the only ones who communicate with the workers. Each workers’ control board will also review annual fiscal reports from employers and will pass these reviews along to the authorized general council of their particular industry.
These authorized general councils representing each industry will have 16 members and will be under the direct supervision of the Economic Council of Catalonia. They will be responsible for directing the works councils toward goals for the industry they represent. They are responsible for market, technical and statistical research, setting prices, coordinating enterprises according to consumption and for coordinating buying and selling for machines and raw materials. Workers can appeal to Catalonia’s Minister of Economy with any disagreement they have with their general council. Each of these general councils will be made up of four technicians appointed by the Economic Council of Catalonia, eight representatives of trade unions from the industry and four members of each works council.
These works councils are the managing bodies of the industries designated as workers’ cooperatives. Workers at each of these types of enterprises elect between five and fifteen workers representing proportionately the departments of each enterprise. Half of each council is up for election every two years. Members may be re-elected. Members of each works council are responsible to the workers at the enterprise they manage as well as to the authorized general council of their particular industry. Each works council will submit semi-annual and annual fiscal reports along with details of its plans for the enterprise it manages. The decree states that workers or the authorized general council of their particular industry may “remove the entire works council or a part of it from duty,” which means that workers or the general council may recall those serving on works councils. In cases when it is the general council who initiates the recall, workers can complain if they wish to Catalonia’s Minister of Economy, and the Minister will examine the situation.
For proponents of self-governing socialism, the most fascinating part of the Spanish Civil War would probably have to be the way workers managed the economy. For the first time since attempts to establish socialism in Russia, Hungary, Germany, England and Italy following WWI, the revolutionary struggle of the Spanish workers demonstrates the transformation from capitalist to collective modes of production. Though collectivization was incomplete, the revolution remains an important achievement because workers transformed the economy on such an impressive scale. Between 1936 to 1938, at least two thousand self-managed rural collectives were formed, over fifteen million acres of land expropriated and between seven and eight million people were directly or indirectly affected by collectivization in the nearly 60 percent of Spain's land area held by socialists, many of whom were anarchists or self-governing types.
One of the first measures toward workers’ self-management was firing the railway directors and their assistants. They were the biggest wage earners at the railway, and firing them saved money. The extra money went to increase the pay of lowest paid workers. Similar measures happened in the transportation and telephone industries. Obviously collectivization meant the end of private capitalist corporations. Stocks, bonds, and debts contracted by the old administration were repudiated (in most cases. See below for some exceptions). Financiers left the country to await the outcome of the fascist military offensive, which left industries open to reconstruction under worker self-management. The syndicates collectivized all properties belonging to the gas, water and electric companies. The savings accruing from good management and abolition of dividends, profits, interest on loans, etc. were diverted to cutting water rates by half. Textile factory owners transferred themselves and the assets of the industry abroad, but by cutting off dividends and premiums and eliminating high salaried directors and other wasteful expenditures, the collectives were able to pay the increased costs for raw materials.
The port of Barcelona was socialized. Collectivization also embraced smaller establishments: small factories, artisan workshops, service and repair shops, etc. The artisans and small workshop owners, together with their employees and apprentices, often joined the union of their trade. By consolidating their efforts and pooling their resources on a fraternal basis, the shops were able to undertake very big projects and provide services on a much wider scale. All beauty parlors joined the union. The union closed unprofitable shops and invested in modernizing them.

Self-Governing Socialism: The CNT

2010-01-08T19:02:00.000-08:00

The National Confederation of Labor (1910-present) is an association of labor unions in Spain that subscribes to the philosophy of anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist communism, though workers don’t need to subscribe to this philosophy in order to join. It works toward establishing self-governing socialism. The National Confederation of Labor (CNT) is not open to police, nor to soldiers nor to any political official. Naturally, bosses, managers and supervisors cannot join either.
The CNT was legalized in 1936, and during the Civil War the CNT ran Barcelona and part of Aragon. George Orwell, described the situation in the first chapter of Homage to Catalonia:

It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said Señor or Don or even Usted; everyone called everyone else Comrade and Thou, and even said Salud! instead of Buenos dias.

In chapter seven, Orwell explains the situation in Aragón:

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragón one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life– snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.– had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is most unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.

In the rural areas of Lower Teruel and Huesca, CNT militias enforced land seizures. Large landowners were prohibited from hiring anyone outside of their families.
In the “Report of the Graphic Arts Trade Union of Barcelona” of 1936, the authors explain the difference between the social structure of the past, society structured under capitalism, and the one under direction of the CNT. Under capitalism, the worker was obliged to sell his or her labor to pay for the investor’s idle time or better life, and thus social order reflected the privileges of one social position over the other based on who owned what. Under the CNT, working people will not labor for the benefit of investors but for the benefit of themselves. Under the CNT, society will be structured according to one’s work, not according to what one owns, and democracy will take place in factories, farms, workshops, mines, etc., rather than at parliaments and city halls. This means that society will decide directly and for itself how best to deal out the produce of its own labor. Each person is completely free to act upon his or her own particular tastes, personal affinities or interests, or act based upon his or her proximity to others, or at least as free to act as the worker and renter was free to be wealthy under capitalism, but none of these are of any legitimate consequence under the new system. (This may very well have still improved the availability of choice for a class of people too poor to afford many preferences other than whatever was cheapest.)
To reorganize the economy, the CNT directs workers to elect from among their ranks members to serve on committees at every factory, farm, mine, workshop, etc., and that each of these committees represent the makeup of the facility each represents. The members are recallable at any moment. The committees then join together locally along similar lines of industry to form industrial councils, thus forming as many industrial councils as there are specific types of industries in a particular area. All of these industrial councils are then responsible for working together to coordinate the local economy. It is at this level that regulations will be determined on production and distribution according to demographics and statistics.
This way of organizing the economy is intended to ensure two types of social structures. One pattern of social organization works along industrial lines, linking the printing industry in Barcelona with the printing industry in Tarragona. The other way is territorially, along geographic lines that link all printing industries together under the guidance of a central coordinating body. In both cases, the social structure is industrial. For this reason, residents will have to register with the State, “not as citizens, future soldiers, or taxpayers, but as producers and consumers.” They further explain, “The natural and spontaneous play of these forces of production excludes parasitic entities, whose function yields no benefit to useful work. Thus, courts, jailers, police, professional armies, state functionaries, the financial apparatus, rentiers, speculators and clergy disappear….” I seriously doubt the new utopia ran so smoothly that they didn’t need to lock away the occasional drunk, but getting rid of the professional army and state functionaries meant deep reductions in expenditures. Without landlords and financial investors, profits could return in greater measure to the workers.

The good ol' days!

2010-01-05T17:03:00.000-08:00

2010-01-05T16:59:00.000-08:00

2010-01-03T12:11:00.000-08:00

Self-Governing Socialism: Antonio Gramsci

2009-12-28T18:00:00.000-08:00

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) leaned toward supporting the councils during the council movement in Italy. He was a militant journalist and theorist of the proletariat. He is probably best known for his study of cultural hegemony and for his support of the councils from 1919-1920 before he helped to form the Communist Party of Italy. After that, he spent a number of years supporting Moscow leadership of the Party and a number of years in prison. Overall, Gramsci was not as much of a supporter of self-governing socialism as he was Marxist-Leninist. He generally toed the Party line. What is important, however, in regard to self-governing socialism, is that he often wrote editorials on the council movement in Italy. It is interesting to see how often he repeats the word "discipline" as if he were telling us how to run a reform school for wayward girls. He keeps trying to include the Party and the union into every analysis of the council, and he does that only by way of how they interact in theory.
Gramsci joined the Socialist Party of Italy and became a journalist in his early 20s. During this time, he was generally ambivalent to Italy’s involvement in WWI, but he spoke regularly at events on issues of socialism. In 1919, Gramsci and a group of Italian socialists proposing revolutionary change through workers’ councils helped formed the organization and weekly newspaper The New Order. The New Order group supported a council movement that appeared during large strikes in Turin during that time. The New Order proposed that the working class refuse all compromise with the employing class, refuse to engage in any institution that was not specifically working class, and gain power instead through labor unions and especially through factory councils.
As early as May 1919, factory councils were fast becoming the organization of choice among metalworkers in Italy. When large general strikes no longer upset the establishment, anarchists and other socialists started to organize factory takeovers. In April, several shop stewards were fired at the Fiat plant in Turin, sparking a sit-in strike. The bosses responded with a lockout. Military troops accompanied the lockout. After two weeks, the workers gave in, and the bosses demanded an end to factory councils. Yet another general strike involving 500,000 workers countered these demands. When workers asked Italy’s Socialist Party and its General Confederation of Labor to help spread the strike nationally. Both refused, but anarcho-syndicalist groups encouraged popular support in Pisa, Florence and Genoa. The strike won partial concessions, and the workers of Turin felt betrayed by the lack of support from the Socialist Party and from most unions. In August and September, land seizures by the peasants accompanied worker occupations and strikes among engineering, railway and road transport industries. The movement spread throughout Italy. It was during this time that 500,000 striking workers ran their factories themselves. Workers at these factories formed armed patrols to guard against military and police attacks, and the factories continued to pay wages. The workers raised red and black flags above occupied factories. In December 1919, the Turinese section of the Socialist Party of Italy and the Turin Chamber of Labor voted in favor of establishing factory councils throughout Italy.
Throughout 1919 and 1920, Gramsci was active in the factory council movement and The New Order published its struggles. Gramsci’s editorials are analysis pieces on the theory of workers’ councils. Though they are redundant and nebulous, they offer unique insight on the role of workers’ organizations in the period of transition between capitalism and communism.
In the editorial “Workers’ Democracy,” by Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, published in the June 21, 1919, edition of The New Order, the authors suggest that the Party and the unions are their salvation. Though they ask working people to originate a strategy toward establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat in Italy, they aren’t about to leave it all up for them to decide. They set some ground rules to ensure a vanguard to lead the rest into communism. They suggest that the future system must be one that respects the autonomy and interconnectedness of “social institutions,” while placing them under the authority of a central hierarchy. The Party, they state, must remain an educational authority, and only certain people who have achieved a level of discipline should be allowed to join. Since “the shop with its internal committees, socialist circles and the peasant communities are the centers of proletarian life,” the Party must work directly in them.
By this time, the workers had formed “shop committees” to handle the functions of arbitration and discipline. The authors see these democratic organs taking on more responsibility and power until they have taken all authority from the capitalists. They write, “All power in the shop to the shop committees,” and “all state power to the workers’ and peasants’ councils.”
The first step toward this would be to elect delegates to serve on ward councils, which organized all shop committees within each ward. They recommend one delegate for every 15 workers in each shop. Each ward council will represent as close as possible the actual make-up of the working class in the ward, and each ward council can have the ability to cause an immediate stop to work in the entire ward. They suggest that each one of these ward committees link up under the authority of the Socialist Party and the unions according to city. From here, they will coordinate production along with local peasant organizations.
In the Nov. 8, 1919, edition of The New Order, Gramsci wrote an editorial titled “Trade Unions and Councils.” He starts the piece by writing, “Trade unionism has shown itself to be no more than another form of capitalist society, not a potential suppression of it. It organizes the workers not as producers, but as wage earners, that is, as products of the capitalist system of private property, as sellers of the commodity of labor.” The worker will only begin to understand himself or herself as part of the producing class, the sole creating class, of everything that exists when he or she can come to understand that all people who works for everything they have is one of his or her own kind. Having come to this conclusion, the worker will understand the need to eliminate the capitalist from the productive process.
In the Oct. 11, 1919, edition, Gramsci continues this line of thought by explaining that “wage earners” are not ready to take on a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and that workers’ councils are the best way to turn wage earners into workers who are conscious of themselves as the only productive people in society and therefore the only ones who have the rights and responsibilities of dictatorship. The workers’ councils are supposed to reflect what goes on in the factories, and thus departments in each factory choose delegates. Since the workers’ council is intended to mirror the factory, one should expect to find the same camaraderie in the council that happens in the factories run by those councils. It is through the bonds of setting goals together and cooperating together to realize those goals that the workers turn into communists. Gramsci compares this to the endless “struggle” workers feel they have to fight as members of the union. It is only when workers realize their role as producers rather than as simply wage-sellers in the capitalist machine, that they will quit the endless struggle and start to imposing a new structure to economic life and take responsibility for improving production for their communist society.
Gramsci further defines the role of unions in the June 12, 1920, issue. He states that the union’s function should be to ready the working class to take control of the economy, and part of maintaining workers’ power includes respecting the boundaries between workers and employers. The union should guard against letting workers take steps they are unprepared for, but the council is always working toward possessing the means of production. One cannot take power over the other. The two must exist together, and a sizable number of workers should be members of both at the same time. The Socialist Party, Gramsci says, needs to be the central guiding energy keeping the union involved in the struggle. Though Gramsci remains vague and theoretical, it is his opinion that involving union control over the workers will keep them conscientious and responsible until they are strong enough to take the necessary steps toward their dictatorship. Since he gives no details, I have no idea how this would actually work.
In “The Factory Council,” published in the June 5, 1920, issue, Gramsci offers a bit more in analysis. He explains that the “revolution” will not take place by way of some organization proclaiming itself to be revolutionary, but through the emergence of a new system of production. The revolutionary energy must be “controllable” and “documented.” The revolution will not come about just because enough workers have become members of a specific party or of the union. These organizations may possess an embryonic formation of workers’ control over the economy, but the revolution will not come about within the party or union, but within the factories. The revolution isn’t about recognizing one’s freedom to join a party or a union, but in recognizing one’s constraint to produce for one’s own kind while others do the same in return. This is revolutionary, and this happens in the factories, farms, shops, mines, etc. When a new State apparatus reflects this way of thinking, then this will be the revolution. When the workers everywhere in the world undergo the same revolution, this way of thinking will bind all workers into international economic coordination. It is the Party’s and the unions’ job to encourage this process.

Self-Governing Socialism: The Leeds Soviet

2009-12-25T18:37:00.000-08:00

The Leeds Soviet was a convention of the British left wing, of which one outcome was the establishment of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which were to function as organs of self-governing socialism. W.C. Anderson played a prominent role in the convention. Anderson started to attend meetings of the local Social Democratic Federation when he was 16. In 1900, Anderson moved to Glasgow and volunteered to help A.E. Fletcher run as the Independent Labour Party candidate for parliament. The ILP was a reformist party founded in 1893 during an active strike movement and during a time when workers were moving away from the old political parties. When he moved to Glasgow, Anderson also joined the Glasgow branch of the ILP and the union. He was still in his early 30s when he became a well-known union leader. He chaired the ILP from 1910-1913. He served in parliament from 1914-1918.
The British Socialist Party and the ILP helped to organize the Leeds Soviet of June 3, 1917, and the Socialist Labour Party and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Suffrage Federation also attended. Pankhurst also played a prominent role at the convention. One outcome of the convention was the joining of the SLP and the WSF to call for workers and soldiers to set up workers’ and soldiers’ councils all over England. The fourth resolution passed by the Leeds Soviet pertained to the establishment of workers’ and soldiers’ councils. It states:

The Conference calls upon the constituent bodies at once to establish in every town, urban and rural districts, Councils of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ delegates for initiating and coordinating working class activity in support of the policy set out in the foregoing resolution, and to work strenuously for a peace made by the peoples of the various countries, and for the complete political and economic emancipation of international labour. Such Councils shall also watch diligently for and resist every encroachment upon industrial and civil liberty; shall give special attention to the position of women employed in industry and generally support the work of the trade unions; shall take active steps to stop the exploitation of food and all other necessities of life, and shall concern themselves with questions affecting the pensions of wounded and disabled soldiers and the maintenance grants to the dependents of men serving with the Army and Navy; and the making of adequate provisions for the training of disabled soldiers and for suitable and remunerative work for the men on their return to civilian life. And, further, that the conveners of this Conference be appointed as a Provisional Committee, whose duty shall be to assist the formation of local Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Councils, and generally to give effect to the policy determined by this Conference.
W.C. Anderson, M.P., moving the resolution before the Convention, said:
I gather from the Press reports that this Fourth Resolution is regarded as the ugly duckling among the resolutions, and therefore I claim for it on that ground your special solicitude and support. I saw a paragraph the other day in that dear old mid-Victorian journal the Morning Post, which states that the Fourth Resolution is the one that really matters, being more than mere rhetoric. “This resolution is clearly,” it says, “a violation of the law, as inciting to the subversion of Army discipline and military authorities. Those who move such a resolution and those who act on it are liable to severe penalties.” (Laughter) “It is therefore unthinkable that the Government will wittingly permit such action.” Well, I move the resolution without any apology of any kind, and if they want criminals, there is a pretty haul of them in this hall.

Self-Governing Socialism: Richard Müller

2009-12-24T19:24:00.001-08:00

Richard Müller (1880 – 1943) was a German socialist who was a leading figure of self-governing socialism during WWI. He joined the union and the Social Democratic Party of Germany in about 1906. In his mid-30s, the union had placed him in charge of about 9,000 lathe operators in Berlin. When his union and his party both backed WWI, he and the left wing members of the union started wildcat strikes. Müller grew to be the most prominent organizer of the “revolutionary stewards,” and from 1916 to 1918, the strikes crippled political support for the war effort. Shop stewards have, many times throughout labor history, organized strikes of the rank-and-file union workers when they have a problem with union leadership. The German government started to crack down on dissent about the same time as German people were starting to realize they were going to lose the war. The revolutionary stewards met with the Spartacus League (not to be confused with the Spartacists League) and representatives of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (who had split from the Social Democratic Party over the latter’s decision to support the war effort) to organize an armed insurrection. They jumped into action upon hearing of the Kaiserliche Marine mutinies at the ports of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel on Oct. 29, 1918. On November 9, stewards called for a general strike and armed demonstrations formed to enter the center of Berlin. They took Berlin with no resistance. Müller remained influential in the council movement after they took power by analyzing the strategies and goals of the movement.
In Müller’s 1921 essay, “The Council System in Germany,” he explains how the council movement began in Germany: “When, in July 1916, fifty-five thousand Berlin workers suddenly went on strike, not in order to improve their economic position, but on political grounds, bourgeois society, the leaders of social democracy and the trade unions could not at all grasp this unheard of fact. It simply turned upside down all the previous experiences of the workers’ movement. Where did the causes lie? Who prepared and led this strike? Bourgeois society, as well as the leaders of the trade unions, cared little about the first question. They did not see, or did not wish to see, what revolutionary tendencies the war and the brutal suppression of the working class must release. Hence, they sought by all means to lay hold of the leaders of this movement. They seized them in the large factories…. They were workers who had joined together in “factory committees” which operated like large Petersburg concerns in 1905, though they had no knowledge of the latter’s activity.
These factory committees, writes Müller, can be considered the forerunners of the revolutionary workers’ councils of 1918-1923. When the workers and soldiers had overpowered the old regime in November 1918 to establish council communism, the revolutionary spirit had not been created, writes Müller, but had been directed. He explains: “As early as the beginning of 1918, the moment of this collapse could be foreseen. At that time, it was vital to concentrate the revolutionary energy stored up in the working class and to prevent it from dissipating in individual actions; to contain it and, in a given situation, to set out in closed ranks to overthrow the old regime.” It was only after the revolution that councils grew spontaneously from “revolutionary relationships” between the workers. It was not based on the soviets of Russia, and it did not manifest through industrial unions, syndicates, guilds or a party. He had witnessed workers coming together, regardless of their political and religious beliefs, in ways they had not in the union. The council appeared to Müller to be the natural tool for self-governing socialism. The German Revolution had proven that.
Müller then describes his own rendition of the ideal council system. In the council system, the workers’ councils should bring together the representatives of the working people. Exploiters of others’ labor are excluded from the right to vote, and this council system should take the place of parliament. Representatives should not be elected for any definite term, but should be easily subject to recall at any time. The council must take the role of political authority and economic organizer.
When socialization happens in a capitalist society, workers need to be wary of nationalization. Müller states that nationalization will only get the power of the government involved in the fight between the working class and the employing class. Workers’ councils must socialize industry. That does not mean that all industry needs to be socialized at the same time, however. The largest industries should be socialized through workers’ councils first. The rest can be socialized a little at a time. And workers’ councils cannot truly socialize industry without consumer’s councils involved as well. Obviously, workers cannot just create however much they want of any product they want. They must take into account what society needs. Plans should also benefit from scholars, Müller writes.
He describes how such control should be organized and maintained. A works council will manage each mine, factory, farm, etc., and these works councils are appointed by the corresponding district group council. Small shops of the same kind will be grouped together by districts when establishing industrial organizations. Extremely large facilities may have more than one workers’ council. Each district group council is composed of representatives elected by the workers. Scholars work alongside the workers’ councils to facilitate managing production. Each industry’s workers councils elects from their midst representatives to serve on a national group council. A national group council will regulate the kinds and volumes of production, the planning and allocation of raw materials, and the sale of the product in their industry. Representatives are elected from the national group councils to serve on the national economic council. The organization of consumption is united with the organization of production in a national economic council. The national economic council will determine the overall economic plan for the nation.

Self-Governing Socialism: Karl Korsch

2009-12-20T08:36:00.001-08:00

Karl Korsch (1886-1961) was a left-communist theorist during the workers’ council movement in Germany. In his early days, he was strongly influenced by syndicalism and the Fabian Society. Workers’ councils, or soviets, had been the revolutionary force during the Russian Revolution, and Korsch praised them as the ideal form of workers’ democracy. They had appeared in Hungary as the revolutionary force during the Chrysanthemum Revolution, and now they were revolutionizing Germany.
Korsch’s ideas were also an inspiration for the Frankfurt School and to Arthur Rosenberg, author of A History of Bolshevism: From Marx to the First Five Years' Plan (1932). He also influenced playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956).
Korsch’s writings on self-governing socialism were not in line with official Party Marxism of his day. In particular, Korsch was not convinced that a powerful State apparatus could realize socialism without the workers being in direct control of the factories, farms, mines, etc. At the same time, he knew that socialism would need more than a collection of workers’ cooperatives. He solves the problem by pairing government from below with government from above, and Korsch believes he does it without letting either govern more than what is fair.
In his 1919 essay “On Socialization,” Korsch writes that he sees two trends developing when people try to socialize industry, and neither of those trends really leads to true socialism. He states:
Those forms of socialization that pose a danger of consumer capitalism are socialization through nationalization, through communalization and the merger of production plants with consumer cooperatives. In contrast, the danger of producer capitalism arises in attempts at socialization along the lines of the producer cooperative movement and modern trade unionism (“the mines to the miners,” “the railroads to the railwaymen,”
etc.).
Obviously, socialization requires taking the means of production away from the idle owning and investing class, but then what do you do with it? If the public organs of the community nationalized the means of production, workers would have no right to self-governance. The State or consumer cooperatives would decide everything, who to hire, who to fire, how much work each person should do, who is the boss, how much the boss gets paid, etc. On the other hand, if the means of production becomes the common possession of collective producer associations, the consumer would have no right of access to affect the goods and services the consumer needs in order to survive. The quality or the quantity produced may be too low, or the price too high. In neither case do the means of production become the true common ownership for the totality of producers and consumers, and thus, neither outcome produces socialism. In both instances stated, control from above and control from below, the means of production still belong to some group instead of to everyone. In addition, in both instances, the profits produced still belong to some group instead of to everyone.
Korsch encourages social policy that will enable both of these simultaneously and cooperatively. He calls the end result of this dual approach to socialization “industrial autonomy.” He describes how industrial autonomy might come about: A particular labor union might have complete control over all the factories, farms, mines, etc., making all management decisions, but they must meet certain quotas, standards and price targets. Another way might be to split direct management of factories, farms, mines, etc., between the workers operating the factories, farms, mines, etc., and let a central State administer issues of quotas, standards and expenses (I suppose. He is unclear to me here.) A third way he suggests could involve workers having control over a particular sphere of production that directly affects the workers most, and letting unions and top business management control the rest. (I can see in this last way how entrepreneurs and investors might believe they already give this freedom to their employees, though I doubt their employees would say the same.) In all of these cases, some mechanism needs to keep production at a certain level while maintaining adequate levels of efficiency and quality. Workers must meet certain production goals planned in advance to satisfy consumers’ demands. So, he recommends legally binding obligations between unions and consumer associations (consumer unions, consumers’ cooperatives, etc.) to achieve a certain level of satisfaction in quality, quantity and price. In this way, workers will produce for need and not for exchange. The means of production will be truly socialized if worker self-management exists while meeting these production goals. For Korsch, self-governing socialism obviously requires economic management from below, but for production to have any value at all, goods and services must be valuable to consumers. To concentrate on management from below is no better than concentrating on management from above. The two work together. For this reason, in Korsch’s proposal, autonomous industry is managed from below by workers, but it is also managed from above by consumers.
If workers and consumers work together to carve out their own economy within a capitalist economy, production within autonomous industries can meet their own demands for adequate production and self-management, and can also sell their goods and services in the free market. In addition, within this economy of industrial autonomy, workers within the same union or industry should pool their profits to some degree in order to offset low wages paid at struggling facilities, farms, mines, etc. If a facility is simply unable to thrive due to old technology or product obsolescence, the union should close the facility and move workers there into similar, more productive employment. In addition to wage-sharing within the same industry or union, the workers will split total profits of each facility, with one part going to support needs in the community of autonomous industries and the other back to the facility that made the profit.
Autonomous industry is not the same as nationalized industry. The socialized industry he envisions allows for partial socialization within an economy. Korsch does not envision a socialist society where all industries are nationalized. Nationalized industries often become inefficient, bureaucratized and torpid, Korsch writes. This does not mean private enterprise in a free market is the solution. Rather, autonomous industry socializes the production and consumption of goods and services, without it being centrally managed as is common to nationalized industries. As for the argument free market capitalists make that socialization kills individual initiative, he responds, “private initiative will not be killed, but where possible still heightened, since the possibilities for the exercise of such initiative through autonomy will be extended to a circle of enterprise participants who, under private capitalist economy, have no opportunity to exercise initiative.” The best first step toward a socialized economy from within the capitalist economy would be the collaboration of workers to control as much from the bottom as they can, Korsch writes. And the best form of collaboration that exists, Korsch adds, is the council.
The “Proclamation of the German-Austrian Social Democracy” of 1919 reflects some of Korsch’s ideas on socialization. It states that any industry where production is concentrated within a few large plants will be socialized and managed by managerial boards. One management board will manage one whole industry, not each facility. One third of each board will be representatives picked by the National Assembly, but not from its midst. The proclamation distinguishes this third as representing the State, yet it specifies that the government is not part of the board, nor can it influence a board’s decision. One third of each board will be representatives picked by the workers in each industry. The last third will be representatives of the consumers of each industry. Consumers will be elected by consumer associations (consumer unions, consumers’ cooperatives, etc.). If the consumers happen to be other industries, as in the case of raw material production, then the consumer third will be representatives of those other industries. Each management board is responsible for appointing officials at each facility within the industry, setting prices for goods produced in the industry, negotiating and honoring union contracts and dividing profits. It is not clear if profits will be divided according to each facility or according to the entire industry.
Profits (either for each facility or for the whole industry) will be divided into thirds. One third will go to the workers as profit shares. One third will go to the State treasury. The last third will go first to facility improvements or expansion. If this is not needed, it will go toward lowering prices for goods produced.
At each individual facility, managers are legally bound to cooperate with a workers’ committee elected from the workers at each facility, but technicians will manage the facilities directly.
The second point of the proclamation is that a law will be passed giving communities, workers’ cooperatives, consumer associations and agricultural cooperatives the right to expropriate any facility they need, and each of these facilities are to be run according to the way described above, or else they will be run as industrial combines, described below.
The third point is that all industries that are not easily socialized will be joined together into industrial combines, joining each facility according to its industry. Management boards will manage each industrial combine. One fourth of the board will be elected by the National Assembly, but not from its midst; one fourth will be entrepreneurs of the industry, one fourth will be representatives of the workers and one forth will be representatives of consumers. Management boards will be responsible for improving industry standards and efficiency and better allocating production quotas to each facility. If certain facilities are not able to thrive due to old technology, the management board should close the facility and move production there into facilities with better technology. The owners of closed facilities will be paid for their losses from the profits of the facilities taking their work. If the management board finds that this new system results in a number of facilities few enough to be easily socialized, then the industry will be socialized according to the first point in the proclamation. Management boards should also establish their own procurement jointly to save money buying in bulk and by bargaining for the best price. The management board will also be responsible for figuring in advance how much customers need and setting production quotas by that number. The management board will set the price for each product, and will establish a price that will not bring profits to the entrepreneurs greater than the salaries they deserve for the amount of work they really do. The management board will also be in charge of negotiating and honoring contracts with unions, and union contracts will apply to every facility in the combine. Any expense borne by these industrial combines will be paid for by the entrepreneurs. At each individual facility, managers are legally bound to cooperate with a workers’ committee elected from the workers at each facility, but the entrepreneurs will manage the facilities directly.

Self-Governing Socialism: The Chrysanthemum Revolution and the Uprising of '56

2009-12-14T17:17:00.000-08:00

Hungary experienced two revolutions that brought the people self-governing socialism. The first was the Chrysanthemum Revolution or the Aster Revolution. The second was the revolution of 1956.
The story of the Chrysanthemum Revolution (Oct. 31, 1918—August 1, 1919) begins when Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Though the empire was a single entity, three parts of the empire acted independently. The Austrian government had its own parliament and its own prime minister to rule the side that was Austria. The Hungarian government ruled the Hungary side of the empire with its own parliament and its own prime minister. A monarchy managed foreign policy and a military that was common to both Austria and Hungary, but which really belonged to the monarchy. Apparently, the monarchy also had to ability to appoint the Hungarian prime minister.
Within the boundaries and Austria and the boundaries of Hungary, many different nationalities with many different heritages lived side-by-side, and sometimes the differences led to problems. One such problem was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, which any person should remember is what kicked off a chain of events that ended up causing the Great War, also known now as the First World War.
Though the military belonged to the monarchy, the king himself didn’t manage it. For the sake of simplicity, the monarchy placed the Austro-Hungarian military under the leadership of Germany. Thus, when the people of Austria and Hungary joined the military, they found themselves being sent to war by a foreign country to fight a war that had nothing to do with Austria or with Hungary.
This was one reason that the Austrian and Hungarian working class started to see themselves as pawns being used by the governing elite. They organized strikes to protest. One major strike that started Jan. 18, 1918, ended up involving workers not only in Austria-Hungary, but also Germany. Workers in Hungary had stated their intentions three days earlier to organize all Hungarian producers into a federation of workers’ councils all across Hungary. These workers’ councils were also to take control of the Hungarian Socialist Party. The official statement was the “Resolution of the Workers of Budapest on the Formation of Workers’ Councils:”

The Budapest workers proclaim that Socialist Party policy which corresponds to the present times, adapts to the development of events, and uses without hesitation and fear all possible means of class struggle, can lead or begin to lead if the workers take it into their hands and constantly and directly exercise control over its course. In the interest of the goals that the proletarian movement can achieve today, the workers consider it essential to relieve the Party leadership of its political and historical responsibility in the explained way and thereby enable more decisive and far-reaching policy to be instituted. For the sake of the practical realization of the above, a Workers’ Council of Budapest is formed immediately, in which all factories and professional organizations shall be represented on the basis of a democratic statute which shall be adopted. The council shall be supplemented by delegates of workers’ councils that will be formed in the country. The Workers’ Council of Budapest shall be responsible for all the activity of the Party leadership, which shall at all times act in accordance with the policy of the workers’ council.

In June, workers organized a new strike and established workers’ councils all across Hungary. Workers in several major Hungarian cities demanded an end to the war, universal suffrage and all power to the workers’ councils.
At the same time, the State apparatus in Austria-Hungary started to disintegrate, especially in Budapest. Hungary declared itself independent from the Austro-Hungarian Empire on Oct. 29, 1918. On October 31, members of the Budapest Workers’ Council armed themselves, pinned chrysanthemums to their lapels and occupied government buildings around the city. They bought the mums, or asters, from street vendors and used them to distinguish revolutionaries from monarchist forces. They forced the Hungarian Prime Minister to resign, and they executed the former Prime Minister!
The uprising scared Hungary’s elite and the monarchy. What remained of the monarchy immediately appointed Count Mihály Károlyi (1875—1955) as the new prime minister of Hungary. Károlyi was considered a leftist who had a history of support from the working class. He took office Oct. 31, 1918. Since Károlyi had grown to oppose the Great War, he thought the right thing to do at that point was to immediately send troops home and let invading troops pour in. The workers were astounded by Károlyi’s level of idiocy. They never wanted a war, but they sure didn’t want to be overrun with foreign looters, either. Since Károlyi’s was obviously a moron, the workers turned to their workers’ councils for leadership. The workers’ councils assumed control of the towns where they were located. Peasants likewise started to take land. On Nov. 5, 1918, the Workers’ Council of Budapest published its statute so that its basic principles might serve as guidelines in the founding of workers’ councils in the countryside.
The statute stated that workers should be elected to workers’ councils only if they have been associated with the Hungarian Socialist Party for at least a year and have been subscribing to the Socialist Party newspaper for a year. Each workers’ council will have both elected and delegated members. Each workers’ council should have the following delegates in order to have fair representation:

General consumers’ cooperative - 2 members
Territorial women’s committee -2 members
National committees - 2 members
The executive board of the capital - 2 members
Organizational committee of working youth - 2 members
Territorial and independent centers of free trade unions belonging to the trade union federation - 1 member each
District party organizations of Budapest - 1 member each
Party organization of Kispest - 2 members
Party organization of Csépel - 2 members
Party organization of Erzsébetfalva - 2 members
Delegates of the Party organization of Újpest - 2 members

And as for elected members: Territorial and independent local free trade unions elect one member for each 500 of its own members on the basis of the number of members in 1917.
In addition, the unions can elect one delegate for each additional 500 members.
Organizations with less that 250 members are not taken into account, while any number of members above 250 is considered as 500.
At least two-thirds of the elected delegates should be chosen from among workers employed in the workshops of the enterprise that falls under the organization concerned. Delegates elected by enterprises can be only persons who truly work (like on the production line or whatever) in the enterprise concerned.
All together, each workers’ council should have a total of 365 members. Of this 365, 16 of these members will be Party delegates and 16 will be delegates from trade unions. On March 21, 1919, the workers’ councils demanded full control of the entire nation of Hungary.
Károlyi immediately resigned, leaving the Hungarian Socialist Party in control. Philosophically, the HSP represented a merger between the Hungarian Social Democratic Party and the much smaller but much more strident Communist Party headed by Bolshevik Béla Kun. Communists took the lead in the new HSP and assumed political power over Hungary. The communist takeover meant that workers’ councils would not claim complete, direct control over Hungary, but the workers’ councils still enjoyed some authority over workplaces.
On March 26, 1919, the Revolutionary Executive Soviet issued a decree putting mines, factories and the transportation industries directly into the hands of production commissioners and workers’ councils, or soviets. The decree states, “The Soviet Republic (which is how the new government defined Hungary under its new Party authority) considers it its task to take over the means of production and deliver them to the ownership of the workers, to organize and strengthen production.” The decree states that all industrial facilities employing more than 20 people will be under State management and under workers’ supervision. The responsibility of management falls to an individual commissioner, appointed by the National Commissariat for the economy of the Soviet Republic. The responsibility of supervision falls to a an elected soviet, democratically elected by the workers in the facility, by secret ballet if desired, which is composed of three to seven people, depending on the number of employees. Their responsibility is to maintain discipline at the facility, (which probably includes hiring and firing,) protection of the property and control of production, (which probably means full control of the quality and quantity of whatever goods and services get made by the workers there.) This is its definition of supervision. The commissariat appears to play an indirect role, since the government can give one commissariat several facilities to be in charge of, and the decree indicates that the commissariat will manage as an expert on economic matters and stop by from time-to-time for inspections. This is the decree’s definition of management. If the commissariat gives orders that the soviet disagrees with, the soviet can appeal to a higher authority.
This sort of communism died when Béla Kun started a fight with Romanians that he couldn’t finish without the help of Russia. Russia had promised help but never came through, and so Romania took over Hungary and turned Hungary back into the chaos of a free market.

After the Chrysanthemum Revolution, Self-governing socialism in Hungary reappeared in 1956. It started after WWII reparations proved a heavy burden on working people and after they realized communists had slowly been inching their way back into offices.
Hungary had been left relatively free after WWII. However, the small Hungarian Communist Party that resurfaced came up with a rather brilliant political strategy involving a series of short-lived alliances. The strategy came to be known as salami tactics. It happened like this: In the free elections of 1945, the Communists polled only 17 percent of the vote while the democratic Smallholders Party polled 56.5 percent, a clear majority. If the communists wanted control again, they would have to sneak their way back in little by little. Communists worked to this end by dividing and conquered one tiny bit of society at a time until it had taken over. A typical maneuver might involve the Party requesting to work with an institution or faction within an organization that was important to those in power. In return, the institution received clout or some other benefit. Other times, they were threatened into playing the game. As this was happening, the Party would start a campaign to damage or possess a similar institution or faction, knowing that their alliance with the first institution would prevent it from aiding the second. Then after the second institution was taken or destroyed, the Party would start to attack the first institution. Little by little, the Party took over any industry, church, etc., that helped give the ruling party its influence. One of the first organizations the Party took over was the Hungarian State Security Police. Under the control of the Party, the department employed methods of intimidation, false accusations, imprisonment and torture, to suppress political opposition. Another early conquest was the protestant churches. They did this by aligning themselves with the Catholic churches. When the protestants were destroyed, they turned the attack onto the Catholics. Eventually, the Hungarian Communist Party merged with the Social Democratic Party and became the Hungarian Working People's Party. The candidates from this party ran unopposed in 1949. The People's Republic of Hungary was declared.
Since Hungary had shared the loss of WWII, they had to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The reparations totaled between 19 and 22 percent of the country’s annual national income. The standard of living fell.
At the same time, communism throughout Europe went through reforms following the death of Stalin in 1953. Hungarian Stalinist leader Mátyás Rákosi resigned from office in July, 1956. The spirit of reform ignited a successful worker uprising in Poland in October.
On Oct. 23, the Hungarian Writers’ Union and university students demonstrated in Budapest against leftover Stalinist policies, which marked the beginning of the Hungarian Uprising. The single recorded act of rebellion on this day was the photograph of people toppling of a 30-foot high statue of Stalin. Police opened fire on the crowd, which angered the crowd further. Authorities called out the military for backup, but the soldiers generally sided with the crowd. Authorities then called for support from Moscow. Russian troops rolled into Budapest the next day. The day after that, police fired into the crowd again. Workers established workers’ councils to assume local governmental authority and to organize a general strike. Citizens formed militias. One militia of 400 citizens executed Stalinist sympathizers and mowed down police officers.
A freed ex-general arranged a ceasefire Oct. 28. Hungarian government officials concluded that the uprising had been “a broad democratic mass movement,” and not a counter-revolution, probably because they knew all along that Stalinism had been a bad idea from the start. The people formed workers’ councils throughout Hungary and proclaimed them to be the new bodies of governance. The Hungarian government cowered, even thanking these “autonomous, democratic local organs” for stepping up to take control. Councils were generally established at industrial plants and mines. The workers' councils took on the responsibility of managing these facilities according to workers' interests. The federation of workers’ councils wasn’t a political machine per se. The councils were not obliged to any political party.
The bloody and violent side of the uprising had ended by Nov. 10, but the Hungarian government had learned from the rebellion. They knew that they were going to have to enlist popular support, and they did this by espousing the principle of self-governing socialism they had heard voiced during the uprising. The principle became a decree. One prominent Hungarian politician, István Dobi, announced the new decree of self-governing socialism during a radio address Nov. 21, 1956. The address, titled “Legal Decree of the Presidium on Workers’ Councils,” was issued by the Presidium of the People’s Republic of Hungary to relate newly passed laws regarding workers’ councils. The decree states that every factory, mine and farm will need to elect their own workers’ council. Enterprises that do not manufacture anything don’t need to. Also, enterprises that already operate as workers’ cooperatives do not need to. Within applicable enterprises, at least two-thirds of the members who will sit on these workers’ councils must come from those folks who work directly on the production line. Each member serves one year, but any member can be recalled from the council with two-thirds of the vote. The workers’ council will be responsible for making sure everyone gets paid; will be responsible for determining who gets paid what; will decide bonuses; will decide what to spend on community donations; will decide what to spend on repairs; will make sure production is efficient; will supervise paying their taxes; will supervising paying their union dues; will decide how many workers the facility needs; will set goals for the facility; will fill out import and export documents; will apply for loans; and will balance the enterprise’s budget.

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Self-Governing Socialism: Peter Arshinov

2009-12-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

Peter Arshinov (1887-1937) is best known for his work with fellow revolutionary anarchist Nestor Makhno and for his association with influential anarchist organizations after the Russian revolution. He was executed during Stalin’s purges.
Arshinov began his career as a radical when he joined the Bolshevik section of the Social Democratic Party in 1904. In 1905, he got a job with the railway and became editor of a railway workers’ leftist newspaper, Molot. In 1906, he led an attack on a police station. In 1907, he publicly executed the boss of a railway workshop who had been responsible for turning in railway workers who had participated in the attack on the police station. Authorities arrested Arshinov in 1907 and sentenced him to be hanged, but he escaped and fled to France. He returned to Russia and was arrested two years later for distributing anarchist literature among the workers, but he escaped once again. He continued preaching anarchism, and in 1910, he robbed two wine warehouses in Russia. Later that same year, he was arrested while in Austria picking up arms and propaganda. Austria turned him over to Russian authorities, and Russian authorities sentenced him to 20 years in prison. In prison, he met and mentored Makhno. They were freed from prison during the 1917 revolution. Upon his release, Arshinov helped found the Federation of Moscow Anarchist Groups and worked to raise awareness about anarchism among Moscow workers.
When the new soviet state officially exited WWI in 1918, the treaty they signed gave Ukraine over to the Central Powers (the “Axis” version of WWI), and left the people of Ukraine to fight the Central Powers by themselves. Arshinov joined the Black Army, the anarchist partisans led by Makhno, and helped defeat Austro-Hungarian and German forces, then what remained of Russian imperial forces. Then, the Bolsheviks decided they wanted Ukraine, and the Bolsheviks attacked and defeated the Ukrainian anarchists in 1921. Arshinov fled to Berlin then lived in Paris and Chicago. Shortly upon his arrival in Berlin, he wrote History of the Makhnovist Movement: 1918-1921. While in Berlin, he wrote “On the Occupation of Factories and Works” in 1923. He grew homesick and contacted a soviet leader he knew from prison to request the privilege of re-entry. He was granted permission under the provision that he denounce anarchism in favor of Bolshevism. In order to prove his new allegiance, Arshinov wrote two pamphlets: “Anarchism and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” in 1931 and “Anarchism in Our Age” in 1933. In 1935, he voiced his official break with the anarchist movement with a Russian magazine article titled “Fiasco of Anarchism.” For this, Makhno, Max Nettlau and Alexander Berkman denounced Arshinov. As Arshinov planned his return, Voline tried to convince Arshinov that the Bolsheviks were waiting to kill him. He returned anyway and was executed in 1937.
In his essay “On the Occupation of Factories and Works,” Arshinov advances the ongoing themes among the Russian left of completely severing all traditional authority over those who create society’s wealth. The remnants of the old society linger in the form of managerial authority in the factories and workshops, and a real socialist revolution includes the occupation of factories and workshops by the workers. In response to workers’ opposition to authority, the endangered elites will propagate the myth that the worker cannot manage himself. The worker, trained since childhood to struggle alone in order to ensure his or her own self, tends to swallow the propaganda. In the society of bourgeois contradiction, the worker had to remain humble and submissive if he or she wanted to keep working. The revolution was supposed to overcome the contradiction of the free market by freeing the workers from enslavement to capital. The revolution brought workers political self-governance, but if the workers do not recognize the necessity for the same in industry, workers will have lost the whole revolution. Arshinov writes, “The overthrow of the power of the state and the takeover of industry by the workers does not yet guarantee the success of the revolution; errors are still possible, errors that could reduce to nothing the conquests of the workers. The Russian Revolution is a striking example of this. Instead of passing immediately to the organization of production on the basis of self-management, after the overthrow of power and the takeover of industry, the workers allowed a new power to establish itself which, once well installed, concentrated in its hands the entire economy of the country and eliminated the forms of independent management of production.”

How to get the goods!

2009-12-10T04:44:00.000-08:00

Self-Governing Socialism: Alexandra Kollontai

2009-12-08T16:27:00.000-08:00

Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) was a prominent Soviet official and a member of the Workers’ Opposition, a left-wing faction within the Communist Party, and was friends with Alexander Shlyapnikov, a leading left-wing communist who Stalin executed. For her role in the Workers’ Opposition, she is remembered as a champion for self-governing socialism. She is also important historically for being the most influential woman in early Soviet administration, and she is remembered for founding the Central Commission for Agitation and Propaganda Among Working Women in 1919 to improve the conditions of women’s lives in the young socialist state. In 1899, at the age of 27, she became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, witnessed Bloody Sunday and met Lenin. Shortly thereafter, she became a colleague of Luxemburg. At some point after 1903, she joined the Mensheviks (along with Trotsky) because she thought Lenin was turning into a dictator. She eventually joined the Bolsheviks in 1915, but she and Lenin never got along. In 1908, she fled to Germany after publishing “Finland and Socialism,” a pamphlet she wrote in which she called for Finland’s armed insurrection against Russia. In 1915, she took a lecture tour of the United Sates with the sponsorship of the American Socialist Party. After the 1917 revolution, she became People’s Commissar for Social Welfare. Her Central Commission for Agitation and Propaganda Among Working Women helped educate women about new laws for marriage, education and labor. Though she studied feminism and worked for equality, she opposed liberal feminism as bourgeois ideology. She advocated marital fidelity until men and women were truly equal in Russia, but she also advocated the idea of free love to shake up bourgeois morality. She also believed the family unit was destined to wither away under mature communism.
As a member of the Workers’ Opposition, Kollantai published a pamphlet, “The Workers' Opposition in Russia” (1921), in which she called for more political freedom for trade unionists and less bureaucracy in the Party.
Lenin did what he could to debilitate the Workers’ Opposition, and Kollontai herself suffered politically for her role in the movement. Instead of appointing her to positions important to national policy for women, Party heads kept appointing her to diplomatic positions. In 1923, the Party appointed her Soviet Ambassador to Norway, which made her the first female ambassador in the world. She also served as a member of the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations.
In “The Workers’ Opposition in Russia,” Kollantai compares individual management of a workplace to workers’ cooperative management. She states: “Individual management is the individualist viewpoint of the bourgeois class. Individual management amounts basically to the unrestrained, isolated, and arbitrary exercise of one person bound in no way with the collectivity. …It is the ultimate wisdom of bourgeois thought. The bourgeoisie has no faith in the power of a collective body and hence finds it useful to reduce the masses to an obedient flock and lead them wherever its unrestrained will desires….”
In her view, the crisis pitting the Workers’ Opposition against authority, the proletariat against Party leadership and Trotsky against Lenin, is happening because the young state is trying to make communism a reality without the benefit of starting with a functioning economy or from the fundamental platform of a complete capitalist economic cycle that would have produced trusts, all while fighting the White army.
However, she states, such problems don’t excuse betraying the revolution. The revolution was supposed to free the proletariat from domination. Putting a bunch of former middle-class university-educated specialists who were trained in their fields during a time and place completely irrelevant to Soviet society does not work toward this end. Technicians and businessmen from a bourgeois society are not going to introduce new forms of organization into labor, and they are not going to understand why or how they need to think about production and consumption the same way producers and consumers themselves think about it. The working class had made the revolution happen, and none of them were going to take kindly to some Johnny-come-lately stepping in to boss them around now.
“To find an incentive for labor—this is the major task of the working class at the threshold of communism,” she explains, and the best way to accomplish this is to put the workers in charge of themselves directly. No one among Party leadership, she says, including Lenin or Trotsky, truly support the workers. The Party must make immediate changes. To this end, she demands 1.) Bureaucratic appointments from above be replaced immediately in every case by the principle of election from below. 2.) Free and open debate in official Party forums on issues important to the rank-and-file union members. 3.) Kicking everyone out of Party leadership who isn’t a true working class person.
She was the only major critic of the Soviet government who Joseph Stalin did not exterminate.

Self-Governing Socialism: Alexander Shlyapnikov

2009-12-06T16:30:00.000-08:00

Alexander Shlyapnikov (1885-1937) was a left-communist metalworker who dedicated his life to self-governing socialism, only to be executed for political crimes during Stalin’s purges. Shlyapnikov is probably best known for heading the Workers’ Opposition (1920-1926), a left-wing movement within the Russian Communist Party. Members of the Workers’ Opposition represented a view that workers should control the whole economy. They represented the view that workers had been under the impression that they were fighting for a society that would turn every workplace over to the complete, direct management of the workers, thereby putting the actual machinists, farmers, schoolteachers, etc., in charge of coordinating the economy. They were disappointed with what they ended up getting. The new State, in fact, never turned control of the factories, etc., directly over to the people who worked in them. Instead, Anna Pankratova, the chief soviet labor historian, notes that at most, it “stamped a proletarian character on management by linking it to the working masses, who could directly designate their representatives to the factory management committee.” The regional office of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy picked two-thirds of the management committee. Unionized workers at the particular factory, workshop, etc., picked the other third from among their ranks. The Congress of the Soviets of the National Economy made this the way workplaces were managed when they adopted the “Regulation on the Management of Nationalized Enterprises” in 1918. The trade unionists wanted more. They wanted the right to hire and fire, to set wages, to approve department heads and to see all financial and production records, or at least that is what they formally decided during a conference of factory committees of Petrograd on April 23, 1917. They had decided on March 13, 1917, that they didn’t want to take any responsibility for the factories. All they felt they should be required to do is make demands, but they soon realized that in order to make demands of one area, they had to keep all the other areas in check as well. They couldn’t just set their own wages, for instance, because all that would accomplish is increased prices for their products, which would in turn be paid by consumers, which included themselves and their comrades. It wasn’t a good idea then, and it isn’t a good idea today, either. For the same reason, it wouldn’t do them much good to control even a whole industry if they didn’t control the whole economy. Thus, they saw the need to control the whole thing. Only then, could they put the squeeze exactly where they wanted.
Economic control is obviously necessary in a socialist society, but the majority of Party leaders didn’t think it wise to immediately stick the whole lot of workers with the responsibility of economic planning. But who, then? Should the State annex unions to give it planning power? If so, would any difference between unions and the State remain? Is there even a need for this difference in a socialist society? If the Revolution made factories the possession of the people, and if unions are the workers’ organized struggle against capital, then the leverage wielded by organized labor didn’t affect capitalists anymore, only comrades. But at the same time, should the workers entrust the only power they held, the power of labor, to common ownership? What if they ended up needing it again? On the other hand, why would state organs resist turning economic planning over to the unions? The only reason would be that they simply didn’t have faith in the workers. If this lack of confidence means state officials would trust an inert bureaucracy to manage production before they would trust the producing class to manage themselves, the future of the Soviet State might be a real bummer.
Shlyapnikov writes, “The First All-Russian Trade Union Congress in January 1918 defined the task of the trade unions as follows: ‘The focus of the trade unions’ activity at the present moment must lie in the organizational-economic sector. As class organizations of the proletariat, built according to the production principle, the trade unions must carry out their main work through the organization of production and the restoration of the disrupted productive forces of the country.’”
He also notes that the Second All-Russian Trade Union Congress a year later specifically stated that the “trade unions passed from control of production to its organization, in which they actively participated both in the management of individual enterprises and in the overall economic life of the country.” The resolution he quotes concludes that the trade unions “must therefore train their organization and the broad working masses not only for management of production, but also for participation in the entire state apparatus, and must prepare them to interest themselves in Soviet work.”
And if that isn’t enough, Shlyapnikov even quotes from the Program of the Russian Communist Party: “The organizational apparatus of socialized industry must first of all rest on the trade union.”
Despite this, he states that over the past two years, state organs have been systematically undermining the authority of the unions, so that now nobody seems to care about these declarations or even about unions at all. By this point, the unions didn’t even have a functioning newspaper because state organs would not spare them the paper and ink. He didn’t think it was just a coincidence, but a deliberate attempt by certain elements to kill the unions.
Shlyapnikov attests to the unions’ capabilities to manage the economy. Union folks come from all walks of life, and many of them serve aptly in positions at least as complicated as those a planning bureaucrat would have, he writes. Further, a union member understands the value of democratic election. He or she knows the value of working together and knows the rest of the union is counting on him or her. How could a bureaucrat be more qualified? But even if a union member isn’t qualified after being elected to a position, they get recalled. A bureaucrat doesn’t get recalled. A person in this position would have more chance being qualified for the position if they were elected by a group of people rather than just one person, and then they need to be responsible to those people.
Thus was the reasoning of Shlyapnikov and the Workers’ Opposition. Members of the WO started to agitate. Party officials started to accuse them of factionalism. Leon Trotsky suggested turning the unions into state organs, but the WO didn’t approve. Agitate as they might, the WO never won any Party leaders over to its side. The sections quoted above and the arguments summarized were presented at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921. The WO platform was rejected, its ideas condemned, and its members ordered to disperse. State organs transferred WO members to remote areas. In 1926, the remaining members of the WO joined the Left Opposition, along with Trotsky, and tried unsuccessfully to prevent Stalin from taking full control of the Party. When Stalin took control of the Party, all but one of the WO supporters were executed or disappeared.

Self-Governing Socialism: Anna Pankratova

2009-12-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

Anna Pankratova (1897-1957) was a leading labor historian and academic administrator in the Soviet Union from the 1920s until her death. She is perhaps best known for her role as a leader of the partisans against White Army General Anton Denikin, a truly despicable man if ever there was one, for which she became a widely admired heroine. Pankratova joined the Bolshevik Party in 1919 as an Odessa University student. She wrote a number of books on the history of the Russian labor movement and later became a professor at Moscow University and at the Academy of Social Sciences. In 1952 she was elected to the Central Committee of the Party and the following year became editor-in-chief of the Party journal, Voprosii Istorii (Questions of History). At one point, she was probably the most powerful woman in the Soviet Union’s history profession. She was also a champion of national rights for the Kazakhs. During the purges, her husband was charged with political crimes, and she was expelled from the Party.
Though Pankratova often wrote about self-governing socialism, it would not be altogether accurate to say Pankratova was a champion of self-governing socialism. Still, she remains an important figure in the struggle because she meticulously recorded the role labor played in the young republic. Her name appears time and again.
The role of workers in managing the farms and factories were among many of the issues communists had to tackle after the 1917 revolution. One aspect of this issue was whether workers should engage in labor unions or in factory committees. If they worked mainly through unions, they would basically serve as laborers. If they worked mainly through committees, they would take a more active role in the whole process of production. But would that more active role necessarily include planning the economy? If so, how would factory workers go about tackling such a job? These are questions are asked in Pankratova’s “Works Committees in Russia in the Period of Revolution” (1917-1918), from which the quotes below come.
One immediate outcome of the 1917 revolution was the establishment of factory committees. These committees not only put workers in possession of their own factories, but also put peasants in possession of large estates.
The original law of April 23, 1917 states:

All the ordinances concerning the internal procedure fixed by the law [such as regulation of working time, wages, hiring and firing, holidays, etc.] issue from the factory committee with notification to the director of the factory or of the section.
All administrative personnel [higher cadres, heads of sections or of workshops, technicians] are engaged with the consent of the factory committee, which must announce the appointment at the general meeting of the whole factory or through the intermediary of the workshop committees.
The factory committee has the right to reject administrative personnel who cannot guarantee normal relations with the workers.
The factory committee constitutes the body that controls the activity of the management in the administrative, economic and technical domains. In order to carry out this preliminary control, the factory committee sends one of its members to represent it, alongside the management, in the economic and technical committees as well as in the different sections of the factory; in addition, all the management’s official documents, budgets of production and expenditures, as well as all the documents of inputs and outputs must be presented to the representative of the factory committee to keep it informed.

Can you imagine such a law here and now? Sounds pretty sweet. Unfortunately, the law also stated that key issues were left to the mutual agreement of parties concerned. In other words, nothing forced employers to deal directly with these committees. In practice, the workers thought they should disregard this last part and take liberties managing themselves at the workplace. Employers weren’t on board with that idea.
Needless to say, employers jealously guarded their right to hire and fire whomever they wanted, and the workers kept demanding for themselves that right in particular. When employers put up resistance, the workers went on strike. Tannery and textile workers in Moscow, engineering workers in Petrograd, fuel workers in Baku and miners in the Donbas all went on strike because their employers categorically refused to recognize the authority of the factory committees.
The workers realized the need for more power in their fight against capital and welcomed nationalization of the largest industries in 1918. By 1923, the State had assumed power for coordinating production among these industries. When this happened, factories were no longer in the hands of employers, but they were also not in the hands of workers. And, really, they never would be.
Pankratova describes what the law of April 23, meant to the workers.
Workers had never before gotten as close to complete workers’ control of their factories and workers’ coordination of industry, Pankratova writes. There had been previous factory constitutions, but none had gone so far. Except for the severe limitation regarding mutual agreement, this law was a long-awaited bridge uniting capital with labor.
There had been previous worker-managed experiments, but they had not always gone well. Previous factory constitutions had set up factory committees that ended up being treated as a sort of errand runner. Other times, when factory committees took over factories abandoned by its owner, the committees acted no better than the boss. They often had no regard for coordinating production in relation to the rest of the industry, either. When committees took over an enterprise that owners left behind, the committees also often took a dog-eat-dog stance to get their piece of the market and resources. This was anti-social competition all over again, only without a boss, per se, at the factory. Pankratova implies that this is what the anarchists wanted to see happen because it seemed to support the idea popular among certain anarchists that self-centered autonomy helps ensure against authoritarianism. Thus, in her view, for a factory committee to demand control over coordinating production is to demand isolation from the rest of society. (Even if this were the case in 1917 in Russia, this doesn’t seem to be the philosophy of Proudhon or Bakunin.)
She summarizes some detailed instructions proposed by the Central Soviet of Factory Committees on some moderate job descriptions they had in mind for factory committees:

The factory committees unite in district soviets of workers’ control, which, in turn, join in urban, provincial and regional soviets of the national economy working under the leadership of the Central Soviet of Factory Committees. The soviets of the national economy are divided into sectors according to branches of industry….
Workers’ control is in fact applied in the following way: when the factories need raw materials, fuel, money, etc., the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy, represented by the corresponding section of production, demands of the control committees formed in the factories justifying statements, subsequently verified on the spot. This measure is necessary because the employers often abuse the confidence of these committees and profit by their lack of experience in technical and administrative questions.

Pankratova justifies the reasonableness of a more moderate function than complete, unfettered, direct control of all aspects of production by the rank-and-file. Quite simply, the workers who sat on factory committees were not educated enough, she writes, and the entire lot of factory committees was not technologically armed to coordinate supply with demand for the entire nation. Thus, according the Pankratova, industries required nationalization in order for the planned economy to work in the brand new socialist State.
The point Pankratova makes, however, doesn’t seem to warrant changes to the factory committee system made by the First Congress of Soviets of the National Economy. In May and June of 1918, the Congress convened and voted in favor of this rather restrictive job description for factory committees:

Workers’ control not only extends to the inventory of raw materials, to production, finance, etc., but also establishes selling prices and verifies whether the enterprise works in conformity with the plans elaborated by the soviets of the national economy. In cases in which activity does not conform to the defined tasks, the organs of workers’ control immediately communicate all the shortcomings and variances to the regional or provincial soviet of the national economy without waiting for the decision of the administrative council. The soviet of the national economy, shall, on its part, urgently undertake all the measures necessary to eliminate the noted shortcomings. Workers’ control concerns not only the employer or the head of the enterprise, but also the workers, for whom it fixes the efficiency of work, norms of production, and work discipline. Workers’ control thus conceived makes industrial activity known to the workers and contributes to the gradual and systematic carrying out of nationalization by the regional soviets, until the measures taken by the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy have been implemented.

So, this part would surely have been a disappointment to anyone hoping for worker self-management. However, paragraph two of the resolution still offered workers a little power to influence management:

A works management committee is formed in every plant, factory, mine, etc., that has become the property of the Republic. Two-thirds of the members of this committee are designated by the regional soviet of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy (if the enterprise is directly subjected to central direction); in addition, the Soviet of the National Economy has the right to permit the regional or national trade union to propose half of its candidates.
A third of the members of the management committee is elected by the unionized workers of the enterprise. The factory management committee shall include a third of specialists from among the technical and commercial employees.

This certainly isn’t a big win for self-governing socialism, but these powers are still far greater than citizens in the U.S. have ever enjoyed.

Self-Governing Socialism: V. I. Lenin

2009-12-04T20:52:00.000-08:00

V. I. Lenin (1870-1924) is fairly well known as the father of soviet socialism, but there are some indications that sometimes, Lenin favored at least certain aspects of a more libertarian form of socialism.
In May, 1917, Lenin presented to those assembled for the First Petrograd Conference of Factory Committees a resolution arguing that workers’ control represented the only way to avoid economic disaster. The resolution was carried with a great majority. After the conference, however, Lenin explained his position more precisely that to him, workers’ control meant control by the soviets and not “the ridiculous passing of the railroads into the hands of the railwaymen, the leather factories into the hands of the leather workers.”
Still, there are rumors. Sociologist Georges Gurvitch (1894-1965) took part in forming factory committees in Petrograd and has stated that at that time, Lenin took the position that planning and social revolution were impossible if they were not based on the direct participation of the workers, on workers’ self-management. This position also went into the second program of the Bolshevik Party, which, however, was destroyed after it was printed. Through the combined efforts of Trotsky and Stalin, says Gurvitch, Lenin was persuaded that workers’ management was detrimental to the efficiency of production. Gurvitch also claims that the first soviets were organized by Proudhonists among the social revolutionaries and the left wing of the social democrats. This information comes from Autogestion, No. 1, 1966, pp 5-6.
But the most credible place to find evidence of Lenin’s libertarian leanings will probably be his 1917 work State and Revolution. There are only a few pages that apply. At one point, Lenin begins to discuss the revolutionary nature of the “State” the communards set up in place of French law, and how it remained revolutionary after it was established. He refers to “primitive democracy,” which appears to be a term denoting a democratic system that is a working system, meaning among other things, a system without bureaucracy. It would be the system Marx seemed to praise when he defined the Paris Commune as “a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time.” Professionals did not maintain administrative offices. The commune was throughout a workers’ government. So, yes, it might be primitive in a sense for everyone to be both a decision-maker as well as one who acts on those decisions. On this, Lenin states that “first of all, the transition from Capitalism to Socialism is impossible without ‘return,’ in a measure, to ‘primitive’ Democracy.” (I can imagine some anti-civilization types getting a hard-on right now.) Fortunately for us working class types, Lenin writes, technology has made many tasks of administration pretty simple, so there shouldn’t be much problem taking over these functions ourselves when we get rid of the old government and start to manage ourselves. Lenin values the idea communards had of workers keeping their representatives on a short leash and paying them wages that average the working person’s wage. It helps maintain self-governing socialism.
But what about the railways? Surely, something as complicated and big as the rail system would require a professional bureaucracy. Lenin states, “This view is erroneous, and represents a step backward by comparison with the deductions of Marx and Engels in the seventies from the example of the Commune. So far as this assumed necessity of ‘bureaucratic’ organization is concerned, there is no difference whatever between railways and any other form of big industry, and factory, great commercial undertaking or extensive capitalist farm.” And even if the workers decide to form some kind of parliament, it wouldn’t be the same kind of parliament that exists in a capitalist society. The governing body will not be a bureaucratic monstrosity, because 1.) officials are elected and subject to recall at any time, 2.) they will receive payment no higher than the ordinary worker and 3.) skills necessary to be administrators will be shared with everyone so that no one can claim to be significantly more qualified as a bureaucrat.

Self-Governing Socialism: Karl Marx

2009-12-04T16:46:00.000-08:00

To shed light on Karl Marx (1818-1883) as a self-governing socialist, one would no doubt spend some time hand-picking writings that reflect something influenced by a time or place rather than try to analyze the Party's required reading list.
In 1969, French anarchist Daniel Guérin (1904-1988) hand-picked some of those works. He pointed out that Marx and Engels wrote a preface for the 1872 edition of the Communist Manifesto that was different in important ways from the preface accompanying the 1848 edition, and that this difference looks a lot like a revision of Marx’s theory about how the nationalization of industry and the proletarian’s conquest of political power will mark the first stage of proletarian evolution. If that is, indeed, how a reader should interpret the preface, as the program of a political party. In the 1872 edition of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state that this part of their theory should have been worded differently and has become antiquated. They further explain the reason for this change is because they have learned from events of the Paris Commune. On the other hand, if the Manifesto was intended to encourage the growing number of unsatisfied workers to recognize what was about to happen and to take ownership together of their unrest, then Marx and Engels didn't necessarily intend for the Manifesto to be the program of a political party per se.
In The Civil War in France, Marx states specifically that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for their own purposes,” and that the commune is “the final discovery of the political form by which the economic emancipation of labor may be created.” Marx goes on to say, “The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organ of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature—organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchical division of labor—originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle-class society as a mighty weapon in the struggle against feudalism.”
Marx explains the events leading up to the Paris Commune. The political form discarded in favor of the communal system was the political form the French government had imposed upon them from above, which had already replaced another predecessor, which likewise marked the emancipation of another class of people from domination, and at that time, property ownership is what empowered that class. This was the French Revolution (1789-1799). The propertied class then came to dominate the un-propertied class. In this era, modern industry worked in favor of the propertied class to the point where those who made money with both their property and their labor eventually gained a permanent upper hand over those who only had their labor to sell. In 1830, investor capitalists took political power from property owners, which put capital directly in control of labor. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte took political power in 1848 with peasants as his supporters. Under his leadership, the rich became richer and the poor, poorer. Then, Prussia attacked France. France was in this condition when the communards issued their first decree, the suppression of the standing army and the substitution of it by the armed people. Soon thereafter, communards issued the decree that those who had caused the Franco-Prussian War would be the ones to pay the price for it. The communards ran their commune cheaply by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure—the standing army and state functionaries. All of this meant tax cuts for the peasants, and, according to Marx, the commune earned peasant support because of this.
The new State was of their own making. Communards elected representatives from the wards of Paris, and made sure these representatives were to only serve short terms and were always susceptible to recall. The communards next put the police under the authority of the commune. All administrators’ wages were cut to the level typical to working class wages. Dignitaries disappeared. Judges were elected by the people and served under the condition that the people could recall them at any time.
Marx writes that the Commune was not obliged to recognize any central governance in France, except for a central conference of delegates from each commune that convened in Paris. They did not intend for the nation to be broken into communes per se, but for the nation to reorganize itself communally, breaking the nation’s government. Marx also sees a commune of sorts that has no territorial boundaries. The commune in each communard had nothing to do with Paris. This shines clearly in the communards' general disgust when war pits one nation against another, and the alliance they recognize to share with working people throughout Europe. They invited foreigners into their ranks as well, because they knew they had more in common with working people in Germany and Poland than they had with affluent Frenchmen, the rurals, the Versailles government or the clergy. They kicked the clergy to the curb, but they didn't have any less animosity for the clergy outside Paris.
The communards of Paris saw their commune as a model for the rest of the country, each commune being a self-governing entity. Marx explains, “The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centers of France. The communal regime, once established in Paris and the secondary centers, the old centralized government would, in the provinces too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers.” These are the words of Karl Marx, the communist inspiration for Soviet Russia and Maoist China.

The Decree on the Requisition of Closed Factories

2009-12-04T10:35:00.000-08:00

The Paris Commune, considering that a large number of factories have been abandoned by their directors, who have fled in order to escape from their duties as citizens and without caring about the workers’ interests,
considering that, as a consequence of the cowardly flight, numerous industries important to communal life have been interrupted, and that the existence of the workers is at stake,
decrees:
that the syndical labor societies are convened to appoint a committee of inquiry that will have the task of:
1. establishing statistics of abandoned factories as well as a precise inventory of the state in which they are found and the conditions of the instruments of work they contain;
2. making a report presenting the practical conditions for activating these factories immediately, not by the deserters who have abandoned them, but by the cooperative association of the workers employed in these factories;
3. elaborating a plan for the formation of these cooperative workers’ societies;
4. instituting an arbitration tribunal that will determine at the time of the entrepreneurs’ return the conditions of definitive cession of the factories to the workers’ societies and the compensation to be paid to the entrepreneurs by the societies.
This committee of inquiry shall present its report to the Committee for Labor and Commerce and the latter shall submit to the Commune as quickly as possible a draft law that shall render justice to the Commune’s interests as well as to those of the workers.

Paris, April 16, 1871

Self-Governing Socialism: Bertrand Russell

2009-12-04T10:10:00.001-08:00

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was an analytic philosopher who is best known in some circles for his essay “Why I am not a Christian.” He was a proponent of free trade and nuclear disarmament. He was a critic of Soviet Russia and America’s involvement in Vietnam. He was a champion of humanitarian ideals and free thought, and he held well-reasoned opinions on an astonishingly large number of social issues. In 1918, Russell wrote Roads to Freedom, in which Russell asks, “From the point of view of liberty, what system would be the best? In what direction should we wish the forces of progress to move?” He answers, “I have no doubt that the best system would be one not far removed from that advocated by Kropotkin, but rendered more practicable by the adoption of the main principles of Guild Socialism.”
He illustrates what this society would look like. First, no one would be required to work. A bare minimum of subsistence, what he calls a “vagabond’s wage,” would keep idle people alive. This would encourage businesses to make jobs attractive enough to compete for labor. Those who do work, and he assumes the great majority of people in society would choose to work, will learn more than one trade or more than one small part of a trade, so that the worker could shift into other jobs according to cyclical demand. People will also be paid the same for being willing to work as they would for actually working.
Second, workers will manage themselves and possess their own places of business, their factories, farms, workshops, etc., and a Guild Congress will serve the same function in industry as a nation’s Parliament or Congress does in politics. He does not recommend replacing parliamentary government with this Guild Congress, however. He thinks society needs both.
Third, a government will still exist, Russell writes, and will consist of two parts. One part will be community decisions; the other part will be enforcing those decisions. He understands that anarchists generally take issue with the notion of majority rule in a democracy. In response to this criticism, he suggests placing the decision of questions that primarily affect a section of the community into to hands of just that section, rather than of a central chamber. In this way, people would not be forced to submit to decisions made by people who are ignorant of the matter at hand. This would often decentralize decision making down to the level of a union or a factory or a farm, since these people would often have shared interests that wouldn’t apply to the rest of society. He further suggests that this society reduces the possibility of war to such a point as to deconstruct the justification for executive power to make quick decisions about national security.
Fourth, the capital being socially possessed, it should be the workers specifically who possess the capital, and not the State. He writes, “There are various forms of socialism: the form in which the State is the employer and all who work receive wages from it involves dangers of tyranny and interference with progress, which would make it, if possible, even worse than the present régime.”

Self-Governing Socialism: The Building Guilds of England

2009-12-04T07:14:00.001-08:00

Building guilds in England between 1920 and 1922 played an important role in advancing the idea of self-governing socialism. In January 1920, building unions in Manchester, England, came together to form a building guild committee in hope that it might help construction workers bid on jobs themselves instead of working for the benefit of an employer. In May, building unions in London formed a second guild committee. By the end of the year, the idea of guild committees had spread throughout England. At the peak of the guild movement, there were about 150 guild committees, (though only about half were active,) and a National Building Guild coordinated them all. The National Building Guild, Ltd., represented the single largest building concern in the country and employed 6,000 workers, which represented between one and two percent of the total building union membership. The aim of guilds was to build good houses at affordable prices while offering workers job security and safe conditions. Additionally, the pay for workers would be continuous, providing wages for workers during holidays, sickness and during inclement weather. The guild had only to spend about three and a half percent of total labor expenses on wages for downtime. Building guild committees started by promising local housing authorities houses cheaper than anyone else could offer, because they could do the work without having to make a profit for an employer. Guild organizers figured they could build for about three-quarters the price of the lowest bid from profit-seeking firms. This exposed the huge profit employers were raking in from employee labor, and made guilds popular. Within two years, guild workers had build 1,200 houses for local authorities throughout England. Additionally, the quality of the houses built were equal or better than that of houses built by private builders.
Those who supported the guild generally saw more potential in the guild system than they saw in unions or in the Labour Party. Unfortunately, governments started to change the way they funded housing projects and ceased to provide working capital up front. The change meant that builders would have to invest their own capital in order to get started on projects, and the guilds did not have enough money to compete with wealthier builders. The guild socialist movement collapsed in 1922, but the movement gave rise to the crystallization of ideas for alternatives to capitalist civilization.
Carl S. Joslyn, head of the sociology department at the University of Maryland, spent the winter and spring of 1921-1922 studying how the building guilds of England worked. He published his findings in 1922 as “Two Years’ Working of the Building Guilds in England.” In it, he explains how the guild system operates:
One or two, but not more than two, representatives from the local building unions, and those unions for industries related to the building industry, make up a guild committee. Each guild committee elects a chair and a secretary, but these two positions do not necessarily have to be filled by members of the committee. They must, however, be union members who are in good standing with their union. A guild committee is responsible for carrying out contracts and drawing and signing checks for wages and materials. The guild committee, however, cannot buy anything on the regional council’s (explained below) credit and cannot themselves sign contracts or organize financing or take legal responsibility for contracted work.
In larger cities, one or two representatives from different local guild committees make up an area guild committee. Once a month, delegates from area guild committees attend an area conference to discuss administrative problems referred to them by the regional council.
Construction site workers are categorized by craft, and each craft elects one delegate to represent them on a works committee. There is one of these works committees for each construction site. In a couple cases, works committees advised the area guild committee, but the status of the works committees had not been clearly defined. This caused some contention.
Guild committees are sectioned into ten different areas across the country, and representatives from these committees each form one of ten different regional councils. Other representatives can sit on the regional council as well. The London regional council was made up of 11 members of guild committees (who had joined the guild committees because they were representing local unions), nine representatives from area guild committees (who had joined the area committees because they were representing guild committees and thus were representing the local unions), one representative from an approved group of architects or surveyors, one from a local electrical trades union, and one from the local clerks’ union. Functions of the regional council include issuing bids on construction projects and hiring architects and surveyors. Local guild committee members nominate and elect from the regional guild committee one representative to sit on the National Building Guild, Ltd. The National Building Guild can either organize financing, sign contracts, arrange credit and take legal responsibility for contracted work itself, or it can consent to allow the regional council to take on these tasks.
Departmental foremen oversee construction at construction sites, and there is one foreman for every type of craft utilized at the site. These departmental foremen are elected by the guild committee, but are nominated by the union. There is also a general foreman who takes responsibility for entire project. This general foreman is also nominated by the local union and elected by the guild committee, but the general foreman must be approved by one of the ten regional councils. The guild committees also have the right to recall any foreman they want. Joslyn notes, “No foreman, it should be remarked, is appointed by the men working on a given contract.” At the same time, no foreman can sit on the regional council. The foremen may attend the regional council meetings, but only as advisors. Joslyn noted also that as he traveled he heard the rank and file workers pushing for more self-management.

Self-Governing Socialism: G. D. H. Cole

2009-12-03T14:14:00.000-08:00

G. D. H. Cole (1889-1959) was a Fabian and cooperativist who was a strong proponent of self-governing socialism. His theory of turning workers’ cooperatives into governing bodies is fundamental to his vision. Cole once stated that he became interested in socialism after reading News From Nowhere (1890), a utopian novel by William Morris. Cole studied Marx and Lenin, but he was not a Marxist. He called himself a Guild Socialist and addressed significant philosophical questions about self-governing socialism in his 1920 book Guild Socialism Restated.
Is it reasonable to assume that workers’ cooperatives must be the governing bodies for true self-governing socialist societies? He responds that there is no reason to assume any such thing, but that “it seems clear enough that only a community that is self-governing…over the whole length and breadth of its activities, can hope to call out what is best in its members, or to give them that maximum opportunity for personal and social self-expression which is requisite to real freedom.” A genuinely free person must be free in every one of his or her social actions. That would include freedom to affect industrial and economic affairs. Therefore, any political democracy that does not include democracy at the workplace is a sham. Cole explains that “‘democrats’ totally ignore the effects of undemocratic organization and convention in non-political spheres of social action.” Because of this, the undemocratic spheres of human life eclipse the freedom in the political sphere. To make matters worse, when political freedom is assumed to make up the whole lot of human freedom, political activity takes over far more of the whole lot of human activity than it should. And any time a person is elected to represent another person for an indefinitely large number of disparate purposes, the representative will have less and less relation to those he or she was elected to represent. Cole writes, “The omnicompetent State…is thus utterly unsuitable to any really democratic community, and must be destroyed or painlessly extinguished as it has destroyed or extinguished its rivals in the sphere of communal organization.” A person should not have to choose a single representative to speak for him or her on every aspect of citizenship, Cole writes. Instead, a person should be able to elect representatives according to any number of human activities he or she has an opinion about. He calls this functional representation. A person should have as many distinct and separately exercised votes as he or she has distinct social opinions, purposes or interests.
Of course, this means that a single functional representative will represent that segment of society who shares the same opinion, purpose or interest, (but only as a representative of this opinion, purpose or interest,) and it is from this premise that he assumes people will naturally tend to segment themselves along industrial lines. He is led to this conclusion because he believes people are strongly bound together by vocation and by consumption patterns. Though he does not say this specifically, one may even go a step further and suppose that under such a system, there would no longer be a need to segment according to sexual preference or by race. Under the structure Cole proposes for society, no human function would be important enough to rally around other than one’s vocation and consumption. Under self-governance, prejudice is impotent. Sexual preference, gender and race would be of no consequence.
But doesn’t everything affect everyone else at least a little? Cole gives an example. The coal industry is of great importance to the association of coalminers, but it is also of great importance to anyone who burns coal. The education field is of great importance to schoolteachers, but it is also of great importance to children. Why, then, should workers alone manage a coalmine or a school?
This question, he states, “really brings us to the heart of our problem, and to the great practical difference between Guild Socialism and other schools of socialist opinion.” In some schools of socialism, the State represents the consumer. In others, buyers’ cooperatives represent the consumer. Cole explains that neither of these schools of thought recognizes the right of workers to self-governance. On the other hand, Cole sees syndicalism or trade unionism as having no concern for consumer demand. Cole believes Guild Socialism offers a better alternative. He concludes that workers should control internal conditions of mines, schools, etc. That means workers should control the ways they are managed, administrators appointed and conditions determined. Workers have every right to manage themselves in the workplace, but they don’t have the right to disregard consumer demand. The consumers should be able to control the quantity and quality of goods produced, the excellence of their distribution and sale prices. Consumers have every right to make these demands, but that doesn’t give them the right to influence the way workers manage their factories.
On the issue of decentralization, Cole does not believe decentralized coordination is necessarily the best way to manage all social functions. The degree of centralization will largely depend on the character of the service. “Thus, the railway industry obviously demands a much higher degree of centralization than the building industry, which serves mainly a local market.” He suggests national guilds to coordinate supply and demand for industries, and the extent to which national guilds play roles in coordinating industry will depend on the character of the service. But even in industries like the railway service, national guilds would only coordinate the service or product to meet demand and would never interfere with worker management. These national guilds serve as the new State, and they are responsible for coordinating the activities of the various functional bodies in society. This is, of course, a very different definition of “State” than what exists as political democracy with its non-functional elections and its undifferentiated representatives.
The new State is in no sense born from the old one, and the new State will not reproduce the structure of the old one. In the first place, the old State was set up to work on the notion that a lone representative can hold the exact same opinion on every issue as every person that the representative is supposed to represent. Lenin, he said, has already aptly addressed the second reason in State and Revolution. Cole states:

The present political machine is definitely an organ of class domination, not merely because it has been perverted by the power of capitalists, but because it is based on coercion and is primarily an instrument of coercion. Its essential idea is that of an externally imposed ‘order,’ and its transformation into a form expressive of self-government and freedom is impossible.

Cole foresees the new State gradually taking social functions away from the old State’s rule. New bodies will free economic and civic functions, as well as their coordination, from State control.

Self-Governing Socialism: The Fed

2009-12-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

The South Wales Minders’ Federation, nicknamed “The Fed,” played an important role in Wales from 1912 until 1944 in the struggle for self-governing socialism. Welsh coalminers formed The Fed after strikers won only moderate concessions in the Welsh Coal Strike of 1898. The Cambrian Combine Dispute of 1910-1911, of which the Tonypandy riots were part, was a 10-month-long strike that caused Winston Churchill to send London metropolitan police and authorized the use of British soldiers in Tonypandy. These heavy-handed tactics inspired militancy among the workers, which triggered a syndicalist stance among many Fed leaders. Noah Ablett was one of those syndicalists.
“The Miners’ Next Step” (1912), penned mostly by Ablett, who was a founding member of the unofficial Reform Committee of the South Wales Miners, called for the miners to take full control of the mines and completely manage coal production themselves.
The committee explains that there are good and bad aspects to leadership. If the leader is the one making decisions for the group, one person can generally make decisions quicker than a group can. This also means that one person takes all responsibility for the decision made. Further, it means someone is always responsible for making sure action is taken where necessary. It also tends to keep the best person for the job in office, since the leader can be replaced.
Conversely, the leader also has power, and power has always led to abuse of power. Every decision a leader makes is always based in part on how such decision will affect the leader’s position. Further, the leader’s power is not of his or her own making, but is the power of those being led. The power is usurped. In order to lead, the leader must keep all the followers in line. He or she not only has to maintain respect from those being led, but also of the general public and the employer. To this end, the leader wants drill sergeants as his sub-leaders and has no motivation toward a democratic union.
It seems far more likely that what takes place in his or her industry affects a worker far more than what takes place in his or her party or precinct, and so it would seem democracy would be even more guarded in the union than it is in the State. In addition, the very nature of a system directed by the decisions of a leader means that the great majority of workers may not even understand reasons for their own participation in mass efforts. And since they are being led about, the workers share no solidarity among themselves. He explains, “Sheep cannot be said to have solidarity. In obedience to a shepherd, they will go up or down, backwards or forwards as they are driven by him and his dogs. But they have no solidarity, for that means unity and loyalty…not to an individual, or the policy of an individual, but to an interest and a policy which is understood and worked for by all.”
But how can an organization ensure the power of mass action while maintaining only the good aspects of leadership?
The committee recommends all organized labor in the mining and quarrying industries join forces into one Central Executive, and that every worker has a say in who represents him or her. The same organizing must take place in all other industrial sectors, with solid organization along local industrial lines and then proceeding to national and international industrial lines. The single goal all workers will strive toward is putting the factories, farms, workshops, etc., into the hands of the workers.
One aspect of worker control will also involve managing levels of production according to the needs of the people instead of according to profit, that is, according to effective demand or petty competition to gain market share. The committee suggests, “The co-ordination of all industries on a Central Production Board, which, with a statistical department to ascertain the needs of the people, will issue its demands on the different departments of industry, leaving to the men themselves to determine under what conditions and how the work should be done. This would mean real democracy in real life, making for real manhood and womanhood. Any other form of democracy is a delusion and a snare.”
Toward this end, the people knowing best how to take over management of a factory would generally be the people who work at the factory in question. The committee states, “Today, the shareholders own and rule the coalfields. They own and rule them mainly through paid officials. The men who work in the mine are surely as competent to elect these as shareholders who may have never seen a colliery.” Thus, negotiations between workers and management would be most effective if negotiations involve just the workers and management of the factory in question. However, the direction negotiations take depend in large part on the amount of power workers wield, thus the strength of the workers against management needs to remain collective strength. The more collective the strength, the more power the workers have. The fight of the workers against management at a particular factory needs to carry the fighting strength of all workers in the whole union. However, every worker who contributes to the fight must get something in return, either in improved conditions or better wages as his or her share of the victory.
The committee further recommends fighting nationalization. Nationalization does nothing to improve the situation of the worker. All it does it get the full force of the government involved in the struggle between capital and labor, and the government is going to see to it that the interest gets paid on bonds, which will then go to pay those who hold the bonds, the capitalists.

Self-Governing Socialism: James Connolly

2009-11-27T19:39:00.001-08:00

James Connolly (1868-1916) was a socialist leader in Scotland and Ireland who was executed by the British government for his role in armed resistance against the British in Dublin. Connolly served as secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation in 1895. In 1896, he took a full-time job as secretary of the Dublin Socialist Society and helped change the society into the Irish Socialist Republican Party. Connolly took command of a workers’ militia, the Irish Citizen Army, in 1914. The militia had been established to fight the Dublin Metropolitan Police during strikes and had no more than 250 members. On Easter week, 1916, Connolly led the ICA to take over key points in Dublin in an attempt to establish an Irish Republic. The ensuing battle against police and British soldiers lasted seven days. The insurrection left 116 British soldiers and 16 policemen dead. The ICA lost 11. It became known as the Easter Rising.
In Connolly’s 1908 essay “Industrial Unionism and Constructive Socialism,” he explains how a government based on city, county and state elections was born, why it is absurd and why the only government we need now is an administration of industry, by the workers:

The political institutions of today are simply the coercive forces of capitalist society; they have grown up out of, and are based upon, territorial divisions of power in the hands of the ruling class in past ages, and were carried over into capitalist society to suit the needs of the capitalist class when that class overthrew the domination of its predecessors…. The delegation of the function of government into the hands of representatives elected from certain districts, States or territories represents no real natural division suited to the requirements of modern society, but is a survival from a time when territorial influences were more potent in the world than industrial influences, and for that reason is totally unsuited to the needs of the new social order, which must be based upon industry.
The Socialist thinker, when he paints the structural form of the new social order, does not imagine an industrial system directed or ruled by a body of men or women elected from an indiscriminate mass of residents within given districts, said residents working at a heterogeneous collection of trades and industries. To give the ruling, controlling and directing of industry into the hands of such a body would be too utterly foolish.

In place of a national government based on democratically elected representation of citizens according to where they live, he proposes the workers establish industrial administration as their only national government. Until this happens, nationalization of industries in a territorially ruled society might “restrict the greed of capitalism and…familiarize the workers with the conception of common ownership,” but “measures which aim to place industries in the hands of, or under the control of, such a political State are in no sense steps towards that ideal.”
He proposes that the workers start this political transition in their workshops and advance up from them. He writes that “social democracy must proceed from the bottom upward, whereas capitalist political society is organized from above downward.” He further states that “the enrolment of the workers in unions patterned closely after the structure of modern industries, and following the organic lines of industrial development, is par excellence the swiftest, safest and most peaceful form of constructive work the Socialist can engage in.” In this way, the agitator, the organizer, the union man and woman, all play roles of utmost importance in bringing about the new society. They aren’t just negotiating for better contracts. The entire future of humankind depends upon the future of organized labor.

Self-Governing Socialism: Daniel De Leon

2009-11-27T13:38:00.000-08:00

Daniel De Leon (1852-1914) was a Marxian syndicalist who is best known as one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World and as the prime intellectual inspiration for the Socialist Labor Party, the oldest socialist political party in the U.S. (1876) and the second oldest in the world. De Leon joined the SLP in 1890. (I joined the party myself just before they closed their national office in September 2008.) De Leon served as editor of the SLP’s newspaper, The People, starting in 1891 and ran for governor of New York three times. In 1902, he received 15,000 votes. He ran for NY Secretary of State in 1893 and ran for NY Court of Appeals in 1903. He never won any election to public office. He was in many ways a manipulative and controlling individual. He caused problems for every labor union he came into contact with and was intolerant of dissent in the SLP. He once even expelled his own son from the party.
De Leon’s writings have inspired the formation of the New Union Party in 1980 and the Campaign for a Working Democracy in 2005.
He is also well known in certain circles for being kicked out of the IWW in 1908 for, among other things, referring to the members it attracted early on as “slum proletarians” and bums. More substantially, De Leon and his faction were causing problems for the IWW because the majority of wobblies didn’t want to team up with the SLP like De Leon kept urging them to do. De Leon’s fellow founding member “Big” Bill Haywood (1869-1928) wanted to keep the IWW out of politics. Haywood and his faction believed in direct action through the strength of industrial unionism alone. “What, then, is Haywoodism?” De Leon asked in a 1913 editorial. He answered, it is “a mob whose staff ‘having the devil in their bowels,’ confused the ‘revolutionary idea’ with ‘destruction’ and had no conception of revolutionary agitation, education and organization other than…’the unchaining of what we have been taught to call the bad passions.’” De Leon believed that workers would only be able to find enough strength through industrial unionism combined with political action, namely, the political action of the SLP. He believed worker empowerment would have to involve some sort of politics. Workers were born under political authority and thus had found themselves functioning according to the limits of property ownership, that is, territorially. However, he didn’t think that fighting the owning class along industrial lines necessarily conflicted with fighting them territorially. De Leon believed they had every right and reason to use both tools at the same time, both a party and a union, against the capitalist class. For De Leon, laborers had to stand together along industrial lines in order to have enough power to make changes to society. But this would have to involve politics, since he believed a political struggle was needed in order to amend the U.S. Constitution and to preach socialism from the privileged position of official forums. Only from the position of a socially respected podium could the left have enough legitimacy to raise a broad awareness of the class struggle. There was no substitute for this.
This was not the first time De Leon had tried to team labor organizers with the SLP. In fact, he had tried unsuccessfully time and again to build an industrial unionizing wing for the SLP. Starting in the early 1890s, he had tried to turn what remained of the Knights of Labor into the labor organizing wing of the SLP. The KOL went under soon after. Next, he tried to bore from within the American Federation of Labor, but to no avail. After that, he organized the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance in 1895 in an attempt to make it the industrial unionizing arm of the SLP, but this organization also soon petered out. It was at this point that he helped found the IWW and started arguing with Haywood.

Self-Governing Socialism: Fernand Pelloutier

2009-11-26T13:48:00.000-08:00

French anarchist Fernand Pelloutier (1867-1901) is best known for heading the labor exchanges program in France from 1895 until his death. He broke from the Party of French Workers, a Marxist political organization, in 1892 over a disagreement he had with party leadership on the role of the general strike. He became secretary of the Federation of Labor Exchanges in 1895. The federation was a group of organizations, the “labor exchanges,” that placed workers in decent jobs on their own terms and thereby competed with private job placement services. The labor exchanges didn’t really “exchange” anything per se. The exchanges functioned together as one big labor union for all the employees they represented and as places workers could meet, socialize, educate themselves and host entertainment.
France elected Léon Gambetta (1838-1882) to lead the nation in 1881. His constituents were mostly working class, and so Gambetta promised to establish the first worker exchange for them. He died at his house three months after he took office when a pistol accidentally discharged, but the radicals and socialists who also held other public offices continued to fund labor exchanges with tax dollars. In 1904, the government mandated that every city with more than 10,000 inhabitants had to create a placement bureau, which would have its office within the labor exchange facility.
The exchanges grew with Pelloutier guidance. At one point, the federation claimed 250,000 members. His posthumously published History of the Labor Exchanges defines the exchanges and explains their functions and goals:

They are, first, to know at every moment with exactitude, and for each profession, the number of unemployed workers and, at the same time, the multiple causes of the disturbances introduced each day into the conditions of work and working life; then, to borrow from statistics…”the cost of living of each individual, compared to the wages granted, the number of professions, number of workers included in each, number of products manufactured, extracted or harvested, and, in turn, the total number of products necessary for the feeding and maintenance of the population in the entire region within the radius of the Labor Exchange.”

To this end, Poulloutier established the National Office of Statistics and Placement in 1900, but his vision for France’s labor movement went beyond even this. He saw in France’s labor exchange program the vehicle for creating an entirely new State apparatus or at least for bringing about a social revolution that would usher in Bakunin’s free association of producers. Pelloutier did not see France’s labor exchange program as merely an instrument of struggle against capital, nor were they modest placement services. His vision for the labor exchanges included socializing all capital and a means for meticulously coordinating production and distribution, suppressing the very notion of exchange value between consumers and producers. But what does he think all this will accomplish? He states:

The consequence of this new state, of this suppression of useless social bodies, of this simplification of the necessary machinery, is that man produces better, more and faster; that he can, as a result, devote long hours to his intellectual development, thus accelerate the progress of mechanization, relieve himself more and more of onerous manual labor, and order his existence in a way more comfortable to the instinctive aspirations for studious repose.

Freeland: A Social Anticipation, Selections

2009-11-25T22:41:00.000-08:00

The committee therefore drew up a 'Model Statute' for the use of the associations, not at all anticipating that it would really be preserved as a model, but merely for the sake of making a beginning and of providing a formula which the associations might use as the skeleton of the schemes of organisation that their experience would enable them to devise. As a matter of fact this 'Model Statute,' which was at first accepted almost unaltered by all the associations, was in less than twelve months so much altered and enlarged that little more than the leading principles of its original form remained. These, however, were the following:

1. Admission into every association is free to everyone, whether a member of any other association or not; and any member can leave any association at any time.

2. Every member has a claim upon such a share of the net profits of the association as is proportionate to the amount of work he has contributed.

3. Every member's contribution of work shall be measured by the number of hours he has worked; the older members receiving more than those who have joined the association later, in the proportion of a premium of x per cent. for every year of seniority. Also, a premium can be contracted for, in the way of free association, for skilled labour.

4. The labour contribution of superintendents or directors shall, according to a voluntary arrangement with every individual concerned, be reckoned us equal to a certain number of hours of work per day.

5. The profits of the association shall be calculated at the end of every year of business, and, after deducting the repayment of capital and the taxes paid to the Freeland commonwealth, divided. During each year the members shall receive, for every hour of work or of reckoned work, advances equal to x per cent. of the net profits of the previous year.

6. The members shall, in case of the dissolution or liquidation of on association, be liable for the contracted loan in equal proportions; which liability, so far as regards the still outstanding amount, attaches also to newly entering members. When a member leaves, his liability for the already contracted loan shall not cease. This liability for the debts of the association shall, in case of dissolution or liquidation, be in proportion to the claim of the liable member upon the existing property.

7. The highest authority of the association is the general meeting, in which every member possesses an equal active and passive vote. The general meeting carries its motions by a simple majority of votes; a majority of three-fourths is required for the alteration of statutes, dissolution, or liquidation.

8. The general meeting exercises its rights either directly as such, or through its elected functionaries, who are responsible to it.

9. The management of the business of the association is placed in the hands of a directorate of x members, elected for x years by the general meeting, but their appointment can be at any time rescinded. The subordinate business functionaries are nominated by the directorate; but the fixing of the salaries--measured in hours of work--of these functionaries is the business of the general assembly on the proposition of the directorate.

10. The general meeting annually elects a council of inspection consisting of x members, to inspect the books and take note of the manner in which the business is conducted, and to furnish periodical reports.

It will strike the reader at once that only with reference to the possible dissolution of an association (section 6) is there a mention of what should apparently be regarded as the principal thing--namely, of the 'property' of the associations and of the claims of the members upon this property. The reason of this is that any 'property' of the association, in the ordinary sense, does not exist. The members, it is true, possess the right of usufruct of the existing productive capital; but as they always share this right with every newly entering member, and are themselves bound to the association by nothing except their interest in the profits of their labour, so there can be no property-interest in the association so long as they are carrying on their work. And, in fact, that which everyone can use cannot constitute property, however useful it maybe. There are no proprietors--merely usufructuaries of the association's capital. And should it be thought that this is in contradiction to the obligation to reimburse the loaned productive capital of the associations, it ought not to be overlooked that even this repayment of capital--except in the already mentioned case of a liquidation--is done by the members merely in their capacity of usufructuaries of the means of production. As the reimbursed capital is derived from the profits, and these are divided among the members in proportion to each one's contribution of work, every member contributes to the reimbursement in proportion to the amount of work he does. And when the subject is looked at more closely it will be seen that the repayments are ultimately derived from the consumers of the commodities produced by the associations; they form, of course, a part of the cost of production, and must necessarily be covered by the price of the product. That this shall take place fully and universally is ensured with infallible certainty by the free mobilisation of labour. A production in which these repayments were not completely covered by the price of the commodities produced would fail to attract labour until the diminished supply of the commodities had produced the requisite rise in price. When the repayments have all been made, this part of the cost of production ceases; the association capital may be regarded as amortised, and the prices of the commodities produced sink--again under the influence of the free mobilisation of labour; so that the members of the association individually profit as little by the employment of burdenless capital as they suffered before by the liquidation of their burden. Profit and loss are always distributed--still thanks to the mobilisation of labour--equally among all the workers of Freeland.

Thus it is seen that, in consequence of this simple and infallibly operative arrangement, productive capital is, strictly speaking, as ownerless as the land; it belongs to everyone, and therefore to no one. The community of producers supplies it and employs it, and it does both in exact proportion to the amount of work contributed by each individual; and payment for the expenditure is made by the community of consumers--again by each one in exact proportion to the consumption of each individual.
...
We now come to the question how it is possible to guarantee the equal right of everyone to equally fertile land. This problem also is solvable in the simplest manner by the free mobility of labour involved in the principle of free association. As everywhere else in the world, there was in Freeland richer and poorer land; but as more workers were attracted to the better land than to the worse, and as, according to a well-known economic law, a greater expenditure of labour upon an equal extent of land is followed by relatively diminishing returns, so the individual worker obtained no higher net profit per hour of labour on the best land than upon the worst land which could be cultivated at all.
...
The fundamental laws were thus expressed:

1. Every inhabitant of Freeland has an equal and inalienable claim upon the whole of the land, and upon the means of production accumulated by the community.

2. Women, children, old men, and men incapable of work, have a right to a competent maintenance, fairly proportionate to the level of the average wealth of the community.

3. No one can be hindered from the active exercise of his own free individual will, so long as he does not infringe upon the rights of others.

4. Public affairs are to be administered as shall be determined by all the adult (above twenty years of age) inhabitants of Freeland, without distinction of sex, who shall all possess an equal active and passive right of vote and of election in all matters that affect the commonwealth.

5. Both the legislative and the executive authority shall be divided into departments, and in such a manner that the whole of the electors shall choose special representatives for the principal public departments, who shall give their decisions apart and watch over the action of the administrative boards of the respective departments.

In these five points is contained the whole substance of the public law of Freeland; everything else is merely the natural consequence or the more detailed expression of these points. Thus the principles upon which the associations were based--the right of the worker to the profit, the division of the profit in proportion to the amount of work contributed, and freedom of contract in view of special efficiency of labour--are naturally and necessarily implied in the first and third fundamental laws. As the whole of the means of labour were accessible to everyone, no one could be compelled to forego the profit of his own labour; and as no one could be forced to place his higher capabilities at the disposal of others, these higher capabilities--so far as they were needed in the guidance and direction of production--must find adequate recompense in the way of freedom of contract.
...
Imagine a European or American State in which the manufacturers exercised legislative and executive control over manufactures, agriculturists over agriculture, railway shareholders over the means of transport, and so forth--the specialist representatives of each separate interest making and administering the laws that particularly concerned their own profession! As under the exploiting system of society the struggle for existence is directed towards a mutual suppression and supplanting, so must the consequences of such a 'constitution' as we have just supposed be positively dreadful. In those cases which are grouped together under the heading of 'political corruption,' where isolated interests have succeeded in imposing their will upon the community, the shamelessness of the exploitage has exceeded all bounds.

But it is different in Freeland. With us no separate interest is antagonistic to or not in perfect harmony with the common interest. Producers, for example, who in Freeland conceive the idea of increasing their gains by laying an impost upon imports, must be idiotic. For, to compel the consumers to pay more for their manufactures would not help them, since the influx of labour would at once bring down their gains again to the average level. On the other hand, to make it more difficult for other producers to produce would certainly injure themselves, for the average level of gain--above which their own cannot permanently rise--would be thereby lowered. And exactly the same holds good for all our different interests. In consequence of the arrangement whereby every interest is open to everyone, and no one has either the right or the might to reserve any advantage to himself alone, we are fortunately able to entrust the decision of all questions affecting material interest to those who are the most directly interested--therefore, to those who possess the most special knowledge. Not merely do the legislature and the executive thereby acquire in the highest degree a specialist character, but there disappears from public life that passionate prepossession which elsewhere is the characteristic note of party politics.
...
We forbid the payment of interest as little as we "forbid" the undertaker's profit or the landlord's ground-rent. These three items of income do not exist here, simply because no one is under the necessity of paying them. If our workers needed an "undertaker" to organise and discipline them for highly productive activity, no power could prevent them from giving up to him what belonged to him--namely, the profit of the undertaking--and remaining satisfied themselves with a bare subsistence.
...
'You see, it is exactly the same with interest as with the undertaker's gains and with ground-rent: the guaranteed right of association saves the worker from the necessity of handing over a part of the proceeds of his production to a third person under any plea whatever. Interest disappears of itself, just like profit and rent, for the sole but sufficient reason that the freely associated worker is his own capitalist, as well as his own undertaker and landlord. Or, if one will put it so, interest, profit, and rent remain, but they are not separated from wages, with which they combine to form a single and indivisible return for labour.'

Self-Governing Socialism: Theodor Hertzka

2009-11-25T18:02:00.000-08:00

Theodor Hertzka (1845-1924), a Hungarian-Austrian economist and journalist, is often referred to as the “Austrian Bellamy,” after the Massachusetts lawyer Edward Bellamy, since Hertzka’s utopian novel Freeland: A Social Anticipation (1890) had some similarities to Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888).
In Looking Backward, Bellamy describes a future in which the United States has changed into what he believes to be a sort of utopia, but he doesn’t give many details on how the economy actually works in this utopia. He describes how the government possesses the full productive capacity of the entire nation, and how buyers’ cooperatives work to reduce the cost of distributed goods and services. Some of Bellamy’s readers considered the proposals he makes to be socialist in nature, but Bellamy detested being called a socialist.
In Freeland, Hertzka describes his own version of a self-governed socialist utopia, and envisions at least two sound reasons why his proposals would ensure a just and efficient society:
To preface, his conception of social order consists in great measure within an economic framework. This is not a unique idea. It had already been explored by Saint-Simon, Blanc, Proudhon and others. Specifically, Hertzka puts forward the idea that “The decision-making as well as the executive authority is divided according to industries in such a way that the collectivity of voters elects for the principal public industries special representatives who render their decisions separately and control the conduct of the existing managerial bodies of the industries….” This way, “representatives of each branch of interests…make, carry out, and control the laws of the sphere closely interesting them: manufacturers for manufacturing, farmers for agricultural production, railroadmen for transport, etc.” Notice that this specifically implies an assumption that command of these industries is not left up entirely to the chaos of a free market.
At the same time, the labor market is left completely free. Workers are free to join any firm where they would like to work. They don’t search the want ads. They don’t drop off résumés. They don’t get hired. They simply show up wherever they want and start working.
This appropriation of industrial concerns under the deliberate command of Freeland’s citizenry is a fundamental tenet of Freeland society from which its entire political system originates. It is one of only five points that lay down the whole essence of law in Freeland. The other four points are, a.) The right of access by anyone to the common land and to the means of production by way of joining any association (addressed below) he or she wants to join; b.) The right to be left alone so long as he or she doesn’t harm someone else; c.) Equal voting rights for everyone over the age of 20 (note the libertarian nature of these three guarantees, which implies that the energy of Freeland’s State apparatus isn’t spent controlling the lives of individuals) and d.) Welfare to the handicapped, children and elderly. “…Everything further is but the obvious result or the close derivative of the same.” This breed of political science will guarantee that “not only are legislation and administration expertly formed in the highest degree, but that vehement bias that is the characteristic trait of the party machine disappears from public life.”
To preface a bit further, the productive capacity of the Freeland Commonwealth is possessed by organizations he refers to as “associations,” not by individuals or by the commonwealth itself. This means that everything that can be called capital is all possessed by different associations, and each association possesses its own. Thereby, the associations’ necessary capital, in whatever forms they come, i.e., credit, land, machinery, etc., belongs in full to the association that possesses it and not to the members of the association. Each member of each association gets paid an hourly wage calculated according to his or her association’s net proceeds claimed from the previous fiscal year.
The first reason Hertzka gives why his proposals would ensure a just and efficient society is because the society he envisions will be cooperative. Since each citizen of Freeland is paid according to the net proceeds of the associations to which he or she belongs, it is in each citizen’s best interest to only concern themselves with their own association’s productivity, not their market share. If manufacturer representatives lobby for tariffs on imports of a particular commodity, they will only be forcing consumers to choose a Freeland-made commodity instead of the import. This will have one of two results. They will either make more work for themselves, which will require more workers, who will then take their own shares of the net profits, which means the wages on average would not change. Or, if they not only impose a tariff but also raise the cost of their own Freeland-made commodity, they will be forcing consumers to pay more for Freeland-made commodities they choose. This will have the effect of increasing wages, to be sure, but only briefly, because all the workers belonging to all the other associations could clearly see higher wages now being paid for manufacturing this artificially and recently more expensive commodity, and they will naturally flock to where they can get more money for their labor. Since workers can come and go as they please to and from any association they like, the free influx of labor into associations manufacturing the suddenly more profitable, tariff-protected, domestic commodity will lower the wages all over again to its average level, or if you like, to its rational free market value. In this sense, Freeland maintains a free market labor market.
The second reason Hertzka gives why his proposals would ensure a just and efficient society is because it prohibits passive income. Since passive income enriches a person by way of owning a resource or tool necessary for some sort of production or by way of owning a business where employees are hired or by way of owning farmland or real estate beyond his or her needs, and since this means revenues from rent and from employee labor and from interest necessarily divert a share of the wealth created by labor into the purses of the owners, and since it is when this pattern not checked or is even encouraged, as it is in a capitalist, free-market society, that wealth grows exponentially in favor of the owners of capital instead of the owners of labor (meaning, the laborers themselves), that the owners can and do bid up the cost of living for everyone, leaving the mass of laborers with less relative wealth on average until so few people are buying anything that an economic crisis happens, then spreads, then forces factories to close, which then leaves machines and workers idle, it is for these reasons that when workers’ associations possess all the capital and when passive income has thus been annihilated, society is more just and efficient. Since “no one has the right and power to claim for himself a growing share anywhere, we are in the fortunate position of entrusting decision-making on all questions of interest to those most closely involved and therefore most experienced.” He goes on to write, “We prohibit interest on capital as little as we ‘prohibit’ the profit of the employer or land rent. These three types of income do not exist in this country merely for the reason that no one is in the distressed condition of having to pay for them.” And, “Interest disappears quite by itself like profit and rent, on the decisive ground alone that the freely associated worker will be his own capitalist as well as his own employer and landowner.”

Self-Governing Socialism: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

2009-11-23T16:31:00.000-08:00

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) was a working-class socialist, a radical who started his education reading what he printed for other people in a print shop. He later went into editing, publishing, writing and politics and at one point attempted to organize a sort of credit union. He was a proponent of mutual aid and the establishment of mutually-possessed tools and land among workers. Though he called himself an anarchist, he often proposed ways in which the government might work better. He was heavily influenced by Adam Smith and the Bible. He remained a devout Christian most of his life. Though he once claimed to have also been influenced by Hegel, he eventually admitted himself that his attempt to address Hegelian thought in his book The System of Economic Contradictions or The Philosophy of Misery was mostly a mistake. He often deflected compliments with criticisms and never let another person ride his intellectual coattails. His arrogance made him the enemy of another arrogant socialist, Karl Marx. After What is Property? the two agreed on very little.
Proudhon didn’t care much for the type of socialism that he described as “government of all men by all men, that is panarchy or communism” (Principle of Federation, 1863). He categorized this as a form of government based on authority, not self-government. He believed this sort of government, what he understood as ‘communism,’ had no division of power, and was in this sense no freer than a monarchy.
He remained a steadfast proponent of what we may define today as self-governing socialism, and he generally opposed bringing about this socialism through violence. At times, he proposed using the government to bring about change. Other times, he proposed using organized labor movements to bring about change. Considering his own interpretations of State and of government, these two approaches are not necessarily in conflict. That isn’t to say that his views were always consistent, either. His views would change often, but he remained throughout his life a defender of radical equality, workers’ solidarity and human reason.
Proudhon defined his notion of the State in a self-governing, socialist society as “the product of the freely consented union formed by equal, independent subjects, all of whom alike are lawmakers. Thus, the State represents only group interests, and any debate between Power and the citizen is really only a debate between citizens.” This comes from Proudhon’s Of the Political Capacity of the Working Class, published in 1865. He continues. “Accordingly, the only prerogative in society is liberty, the only supreme force, Law. Authority and charity, they say, have served their time. What we want instead is justice.” He wants to turn the old adage an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth on its head under the law of the new State. In the self-governing society, laws will foster mutual economic exchanges: Labor for labor, commodity for commodity. On this underlying virtue will depend the success of “mutual insurance, mutual credit, mutual aid, mutual education.
“… This is what the principle of mutualism claims to use, with the aid of certain institutions, as the foundation of the State, the law of the State, and I will even go so far as to say as a kind of religion of the State.
“… The State or government is no longer sovereign. Authority is no longer the antithesis of liberty, and State, government, power, authority, etc., are only expressions that designate liberty in a different way. They are general formulae borrowed from outmoded speech which in certain cases signify the sum, the union, the identity and the solidarity of individual interests.”
Thus, it is in this sense that, when Proudhon talks about the State, he does not necessarily contradict himself when he also says in What is Property? (1840) that, “Although I am a strong supporter of order, I am in the fullest sense of the term, an anarchist.” He further explains in an 1864 letter when he writes, “Since the expression ‘anarchical government’ is a contradiction in terms, the system itself seems to be impossible and the idea absurd. However, it is only language that needs to be criticized. … It means that once industrial functions have taken over from political functions, then business transactions and exchange alone produce the social order.”
Thus, the social order he supports is one that replaces economic order for authority and politics. This, he says in “Philosophy of Progress” (1853), “is alone capable of leading to a rational, practical conception of social order.”
The social order he supports is contractarian. He sees the contract as the ideal form of governance between people, because it is only through the contract that a person is in full control of his or her rights and responsibilities. Here, too, Proudhon appears to be assuming that equality under the new social order will ensure that those who enter into contracts do so on equal footing, meaning among other things, equal economic conditions. He dreams about his ideal contractarian society in The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851): “Instead of laws, we would have contracts. No laws would be passed, either by majority vote or unanimously. Each citizen, each commune or corporation, would make its own laws.” This doesn’t fit easily with his ideas about the Academy of Science and the Prime Minister:
The social order he supported was a society that utilized “the Academy of Science, whose permanent secretary must necessarily become Prime Minister” (What is Property?). We must remember that whatever he means by this title is not necessarily concrete, since it would be just another word borrowed from outmoded speech. His faith in the impartiality of scientific work seems a bit naïve, but here, too, he is referring to social equality that is yet to be fully realized until economic order replaces political power. He goes on to explain that, “Since citizens may lay a memorandum before the Academy, all citizens are lawmakers. But since no person’s opinion carries any weight unless it is supported by facts, no one person’s will can override reason, and therefore no one is king….”
In the lines that follow, he appears to promote deliberative democracy and a consensus theory of truth:
“Any citizen may affirm that such and such a thing is true or just, but his conviction binds no one other than himself. If the truth which he is proclaiming is to become law, then it must be generally recognized as such. But what is recognizing a law? It is verifying a mathematical or metaphysical calculation. It is repeating an experiment, observing a phenomenon or taking note of a fact.” In this sense, his social philosophy is positive, humanistic and dialogical.
The social order he supports is one based on liberty, but not necessarily a democratic liberty. He defines democracy as a system in which all people are governed by each person. In democracy, he writes in Principle of Federation, there is indeed a division of power, but Proudhon still sees democracy as inferior to the government of each person by himself or herself. This "anarchy" is Proudhon’s social order.

Self-Governing Socialism: Louis Blanc

2009-11-23T10:09:00.000-08:00

Louis Blanc (1811-1882) is best known for his work getting the French provisional government to establish workshops similar to workers’ cooperatives. To fund these cooperatives, the government used money from the French rail service. For his efforts, Blanc became a hero of the workers. That is, until the provisional government deliberately mismanaged the program and used him as a scapegoat. He is also known as the one who originally used the phrase “from each according to his or her abilities; to each according to his or her needs,” which Marx adopted.
Blanc laid out his ideas on workers’ cooperatives in his 1840 book Organization of Work. Blanc begins by instructing his reader to decide how to restructure the economy while also preparing to take political power. He urges them to establish a solid plan on what to do with the power they seize. “The revolutions that do not fail are those whose goals are precise and have been defined in advance.” This is contrary to the idea that workers should decide what to do with their society only after a revolution takes place and that to do so beforehand is a waste of time or even utopian.
Blanc predicted that the workshops would only need government supervision for the first year. After that, the workers could take over and run the workshops themselves by electing their own managers. He set no specific limits to the number of people involved in these workshops. The workshops would soon take over part of the largest industries, which would pit workshops against private firms. He believed the private firms would not be able to compete with these workshops and thus would grow obsolete. He held the opinion that workshops would have the upper hand because they would support each other financially to ensure each industry made it through their own crises. But this transition from the old system to the new, from what he believed was an economic system pitting one workshop against another to a system in which workshops would coordinate their own production together along industrial lines, would happen with far fewer negative consequences than happens constantly under a free market.

Between the industrial war that a large capitalist declares today against a small capitalist and that which the government would declare in our system against the individual, there is no comparison possible. The former necessarily perpetrates fraud, violence and all the evils that iniquity carries on its flanks; the latter would be conducted without brutality, without shocks and in a way solely to attain its end, the successful and peaceful absorption of the individual workshops into the social workshops. Thus, instead of being—as are the large capitalists today—the master and tyrant of the market, the government would be its regulator. It would make use of the weapon of competition, not in order violently to overthrow private industry… but to lead it imperceptibly to combination.

However, the government’s involvement in making this happen after the first year would consist of managing the coordination of production among workshops in the same industry, not direct management of the workers. Again, he believed the workshops themselves would only need one year of direct government supervision.
He also saw no problem with paying capitalists interest if they wanted to invest their money in the workshops. “Soon, indeed in every sphere of industry in which a social workshop was established, people would flock to this workshop because of the advantages to those associated, the workers and capitalists.”
Funding to expand the workshop system will come in part from the workshops themselves, he suggested. One third of all profits would go toward this end. This, he believed, would replace the banking system, for which he had no sympathy. Another third would be set aside to keep their associated workshops going in times of temporary crises. The last third would be set aside for the elderly and sick.

Self-Governing Socialism: Robert Owen

2009-11-22T11:30:00.000-08:00

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was one of the earliest visionaries of worker-management or self-governing socialism. In his Report to the County of Lanark of May 1, 1820, Owen specified some details about his plan for “relieving public distress and removing discontent, by giving permanent, productive employment to the poor and working classes, under arrangements which will essentially improve their character and ameliorate their condition, diminish the expenses of production and consumption, and create markets co-extensive with production.” Notice Owen’s paternalistic tone. Fortunately, he was one of those rare breeds who was both a boss and a visionary of worker self-management. Of his vision, he writes, “Sufficient land…will be allotted to these cultivators to enable them to raise an abundant supply of food and the necessaries of life for themselves….” Further, “Under a well-devised arrangement for the working classes they will all procure for themselves the necessaries and comforts of life in so short a time, and so easily and pleasantly, that the occupation will be experienced to be little more than a recreation, sufficient to keep them in the best health and spirits for rational enjoyment of life.” He proposes that workers live in associations of between 300 to 2,000, (the optimal number of people actually being between 800 and 1,200, according to Owen) and that they live near where they work and cook communally in a large kitchen. He proposes a mostly agrarian society and whatever associated industries are necessary to manufacture the most modern agricultural technology available.
He believes that a cooperative society will end up producing more than what is capable of being consumed by the society, and since this would alleviate scarcity, there would be no reason to ration commodities according to effective demand, that is, there would be no need to charge a price. Everything will be completely free.
How does he propose such a society get started? He recommends it gets funded by the benevolent wealthy, but also from local governments in order to lower their local rates of poverty. But, he said, it is also possible to form such a society “by associations of the middle and working classes of mechanics, farmers and tradesmen, to relieve themselves of the evils of the present system.” He goes on to suggest that “Those formed by middle and working classes, upon a complete reciprocity of interests, should be governed by themselves, upon principles that will prevent divisions, opposition of interest, jealousies, or any of the common and vulgar passions which a contention of power is certain to generate.”
He suggests a unique approach to self-governance. Instead of having representatives or delegates, he recommends that everyone within a particular age range of 10 years or so govern. Therefore, these people of a certain age will decide what is best for the association for 10 years. Then, after they have retired from this, they will reap whatever they have sowed. It will be their responsibility to prepare their children for the position as well, since everyone will have to do it. Such a system would be possible only if the association remains no larger than 2,000.

On the USW's collaboration with Co-ops

2009-11-06T13:18:00.000-08:00

Last week, the United Steelworkers announced a framework agreement for collaboration in establishing cooperatives in the manufacturing sector within the United States and Canada. The USW is North America’s largest industrial union representing 1.2 million active and retired members in a diverse range of industries. The closest USW to Asheville is of course in Canton, NC, where they represent the Evergreen Packaging facility, formerly known as Blue Ridge Paper Company and Champion International. The paper mill has been in Canton since 1906. Alan Jones is the president of the USW, Smoky Mountain Local 507. The union represents about 1,100 hourly workers at the Canton mill. Unfortunately, the mill has also been criticized by shallow, egocentric lifestyle liberals who have more regard for the environment than they have for working families who have fought so hard for unionization.
This announcement is a sign that the USW understands its role in empowering working people. By coming to aid the worker-owned cooperatives, the USW has shown its willingness to fight the owning and employing class using two very different strategies, though these strategies are at times opposed to each other.
Historically and logically, there appear to be two approaches to fighting the owning and employing class: One is negative and containing. The other is positive and constructive. In addition, and though the two approaches are opposed to each other as they exist on their own, the former will give birth to the latter. Labor unions represent the former. Worker-owned workers’ cooperatives represent the latter.
In the sense that capitalism depends upon the conflicting relationship between labor and capital, that is, between the working class and the owning and employing class, labor unions empower workers in their fight against the employer-owners. Organized labor, then, is a weapon in the class struggle, and its existence depends upon ongoing class conflict. If successful, the labor union wins power for the workers against the employer-owner by setting limits on the employer-owner’s power. The workers keep the employer-owner in check in this scenario, but they do not offer proposals on production. They do not have a stake in the business’ success, because the machines, the capital, the means of production, is not in their possession.
It is important to remember that capitalism depends upon class competition, upon one class profiting by owning the means of production, while the other class sells its labor to the owning class via employment. Of course, the laborers are not remunerated in full for the value of their labor, if their labor is being measured by the value of the product they make, and I believe that it should, since the owning class takes their cut of the profit by contributing capital instead of labor. This system leaves the owning and employing class free time to improve its own position even further.
Capitalism depends on this competition, and when unions get involved, unions make the competition fairer, but unions do not help the worker overcome this competition. And where there is competition, there cannot be a cooperation of labor and capital. There cannot be socialism, and there cannot be worker-ownership. For this reason, labor unions have at times opposed the notion of worker-ownership. Worker-ownership puts an end to the conflict between labor and capital, and thus the need for unions.
Following the Second Russian Revolution, two opposing views were debated on the role of workers in production. Should the workers involve themselves in unions, or should workers involve themselves in committees? Should workers join unions, seeing themselves as merely the labor part of production, which would inherently pit their interests against the rest of the production process? Or should workers form factory committees, which would assume responsibility for the whole process of production? The revolution had legalized factory committees in 1917, which soon put workers in full possession of their factories and peasants in full possession of large estates. Lenin had supported the move as the only way to avoid economic disaster. In 1918, the largest industries were nationalized. By 1923, the State had assumed power for coordinating production, and the labor unions had degenerated into nothing more than instruments to persuade workers to meet quotas. Committees were obsolete. Thus ended any hope for worker-ownership in Russia.
In 1919, workers in Turin, Italy, formed a factory council made up of shop stewards. Labor organizer Antonio Gramsci proposed workers form additional factory councils, since councils could change the way workers thought of themselves as being simply the labor part of production and could put workers in full possession of their factories. Naturally enough, this idea did not appeal to the unions. Workers started to take possession of factories and manage the factories themselves. The government stepped in and returned factories back to owners and their own managers. Owners were determined to never lose control again, and they started funding the fascists. By 1925, fascism was firmly established in Italy.
These are probably the two most popular tragedies of worker-ownership prior to the Yugoslav experience, which ended with the death of Tito. It illustrates what can happen when the union model of worker empowerment conflicts with the worker-owner model of empowerment.
But the conflict between unionizing and worker-ownership need not conflict. If the union fights worker-ownership, the worker will continue to struggle against the owner and employer and may eventually end up with neither a positive nor negative influence on management, as history shows. Unions are necessary for more democratic workplaces, but unions that are so necessary for democracy in the workplace must embrace the next stage, even if that means the demise of traditional unionizing.
In the end, unionism will give rise to worker-owned cooperativism. This will come about for different reasons. First, employers may introduce the notion of joint-consultation themselves in order to keep union development in check. This, of course, requires the threat of a strong union. Second, the State may step in during times of crisis to placate workers enough to keep them from striking. This, too, requires the threat of a strong union. Third, employers may seek joint-consultation themselves to ensure more productive workers with better workplaces and to keep turnover low and strikes infrequent. Again, a strong union is necessary for this.
When unions keep the power of the capitalists in check, unions raise the status of the workers and chip away at the power of the owners and their management. If, in the meantime, the workers have been honing their own self-management skills by participating in noncontroversial matters such as safety and health in the workplace, and if the unions remain strong while understanding their transitory state, workplaces will become so democratized that they will start putting workers in charge of making company decisions. The end result will be companies that are managed by the workers themselves and the owners will lose their factories and their idle profits. The workers will possess the factories, and the workers will manage themselves. They will become workers in charge of their own cooperatives.

Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class

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Anthropocentrism and Deep Ecology

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by William Grey

Australiasian Journal of Philosophy,
Vol 71, No 4 (1993), pp. 463-475.

ABSTRACT
A predominant theme in environmental philosophy is the claim that we need to correct an anthropocentric bias in our attitudes to the nonhuman world, and in particular to extend moral concern across time and across species. This is the central claim of "deep ecology", which maintains that the uncritical acceptance of anthropocentric values has abetted reprehensible practices with respect to the nonhuman world. In this paper I argue this central claim of "deep ecology" is mistaken and provide a defence of qualified anthropocentrism.

The intellectual history of the past few centuries can be characterized as pedestal bashing: a succession of successful demolitions of comforting myths through which we have sought to locate ourselves in the world. Freud pointed out that Copernicus was only the first in a line of innovative thinkers who overturned the comforts of a traditional world-view. First, Copernicus effectively displaced humanity from the physical centre of the universe. A few centuries later Darwin pointed out that humanity occupied no biologically privileged position. Then Freud claimed that one of our fondly cherished distinctive characteristics—rationality—was mostly a sham.

This progressive displacement of humanity from the predominant position in the physical, temporal and biological stage during the last few centuries is partly a consequence of spectacular discoveries of the physical and temporal magnitude of the universe. We have found that the universe is much larger, and its history much longer and more varied, than was previously imagined. In fact the spatial and temporal magnitudes are far beyond those of experiential familiarity, and we can grasp them only by the use of scaling metaphors, such as the cosmic day or the cosmic kilometer. The last two centuries, for example, are equivalent to less than half a second when mapped on to the "cosmic year". In this paper I evaluate the impact and explore some of the implications which these expansive perspectives have on our attitudes to the environment.

One strand of environmental thinking provides a challenge to a further alleged bastion of anthropocentric parochialism—anthropocentrism or human chauvinism. Just as we have abandoned our geocentric cosmology, our anthropocentric biology, and related conceits; so, it is claimed, we should give up our anthropocentric morality. Indeed the search for a credible non-anthropocentric basis for value in nature has been the central preoccupation of environmental philosophy. Anthropocentrism is the focal issue of this paper. Part of the challenge is to find an appropriate scale for concern about our biotic fellow citizens, a concern which extends across species and across time.

My aim however is not to bury anthropocentrism, but to defend it, at least in a qualified form. My claim is that if we attempt to step too far outside the scale of the recognizably human, rather than expanding and enriching our moral horizons we render them meaningless, or at least almost unrecognizable. The grand perspective of evolutionary biology provides a reductio ad absurdum of the cluster of non-anthropocentric ethics which can be found under the label "deep ecology". What deep ecology seeks to promote, and what deep ecologists seek to condemn, needs to be articulated from a distinctively human perspective. And this is more than the trivial claim that our perspectives, values and judgements are necessarily human
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perspectives, values and judgements. Within the moral world we do occupy a privileged position.
I Environmental Philosophy
Moral philosophy aims to provide a rational critique or justification of the principles which guide or govern human conduct. In this inquiry it is of course assumed that these principles are accessible to reason. Human activity, particularly when amplified by sophisticated science-based technologies, now extends far beyond the stone age boundaries which constrained our actions for most of human history. The chain saw and the drift net have transformed biological systems far more rapidly and violently than the neolithic axe and spear. The rapid and accelerating technologically-driven modification of our natural surroundings has changed them beyond the wildest neolithic dreams. It is these changes which have prompted the question whether constraints on human conduct should take into consideration more than purely human interests.

Environmental philosophers have proposed a critique of traditional Western moral thought, which, it is alleged, is deficient for providing a satisfactory ethic of obligation and concern for the nonhuman world. This concern, it is claimed, needs to be extended, in particular, toward nonhuman individuals, wilderness areas, and across time and species. The project of extending our concern in the latter two cases—over time and over species—is a central concern of this paper.

The dissatisfaction with the parochialism of traditional Western moral thought has motivated a critique by "deep ecologists".[1] Their strictures have been directed in particular against thinkers like John Passmore (1974) and Garrett Hardin (1972), whose environmental concern has been dismissed as "shallow". Deep ecology has been repudiated by some as fundamentally misguided [2], while others have attempted to develop compromise positions [3]. In this paper I raise some misgivings about deep ecology from a different direction. These concerns arise when we consider our predicament from the expansive perspective of evolutionary biology. I will suggest that while stepping outside the human scale of experience provides an enriching and expansive perspective for reflection, it is neither relevant nor helpful for human action.

A complex assortment of "deep" positions have been proposed, and I do not attempt to address them all here. It is part of an enthusiastically pursued research program, with an expanding literature, much of it in the journal Environmental
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Ethics [4]. However a common thread which unites most of the "deep" positions is the concern to provide some rationale for the claim that nonhuman individuals merit the same consideration (not treatment) which Kant (1948, p. 90) thought should be extended only to rational beings, viz that they are "something whose existence has in itself an absolute value". Much attention has also been devoted to a complementary issue: the problematic metaethical concern about the ascription (or recognition) of intrinsic values.
II The Concerns of Deep Ecology
Deep ecology has been stimulated largely, as the name 'ecology' suggests, by discoveries in natural science. For it is the biological sciences, and the science of ecology in particular, which have revealed a complex web of interdependencies in the biological world which support the life of individuals and populations. And it is the extravagant and reckless interference with these life support networks which has motivated many of the writers mentioned above to call for a new set of moral constraints to curtail our destructive behaviour with respect to the natural world. It is precisely the failure of traditional moral constraints to curtail human behaviour, and to allow intricate biological interdependencies to be compromised, that exposes a profound deficiency in the received moral view. Or so it is widely claimed. It is therefore natural to think of deep ecology as the ethical impact of contemporary biology [5]. In fact biologists have been calling for substantial changes in our treatment of nature for several centuries: the roots of Western environmental concern can be traced back to seventeenth and eighteenth century European naturalists (see Grove 1992).

There are several very plausible elements in the concerns of deep ecology. First, there is the worry about the effects of unconstrained human interference in natural systems impoverishing and degrading them. Human interference and human action is often contrasted with the wisdom of natural cycles and natural development. Contrast the violence of a strip-mined hillside, or a clear-felled forest with the tranquil majesty of a climax ecosystem such as a tropical rain forest or a coral reef. "Nature knows best", it is said.

A second worry focuses on the way that we tend to treat humans and human activity in isolation from, rather than as a part of nature. This is often characterized as an atomistic conception of humans as discrete and separate interacting units, in contrast to the holistic organic conception of organisms as nodes in complex biotic webs. The sharp separation between humanity and nature is said to be one of the characteristic deficiencies of shallow thought, which is often accompanied by the denial that the nonhuman world possesses intrinsic value.

A third common worry concerns the extremely short-term view which people commonly take about the consequences of their actions.

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There is an obvious tension which arises when attempting to rectify the first two worries at the same time. For extolling the virtues of the natural, while at the same time vilifying the man-made or artificial, depends on a distinction between the natural and the artificial which the stress on a continuity between human and nonhuman (the focus of the second worry) undermines. On the one side there is emphasis on continuity and dependency, and on the other on distinctness and separation. It seems that, while we are a part of nature, our actions are nevertheless unnatural.

This is one of the points where deep ecologists often risk lapsing into an incoherence, from which they are able to save themselves (as I will illustrate) with the help of a little covert anthropocentrism. Or putting the point another way, a suitably enriched (non-atomistic) conception of humans as an integral part of larger systems—that is, correcting the misconception of humanity as distinct and separate from the natural world—means that anthropocentric concern for our own well-being naturally flows on to concern for the nonhuman world. If we value ourselves and our projects, and part of us is constituted by the natural world, then these evaluations will be transmitted to the world.

That we habitually assume characteristically anthropocentric perspectives and values is claimed by deep ecologists to be a defect. And as a corrective to this parochialism, we are invited to assume an "ecocentric" (Rolston 1986, Callicott 1989) or "biocentric" (Taylor 1986) perspective. I am not persuaded, however, that it is intelligible to abandon our anthropocentric perspective in favour of one which is more inclusive or expansive. We should certainly abandon a crude conception of human needs which equates them (roughly) with the sort of needs which are satisfied by extravagant resource use. But the problem with so-called "shallow" views lies not in their anthropocentrism, but rather with the fact that they are characteristically short-term, sectional, and self-regarding. A suitably enriched and enlightened anthropocentrism provides the wherewithal for a satisfactory ethic of obligation and concern for the nonhuman world. And a genuinely non-anthropocentric view delivers only confusion.
III The Distant Future and Distant Relatives
Consider some extreme cases: should we be concerned about the fate of the planet several billion years hence, or about the welfare of bacteria? I think not. Such concern would be pointless and misdirected for the simple reason that there's nothing we can do to affect the fate of the planet in the very long term, or to seriously disrupt the welfare of single-celled creatures. Bacteria have been the dominant life form on the planet for more than three billion years—about five sixths of evolutionary history—and will almost certainly continue long after the demise of our species. It is often said that we live in the Age of Mammals; but, as Gould has pointed out, it is now, as it has always been, the Age of Bacteria. There are more e. coli in every human intestine than there have ever been homo sapiens. Multicellular life is a comparatively recent arrival in the biosphere, having evolved only within the last half billion years or so.

It is instructive to pause and reflect on life on the planet from the expansive billion-year geological perspective. Human occupancy of the biosphere thus viewed is
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but a blink of geological time. Some have concluded after ruminating on our comparatively modest spatial and temporal occupancy of the world, that we are, after all, not very significant in the scheme of things. If in the long run time overwhelms all, does not that reduce our concerns to insignificance? The billion-year perspective troubled some thinkers, such as Russell, but as Frank Ramsey (1931, p. 291) pointed out it should not have. Ramsey conceded that the scale of stars and galaxies is impressive, but pointed out that for all their size celestial objects were, on the whole, rather boring, since they lack interesting properties like the capacity to think and to love. The billion year time frame and the galactic spatial perspective are the wrong scale for judgements about importance; and one of the things wrong with them is that they are not recognizably human.

The thought that nothing we do now will have any significant impact on the distant future is not relevant for the assessment of present significance. The confusion underlying this thought has been nicely pinpointed by Thomas Nagel (1971), who has argued that if nothing matters in a million years, then by the same token nothing that will matter in a million years matters now. And in particular, the fact that in a million years nothing will matter, does not matter now. That is to say, the (alleged) future insignificance of the present entails the present insignificance of the future, and hence the present insignificance of the future insignificance of the present.

Likewise, if nothing matters from a cosmic point of view, the fact that nothing matters from a cosmic point of view does not, from that point of view, matter. We cannot validly infer our cosmic insignificance, but only our cosmic non-significance; that is we can infer only the irrelevance of such a perspective for considerations of significance. And that does nothing to undermine the fact of significance from our more parochial temporal (and anthropocentric) perspective.

The sweeping geological perspective is I think a fascinating and enriching one, but one which is not relevant for reflections about (or the regulation of) human conduct. Yet while we should dismiss the relevance of the billion year time scale, it does not follow that we should limit our concern to the interests of our species and our immediate descendants. We should certainly consider the impact of our actions beyond our immediate circumstances, and beyond the interests of our immediate descendants; the limit of concern for Passmore [6].

Such extension of concern nevertheless is intelligible only as long as it relates to a scale which is recognisably human, and to that extent, anthropocentric. Australia's Great Barrier Reef will probably disappear altogether and reform again several times over within the next ten thousand years; but that fact seems quite irrelevant to our concern to preserve it now. Passmore may be right in claiming that we can extend concern only to a world that we can rationally conjecture to be recognizably human, or at least relate to recognizably human concerns. But that should lead us to extend our concern over centuries, rather than years or decades. The fact that we cannot specify a determinate number of centuries or generations does not matter. The problem with Passmore's claim that concern can be extended only to immediate posterity is a consequence of his view that concern can be extended only to what we can recognize and love. It isn't the anthropocentrism in Passmore's
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view that is objectionable, but the limited and short-term vision of what constitutes human well-being.
IV Naess on the Need for Deep Ecology
"Deep ecology" is a phrase coined by Arne Naess (1973) to encapsulate a perceived problem about the impact of human populations and technology on the natural environment. It was originally articulated, in Naess's words, by seven "rather vague generalizations" (Naess 1973, p. 94). Deep ecology was the name for a complex set of problems, as well as a political manifesto for change in the rather vaguely delineated directions of global harmony and ecological wisdom. Deep ecology calls for a substantial reduction of human populations, and change to our high energy consumption and profligate resource use.

In drawing the distinction between shallow and deep, Naess laid great stress on a distinction between the short term and the long term. Shallow views are unsatisfactory because short term considerations can distract from the important longer term issues and because they incline one too much towards compromise positions. Deep ecology, in contrast to shallow positions, is concerned to treat causes, not symptoms. The attempt to articulate Naess's "vague generalizations" with greater clarity and precision has not however produced an integrated and unified conception of deep ecology, but a discordant clamour of competing conceptions. "Deep ecology" is a resonant phrase which has generated a lot of muddle. The task of tracing the complex web of alternative conceptions however is not germane to the present argument [7]. For a critical survey of deep ecology see Richard Sylvan (1985).

A great deal of hyperbole has been deployed in articulating the claims of deep ecology. It is common, for example, to encounter claims that destructive human activity—and in particular human technology—is threatening life on the planet; that we are disrupting the delicate fabric of the ecosphere, and driving it towards collapse. Such claims are exaggerated. There have been far more traumatic disruptions to the planet than any we can initiate. From a long-term planetary perspective, this is alarmist nonsense. However from an anthropocentric point of view such fears may be well founded.

If the concerns for humanity and nonhuman species raised by advocates of deep ecology are expressed as concerns about the fate of the planet, then these concerns are misplaced. From a planetary perspective, we may be entering a phase of mass extinction of the magnitude of the Cretaceous. For planet earth that is just another incident in a four and a half billion year saga. Life will go on—in some guise or other. The arthropods, algae and the ubiquitous bacteria, at least, will almost certainly be around for a few billion years more. And with luck and good management, some of the more complex and interesting creatures, such as ourselves, may continue for a while longer as well. Of course our present disruptive and destructive activities are, or should be, of great concern to us all. But that is a quite properly human concern, expressing anthropocentric values from an anthropocentric perspec-
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tive. Life will continue; but we should take steps to maintain and preserve our sort of living planet; one that suits us and, with a few exceptions, our biotic co-existents.

I will illustrate the way that allegedly non-anthropocentric points of view incorporate a covert anthropocentrism with some representative examples which, I believe, reveal the inevitability of anthropocentrism and show that it is not necessarily something to be deplored. Anthropocentrism is natural and inevitable, and when properly qualified turns out to be perfectly benign. The first illustration concerns a proposal to develop a non-anthropocentric basis for value by grounding it in the naturalness of an historical process.
V A Naturalistic Basis for Value?
Robert Goodin has proposed a "moderately deep" theory of value, according to which what imparts value to an outcome is the naturalness of the historical process through which it has come about (Goodin 1991, p. 74). Putting aside the problem, mentioned above, that the distinction between what is natural and what is cultural (or technological, or artefactual) is problematic, the deliverances of natural historical processes are not necessarily benign, nor ones which should command our approval. The traumatic disruptions to the planet brought about by natural forces far exceed anything which we have been able to effect. Consider, first, what Lovelock (1979) has called the worst atmospheric pollution incident ever: the accumulation of that toxic and corrosive gas oxygen some two billion years ago, with devastating consequences for the then predominant anaerobic life forms. Or the Cretaceous extinction 65 million years ago, which wiped out the large reptiles, the then dominant life forms. Or the Permian extinction some 225 million years ago, which eliminated an estimated 96 per cent of marine species. Like the eruption of Mt St Helens, these were natural events, but it is implausible to suppose that they are to be valued for that reason alone.

There is of course an excellent reason for us to retrospectively evaluate these great planetary disruptions positively from our current position in planetary history, and that is that we can recognise their occurrence as a necessary condition for our own existence. But what could be more anthropocentric than that? However, as Gould has pointed out, mass extinctions are awful for those who are caught up in them.

Suppose that astronomers detect a modest asteroid or comet, say five or ten kilometres diameter, on collision course with planet Earth [8]. The impending collision would be perfectly natural all right, and cataclysmic enough to do to us what another one rather like it probably did to the dinosaurs. Such periodic disruptive events are natural all right, though they probably destroy most of the then extant large life forms. These times of renewal provide opportunities for smaller, flexible organisms to radiate opportunistically into vacated niches, and life goes on. From a biocentric or ecocentric perspective there is little doubt that our demise would provide comparable opportunities for development which we currently prevent. Should we, in
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such circumstances, step aside so that evolution can continue on its majestic course? I think not, and I think further that interference with the natural course of events, if it could be effected, would be no bad thing—at least from our point of view and in terms of our interests, which it is quite legitimate to promote and favour.

Suppose again that we are entering one of the periodic epochs of reduced solar energy flux. An ice age is imminent, with massive disruptions to the agriculturally productive temperate zones. However suppose further that by carefully controlled emissions of greenhouse gases it would be possible to maintain a stable and productive agriculture. No doubt this would be to the detriment of various arctic plant and animal species, but I do not think that such interference, though "unnatural" would be therefore deplorable. Nature in and of itself is not, I suggest, something to be valued independently of human interests. It could be argued moreover that in thus modifying our natural environment, we would be following the precedent of three billion years of organic evolution, since according to the Gaia hypothesis of Lovelock (1979), the atmosphere and oceans are not just biological products, but biological constructions.

Other natural properties—such as biodiversity, beauty, harmony, stability, and integrity—have been proposed to provide a non-anthropocentric basis for value. But unless we smuggle in some anthropocentric bearings, they fare no better than the property of being the outcome of a natural process in providing an intuitively plausible ordering of better and worse states of the world. For example, if biodiversity is taken as a basic value-giving characteristic, then the state of the planet just after the Cambrian explosion (about 570 million years ago) would be rated much more highly than the world of the present, as it was far richer in terms of the range and diversity of its constituent creatures. Most biology textbooks recognize between twenty and thirty extant animal phyla—the phylum being the fundamental design plan of an organism (and the second broadest classification, following 'kingdom', in biological taxonomy). Yet the Burgess Shale, one small quarry in British Columbia dating back some 530 million years, contains the remains of fifteen to twenty organisms so unlike one another, or anything now living, as to each constitute a separate phylum (Gould 1989). In terms of basic diversity, a far greater range of radically different anatomical types existed at that epoch of evolutionary development.

These examples disclose a serious difficulty for a view such as Goodin's which seeks a non-anthropocentric naturalistic basis for value [9]. The fundamental problem is that we can rank preferences only given some anthropocentric bearings. An austerely ecocentric or biocentric perspective delivers no determinate answer as to which of the abundant and wonderfully various unfolding planetary biotas should be preferred.
VI The Value of Autonomy
Another suggested avenue through which a non-anthropocentric account of value might be developed is through the notion of autonomy. A representative example of this approach is Rodman's proposal that:

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one ought not to treat with disrespect or use as a mere means anything that has a telos or end of its own—anything that is autonomous in the basic sense of having a capacity for internal self-direction and self-regulation (Rodman 1983, p. 90)

Plumwood (1991) also favours this autonomy-based approach. Moral consideration, she suggests should be extended to anything which has an interest or good of its own, that is to anything "having a good, or end, or direction, to which it tends or which it strives, and which is its own" (p. 147). There are many natural systems, including inorganic ones, which have a natural directedness, and on this basis, as Plumwood goes on to observe, the net of moral consideration will be cast very wide indeed.

To the extent that rocks and mountains, in particular or in general, are expressions of ongoing processes which have directions, they may satisfy this condition, and ecosystems clearly do possess broadly teleological properties. (Plumwood 1991, p. 147).

There are a number of problems with such a permissive criterion of moral considerability. One is that there are conflicts of interest between goal-directed entities, and something needs to be said about how these are to be resolved. Smallpox and HIV no doubt have their own viral autonomy (as well as being the products of natural historical processes), but for all that it is perfectly legitimate to disregard their interests when they conflict with our own. Yet it is hard to see how a decision to deny them a place in the scheme of things can be defended except by appeal to a value system which favours human interests. Plumwood allows that in casting the moral net widely we will have to "make distinctions for appropriate treatment within each class of items" (p. 147). It seems reasonable to suspect that human standards of appropriateness will be brought to bear to settle cases where such conflicts arise.

Another difficulty with this approach is that goal-directedness is a very general and very pervasive characteristic of both organic and inorganic systems. It is implausible to suppose that we have any obligation to respect the equilibrium states of inorganic systems, goal directed though they may be. Energy moves in the direction of increasing entropy (downhill all the way); planets have stable and predictable paths which are the outcomes of continuing processes. Teleology is just too pervasive and too indiscriminate a characteristic to provide a plausible foundation for moral considerability. It may be prudent to reflect on the consequences of perturbing inorganic systems which have a natural direction, but it is not at all plausible to construe this as an obligation to those systems.

Moreover as Thompson (1990, pp. 152f.) has pointed out, the criterion of goal-directedness is problematic even when restricted to the organic world. Parts of organisms, such as kidneys, as well as populations of organisms, can be characterized teleologically, but it is implausible to suppose that this fact carries any moral clout. Plumwood is right in responding to Thompson to say that what is wrong is that this objection ignores the importance of different organic levels of organization (Plumwood 1991, p. 146), but choosing the right level of organization is an interest-sensitive matter.
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VII Callicott's Anthropocentric Ecocentrism
Finally, I consider the "ecocentric" approach advocated, for example, by J. Baird Callicott (1989), which is another attempt to develop a non-anthropocentric basis for value. This "deep" approach, inspired by Aldo Leopold (1949), on examination also reveals covert anthropocentrism. For example, in "On the Intrinsic Value of Nonhuman Species" Callicott explores various grounds on which we might extend moral consideration to nonhuman individuals. One particular line which he explores, and revealingly rejects is "holistic rationalism". Goodness, on this view, is identified above all with the objective harmony of the biosphere as a whole, which "exemplifies or embodies the Good" (Callicott 1989, p. 142). Since species serve the good of the biotic whole (which is quite independent of human interest) we have a non-anthropocentric justification for species preservation. But individual species, from this perspective, are transitional components of developmental stages of the planet's evolutionary odyssey:

The Age of Reptiles came to a close (for whatever reason) to be followed by the Age of Mammals. A holistic rationalist would not regret the massive die-off of the late Cretaceous because it made possible our yet richer mammal-populated world. The Age of Mammals may likewise end. But the "laws" of organic evolution and of ecology (if any there be) will remain operative. In time speciation would occur and species would radiate anew. Future "intelligent" forms of life may even feel grateful, if not to us then to their God (or the Good), for making their world possible. The new Age (of Insects, perhaps) would eventually be just as diverse, orderly, harmonious and stable and thus no less good than our current ecosystem with its present complement of species.

With friends like the holistic rationalists, species preservation needs no enemies. (Callicott 1989, p. 142)

This passage is revealing. Note the characterization of the Age of Mammals as "richer" than the Age of Reptiles. As mammal chauvinists we might agree, but it is not clear on what grounds Callicott can justify the claim. It is also easy to agree that our demise, and the demise of the ecosystem which currently supports us, would be a matter of regret. But clearly it would be regrettable because of a decidedly anthropocentric set of values, interests and perceptions—if Callicott really eschews such concerns entirely, the grounds on which his regret is based are deprived of any foundation.

There are various levels of description for any natural system, and the level which we adopt is inevitably interest relative. From a perspective which ascribes special value to living systems, Venus and Mars are pretty disappointing planets. However from a purely physical point of view it may be that they are, like Earth, complex equilibrium systems with energy cycles operating through the energy flux of our local star. The reason that the purely physical descriptions are unhelpful for characterizing what makes this planet better than the others in some important respects is that it is the wrong level of organization for explaining what conditions
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are conducive to the flourishing of creatures like us. It is, once again, interest relative. Conceivably a silicon-based life form would find the temperature and atmosphere of Venus congenial, and of Earth execrable. As carbon chauvinists we should feel free to dissent from that judgement.
VIII Conclusion
The attempt to provide a genuinely non-anthropocentric set of values, or preferences seems to be a hopeless quest. Once we eschew all human values, interests and preferences we are confronted with just too many alternatives, as we can see when we consider biological history over a billion year time scale. The problem with the various non-anthropocentric bases for value which have been proposed is that they permit too many different possibilities, not all of which are at all congenial to us. And that matters. We should be concerned to promote a rich, diverse and vibrant biosphere. Human flourishing may certainly be included as a legitimate part of such a flourishing.

The preoccupations of deep ecology arise as a result of human activities which impoverish and degrade the quality of the planet's living systems. But these judgements are possible only if we assume a set of values (that is, preference rankings), based on human preferences. We need to reject not anthropocentrism, but a particularly short term and narrow conception of human interests and concerns. What's wrong with shallow views is not their concern about the well-being of humans, but that they do not really consider enough in what that well-being consists. We need to develop an enriched, fortified anthropocentric notion of human interest to replace the dominant short-term, sectional and self-regarding conception.

Our sort of world, with our sort of fellow occupants is an interesting and engaging place. There is every reason for us to try to keep it, and ourselves, going for a few more cosmic seconds [10].

University of Queensland

FOOTNOTES

1. See, in particular, Leopold (1949), Naess (1973; 1986), R. and V. Routley (1979; 1980); Rodman (1978; 1983), Devall and Sessions (1985), Rolston (1986), Callicott (1989), Taylor (1986). Not all of these thinkers identify themselves as "deep ecologists", though each has developed arguments which support some deep ecology's characteristic claims. For an comprehensive inventory of the deep ecology pantheon see Fox (1990). It is of course a mistake to equate non-anthropocentric ethical theory with deep ecology. While deep ecologists reject anthropocentrism, a non-anthropocentric ethic need not embody the central principles of deep ecology. Although deep ecology provides a convenient starting point, my concern is with anthropocentrism in general and not just its manifestation in deep ecology.
2. See Mannison (1980), Thompson (1990), Williams (1992).
3. Such as Brennan (1988) and Goodin (1991).
4. For useful bibliographies see Katz (1989; 1992). Sessions (1981) provides a survey of the early development deep ecology.
5. My own views about these issues were also prompted by writings in biology, in particular the fascinating history of multicellular life presented in Gould (1989). The relevance—or rather, the irrelevance—of the the majestic billion-year geological perspective of evolutionary biology became apparent while reading Gould's saga of the Burgess Shale.
6. At least in Passmore (1974). His views have been qualified in subsequent writings.
7. Alternative articulations of deep ecology are developed in Naess (1986, 1989), Devall and Sessions (1985), and Fox (1990).
8. Some recent (late 1992) reports suggested that this example may be less fanciful than I supposed when writing.
9. A similar proposal is developed in Elliot (1982).
10. This paper was presented at the 1992 Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference at the University of Queensland.

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