Assessment of the Uruguayan Tupamaros

This is an excerpt from Problems of Revolutionary Strategy by Abraham Guillen

To the credit of the Uruguayan Guerillas, they were the first to operate in the cement jungles of a capitalist metropolis, to endure during the first phase of a revolutionary war thanks to an efficient organization and tactics, and to confound the police and armed forces for a considerable period... With its failures as well as successes, the Movement of National Liberation (Tupamaros) has contributed a model of urban guerrilla warfare that has already made a mark on contemporary history - the scene of a struggle between capitalism and socialism with its epicenter in the great cities. The lessons that can be learned from the Tupamaros can be summarized in the following ten points.

(1) Fixed or Mobile Front? When urban guerrillas lack widespread support because of revolutionary impatience or because their actions do not directly represent popular demands, they have to provide their own clandestine infrastructure by renting houses and apartments. By tying themselves to a fixed terrain in this way, the Tupamaros have lost both mobility and security: two prerequisites of guerrilla strategy. In order to avoid encirclement and annihilation through house-to-house searches, the guerrillas can best survive not by establishing fixed urban bases, but by living apart (from each other) and fighting together.

(2) Mobility and Security. If urban guerrillas rent houses for their commandos, they are in danger of leaving a trail that may be followed by the police who review monthly all registered rentals. Should most of their houses be loaned instead of leased, then the guerrillas should refrain as a general rule from building underground vaults or hideouts which would increase their dependence on the terrain. To retain their mobility and a high margin of security they must spread out among a favourable population. Guerrillas who fight together and then disperse throughout a great city are not easily detected by the police. When dragnets are applied to one neighborhood or zone, guerrillas without a fixed base can shift to another neighborhood. Such mobility is precluded by a reliance on rented houses or hideouts in the homes of sympathizers, heretofore a major strategical error of the Tupamaros.

(3) Heavy or Light Rearguard? Urban guerrillas who develop a heavy infrastructure in many rented houses commit not only a military error, but also an economic and logistical one. For a heavy rearguard requires a comparatively large monthly budget in which economic and financial motives tend to overshadow political considerations. Lacking enough houses, the guerrillas tend to upgrade to positions of command those willing to lend their own. Among the Tupamaros detained in 1972 was the owner of the hacienda "Spartacus," which housed an armory in an underground vault. At about the same time the president of the frigorific plant of Cerro Largo was detained and sentenced for aiding the Tupamaros. He may well have embraced the cause of the Tupamaros with loyalty and sincerity; but as a businessman he responded as any other bourgeois would to his workers' demands for higher wages. Thus when promotion through the ranks is facilitated by owning a big house, a large farm or enterprise, the guerrillas become open to bourgeois tendencies. When guerrillas rely on cover not on a people in arms but on people of property, then urban guerrilla warfare becomes the business of an armed minority, which will never succeed in mobilising in this manner the majority of the population.

(4) Logistical Infrastructure. Although a mobile front is preferable to a fixed one, there are circumstances in which a fixed front is unavoidable, e.g., in the assembly, adjustment and adaptation of arms. These fixed fronts, few a far between, must be concealed from the guerrillas themselves; they should be known only to the few who work there, preferably one person in each, in order to avoid discovery by the repressive forces. In the interest of security it is advisable not to manufacture arms, but to have the parts made separately by various legal establishments, after which they can be assembled in the secret workshops of the guerrillas.

It is dangerous to rely on a fixed front for housing, food, medical supplies and armaments. If the guerrillas are regularly employed, they should live as everybody else does; they should come together only at a designated times and places. Houses that serve as barracks or hideouts tend to immobilise the guerrillas and to expose them to the possibility of encirclement and anihilation. Because the Tupamaros immobilised many of their commandos in fixed quarters, they were exposed in 1972 to mass detentions; they lost a large part of their armaments and related equipment and were compelled to transfer military supplies to the countryside for hiding.

In abusing control over their sympathisers and keeping them under strict military discipline, the Tupamaros had to house them together. But they were seldom used in military operations at a single place or in several simultaneously, indicating the absence of a strategical preparation. If urban guerrillas cannot continually disappear and reappear among the population of a great city, then they lack the political prerequisites for making a revolution, for creating the conditions of a social crisis through the breakdown of "law and order." Despite their proficiency during the first hit-and-run phase of revolutionary war, the Tupamaros have failed to escalate their operations by using larger units at more frequent intervals for the purpose of paralysing the existing regime.

(5) Heroes, Martyrs and Avengers. In revolutionary war any guerrilla action that needs explaining to the people is politically useless: it should be meaningful and convincing by itself. To kill an ordinary soldier in reprisal for the assassination of a guerrilla is to descend to the same political level as a reactionary army. Far better to create a martyr and thereby attract mass sympathy than to lose or neutralise popular support by senseless killings without an evident political goal. To be victorious in a people's war one has to act in conformity with the interests, sentiments and will of the people. A military victory is worthless if it fails to be politically convincing.

In a country where the bourgeoisie has abolished the death penalty, it is self-defeating to condemn to death even the most hated enemies of the people. Oppressors, traitors and informers have condemned themselves before the guerrillas; it is impolitic to make a public show of their crimes for the purpose of creating a climate of terror, insecurity and disregard for basic human rights. A popular army that resorts to unnecessary violence, that is not a symbol of justice, equity, liberty and security, cannot win popular support in the struggle against a dehumanised tyranny.

The Tupamaraos' "prisons of the people" do more harm than benefit to the cause of national liberation. Taking hostages for the purpose of exchanging them for political prisoners has an immediate popular appeal; but informing the world of the existence of "people's prisons" is to focus unnecessarily on a parallel system of oppression. No useful purpose can be served by such politically alienating language. Morover, it is intolerable to keep anyone hostage for a long time. To achieve a political or propaganda victory through this kind of tactic, the ransom terms must be moderate and capable of being met; in no event should the guerrillas be pressed into executing a prisoner because their demands are excessive and accordingly rejected. A hostage may b usefully executed only when a government refused to negotiate on any terms after popular pressure has been applied; for then it is evident to everyone that the government is ultimately responsible for the outcome.

So-called people's prisons are harmful for other reasons: they require several men to stand guard and care for the prisoners; they distract guerrillas frmo carrying out alternative actions more directly useful to the population; and they presuppose a fixed front and corresponding loss of mobility. At most it is convenient to have a secure place to detain for shore periods a single hostage.

To establish people's prisons, to condemn to death various enemies of the people to house guerrillas in secret barracks of underground hideouts is to create an infrastructure supporting a miniature state rather than a revolutionary army. To win the support of the population, arms must be used directly on its behalf. Whoever uses violence against subordinates in the course of building a miniature counter-state should be removed from his command. Surely there is little point in defating one despotism only to erect another in its place!

(6) Delegated Commands. In a professional army the leadership is recruited from the military academies within a hierachical order of command. In a guerrilla organisation the leaders emerge in actual revolutionary struggles, elected because of their capacity, responsibility, combativity, initiative, political understanding and deeds rather than words. However, at pain of forfeiting the democratic character of a revolutionary army and the function of authority as a delegated power, not even the best guerrilla commander can be allowed to remain long at the helm. A rotating leadership is necessary to avoid the "cult of personality"; powers should be alternately exercised by those commanders with the most victories, by those most popular with their soldiers and most respected by the people. Inasmuch as guerrilla warfare takes the form of self-dense, tis success depends on the exercise of direct democracy, on guerrilla self-management and self-discipline - a far cry from the barracks discipline typical of a bureaucratic or professional army...

The people have more need of many revolutionary heroes than of a single outstanding leader like Julius Casesar or Napoleon Bonaparte. Epominondas, the Theban general who defeated the Spartan, held a command that lasted only two years. Although the greatest strategist of his time, he became and ordinary soldier when his command expired. Only because of his extraordinary skill was he made a military adviser to the new commander-in-chief. Guerrillas can benefit by his example.

A delegated command is unlimited except for the time determining its delegation. The responsibility of subordinates is to discuss in advance each operation, to make recommendations, etc. But the discussion ends when the supreme command assumes responsibility for the outcome of a particular battle or engagement. If the commander is mistaken in his judgment, if the result is defeat rather than victory, his duty is to resign. Should he succeed in a vote of confidence he may retain his command; but to successive defeats should make his resignation irrevocable.

One of the most common errors of Latin American guerrillas is to make legends of their leaders as they did of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The resulting messianism conceals the incapacity of many guerrilla commanders who take their troops into the countryside - like the Tupamaros in 1972 - without revising mistaken strategies. Perhaps the leaders of the Uruguayan guerrillas have come to believe in their providential powers, thereby reducing the ordinary guerrilla to a political and military zero, to the status of a soldier in a conventional army.

(7) Revolution: Which Revolution? Youthful Leftists without a proletarian praxis, without having suffered directly the effects of capitalist exploitation, aspire to liberate the workers without the workers' own revolutionary intervention. When revolutionary action is limited to a series of military engagements between guerrillas and a repressive army, armaments ar of little use in mobilising the people for national liberation. The corresponding foquismo [exaggerated reliance on guerrilla focos, armed encounters and military tactics to spark a mass insurrection] is petty bourgeois in origin as well as outlook - evident in the token number of workers and peasants in the guerilllas' ranks. Actually it is an insurrectional movement of piling up cadavers, for giving easy victories to the repressive generals trained by the Pentagon.

In the case of the Tupamaros the commanding cadres and the greater part of the rank and file have come from the universities, the liberal professions and the rebellious petty--bourgeois youth who have learned how to disobey. They long for a revolution. But what kind of revolution? Since there are few workers or peasants in the columns of the Tupamaros, it is understandable that the struggle is limited mainly to engagements between the guerrillas on one side and the army and police on the other. In these encounters the people are caught in the middle, leaving a political vacuum which only a different kind of guerrilla movement can fill: one providing support for all popular acts of protest, strikes, demonstrations, student rebellions, etc. Only through the intermediary of the people, in other words, can urban guerrillas pass from the first phase of revolutionary war to a generalised state of subversion leading to a social revolution.

In their endeavor to create a state within the state through highly disciplined guerrilla columns, secret barracks, "prisons of the people," underground arsenals and a heavy logistical infrastructure, the Tupamaros have become overly professionalised, militarised and isolated from the urban masses. Their organisation is closer to resembling a parallel power contesting the legally established one, a microstate, rather than movement of the masses.

(8) Strategy, Tactics and Politics. If the tactics adopted are successful but the corresponding strategy and politics mistaken, the guerrillas cannot win. Should a succession of tactical victories encourage a strategical objective that is impossible to attain, then a great tactical victory can culminate in an even greater strategical defeat.

The kidnappings of the Brazilian consul Dias Gomide and the CIA agent Dan Mitrione are instances of tactical successes by the Tupamaros. But in demanding in exchange a hundred detained guerrillas, the Tupamaros found the Uruguayan government obstinate, in order not to lose face altogether. Here a successful tactic contributed to an impossible strategical objective. In having to execute Mitrione because the government failed to comply to their demands, the Tuparamaros not only failed to accomplish a political objective, but also suffered a political reversal in their newly acquired role of assassins - the image they acquired through hostile mass media.

The Tupamaros would have done better by taping Mitrione's declarations and giving the story to the press. The population would have followed the incidents of his confession with more interest than the interminable serials. Mitrione's confessed links with the CIA should have been fully documented and sent to Washington in care of Senator Fulbright. With this incident brought to the attention of Congress, the operation against the CIA would have won world support of the Tupamaros. Once the Uruguayan government had lost prestige through this publicity, the Uruguayan press might be asked to publish a manifesto of the Tupamaros explaining their objectives in the Mitrione case. Afterwards his death sentence should have been commuted out of respect for his eight sons, but on condition that he leave the country. Such a solution to the government's refusal to negotiate with the guerrillas would have captured the sympathies of many in favour of the Tupamaros. Even more than conventional war, revolutionary war is a form of politics carried out by violent means.

With respect to Dias Gomide the Tupamaros lost an opportunity to embarrass politically the Brazilian government. They should never have allowed matters to read the point at which his wife could appear as an international heroine of love and marital fidelity by collecting sums for his release. Every cruzerio she collected was a vote against the Tupamaros and indirectly against the Brazilian guerrillas. In exchange for Dias Gomide, a man of considerable importance to the military regime, the Tupamaros should have demanded the publication of a manifesto in the Brazilian press. Its contents might have covered the following items: a denunciation of the "death squad" as an informal instrument of the |Brazilian dictatorship; a demand for free, secret and direct elections; the legalisation of all political parties dissolved by the military regime; the restitution of political rights to Brazil's former leaders and exiles including Quadros, Kubitschek, Brizola, Goular and even reactionaries like Lacerda; the denunciation of government censorship of the press; and a demand that popular priests be est free. With such a political response the revolutionary war might have been exported to Brazil. Guerrilla actions should not be narrowly circumscribed when they can have regional and international repercussions...

The Tupamaros are perilously close to resembling a political Mafia. In demanding large sums of money in ransom for political hostages they have sometimes appeared to be self-serving. It matters little to the average citizen whether bank deposits pass into the hands of "expropriators" who do little directly to lighten the public burden - not because they do not want to but because they cannot do so in isolation from the people and without popular support. There is an historical irony about these would-be liberators who indirectly live off the surplus of the people the liberate.

(9) OPR-33 and the Tupamaros. Enormous losses were suffered by the Tupamaros in 1972 through more than 3000 detentions, including those of persons guilty by association. Popular hatred against the government has intensified because of its house-to-house searches and disregard for fundamental rights. If the Tupamaros had as much political and strategical sense as they have tactical skill, they might have achieved in 1972 a new polarization of forces culminating in a truce, a virtual recognition by the government of a situation of dual powers.

But the political and startegical mistakes of the Tupamaros, their rigorous centralism and hierarchy of authority led instead to internal divisions and split-offs that further weakeneed the organisation. The deliberately mislabeled "Microfaction" broke with the movement. This group politically responseive to the Urguayan Revolutionary WOrkers' Party (PRT) - a political affiliate of the Argentine People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) - would hardly have been permitted to split peacefully were it not for the ERP. The "22nd of December" guerrillas likewise split with the leadership: a group concentrating on operations designed to mobilise the trade unions and other mass organisations without the military centralism of the Tupamaros' general staff..

Politically the Tupamaros follow an ambiguous line promising something of interest to everybody. On the other hand, the Tupamaro Courier, a bulletin of the organisation, has carried in its pages extracts from the speeches of conservative nationalists like Aparicio Saravia. On the other hand the Tupamaros' leadership forobids its cadres from criticising the pro-Moscow Communists. This political irresolution, indefiniteness and ambivalence have hurt the Tupamaros in their efforts to gain a foothold in the Communist-controlled trade unions. Although they penetrated and won over the leadership of the Union of Sugar Workers (UTA) and the workers of the Frigorifico Fray Bentos, they have been unsuccessful in pressing for immediate reforms because they anticipate that seizing political power will resolve everything.

Unlike the Tupamaros, the anarcho-syndicalist Revolutionary Popular Organisation (OPR-33) uses armed struggle to support the workers' immediate demands without directly challenging the government and armed forces. Neither OPR-33 nor the "22nd of December" contributed to the 1971 electoral struggles of the Broad Front against the established political parties. While the Tupamaros supported the Broad Front, OPR-33 used its armed units to win the strike at the Portland Cement Company, where workers with anarcho-syndicalist tendencies demanded higher wages. Rodney Arismendi, secretary-general of the Communist Party, denounced the anarcho-syndicalists as adventurers for allegedly playing into the hands of reactionaries and ignoring the principal task of electing a new president, senators and deputies. But the Broad Front lost the elections, while the workers at Portland Cement won the strike. Moreover, the railroad workers also triumphed against the bosses, thanks to the armed backing of OPR-33 with the support of the Workers-Student Resistance (ROE) and the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU).

OPR-33 and ROE also spurred a series of successful strikes in the metallurgical, rubber and clothing industries. The strike at SERAL, a footwear manufacturer, lasted more than a year. Where the Communist-controlled unions failed, OPR-33 and ROE succeeded. The anarcho-syndicalists initiated the strike at SERAL: they endured in hunger, asked for collections in the streets of Montevideo and mobilised popular support. But the owner, an ex-worker, could not be moved. Finally his son disappeared. OPR-33 was apparently behind the operation but, unlike the Tupamaros, admitted to nothing. No ransom was asked; words were unnecessary. In view of the circumstances it was tacitly understood that the owner, Malguero, could recover his son by negotiating with the workers. In this way the most difficult strike in Uruguay was won: the workers were compensated for lost pay; their union was recognised as the only legal bargaining agent. Thus during the first six months of 1972, when the Tupamaros were being detained by the hundreds, Malaguero's son was lost but reappeared with the resolution of the strike at SERAL. Despite the success of the repressive forces in uncovering the people's prisons and hideouts of the Tupamaros, the boy could not be found. Here was an altogether different style of guerrilla warfare from that of the Tupamaros' - and also more effective.

The strike against the Frigorifico Modelo was won through a similar operation. In the midst of the strike the firm's president Fernandez Llado, disappeared. Thus a second company was coipelled to negotiate. In no instance has OPR-33 been pressured to execute hostages. For it has not made demands of its own, but has applied force only to obtain what hundreds of exploited workers have already been asking for. In this way, little by little, it may continue to win support from the workers until even the reformist trade unions fall into revolutionary hands. Once revolutionaries are in command of their own house, then they are ready for revolutionary action in depth: the occupation of factories that operate at less than full capacity; the transformation of these into producer's cooperatives or self-managed enterprises;p and a preparation for the seizure of political power. For what purpose? To establish a new kind of socialist society in which the people rather than bureaucrats or guerrilla leaders are the beneficiaries.

(10) MIR, ERP and the Tupamaros. The Tupamaros were the first group of urban guerrillas to teach the world how to initiate an insurrection in the cities with few supporters and modest means. But their superb tactics have been nullified by a mediocre strategy and a questionable politics.

Like OPR-33, the Chilean Movement of the Revolutioanry Left (MIR) and the Argenitine People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) offer new models of urban guerrilla warfare in which strategy and politics combine to reinforce the Tupamaros' tactics. The Chilean and Argentine organisations show great initiative in combat, a clar-cut program of national a social liberation, the capacity to mobilise large masses and a virtual absence of petty-bourgeois tendencies. They are openly critical of Right-wing nationalism and the opportunism of Social Democrats and Communists. Without such criticism, without liberating themselves from a naroow professional outlook, urban guerrillas can succeed in tactical engagements; but they cannot develop a revolutionary movement capable of winning power, if not for themselvs as bureaucrats, then for the people they represent.

In 1972 MIR had the most effective revolutionary organisation in Latin America. Its leading cadres are directly responsible to the rank and file through a system of direct democracy; its politics are clear and unambiguous; it proposes at any moment only what it can actually accomplish. Nothing escapes the political analysis and synthesis of the MIR cadres. They are Chile's major revolutionary reserve. In the event Allende's government is overthrown, only they are presently equipped to fight for liberation under conditions of repression. They are acid critics of demagogy and adventurism. Their proposals are well reasoned and concrete with respect both to immediate issues and the future.

The ERP is another model worth imitating. In Rosario it seized the British consul and the manager of Swift for the purpose of settling a major strike. IT has prepared the ground for surmounting the traditional trade-union tactics of the Peronist labor bureaucracy, the pro-Moscow Communists and genteel socialists. Even the tragic finale of Sallustro, president of Argentine Fiat, is an example of blood spilled not so much by the ERP as by the Argentine military. For the dictatorship countermanded the negotiations between the Fiat managment and workers as the price of his release.

The Tupamaros faced their gravest crisis during the first havelf of 1972, when the repressive forces detained several hundred of them. That so many fell was due not to lack of secrecy, but to absence of autonomy. Their supreme command is centralised: it knows all, says all, does lal. Nothing can be more fatal to a guerrilla organisation than lack of self-direction under conditions in which the guerrillas cannot be continually united and in which each group or command has to adapt to the tactical situation at hand without waiting, as a conventional army does, for orders from above. Excessive centralisation of authority makes an organisation rigid and vulnerable: once the repressive forces discover a single thread they can begin looking for the spool.

The Tupamaros acted precipitately in attacking the newly elected government of President Bordaberry. They provoked the as yet untested government to declare a state of war. Repression was escalated in the crudest forms: punitive expeditions, legalised terrorism, physical tortures. A formal democracy gave way to dissimulated dictatorship. Far better had the Tupamaros waited for the economic and social crisis to discredit the new regime. The prime necessities are in scarce supply; there is not enough meat, milk, sugar, kerosene to satisfy demand. Nonetheless, the government is strong because the revolutionaries' rhetoric is weak, and they have not mastered the art of mobilising popular discontent on these basic issues.

A revolutionary organisation must demonstrate that it knows more that its bourgeois rivals in power. To displace the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy, it must convince the public of their incompetence, a task which cannot be done overnight. It must show how greater levels of productivity can be achieved compatible with human freedom, how the scientific-technological revolution can be advanced, how agriculture can be fully mechanised and electrified, how industrial integration can be achieved, how culture can be made to serve economic and technological growth, how atomic energy can be utilised, how the socialism of self-management can be introduced. If a revolutionary leadership fails to demonstrate humane qualities, scientific knowledge and social, political and economic skills, it may commit blunders by initiating an insurrection before fully mobilising popular support. Then is the time for military intervention. Thus in Peru the guerrillas were exterminated by the developmentalist generals who now pass for revolutionaries; and in Brazil the military waged a preventative coup, mortgaged their country to foreign capital, reduced corporate taxes, outlawed industrial unrest and depressed real wages in order to stimulate economic growth.

From the Tupamaros we can learn from both their exploits and mistakes - magnifying their strengths and concealing their weaknesses can be of service to dogmatists and sectarians, not revolutionaries. The Tupamaros have served as the best revolutionary academy in the world on the subject of urban guerrilla warfare; they have taught more through actions than all the revolutionary theories abstracted from concrete situations. But their brilliance in matters of tactics has not been matched by their strategy and politics. Thus the revolutionary ideal must combine the tactical proficiency of the Tupamaros with the mass strategy of OPR-33 and the politics of Chilean MIR - a synthesis most nearly approximated by the Argentine ERP.

Feminism and the Wage

I was reading through CSO statistics for Ireland (as one does on rainy days) and come across the following for 2008:

Males On Home Duties: 6,700
Females On Home Duties: 526,300

The way the statistics office looks at employment and unemployment stems from the classification of who is "in the workforce". Those that are not seeking jobs, are not in the workforce. Now, this point has been made often enough by voices on the left regarding the fact that it hides unemployment of those who have given up seeking employment. The statistic above brings out another aspect. The unemployment figures of women are low, not because they have given up looking for work, but because they are working without pay.

Capitalism has an incessant drive* towards the expansion of commodification. The commons was conquered by the need for profit and we see capital trying continually to press the realm of information into it's sphere.

However, not everything has been commodified. There are still large sections of human social relations which do not use exchange. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the most important of these realms is the reproduction of the labour force itself.

The reproduction of the labour force is done with unpaid labour. Labour which exists outside of the rest of the sphere of commodity exchange. This creates some very strange dynamics. Indeed, thought it is impossible even to acquire food without money for exchange, and though the reproduction of the labour force requires it, there is no compensation for the production of labour.

This means that those who work in the reproduction of the labour force, the greatest lynch pin of the entire capitalist edifice, must be subordinate to: a) Husbands, who will be the arbiters of how their wages should be distributed internally to the family, and more recently b) The state, which acts as a great arbitrary and derelict husband.

I think as can be read quite clearly by the statistics above, women are the vast, vast majority of this labour force. The myth of the emancipation of women by liberal feminism strikes out in bold in these numbers. The vast majority of these women are at the whim of their husbands or the state. There has truly been no end to patriarchy.

Now, not only should we see this and see how bankrupt liberal feminism is and how capitalism inevitably perpetuates patriarchy, but we should also see it as a cautionary tale for any future world we might conceive.

Those who speak of economic democracy (Parecon, Economic Democracy) have a duty to explain to us how to deal with this issue. Will we bring labour reproduction into the sphere of the market? Will the polity act as employer of last resort for reproduction?

If instead we imagine a world based on the principle of fair access to the social product of labour, the issue disappears entirely. I believe that the abolition of the wage entirely is most consonant with the feminist project.

* This is a very teleological view of capitalism. I like telelogy and somewhat resent the dismissal of it by most of the modern science community. I think such statements are true in the same sense that directed behaviour is true of humans. Rather than being anthropomorphic to say that something "wants" something, I think it's quite the opposite. It expresses a sort of directed constrained behaviour, and as such the mechanistic processes which bring about teleology in humans are of the same kind as those that cause behaviours such as: "nature abhors a vacuum" or "the bacteria moves towards food". It is in fact anthrocentric to believe that humans somehow do something quite different. Likewise, processes underly the behaviour of capitalism, yet capitalism has aggregate behaviours with time dependent tendencies which can be expressed clearly as "final cause".

What can we Learn from Lenin

I thought Don Hammerquist's Lenin, Leninism, and some leftovers was a very thoughtful article and enjoyed the response by Wetzel as well.

Some of the questions that are brought up, I believe do not yet have satisfactory answers in our movement. Particularly the methods that should be used in relation the trade unions in terms of being most effective in promoting libertarian struggle, and also in dealing with un-eveness in the development of the class. How to organise in light of these features needs serious investigation both theoretically and in terms of practical activity. Indeed, I think many of them can't be "solved" without essentially trying different approaches and seeing which are least problematic.

Such attempts however should be made consciously and in a coordinated manner. And reviewed periodically to assess how positive the gains are made and published in such a way that we can share our experiences and replicate what appears to be working. This is particularly difficult because of the great deal of difference that can be created by different social contexts. It seems that it would be most useful in someplace like the US which has some level of homogeneity.

I'm not sure what the particular fascination with Lenin is that compels someone to attempt to reclaim the legacy. Indeed, it seems to me that Lenin was such a polemical writer and strategically minded towards a "success" that he often just wrote whatever he thought would be most advantageous to the Bolsheviks at any given time. Often this means incorporating anarchist and syndicalist slogans without really incorporating their content in any meaningful way. This can allow a "libertarian" version of Lenin to be created by carefully chosen selective blindness. A Lenin which I don't believe ever really existed.

I do however agree that anarchists often make oversimplified caricatures of the Bolsheviks. This is a serious failing since comrades who are very knowledgeable of the time period will not be convinced by such ahistoric simplifications. The time period was complex, and while Leninist directions had permanent repercussions with negative results, its important that we look at it in more than a strictly idealist "negative" sense.

When confronted with the need to increase production rapidly in order to keep the delicate alliance of peasants and proletariat what should we do. When confronted with trade unions that are characterised by a historically professional character, how should we deal with them? Do we support the soviets or the factory councils? How do we reconcile the potentially conflictual power struggle between them without losing a section of the professional class which can not easily be replaced?

Obviously we need not concern ourselves in too much detail with a social context so removed from our own. But we can look at this history to see how in fact we need to be more strategically minded in relation to the method of struggle that we actually support in our own context without oversimplifying the complex character of the social landscape in which we are going to be fighting.

Hammerquist does seem to get confused by differences in language. In particular this quote:

I recently read a report by an Irish class struggle social anarchist about a tour he took around the U.S. and his impressions of the anarchist movement overall and in specific localities. One point that I noted with more than a little consternation was that he treated “insurrectionist anarchism” as little more than the anti-working class anarchist primitivism of the Eugene variant. It does seem that class struggle social anarchists tend to discount the politics of insurrection, ceding the issue to various “post-left” elements, including the “crazies” among the life style anarchists, where it becomes little more than an element of generational extremism, a theatrical pose that will evaporate in the face of any real repression, if not at the mere possibility of repression such as followed after 9/11.

This seems to merely be a misunderstanding of Insurrectionist. It seems to me that the vast majority of Social Anarchists that I've talked to fully believe in the necessity of some level of insurrectionary force. It's quite difficult to imagine scenarios in which this doesn't occur. The problem is strictly that "insurrection" is not a stand in for politics and political organising. Insurrection is merely a tactic that should only be used to facilitate libertarian struggle and is worthless if it isn't doing this. In some contexts it may do this, in others it may do exactly the opposite.

This is something that is particularly important in the Irish context where we have a history of Republicanism. We can see the IRA at various points as an insurrectionary force in search of a political ideology. Here it is important to point out the need to put the horse before the cart.

I'm sure Hammerquist would agree, but failed to understand what was being argued against.

(I have some experiences with all of the above, none particularly successful, but have always favored yet another option: organize a direct action mass grouping of workers at the point of production that can begin to understand the relevance of class issues beyond their particular shop floor--whatever the nature of the union or whether or not there is one. This approach has it problems as well, but they are a matter for a different discussion.)

I'd love to hear more about these experiences. The major problem (in my estimation) with current theory among anarchists is a lack of studies of actual attempts to use various strategies in relation to the unions.

Engaging with the Class

One of the deep insights of anarchist theory is that means and ends are inseparable. The method of struggle will have important repercussions on the realisable ends. The development of Anarchist theory and practice has been a search for liberatory methods that are likely to create the society that we hope to see. The role of the organisation then has to fall in line with those tactics and strategies that are liable to bring about a libertarian society.

"The Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists" [1] (Abbreviated: The Platform) was first written after the failure of the revolution in Russia and the Ukraine. An attempt was made to give solutions to those factors in the struggle which had lead to failure.

In 1936, a syndicalist revolution was attempted in Spain. This attempt also failed. The Friends of Durutti Group [3] formed in 1937 in an attempt to guard the ideological purity of anarchism, and to advocate against the regimentation of the military. This initiative however, came too late, after the argument had already been lost.

Again, starting in 1956, we see the emergence of the FAU [6], also in rough agreement with the guidelines given by the Platform though likely developed quite independently. Later we see the FARJ [5] express a slightly more nuanced understanding of how the anarchist organisation should function in relation to the mass movement. This understanding was born out of the practice in working with various social groups, including the unions and students.

None of these initiatives were ultimately successful. However, the notion of Platformism, the Anarchist Vanguard group [2] [3] and Especifismo [4] have seen growing interest in recent years. This interest grows out of repeated failure by anarchists to gain traction since the failed revolution of '36 and a look at the (qualified) successes of the Especifismo approach.

In order to have a libertarian revolution, the manner in which the power of the state is dispensed with is essential. The "seizure of the state", as Leninist groups approach the problem, simply replaces one form of rule with another. In order to change the structures of power fundamentally, from the base, it is necessary to have a social revolution.

Specifism

Specifism is an hypothesis. One which has not fully been tested or seen unqualified success. This hypothesis however is rooted in experience, of both success and failure, gained in real struggles. Since the working class is at such a disadvantage, we have not seen any unqualified successes, and therefore those techniques that look promising must be evaluated with a combination of theoretical probing and active attempts at implementation.

The hypothesis is that anarchists should organise into specific political organisations with the intention of promoting the development and radicalisation of elements in those sectors of society which can represent the interests of the working class. These sectors might include the unions, students, unemployed, community groups or anywhere else that strategic and tactical analysis would point towards as a promising sector.

This interaction with particular sectors, which we will call social engagement* involves the active participation of militants in these mass organisations and sectors in ways that will advance the class. The basic rule of thumb for determining advancement is summed up in the following maxim "anarchists should actively promote the increasing participation and power of the working class". That is, we would like to see self-actualisation, self-organisation and the building of prefigurative libertarian structures. This rule of thumb, however, is insufficient. We must attempt to express the libertarian worldview simultaneously. This can happen in the ideological vacuum that is a consequence of struggle, when the illegitimacy of the common sense notions that we inherit from capitalist society are exposed. We need to be bold in widening the division in thinking as the working class begin to see the bankruptcy of ruling class ideas.

Towards Non-Substitutive Engagement

Political revolution is the revolution of heroes, the revolution of a minority. Social revolution is the revolution of the common people, a revolution of the great masses. - Liu Shifu

Social engagement is an alternative to both the substitutionism of Lenin and Guevara, and its tacit rejection so often characterised by those who define themselves in opposition to Leninism in the anarchist milieu and the ultra-left. While not all Leninist or Guevarist tactics are substitutive, they tend to have no critique of the practice. If the revolutionary vanguard, the active or militant classes or the guerrilla armies substitute themselves for the working class then there is no libertarian revolution.

This is true because the elements who substitute can not know the aims of the working class. In the subjective sense, this class can't even be said to exist in the absence of the realisation of their own position in society. In the absence of their own consciousness of existence, they can't have any collective sense of needs. Their needs would then have to be assessed by a group that did not include them, but was outside them. Liberty is about the capacity to make choices. Any revolution in which decisions are made in ones stead, or on ones behalf, is not libertarian.

Neither can this substitutive element increase working class participation by acting in its stead. This participation is a crucial ingredient towards the creation of a new society run by the working class, for the working class. A substitutive group will eventually develop its own class interests.

History has born out this lesson with impressive regularity including the great "communist" revolutions of Russia and China. In the end, both Russia and China devolved into oligarchic capitalism as the substituted revolutionaries relaxed naturally into their position as the new ruling class.

The negation of the Leninist programme, which was first embraced by the ultra-left and later by many groups including the Forest-Johnson tendency, and various anarchist and other libertarian communist groups, is now widely accepted in the libertarian left.

This negation views Leninism's direct active participation in struggle as so dangerous that any sort of activity is in danger of being substitutive. Interaction bears a threat of infection. In this atmosphere most libertarian groups have become either closed or interact only through propaganda, attempting to enlighten the class, but not to guide them.

Social engagement however asks for a third path; interaction for the realisable gain of libertarian advantage. This means that anarchists would actively take part in organisations and communities attempting to build class power. They would argue in their unions for progressive politics and revolutionary goals. Pushing beyond arguments for improved conditions towards the complete removal of capitalism. They would argue in their schools for open access to education. They would argue in their communities to for common ownership of resources and services. All of this would be done by including and assisting cooperatively with the class.

* This has sometimes been called Social Insertion by South American comrades

[1] The Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, Dielo Truda (Workers' Cause)
[2] The Manifesto of Libertarian Communism, Georges Fontenis
[3] The Friends of Durutti Group: 1937-1939, Agustin Guillamón
[4] Especifismo, NEFAC
[5] Interview with the Rio de Janeiro Anarchist Federation (FARJ)
[6] The FAU's Huerta Grande

The Role of The Specific Political Organisation

There has been quite a lot written about revolutionary organisation and on the role that they play in broader progressive movements. Among the problems which must be addressed are those of theoretical and tactical unity and the role and function of the party and the organisation. Some of the ideas that form the modern platformist tendency, of which the Workers' Solidarity Movement is at least nominally in agreement were first expressed in "The Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists" [1].

The role of the revolutionary organisation is dictated by the present features of the political and social terrain. It must therefor hone its own theory on the analysis of current struggles, and the relationship and activity that the organisation has relative to those struggles. In addition the theory of the organisation must serve a predictive function as well. Analysis must be made of history (both remote and current) in order to understand the roles that the organisation should have in various changing climates in order to prepare for their eventuality.

It is assumed hereafter that in discussing the role of the revolutionary organisation we imagine that the final outcome is libertarian communism.

There are two basic features (thought not purely separable) that can be distinguished when talking about the role of a revolutionary organisation. The first is internal organisation. The second is external.

Lenin

The tendencies of revolutionary organisation for the left can not be said to start with Lenin, but 1917 was probably the most pronounced example of the Socialist revolution and therefor serves as a reasonable starting point for analysis.

Lenin had developed a theoretical model of revolutionary organisation that includes the notion of the vanguard party and the notion of democratic centralism as its internal organisational method.

The vanguard party is an organisation that was theoretically to serve an educational role and to act in a tactical capacity. Lenin argues in [7] that the consciousness necessary for revolution had to come from an intellectual group that was able to serve as a catalyst and to serve a directive function to activities. For this reason the vanguard should be staffed with professional revolutionaries, those capable for both the theoretical and tactical tasks to effect the revolution.

Here he argues for alteration of the internal structure of the organisation due to the way in which the organisation must interact with the proletariat.

The notion of spontaneous action on the part of the working class is analysed by Lenin as the fruition of at least embryonic consciousness.

... the ``spontaneous element'', in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form. [7]

However, Lenin rejected that the workers would acquire a fully realised consciousness of the role that the proletariat would need to serve to bring about socialism.

The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. [7]

The rejection of the capacity of the working class to come into consciousness of their role served as a later justification for the increasing control that was to be exercised by the Bolsheviks as the revolution progressed. This leads to the traditional idea of the vanguard party, acting as the agent of the working class and substituting itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat for some transitional stage. The external organisational principle follows from this as one of concentric centralisation of the politicised, the workers and indeed the whole of society around the party.

A note should be made on the "dictatorship of the proletariat". This phrase has been used to mean a range of different things from its use to mean the domination of the working class because of their majority status in a democratic institution to a small cadre that would substitute itself in the interest of the working class. It is likely that the democratic notion is closer to Marx's original interpretation and that the later interpretation is a result of Leninist theory.

We might reflect that this assertion that the working class can not come into consciousness of its own role is at odds with the experience of revolutionary syndicalism that was to come later in Spain. Though not perfect, it would be difficult to argue that the consciousness of the proletariat and the peasants in Spain '36 was merely embryonic in form.

Democratic centralism is an internal organisational principle for the revolutionary party. Internally an organisation should have the freedom to discuss and debate and then finally vote on action based on the outcomes of the debate. This forms the "democratic" component of democratic centralism. "Centralism" describes an extreme tactical unity. That is, when decisions are made, there is total acceptance by the minority, which must go along with the decisions of the organisation. This notion of internal organisation formed one of the major arguments which lead to the split between the Menshevik and Bolshevik tendencies.

A commonly recognised set of principles forming democratic centralism is the following:

1. Election of all party organs from bottom to top and systematic renewal of their composition, if needed.


2. Responsibility of party structures to both lower and upper structures.


3. Strict and conscious discipline in the party—the minority must obey the majority until such time as the policy is changed.


4. Decisions of upper structures are mandatory for the lower structures.


5. Cooperation of all party organs in a collective manner at all times, and correspondingly, personal responsibility of party members for the assignments given to them and for the assignments they themselves create.

Interestingly, item 4 forms a sort of half-subsidiarity in that all higher decision making bodies are to be respected but the purview of these bodies is not in any way limited. Whereas with full subsidiarity additionally all decisions would be made at the least authority of competence.

One Big Party

Some groups take the internal and external roles of the political organisation and identify them completely. It might be noted that this is quite similar to evangelical religious conceptions of the church. One group which vocally advocates an international general party which the majority of the class should join is the Progressive Labor Party. Since the PLP takes democratic centralism as its organisational principle there is no further work other than to find effective methods of proselytising.

This current can also be viewed as a subconscious current in many, or even most other political parties and revolutionary organisations.

The Ultra-Left, Left Communism and Others

The ultra-left and left communism have differed quite a bit in both time and space on the question of internal and external organisational principles. Left communism has gotten some notoriety due to the fact that some vocal exponents have taken the mechanical determinism present in Marx to such an extreme that they theorise the role of the revolutionary organisation out of existence entirely. We will take a very cursory look at some organisational strains. For a more detailed exposition and critique of the various strains of Left Communism see [8].

One of the first arguments against Leninism, a response to "Left-Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder" was given by Herman Gorter [5]. Gorter actually doesn't directly confront Leninism as it manifested in Russia, but rather argues that due to the objective conditions faced by the proletariat in Germany and England, the movement can't but require mass consciousness on the part of the proletariat, and that a strong leadership really serves very little purpose.

Unless the entire class or at least the great majority stand up for the revolution personally, with almost superhuman force, in opposition to all the other classes, the revolution will fail; for you will agree with me again that on determining our tactics we should reckon with our own forces, not with those from outside - on Russian help, for instance.

The proletariat almost unarmed, alone, without help, against a closely united Capitalism, means for Germany that every proletarian must be a conscious fighter, every proletarian a hero; and it is the same for all Western Europe.

For the majority of the proletariat to turn into conscious, steadfast fighters, into real Communists, they must be greater, immeasurably greater, here than in Russia, in an absolute as well as a relative sense. And once more: this is the outcome, not of the representations, the dreams of some intellectual, or poet, but of the purest realities.

And as the importance of the class grows, the importance of the leaders becomes relatively less. This does not mean that we must not have the very best of leaders. The best are not good enough; we are trying hard to find them. It only means that the importance of the leaders, as compared to that of the masses, is decreasing. [5]

Gorter is here advocating the role of the party in a much more educational role with engagement with the mass organisations rather than concentric centralising control. The consequence of his argument comes quite close to the (external) organisational method that is advocated in The Platform.

In addition to Gorter, Gramsci developed ideas concerning the role of education, which he termed philosophy and its practical application to life and to the masses, which he labeled politics [2]. For his divergence in theory from both Marx's mechanicism and Lenin's rejection of the masses coming into consciousness, Gramsci can arguably be called a left communist.

While Gramsci advocated democratic centralism as an internal organisational principle [10], in terms of engagement with broader society, Gramsci brought forward the idea of ideological hegemony as a fundamental (but not exclusive) motive force in society. The idea is basically quite similar to the idea of consciousness described by Lenin but more fully developed and later reflected in the notion of capillary power by Foucault [9].

Gramsci additionally makes an attack on the form of external organisation of anarchism, as he sees it:

But there is one traditional party too with an essentially "indirect" character - which in other words presents itself explicitly as purely "educative", moral, cultural. This is the anarchist movement.

Here of course, the role of anarchist activity as purely educative does not correspond directly to the tendency present in the platform and may not even be historically accurate in terms of the militant syndicalism that was present in Turin, but probably does reflect some Italian Anarchist ideas present at the time (Malatesta?). That is, unless one views all activity in the mass organisations as propaganda by the deed, something Gramsci hints at, in which case the notion is entirely degenerate and identifies all tendencies between Leninism and Platformism.

Additionally there is a current of thought expressed by Gilles Dauvè which recognises the need for organisations to develop theory which will then organically direct activity [3].

Modern Leninist groups (Trotskyist groups, for instance) try to organize the workers. Modern ultra-left groups (I.C.O.., for instance) only circulate information without trying to adopt a collective position on a problem. As opposed to this, we believe it necessary to formulate a theoretical critique of present society. Such a critique implies collective work. We also think that any permanent group of revolutionary workers must try to find a theoretical basis for its action. Theoretical clarification is an element of, and a necessary condition for, practical unification.

This however does seem only to skirt the issue, since it is a theoretical question how best the organisation should interact with the rest of society. It seems to be hinted that the appropriate activity will develop naturally from a sufficiently developed theory of society, but it seems strange that such a well developed theory of society would not also lead to a well developed theory of the mode of interaction that the revolutionary group would take.

For entertainment's sake, another theory was expressed by Sam Moss in The Impotence of the Revolutionary Organisation [10]. Here Sam Moss doesn't agree with those left communists who reject the role of the organisation on philosophical grounds, but merely argues from a pragmatic viewpoint, that the organisation can never have any beneficial impact on the mass organisations.

Autonomism, Affinity and Networks

The organisational approaches present in Autonomism tend to advocate more diffuse or network based approaches. It takes a much more spontaneous and self organisational approach to struggle, while simultaneously recognising a need for theoretical and intellectual explication of the struggle. As such it is difficult to identify definite arguments about the role of the revolutionary organisation in Autonomist currents.

Similar in character to the ideas present in autonomism are those expressed by Day in [11]. These involve the idea of affinity as the basic principle that should be advocated set in opposition to hegemony.

There seems in Day to be some confusion between the idea of ideological hegemony, due to contact with post-modernism. In fact homogeneity of philosophy never exists in any age or place, but there exist various influential currents. The idea of affinity as the most important organisational principle is in fact itself an idea that seeks to be hegemonic if it is to succeed as a principle, in which case the negation of Gramsci's notion of hegemony is not present in Day as it is supposed.

There may indeed by a further, more developed theory that seeks to draw elements from both hegemonic and affinity or network based ideas. This theory would describe using activity and philosphical explication to promote growth of affinity and cooperation in non-concentric spheres of influence. The revolutionary organisation would serve as a particular sphere attempting to facilitate capillary institutions.

The Platform

The Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists had an organisational section in which it was outlined what internal structure the revolutionary organisation should seek.

1. Theoretical Unity


2. Tactical Unity or the Collective Method of Action


3. Collective Responsibility


4. Federalism

Theoretical Unity

The first idea of theoretical unity is shared with democratic centralism and not much critique is made of its counter-part, a disorganised synthesism. However Fontenis has the following to say in support of theoretical unity:

A questions arises: could the programme not be a synthesis, taking account of what is common to people who refer to the same ideal, or more accurately to the same or nearly the same label? That would be to seek an artificial unity where to avoid conflicts you would only uphold most of the time what isn't really important: you'd find a common but almost empty platform. The experiment has been tried too many times and out of 'syntheses' - unions, coalitions, alliances and understandings - has only ever come ineffectiveness and a quick return to conflict: as reality posed problems for which each offered different or opposite solutions the old battles reappeared and the emptiness, the uselessness of the shared pseudo-programme - which could only be a refusal to act - were clearly shown.

Indeed, this may go to far, as it in fact excludes the possibility of the masses coming into the necessary coherence under which libertarian communism could be established. In its polemic attack against synthesism, it may even exclude the known historic events attributable to anarcho-syndicalism in Spain. He almost immediately however corrects himself in the following quote:

Now, a revolutionary programme, the anarchist programme, cannot be one that is created by a few people and then imposed on the masses. It's the opposite that must happen: the programme of the revolutionary vanguard, of the active minority, can only be the expression - concise and powerful, clear and rendered conscious and plain - of the desires of the exploited masses summoned to make the Revolution. In other words: class before party.

It seems that in fact the idea should instead be one of the effectiveness of the specific organisation it its role in advocating anarchist ideas in the mass organisations. This later formulation is advocated in The Platform:

As an aside, the term vanguard party is used to denote the specific revolutionary organisation, not the centralised force of the revolution acting itself as the consciousness of the masses and seeking to establish itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Tactical Unity

Perhaps the most difficult notion to deal with is the one of tactical unity. As we have seen the principle in its extreme form is the one present in democratic centralism. That is, the total acceptance by the minority of the rule of the majority. In the most extreme hegemonic form of democratic centralism, we end up with a situation where there is no alternative to the organisation, since the organisation has in fact become the formal apparatus for all decisions in society. At this point, the possibility of leaving is not present, and we have collapsed into a situation where the tyranny of the majority is very difficult to avoid and must be combated by appeal to principles or parallel, extra-organisational means.

We have a number of important distinctions that must be made. As has been pointed out by Murray Bookchin [12], the organisational principle of consensus can lead to a tyranny of the minority:

I have found that it permits an insidious authoritarianism and gross manipulations -- even when used in the name of autonomy or freedom.

One can imagine the minority blocking all activity and thereby rendering the organisation totally ineffective. A society attempting to abolish capitalism through democratic control of the economy in the hands of the majority would find itself incapable, due to blocking by the capitalist class, under a consensus organisational principle. Or for the small revolutionary organisation, a single infiltrator could halt all activity, or selected activity. Indeed we haven't escaped from the problem of the minority and majority at all.

However, the majority does not derive a mandate purely with respect to numbers. The opposite recriminations that were levelled against consensus can easily be constructed for the majoritarian principle. In fact the problem lends itself to tension at a deep level is intertwined with notions of liberty, federalism and subsidiarity.

The problem must be teased out into some constituent currents.

One of these is the practical effect of decision. If a group is making a decision to perform some activity, especially one that will be engaged in despite decisions made by the organisation (Rossport for example) and since they will be engaged in autonomously the organisation can have no benefit in dictating a policy of non-activity unless that activity is actually in contravention to the principle of the organisation. This intransigent minority is at some level divergent because of a divergence of theory, but this does not represent an avoidable divergence and as such. If a group is negatively effected by a decision, and is opposed to it, then we have the classical problem of the tyranny of the majority.

Another constituent is the level of actual dedication and various levels of responsibility that members are willing to take on. It can come to pass that decisions are made by the majority of the organisation, but with no actual executive power. Here the majoritarian viewpoint is entirely hollow and exists only in good intentions but without any contact with practical activity.

The authors of The Platform attempt to deal with some of these problems:

However, there may be times when the opinions of the Union's membership on such and such an issue would be split, which would give rise to the emergence of a majority and a minority view. Such instances are commonplace in the life of all organizations and all parties. Usually, a resolution of such a situation is worked out.

We reckon, first of all, that for the sake of unity of the Union, the minority should, in such cases, make concessions to the majority. This would be readily achievable, in cases of insignificant differences of opinion between the minority and majority. If, though, the minority were to consider sacrificing its viewpoint an impossibility, then there would be the prospect of having two divergent opinions and tactics within the Union; a majority view and tactic, and a minority view and tactic. [13]

Watching the practical activity in the Workers' Solidarity Movement these problems and features come to light. Indeed there have been times when the organisation is able to come to full theoretical unity on a particular subject, and it turns out that despite the highest decision making body, The National Council, coming to definitive and even unanimous support on a decision, no one is willing to undertake the activity. On the opposite side, there are activities which enjoy very active and dedicated support by large minorities, and yet the majority is quite critical of having involvement in the activity.

The minority/majority problem should probably be though of in terms of subsidiarity, and this principle should ensconced as a constitutional principle which can be evoked.

If some group feels compelled to carry out some practical activity, then the majority should allow the activity to take place as to do otherwise would give decision making authority to individuals not willing to take active engagement and who aren't otherwise suffering from externalities of the activity.

Of course the prevention of activities, in the case that it contravenes the theoretical basis, or the majority believe that it will be tactically regressive, is still possible. One might even imagine an extreme situation where all activities must have total tactically unity to ensure the continued survival of the revolution. In this case members would need to consent to the majority or leave the organisation. One should be careful to remember, however, that this is exactly democratic centralism.

Federalism

Although the fourth point is termed federalism, and the document makes a verbal attack against centralism, it seems to be speaking, in a rather clumsy way, about subsidiarity. That is, the reconciliation of the dialectic tension between individuality and collective responsibility in various spheres. Each level of collective responsibility above the individual in society is based on the requirement that the decision be made at that appropriate level to maximise freedom and the collective good.

Indeed this last principle could stand further and more concrete elaboration especially in light of a more clear concept of subsidiarity, and possibly of notions of overlapping or aggregating subsidiarity. It should also make closer theoretical contact with the problems of methods of collective decision-making and collective responsibility.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, since most socialists profess to want libertarian communism it is useful to survey the landscape of possible revolutionary socialist organisational models, the method of contact with the external and the historical outcome and corollary consequences of the model and the points of divergence and the reasons for that divergence. Indeed libertarian communists in the especifismo and platformist traditions could stand analysis and critique to be made much more explicit and precise on these fronts than it is currently.

Socialist movements have often been rerouted into generating support for a replacement of the state with other oppressive state structures. The cause of this activity is at least partially related to revolutionary organisational principles. We should make sure that we are capable of both generating the climate for revolution, and carrying this revolution out in such a way as to move towards the goal.


[1] Dielo Trouda (Workers' Cause) - The Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists
[2] Antonio Gramsci - Study of Philosophy
[3] Gilles Dauvés and François Martin - Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement
[4] Georges Fontenis - Manifesto of Libertarian Communism
[5] Herman Gorter - Reply to Lenin
[6] V. I. Lenin - What Is To Be Done
[7] Oisin Mac Giollamoir - Left Communism and Its Ideology
[8] Foucault, M - Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings (1972-77).
[9] Antonio Gramsci - The Modern Prince
[10] Sam Moss - The Impotence of the Revolutionary Organisation
[11] Richard J.F. Day - Gramsci is Dead
[12] Murray Bookchin - What is Communalism?
[13] Dielo Truda - Supplement to the Organizational Platform (Questions and Answers)

Gifts and Debt

The capitalist economy is a nexus of structures and activities. The success of capitalism is in part due to the fact that it is based on cultural expressions of real aspects of the human social animal. Humans are capable of acting in ways that allow the increasing universalisation of capitalism in both physical and social space. Globalisation sees capitalism expanding in geophysical spatial terms. At the same time more parts of human existence that were formerly social become mediated by commodity exchange. Humans are capable of relating to each other, through the profit motive, in ways which encourage the maximisation of greed and accumulation. Indeed, they are capable of using violence and coercion to replicate this social order.

However, this state of affairs has not always existed in its present form and it does not always have to exist. Anthropology shows us definitively the true breadth of possible social relations [4]. By taking a survey of human societies, we see that they can vary from the extremely authoritarian and violent to the exceptionally egalitarian and peaceful.

Libertarians can recast society in a form that promotes a truly cooperative and non-combative mode of existence but this must exist with in the confines of the space of possible social relations. Any recasting of society that hopes to avoid the failures, combative anti-egalitarian, and authoritarian aspects of current society must understand both how these relationships come about, how they perpetuate themselves and how new social relationships can be formed in a way capable of sufficient homeostasis or internal stability to serve as an alternative.

This essay does not attempt a survey of the totality of social relations and their basis, and ignores important external constraints on society related to self-reproduction. It is rather a brief exposition of some cultural institutions and social relations and their relationship to the organisation of society and the economy that have existed in the past or exist now and how they are related to human psychology.

What is risk

All human activities which have a goal, either a processual goal or final goal state, contain an element of risk due to the impossibility of perfect prediction. Some events are more predictable than others and hence have lower risk than others if the goal is related to the prediction of the event or behaviour occurring. For instance, the prediction that an apple falls when one drops it has less risk then whether it will rain today.

In essence risk is a means of thinking about prediction and the extent to which prediction is reliable. It is concerned both with time and behaviour.

The methodology of human risk assessment in inter-personal relationships is ad hoc. It relies on dispositions and tendencies. In contrast probability theory provides detailed descriptions of risk. However, even this later science presupposes a detailed understanding of the system which in practice is often not possible.

What is trust

Trust is a social relation that involves time displacement. It is a notion that some activity will be sustained or enacted in the future. Due to the predictive nature of trust, it involves risk.

There are at least two conceptual stages of trust. In the first stage we have decided to accept an unknown amount of risk in order to determine the reliability of a social relation that has been entered. All trust starts initially with an uncertainty in even the risk involved. In the second stage, we are relating to a history of behaviours. Based on these behaviours we can evaluate the risk of future events.

Trust as a social relation is often built through the taking of risks. It can be entered into deliberately or accidentally.

Trust can be manufactured deliberately through a coordinated ritual that involves risk for both parties. This helps to create bonds in a situation in which both parties stand to lose from direct defection from cooperation. Objectively this ritual might seem absurd, as outside of the situation of risk neither party would have the same constraints which would ensure further social solidarity. However trust once developed between humans is often less brittle than the immediate circumstances in which it developed.

The webs of trust that develop in a community through the knowledge of reliability, or low risk in the acceptance of responsibilities generate webs of trust. Social groups are often developed.

The initial stage of trust can also be built and entered into verbally. When one utters that they "trust" someone to carry something out, they are making a transference. This act generates a potential social obligation not just from the direct recipient to the utterer, but also to anyone else within earshot.

The transmission of gossip[5] is also useful in providing social bonds. It propagates both risk itself and a knowledge of risk within a community. This creates interpersonal dependencies due to norms of reciprocity. If someone's secret is deliberately revealed outside of the group then one might be subject to similar retributive acts. Those who reveal secrets or who don't reveal secrets can also be determined through this ritual.

Trust is fundamental in the generation of coherent behaviour in groups. Without trust, the conduits for communication are too slow and tentative to generate effective tactical associations. One can see this concretely in the speed and precision with which action can take place after trust is developed between team mates in football or between veteran direct action activists.

Groups seeking to behave coherently would do well to think of the sociological origin of trust and the fact that it is developed organically and inter-personally. The emergent behaviours of the collective of a group are to some extent dictated by the culture of trust.

What are gifts

Gifts are a mechanism by which people enter into a relationship around a commodity [1]. This relationship is not the exchange relationship that sorrounds commodities and is the dominant mechanism for obtaining commodities in modern society. The gift was, prior to capitalism, perahps the most common mechanism by which economies functioned.

Giving someone something is in a sense entering into a social relationship altruistically. There is some degree of personal risk involved, in that the other person may not be able to reciprocate. This risk builds a `social debt` in which the person who recieves it feels both comradery and respect towards the person giving the gift and at least some feeling of obligation of reciprocation.

When a society is heavily involved in the exchange of gifts, as is the case when gift is the main mechanism of commodity circulation, then we end up with a society tightly interwoven and mutually supporting.

In contrast, modern christian charity is profoundly different to the act of giving. While charity is not the same as the exchange of commodities in the market it is very similar since no social relations are produced in the act. In commodity exchange we receive equal value for equal value and the transaction ends. In charity one is given something and the transaction ends. It is a purely material relation between people and no social relation comes as a result.

There may be internal changes to the participants. The individuals who exchange may each feel they have improved their lot. The philanthropist may have assuaged feelings of guilt. Indeed the recipient of charity may have growing feelings of guilt. However, these are internalised and atomic.

It is interesting to speculate if charity arose in conjunction with or as a necessary result of the rise of the market. The major charitable religions do appear to arise around the same time as markets become a dominant form of economics in their regions[3]. The necessity to prevent social instability and the rise of purely mechanical and material relations between people create an interesting reinforcing symbiosis of charity and market.

The notion that the most elevated form of gift must be the one with no social consequences is not actually a response against capitalism, but a response in symbiosis and in support of capitalism.

What is debt

Debt is a notion related to reciprocation [2]. Norms of reciprocity are deeply embedded in the human psyche and exist across cultures. They cover everything from the notions of social responsibility to return a favour when possible, the notion of solidarity to the darker ideas of vengeance and blood debt.

A norm of reciprocity is an enculturated mechanism of determining the appropriate response to some act. Debt is a system of accounting and remembering what acts are socially obliged.

Systems of accounting extend from individual or social human memory of social obligation all the way through to modern double-entry accounting.

Debt in gift economies involves the memories of the participants. Debt is eliminated by acts that successfully compensate. In some societies, such as the Tlingit [2], this gift debt even exists with interest, requiring the receiver to provide an even more lavish gift in the future.

Groups and Social Relations

The various social relations described in this essay are largely based on inter-personal relationships. The size of groups that can be formed from direct social relationships are highly constrained. It is generally considered to be the case that these groups amongst humans can not extend beyond approximately 150 people [5].

Social mechanisms that have provided cooperation in numbers far beyond 150 people have had to use impersonal mechanisms of generating group behaviour. The capitalist mode of production and market exchange allow for vast complexes to be organised. Any replacement of capitalism is going to require that production and distribution can be organised using abstractions and not just direct human relations.

Understanding this we must reevaluate the concept of debt, risk, trust and social relations and relations with an abstract society or symbolic social order.

Gift economies are often raised as a plausible alternative to our current monetary society. Gift societies however require implicit accounting embedded in paired social relations. It can not scale beyond the village. If it is reified in relation to an abstract social order it will become nothing more than a system of debt accounting (though not necessarily monetary).

A more libertarian version of gift might invert the gift process entirely. This inversion would place hope as primary. This would be a society that organises around desire rather than obligation. The accounting system here is a dual form to both gift and money.

The extent to which this is possible as the main paradigm for a society would be related to the capacity of a culture to move from a push psychology to a pull. The demand for labour would be accounted as the labour most hoped for. Instead of an obligation, labour's value becomes a hope.

Marxists have historically noted that commodity exchange becomes a material relation between people. The process of exchange is desocialised entirely. However, while this critique is correct, it seems to suggest that alternatives reassert social relations in the process of commodity relations. This view should be suspect due to the fundamental limitations which social relations among humans individually have in terms of scale. For an advanced productive society with a huge amount of commodity distribution it is simply impossible to coordinate society based on social relations.

The Personal and the Political

There is a question which repeatedly presents itself. A question of whether society can be reshaped through the changing of social relations between individuals or whether a revolution is required to produce a new society.

In fact this dichotomy is entirely false and the two things are but different sides of the same coin. Social revolution is a revolution not just between humans, but between humans and the symbolic social order itself. All of these facets are inter-related and inseparable. Changes taking place within the movement in the furtherance of realizing an alternative society will not work unless the perspective is a broad one of creating society wide change. That means we must be in constant outreach and contact with the broader society. At the same time we need to realise that creating a movement for revolution is only useful if it is a social revolution. The means of creating social revolution is through our own transformation and the transformation of our social relations with each other and with respect to an abstract society. A movement which does not transform itself will simply recreate itself in the image of its origin.

[1] Lawrence C. Becker Reciprocity
[2] Marcel Mauss The Gift
[3] David Graeber Five Thousand Years of Debt
[4] David Graeber Towards an Anarchist Anthropology
[5] Robin Dunbar Why Gossip is Good for You

The Cost of the Wage

The wage has become a thing that is almost universally considered necessary. When looking at current capitalism it is ubiquitious and it's domain is growing. However, more importantly, looking at almost every future picture of the organisation of production that is currently popular, we find the wage to be central. From economic proposals as diverse as Schweickart's Economic Democracy [1] to Hahnel and Albert's Parecon [2] we have as a core feature of the system, the wage.

While a mainstay of critiques by traditional libertarian communists and anarchist communists [3], the repercussions of the wage have been insufficiently evaluated in most modern libertarian socialist literature. These repercussions must be seriously evaluated in relation to a different system. A system of freely given labour, one in which satisfaction of demand is not dictated by the mode or type of ones labour.

What is a Wage

At it's core, the wage is a mechanism for creating differences in the amount of consumption that people are entitled based on the way in which they work. The evaluation of the way in which they work can vary. Under modern capitalism, the wage is set entirely by market forces. In some envisioned socialist systems, the wage is set based purely on the number of hours worked. In Parecon the wage is set based on a combination of market forces and percieved "effort". Each of these will be dealt with in turn.

Labour Notes

The idea of remunerating labour based strictly on hours worked is an old idea. In addition it seems to have some basis in the Marxian Labour Theory of Value (LTV). If the value of goods is in their labour content (as it is in LTV), it gives a reasonably strong argument that people could be fairly remunerated in terms of labour time.

This idea however has at least three serious problems. The first is that the LTV is a macro-economic theory of value, that is, it doesn't talk about individual products made by individual firms but rather broad emergent trends. Therefor different prices of goods will diverge from the actual labour time by product and sector.

In addition, the fact that labour time is in aggregate the value of a product is an emergent property of capitalism, not socialism. It requires that capitalists are continually trying to undercut each other in competition and buyers are always trying to find the best price.

Lastly, if factories started using labour time vouchers, and some factory produced goods and sold them at their labour time, what would happen if people didn't buy them? Then they would have to reduce the price. Then who would be paying the difference between the products sold and the full remuneration for labour time? It would have to be coordinated by a central clearing house that assured that workers were paid by their time and not the amount that the good sold for.

Supposing that the workers decided to start doing a slow down. This means that they would be remunerated the same for their time, but would produce less. Then the price of the good would rise in the market and more scarcity but the same remuneration. Sectors that did this would exhibit price inflation. Now we have a wage, one that requires that you show up, but doesn't incentivise you to do anymore than if you didn't have a wage at all. It is more complicated than no wage, and serves no function.

Remuneration for Productivity

If productivity is the quantity rewarded then we are in a situation in which the differential becomes the important quantity again. Even with the total non-existence of profit we end up with competition. The worker who is able to produce 10 times as much of a good as another worker will get rewarded for their differential productivity. This immediately incentivises them to hide any productive knowledge from others in order to avail of the incentives that one would get for exceptional productivity. Surely a world where every worker would attempt to withhold productive knowledge is not one that we would like to generate.

Remuneration for Effort

Remuneration for effort is often held up as a remedy for this problem. The problem then becomes who gets to decide who is working well and expending effort. If you have a lot of people in a workplace, who is going to track this? Are you going to be putting quotas on individual workers? When quotas were instituted in the USSR they had all sorts of unintended effects, from having thousands of 1/2" nails to getting a few nails several feet long, all with the intention of satisfying the policy details, but not actually producing things of use-value.

Witholding of Labour

In a system with some form of remuneration tied to the distribution of goods we have the problem of the witholding of labour. Even in the system of labour notes, a particular key sector of society could strike to try to get a greater share or better treatement from society. The one solution to the problem of slowdown, the witholding of labour and sabotage is to ensure that work is done on a voluntary basis. At this point the collective responsibility is to provide opportunities for productivity. This turns the problem on it's head, allowing labour to be an opportunity to participate rather than a burden to bear.

The Attribution Problem

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted” -Albert Einstein

At the core of Kropotkin's critique of the wage system is the impossibility of attributing the usefulness of work. The benefits of production are difficult to see with commodity production. As we move to intermediate commodity production used in production of other goods it becomes even more complex. However, when one starts looking at the effects of knowledge production, tracking the benefit becomes nearly impossible even in principle. What is the benefit recieved from the invention of Algebra, without which no engineering would be possible? How could that possibly be quantified? Such questions make a mockery of the notion that attributing the productive increase of an activity can serve as a means to decide a fair wage.

The Wrong Incentives

The incentives that are provided by either remuneration for effort or remuneration by time encourage the wrong behaviour. The hours worked, or effort expended becomes a parameter which one must game in order to be remunerated. The end goal is never to produce the most socially desirable outcomes or to fulfil needs, or to be safe or happy, but always to fulfil some policy demand, whether it be piece work, quotas, hours or the appearance of being an efficient or hard working person, something which is necessarily a subjective measurement by others. The end result of such policy oriented systems are adherence to the structural laws.

The only effective way to ensure the adherence to the specific meaning of the regulations is to create a managerial cast with the capacity of enforcing sanctions. This tendency has manifested itself repeatedly. In the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks began calling for managerial control over the factories to ensure productivity [4]. This repeated itself in Hungary and Poland [5]. Indeed even in modern times with the National Health Service in Britain we've seen these systemic problems of attempting to use performance measures.

The Right Incentives

Communism is unique in that it supplies the appropriate incentives for a just, egalitarian and free society. It demands that work be sufficiently satisfying and pleasurable that people are willing to do it. It is production were people find fulfilment by cooperation and play. The incentive structure strongly rewards the reduction of all undesirable labour towards total elimination. Nobody will be forced to work in some terrible activity.

Communism gives a powerful incentive to share information. The ability to reduce unnecessary or undesirable work to nothing is potentiated by the total freedom to communicate. These two factors are self reinforcing in a way that moves our society towards one in which people will truely be free.

[1] David Schweickart, Economic Democracy
[2] Michael Albert, Hahnel, Parecon
[3] Peter Kropotkin, The Wage
[4] Paul Averich, The Russian Anarchists
[5] Andy Anderson, Hungary '56