Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism – Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt

8/19/15
I got a lot out of reading this book. It’s definition and understanding of Anarchism is more clear than anything I’ve read so far. A bit dense at times though.
Though now there is controversy surrounding Michael Schmidt apparently being a White Nationalist. So I guess take it with a grain of salt (question everything).
  • The State
    • The state, whether heralded in stars and stripes or a hammer and sickle, is part of the problem. It concentrates power in the hands of the few at the apex of its hierarchy, and defends the system that benefits a ruling class of capitalists, landlords, and state managers. it cannot be used for revolution, since it only create ruling elites – precisely the class system that anarchists want to abolish. for anarchists the new society will be classes, egalitarian, participatory, and creative, all features incompatible with a state apparatus.
    • A person who is dying of starvation, who is crushed by poverty, who every day is on the point of death from cold and hunger and who sees everyone he loves suffering likewise but is unable to come to their aid, is not free; that person is a slave.
    • In a class system, the free market was nothing but a means to exploitation, something to be put aside whenever it suited the ruling class: “‘non-interference,’ and more than non-interference, – direct support, help and protection, – existed only in the interests of the exploiters.
    • A “dictatorship has no objective other than self-preservation,” wrote Bakunin, and “slavery is all that it can generate and install in the people who suffer from it.”
    • Communism / Marxism
      • Bakunin: Nevertheless, while we prefer the republic, we must recognise and proclaim that whatever the form of government may be, so long as human society continues to be divided into different classes as a result of the hereditary inequality of occupations, of wealth, of education, and of rights, there will always be a class-restricted government and the inevitable exploitation of the majorities by the minorities. The State is nothing but this domination and this exploitation, well regulated and systematised.
      • Bakunin commented that “the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labelled the ‘people’s stick.’… No State… not even the reddest republic – can ever give the people what they really want. “
      • Authoritarian means could not be used to promote emancipatory ends: “decrees, like authority in general, abolish nothing; they only perpetuate that which they were supposed to destroy.”
      • If wages – like other prices – were partly set by power and class relations, and if – as Kropotkin believed – the dictatorship of the proletariat would be a new class system, then there was no reason to expect that the wages paid by the revolutionary state would be any more fair than those paid by openly capitalist ones.
      • Marxism’s formal commitment to working-class internationalism has been consistently overwhelmed by this tendency of loyalty to particular states.
      • It was also from the perspective of capitalism as a necessary evil that Marx considered colonialism to be progressive in some respects.
      • Believing that the completion of the capitalist stage was a precondition for socialism, Marx and Engels looked somewhat favorably on Western imperialism as a means of spreading capitalism.
      • If the “peasants are the natural representatives of reaction,” and the “modern, military, bureaucratic state” that emerged from these defeats aided the “slow, but always progressive” movement of history, it followed that the “triumph of the centralized, despotic state” was “an essential condition for the coming Social Revolution.”
      • It was the revolutionary party that lone represented the proletariat, from which it followed that a proletarian dictatorship was equivalent to – and indeed required – party dictatorship
      • For Bakunin, this linking of a claim to truth and a claim to rule was a recipe for an authoritarian regime that would enslave the popular classes and create a new ruling class.
      • Authoritarian methods could not create libertarian outcomes; to “impose freedom and equality obliterates both.”
      • Soviet State Capitalism
        • An alternative anarchist and syndicalist analysis used the idea of state capitalism, and focused on the notion that the Soviet state acted as a single capitalist conglomerate, exploiting labour and realizing the surplus through the sale of commodities on behalf of a ruling classes centered on the state managers who controlled the means of production.
        • The situation of the Russian working class was essentially the same as that of the workers in other capitalist countries, except that there was only one employer, the party-state, in whose collective hands all the means of production were concentrated, to the benefit of the “state bourgeoise.”
    • Nationalism / Independence movements
      • Anti-neoliberal struggles tend to be primarily defensive, directed against the effects of neoliberalism, rather than addressing its causes and developing an effective, lasting solution. These struggles thus tend to be limited, sporadic, and at best sidetracked into moderate (if important) reforms that do not stop neoliberalism, such as pro-democracy movements.
      • Bakunin maintained that the “statist path involving the establishment of separate… States” was “entirely ruinous for the great masses of the people” because it did not abolish class power but simply changed the nationality of the ruling class. Where local capitalists and landlords were weak at independence, a new ruling elite could quickly coalesce through the new state itself.
      • for behind nationalist ideas, wrote Rocker, are “hidden… the selfish interests of power-loving politicians and money-loving businessmen for whom the nation is a convenient cover to hide their personal greed and their schemes for political power.”
  • Capitalism
    • “Apologists for Capitalism”
    • Most modes of production were class systems and based on exploitation, meaning that an economic surplus, produced by the non owning productive class, was transferred to the non producing class by virtue of its ownership of the means of production.
    • The workers, in other words, produced more value than they received in wages. The capitalists owned the products of the workers’ labour and sold those goods for a profit, and this profit was derived from the unpaid surplus value created by the workers.
    • New technologies were typically used to increase exploitation (workers could produce a lager mass of surplus value for the same wage), which led to job losses, which in turn swelled the labour market and placed a downward pressure on wages.
    • Production was, he insisted, a collective process, based on the knowledge, experience, and resources developed in the past, and undertaken by large numbers of people in a complex division of labour in the present. Consequently, individual contributions could not be isolated or calculated, nor could the contribution of a particular group of workers, in a particular industry, to a particular good, be properly calculated.
    • Kropotkin: “The great harm done by bourgeois society is not that capitalists seize a large share of the profits, but that all production has taken a wrong direction, as it is not carried on with a few to securing well-being to all.”
    • For Kropotkin, development is about increasing the ability of society to meet human needs as well as facilitate individual freedom and fulfillment, and neither the free market nor state power can undertake this task for the mass of the people.
      Measured like this, capitalism is not necessarily a highly developed form of society; it is perhaps less developed than egalitarian tribal societies. The achievement of a powerful industrial base is meaningless in itself. indeed, unless the majority of people benefit directly, by having their scope for individuality and ability to meet their needs increased, it may even be a retrograde move.
    • Berkman: “Capitalism thrives not so much on division of work as on division of the workers. it seeks to incite race against race, the factory hand against the farmer, the laborer against the skilled man, the workers of one country against those of another. the strength of the exploiting classes lies in dis-united, divided labour. But the social revolution requires the unity of toiling masses.
    • IWW
      • For the IWW in New Zealand, “any understanding between workers and employers is only an armistice, to be broken, when convenient, by either side.” the “Employing class, as a whole, has always recognized and acted up to this,” so it was “foolish” for workers to “keep to their side of contracts.” It was feared that formal agreements with employers would sap the fighting spirit of the union and prevent it from taking industrial action at will.
      • For the IWW in New Zealand, the “evil effects of Arbitration on the workers generally” included “encouraging dependence on something outside themselves, taking the spine out of unionism, creating parasites in the shape of judges, lawyers, clerks, etc., opening the way to trickery on the part of union secretaries and others, in manipulating legal phraseology which the average worker has no time to unravel.” Arbitration could not protect workers from the changes in capitalism, which continually undermine settlements, and it also legitimized exploitation under the cover of fairness.
    • Social Darwinists
      • For Social Darwinists, human society was characterised by a relentless struggle between individuals, peoples, and races, and the survival of the fittest decreed that the domination of particular individuals, people, and races was a reflection of their inherent superiority, a testament to their victory in the harsh struggle for life. It followed directly that society was necessarily hierarchical and unequal and that the existing social order was the inevitable and immutable result of the endless struggle to survive – world that operated by the law of the jungle. these ideas had an enormous influence in Europe, the United States, East Asia, and elsewhere.
      • Social Darwinist doctrines were easily intertwined with economic liberalism’s  stress on competition in the market and provided a ready justification for class inequality: the rich deserved their wealth, the outward sign of their innate superiority; the poor were an inferior people who had failed in life’s grim struggle.
      • If human races were taken to be analogous to rival species, then conquests by superior races were both inevitable and justifiable; racial dicrimination and segregation were also both necessary, for a superior racial stock must be protected from the degenerative influences of its natural inferiors.
      • Kropotkin claimed that cooperation between individuals within species was at least as important to evolution as competition and the success of humankind was in large measure do to its highly evolved mutual aid.
      • Kropotkin mocked European pretensions to superiority, stating that a man “brought up in ideas of a tribal solidarity in everything for bad and for good” is “incapable of understanding how a ‘moral’ European can ignore the starving poor of one’s own town.”
      • Kropotkin explicitly recognised both competition and cooperation as the “two dominant currents” of evolution, and asserted that he had emphasized cooperation as a corrective to accounts that stressed only conflict.
  • Anarchist Vision
    • Anarchism is a revolutionary and libertarian socialist docterine: advocating individual freedom through a free society, Anarchism aims to create a democratic, egalitarian, and stateless socialist order through an international and internationalist social revolution, abolishing capitalism, landlordism, and the state.
    • to end this situation it is necessary to engage in class struggle and revolution, creating a free socialist society based on common ownership, self-management, democratic planning from below, and production for need, not profit. Only such a social order makes individual freedom possible.
    • Many of the ideals and practices associated with the broad anarchist tradition – direct action, participatory democracy, the view that the means must match the ends, solidarity, a respect for the individual, a rejection of manipulation, a stress on the importance of freedom of opinion and diversity, and an opposition to oppression by race, nationality, and gender – are precisely those that appeal to millions of people in the post-Soviet age.
      These anarchist ideals and practices were consciously designed to avoid the fate that overtook classical Marxism. By stressing antiauthoritarian values, maximizing democracy, and valorizing self-management, the broad anarchist tradition sought to prevent the emergence, from within popular struggles, of new ruling elites.
    • For anarchists, individual freedom is the highest good, and individuality is valuable in itself, but such freedom can only be achieved within and through a new type of society. contenting that a class system prevents the full development of individuality, anarchists advocate class struggle from below to create a better world. in this ideal new order, individual freedom will be harmonized with communal obligations through cooperation, democratic decision-making, and social and economic equality. Anarchist rejects the state as a centralized structure of domination and an instrument of class rule, not simply because it constrains the individual or because anarchists dislike regulations. on the contrary, anarchists believes rights arise from the fulfillment of obligations to society and that there is a place for a certain amount of legitimate coercive power, if derived from collective and democratic decision-making.
    • In place of capitalism and centralized state control, the anarchists favored a stateless, self-managed, and planned economy in which the means of production were controlled by the working class and peasantry, class divisions had been abolished, and distribution took place on the basis of need. this would provide a situation of social and economic equality that would enable genuine individual freedom to exist.
    • Anarchism would be nothing less than the most complete realization of democracy – democracy in the fields, factories, and neighborhoods, coordinated through federal structures and councils from below upward, and based on economic and social equality
    • Those who disagreed with those values were under no obligation to remain within a society with which they were at odds; equally, that society was under no obligation to maintain such persons.
    • Everyone should contribute to society to the best of their ability, and society should in turn provide for everyone’s particular needs as far as possible.
    • Individualism
      • Anarchists did not identify freedom with the right of everybody to do exactly what one pleased but with a social order in which collective effort and responsibilities – that is to say, obligations – would provide the material basis and social nexus in which individual freedom could exist.
      • such, in short, was the aim of anarchism: not “misanthropic bourgeois individualism” but a deep love of freedom, understood as a social product, a deep respect for human rights, a profound celebration of humankind and its potential, and a commitment to form a society where a “true individuality” was irrevocably linked to “the highest communist sociability.” This interlinking of rights and duties opens the door to exercise of a degree of legitimate coercisive power in an anarchist society .
  • The Means / The Movement
    • a class struggle from below, assuming a radically democratic form  and taking place outside of and against the state, and aiming to replace capitalism and the state with collective ownership of the means of production, collective and participatory decision-making, and an international, federal, and self-managed socialist system is at the heart of anarchism.
    • The anarchists maintained that the means shape the ends. The movement for revolution had to contain all the key values of anarchism: internal democracy, self-management, and as far as possible, social and economic equality, and its goals could not be achieved through authoritarianism and hierarchy. such a movement could obviously not take the form of a political party aimed at taking state power, an elite vanguard party aimed at establishing revolutionary dictatorship, or a guerrilla movement aimed at imposing itself on the masses.
    • What was critical was a movement for self-emancipation by and for the working class and peasantry, an expression of the organised will of the popular classes, which would themselves be the architects of the new order rather than the passive recipients of salvation from above. The revolution, Kropotkin argued, could only be “a widespread popular movement” in “every town and village” through associations operation on democratic and anti hierarchical principles. To look above to leaders or the state for freedom was simply to prepare the ground for the rise of a ruling class “Free workers require a free organization,” and this organization must be based on “free agreements and free cooperation, without sacrificing the autonomy of the individual to the all-pervading influence of a state,” asserted Kropotkin.
    • Kropotkin: A revolution is infinitely more than a series of insurrections… is more than a simple fight between parties, however sanguinary; more than mere street-fighting, and much more than a mere change of government… A revolution is a swift overthrow, in a few years, of institutions which have taken centuries to root in the soil, and seem so fixed and immovable that even the most ardent reformers hardly dare to attack them in their writings…
    • Democratic local groups at the workplace and in the neighborhood would be the nucleus of the social movement that would create libertarian socialism. As the revolution took place, these groups would form the basis of the new society. Wherever possible, these groups would deal with local matters in their own way, democratically – for instance, to determine working hours, local parks, school festivals, and so forth.
    • Only class, of all the social relations, involves both domination and exploitation; only the popular classes are exploited, and only exploited classes are able to create a society without exploitation, for they alone do not have a vested interest in exploitation. if exploitation is an integral feature of modern society and human freedom requires the abolition of exploitation, then class struggles alone can emancipate humanity.
    • Malatesta: We who do not seek power, only want the consciences of men; only those who wish to dominate prefer sheep, the better to lead them. We prefer intelligent workers, even if they are our opponents, to anarchists who are such only in order to follow us like sheep. We want freedom for everybody; we want the masses to make the revolution for the masses. The person who thinks with his own brain is to be preferred to the one who blindly approves everything… Better an error consciously committed and in good faith, than a good action performed in a servile manner
    • A tactic cannot be made into a principle; different conditions merit different tactics.
    • Syndicalism
      • Malatesta argued that syndicalists must respond to “all burning questions of the day,” but “relate them to the final goal and utilize every opportunity for agitation, propaganda and the organization of the exploited classes.”
      • For the broad anarchist tradition, revolution could not be imposed or delegated; it was, literally, the task of the popular classes and required that a substantial number of people accepted its necessity. Rejecting authoritarian models like Leninism, syndicalist unions out to minimize the gulf between the conscious anarchist and syndicalist minority and the masses of the people by winning over as many people as possible to their views, and by promoting the practices of self-organization and direct action.
      • This approach poses an alternative to the proletarian dictatorship: rather than headed by a vanguard party, it would be organized through radically democratic unions and other working class organizations.
      • It is based on the structures of self-management, and is “carried out from the bottom up, by free associations, with unions and localities federated by communes, regions, nations, and, finally, a great universal and international federation,” allowing a “federalist and non coercive centralization”
    • Violence / force
      • Auxiliary to this project is the fact that at least one sector of society – the ruling class – will be forcibly suppressed and coerced into anarchist society.
      • From the perspective of the broad anarchist tradition, the forceful overthrow of the ruling class is not a contradiction with the antiauthoritarian principle. it is force used to remove the existing coercion of the capitalist system and can be seen as an act of legitimate self-defense by the popular classes. To allow the ruling class to retain its privileges until it is willing to concede to anarchism, on the grounds that everyone must enter anarchism voluntarily, is to provide that class with a permanent veto on the emancipation of the great majority of humanity.
      • This brings us to the complicated issue of the use of force and violence in the revolution. For Bakunin and Kropotkin, the revolution would certainly always involve some violence, the result of the resistance of the old order to the new. it would thus, sadly but unavoidably, be necessary to organize for the armed self-defense of the masses; the alternative would be brutal counterrevolution. The two anarchists believed that military action had to reflect libertarian forms of organization as far as possible, and that the functions of self-defence had to be carried out by a large proportion of the population in order to prevent the emergence of a separate armed and hierarchical force that would be the seed of a new state. In place of a modern hierarchical army, they advocated a militia, democratic in content and popular in character, in which officers would be elected and should have no special privileges.
    • Organizational models
      • anti organizationalists
        • The Galleanists arguably did not recognize the dangers of informal organization and the merits of formal organization. the great problem of informal organization is the development of informal and invisible hierarchies. By contrast, formal rules and procedures outlining responsibilities, rights, and roles enable a certain amount of accountability and transparency, and provide a safeguard against the “tyranny of structurelessness.”
        • The antiorganizationlists tendencies of many contemporary autonomist Marxists suggest that libertarian socialism – with its emphasis on individual freedom – is perhaps peculiarly vulnerable to the emergence of antiorganisationlist ideas in the way that political socialism is not.
      • Since the anarchists accept the idea that organization should be voluntary, this who hold common views are entitled to exclude from their organizations those who express alternative ones. To insist that an organization cannot excuse someone is to violate the principle of voluntary cooperation. Equally, those who old alternative perspectives and who are excluded from one organization are perfectly entitled to form their own groups, and the fact that other groups exist is no barrier to this free association.
      • An organization aiming at synthesis through brining together “heterogenous theoretical and practical elements” can only result in a “mechanical assembly of individuals each have a different conception of all the questions of the anarchist movement, an assembly which would inevitably disintegrate on encountering reality.”
      • An alternative anarchist and syndicalist approach is represented by the “organization of tendency,” in which specifically anarchist or syndicalist political groups are formed on the basis of shared political positions, with a measure of organizational discipline. the organization has a shared analysis of the situation as well as an agreement on strategic and tactical issues expressed in a clear program, and its members agree to carry out that program and are held accountable for doing so.
      • On the FAI in spain: It was tightly structured: based on small local bodies called “affinity groups,” with a  policy of carefully selecting members, it was organized into local, district, and regional federations, linked through mandated committees and based on regular mass assemblies; it also had a Peninsular Committee that dealt with administrative questions, executed agreed policies, and issued public policy statements.
      • Malatesta: “anyone who associates and cooperates with others for a common purpose must feel the need to coordinate his actions with those of his fellow members and do nothing that harms the work of others,” and that “those who do not feel and do not practice that duty should be thrown out of the association.”
      • The Bakuninist position, advocating an organization of tendency with a shared analysis, strategy, and tactics, coordinated action, and and organisational discipline, seems the most effective approach. By coordinating activity, promoting common positions on the tasks of the present and future, and rallying militants around a program, it offers the basis for consistent and coherent work, the direction of limited resources toward key challenges, and the defense and extension of the influence of anarchism. This approach, going back to the Alliance and expressed in Platform, is probably the only way that anarchism can challenge the hold of mainstream political parties as well as nationalist, statist, and other ideas, and ensure that the anarchists’ “new faith” provides a guide for the struggles of the popular classes.