"Socialism will be free, or it will not be at all." ~ Rudolf Rocker
Moderators: The essay below is pasted in its entirety with permission from
Workers Solidarity WebsiteSocialism from BelowIt may seem dead obvious but it is impossible to go anywhere without first knowing where you are headed for. Without a clear view of the objective and the forces impeding or aiding your advance towards it one can become "all movement and no direction." One question which a socialist must always have on the tip of her tongue is where am I going and how can I get there? If you are heading for socialism then you must have a clear idea of what, exactly, it is.
"Man is born free but everywhere he finds himself in chains" this phrase rings truer today then ever before. Often the chains are very visible. For example in Nigeria; basically a puppet state of the oil giant; Shell. In a letter recently smuggled out from there nineteen political prisoners known as the Ongi 19 informed the world:
"We are allowed to take our bath just twice a week from a well which was until recently a dumping pit for dead inmates and still contains human skeletons. This is also the source of our drinking water...."
The capitalist system causes wars, disease, famine and misery and is slowly killing our planet. But more than this it sells an illusion of freedom and individual choice while in fact Nigeria, as in most of the world, limiting even the most basic civil liberties. But the choices, even for relatively 'affluent consumers' in America and Europe, are pitiful and banal Adidas versus Nike, Spice girls versus Oasis, United versus Liverpool.
What people are lacking, more than anything else in this capitalist world is freedom. The American anarchist Emma Goldman once put the question very well:
"the problem that confronts us today..is how to be one's self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain ones own characteristic."
Anarchists aim to build a world where this problem can be solved.
The anarchist version of socialism is a proposal for a free society. The task is to recreate society so that people can realise their full potential as free individuals. This is the most basic premise of anarchism. That said, there is no such thing as absolute liberty and we would always hold that my right to swing a frying pan ends where your nose begins. Maximum personal freedom must be realised but not at the expense of others.
Freedom is central to anarchism. It is not an optional extra it is basic to our conception of socialism. The only real guarantee of personal freedom is a non-exploitative, non hierarchical and collectively run system. To only way to create this is to hard wire it in to the struggle for socialism from the very start.
If the end is socialism and freedom than the means (of fighting for it) must justify that end. Freedom requires a particular social environment in which to blossom and grow. We believe this must be based on direct democracy and direct management of production by ordinary people for the good of all. Direct management of production means that workers must take over their workplaces, decide what is produced, how it is produced and why it is produced. This self-management must be not just on the level of the individual workplace but covering the entire economy.
In many revolutionary struggles workers have thrown up different organisations of worker's control or management to do just this. The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Spain in 1936, Hungary 1956 and Portugal in 1974 all saw the emergence of workers committees or councils. Even in Ireland during the war of independence; the whole city of Limerick declared itself a soviet for a while.
All of these worker's formations were democratic but the democracy used was direct. Direct democracy is the democracy that anarchists advocate. It is different to parliamentary democracy and Leninist dictatorship in a number of ways:
1. Direct democracy is as much about coming up with new ideas as about giving the nod to proposals already worked out by some set of leaders. It means people originating ideas themselves.
2. It is about delegation. People are elected by assemblies to carry out particular tasks or mandates- if they fail to do this then someone else is elected in their place. Power is in the hands of the assemblies not the delegates.
3. It is about extending democracy to the workplace and therefore to the complete running of society so that we can decided what to produce and how. Only in this manner can socialism become what as the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin described it:
"the government of industry administered on behalf of the whole community" This would really be 'government' by the people, of the people and for the people but not on behalf of the people.
We do not believe that the bosses will not concede this easily or lightly. It will have to be fought for but again the means must justify the end. The tools which are needed and which, we think, should be built into every campaign against capitalism from the start is freedom and real democracy. This means that within unions, community groups and campaigns people must organise in a democratic way and always set their agenda, the must decide what they are fighting for and how they want to get there. This is the only way they can empower themselves and eliminate the dependence on leaders so essential to the functioning of capitalism. As Rudolf Rocker argued in his book Anarcho-Syndicalism "Socialism will be free or it will not be at all"
Much more at
Workers Solidarity Website with internal links.
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