ANARCHISM = SOCIALISM

TRUE OR FALSE?

"Anarchism is really a synonym for socialism. The anarchist is primarily a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man."

This statement was made by Daniel Guérin in his excellent book, Anarchism. I included it at the top of my web page as a way of making it clear that anarchism isn't merely a lifestyle or is somehow compatible with capitalism, but is a radical, revolutionary social theory that, should it ever be successfully implemented (barring the genocidal force that capitalist powers have and continue to put to bear against any popular socialist revolutions that arise), would transform society in ways we can scarcely imagine today.

The ideas of the key thinkers as well as the history and practice of anarchism backs this view up.

"Anarchism is really a synonym for socialism"

What does this mean? To the individual raised on decades of unrelenting anti-communist propaganda, the mere mention of the word "socialism" prompts a knee-jerk reaction, typically involving references to evil, repression, mass murder, totalitarianism.

This is largely a result of the multi-million dollar campaigns waged for the past 80 years against socialism by the capitalist nations of the world. Apologists cite the brutality of Stalin as "proof" that socialism is synonymous with mass murder. However, it should be noted that the capitalist West actually INVADED the nascent USSR in the immediate wake of the October Revolution. President Woodrow Wilson ordered Marines sent to Russia, who ransacked villages, murdered peasants, and threw their lot in with the Tsarist White Russians (beginning an long-repeated tradition of support for fascist/monarchist regimes at the expense of popular uprisings).

So, even before Stalin came onto the scene, the capitalist West was determined that socialism be stamped out!

But one thing that is very important to note is that what came about in the USSR wasn't really socialism in practice--rather, the Bolsheviks seized political power and control of the state (and set about destroying the anarchists within Russia, who actually took the revolution seriously--from 1917-1921, the indigenous anarchist movement in the USSR was systematically wiped out, making the anarchists the first victims of Bolshevik repression!)

So what we had in the USSR was a party vanguard (the Bolsheviks) seizing power FOR the people. Lenin, Trotsky, and the other Bolsheviks had no intention of allowing the state to "wither away". They, instead, killed the Revolution and spent time consolidating their power.

And this, first off, is a very important distinction: the Communist Party ruled in the USSR; NOT the people themselves. Thus was totalitarianism born. Socialism, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is defined as:

1. A social system in which the producers possess both political power and the means of producing and distributing goods.

Think about that for a moment.

Were the Bolsheviks the producers? NO! They were a vanguard party acting (so they said) IN THE INTERESTS OF THE WORKERS. This is an important distinction. They used brutal police and military force to enforce their power over the genuine producers.
Did the workers of the USSR possess the means of producing and distributing goods? NO! In fact, it was the actions of the anarchists in the Ukraine, in the worker soviets, and in the City of Kronstadt to do precisely that (worker control of production and distribution of goods) that the Bolsheviks put a violent end to!

In other words, the Bolsheviks wanted to put an end to SOCIALISM! Why? Because they wanted to secure power for themselves. And that they did, as history has shown.

Let's look at the definition of communism, for the sake of completeness...

1. A social system characterized by the absence of classes and by common ownership of the means of production and subsistence. 2.a. A political, economic, and social doctrine aiming at the establishment of such a classless society

So we see that the defining principle of communism proper is by definition common ownership of productive means and an absence of classes.

Were productive means commonly owned in any "state socialist" regimes? NO! They were owned by the state, by the government. The workers had no say in what was produced, hence the "command economy" or state-planned economy that characterized this system.
Was Soviet society classless? NO! For, after all, the concept of the "state" is largely an abstraction. What is the state, or government? It is an idea. Without people, there could be no free-standing state. Thus, the government is actually whomever controls the means of authority in a given region. And in the USSR (and the other "state socialist" regimes) that was the Communist Party. Thus, within these societies, there WAS a class: it was membership within the ruling political elite, or failure to belong...two classes: worker and vanguard party member.

So we find that the "cardinal example" of "socialism" and "communism" to not be much of an example at all, to not even match up to a couple of basic definitions of the terms.

Thus, what resulted in the wake of the Bolshevik coup of 1917, in the Maoist uprising of 1948, and in the Cuban revolution of 1959 (and elsewhere) followed the party vanguard (or Marxist-Leninist) model of POLITICAL, and not SOCIAL, revolution. The Marxist-Leninist model of political revolution was an aberration, producing vanguardist, command-economy states, and NOT true socialist communities.

Rather than liberating the oppressed workers by dissolving the power structure of government, the vanguardists merely put themselves in charge of the same power structure, confident that THEY would not succumb to the temptations of power.

So, when you compare the definitions of socialism and communism with anarchism, you see that far from being antithetical, they are complementary...

For a society to be anarchistic (e.g., no rulers) would it have to classless? YES.
For a society to be anarchistic, would producers have to have common control of the means of production? YES.
For a society to be anarchistic, would all people have to have political power? YES.

It is in this sense that the first part of Guérin's statement is, in fact, accurate. It is also for this reason that some anarchists term themselves "libertarian socialists" as a way of showing the obvious link between the theories: libertarian polity, socialist economy.

For, when you contrast what happened in the vanguardist regimes with the core principles of socialism, you can see how socialism is, in fact, incompatible with the desire to secure power for oneself or one's party.

"The anarchist is primarily a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man."

This is the key statement to explore, for if someone doesn't have a problem with the exploitation of man by man, they are in no way an anarchist. It simply isn't ideologically consistent, and, as radicals, we put much importance on this.

The anarchist rejection of rulers stems from our opposition to exploitation. Why do we oppose the government? Because the government's purpose is to control the populace: the only reason people "need" to be controlled is to allow their exploitation to continue (and expand) unfettered.

Government exists to protect property. That is the sole reason for its existence. Without a government (of some sort, meaning a relative and systematic monopoly of influence in a given region) to enforce property rights, there is simply NO WAY for capitalists to make their profits from others' labor.

The fiction of "natural law" establishes that property rights are a "natural state" for mankind; however, this is simply not true: property rights can only be maintained through force. Once a given group "claims" X plot of land, they have to defend that claim. If property rights were natural, they wouldn't need force to maintain them.

Anarchists have always opposed property for this reason; property is claimed to make the owner rich. That is why property exists. It's not unlike a profit-generating battery, although it's important to note that the profit comes from the labor of the workers, rather than simply magically appearing...money does not as yet grow on trees.

Workers are routinely and systematically exploited by capitalism. After all, if workers were actually paid the value of their labor (represented by the goods they produced), the owners wouldn't make a profit! Profit is, in its nature, SURPLUS. This surplus comes from selling the manufactured goods at a higher cost than it did to make them (anywhere from a 30% to a 300% markup, even more, if demand is high). Which means that no worker is ever paid the full value of what they produce. It is this con-game that allows the owner to grow rich atop the backs of the workers.

Because this is not an equal transaction between owner and worker, the worker is being exploited. Would the workers *voluntarily* accept this ripoff in the absence of a government power to enforce this? Of course not. The government (whatever that particular government is, e.g., whoever rules) protects the owners from the consequences of their exploitation and allows them to profit accordingly.

It is for this reason that anarchists were among the most militant opponents of capitalism, and remain so today. Government and capitalism walk hand-in-hand, partners in crime, robbing the vast majority of the people for the private gain of an elite.

Capitalists continue to underpay and overwork their workers (one California sweatshop paid its workers $.60 an hour and forced them to work 70-80 hour weeks), make use of child labor (this is on a comeback, sadly; anarchists around the turn of the century fought child labor vigorously, forcing reformists to draft child labor laws--this has been largely circumvented by NAFTA, where less-stringent restrictions on child labor can allow capitalists to make use of this cheap pool of labor now more than ever by relocating their factories in Third and Fourth World nations).

The exploitation will continue and will expand unabated, because capitalism is, in fact, synomyous with exploitation. The exploitation produces the profit by which owners grow very, very rich.

So, far from being hyperbole, Guérin's statement is an accurate one, as has been shown in history by the direct action and commitment to social revolution that characterizes true anarchism. Anarchists have uniformly risen against exploitation wherever it has arisen, at the cost of many of their lives. It is why we oppose vanguardist state socialists as much as capitalists and their fascist cronies.

It is our dream to ultimately bring about a successful social revolution that will put an end to the institutionalization of exploitation that is characterized, practiced, and manifested by government and capitalism.

DO CAPITALISTS OPPOSE EXPLOITATION?

Economists are agreed that there are four methods by which wealth is acquired by those who do not produce it. These are: interest, profit, rent and taxes, each of which is based uupon special privilege, and all are gross violations of the principle of equal liberty. --Charles T. Sprading, Liberty and the Great Libertarians

First, I'll define my terms:

exploit: 1. To employ to the greatest possible advantage; utilize; 2. To make use of selfishly or unethically.

exploitation: 1. The act of exploiting; 2. The utilization of another person for selfish purposes.

The capitalist is one who profits from the labor of others by virtue of their ownership of productive means, like a business, or factory, or even the tools used by workers. The capitalist makes money by not paying the workers the full value of what they produce. If workers were paid the full value of a given product they manufactured, there would simply be nothing "left over" for the capitalist to steal.

The justification for this theft is that, without the capitalist, the workers would be unemployed, and therefore the capitalist is doing the workers a favor by even hiring them in the first place. However, this is a circular, self-serving argument, viewing workers as simple drudges -- capital assets waiting to be used.

However, it does illustrate the utility of unemployment to the capitalist -- it creates a labor pool of individuals suitably desperate enough to take any job offered, no matter how demeaning. If the "choice" is homelessness and starvation to employment in a bad job, the rational worker "chooses" continued survival.

So, this arrangement, erroneously termed "free agreement" (in which the worker is "free" to starve if they don't want to work for someone) is innately exploitative, because it:

Allows a privileged owner, the capitalist, to profit from others' labor
Eliminates the free choice of the worker -- in propertarian society, you cannot choose not to work and expect to thrive

What is considered a "fair" wage is one that the worker will accept -- in other words, a wage that is better than the alternative of homelessness and starvation, which is invariably the bludgeon used to control the worker in capitalist society.

Only capitalist apologists can deny the exploitative nature of their economic system with a straight face. However, they do so only by ignoring the realities of the transaction involved. The worker will never, ever get rich; the capitalist will, by virtue of the unequal, unjust distribution of profits inherent in this system.

Thus, the definition cannot read:

The capitalist is one who opposes the exploitation of man by man.

because exploitation is build directly into the system. A better definition is:

The capitalist is one who exploits the labor of others for personal profit by virtue of private ownership of productive means. This is an accurate definition of what it means to be a capitalist.

The libertarian socialist model of production revolves around the collective or the commune, where all workers within the given collective profit equally from what they produce. The ones who actually do the work get the profit. This is, in essence, the core of our economic ideology.

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