Well, weíll start by looking at collectivist
anarchism; there are two forms here, collectivist
anarchism and the second form is individualist
anarchism. Weíll cover collectivist anarchism,
to start with; it takes range of forms, it
is closer to generally socialistic origins
anarchism and individualist anarchism which
is a somewhat later development.
Well, like socialism, collectivist anarchism
relies on a view of human being as social
beings. And therefore, considers we are better
suited to cooperation and collaboration then
we out of the pursuit individual self-interest.
This is not a naive idea; it is similar to
Marxís recognitions that we can only be made
sense of as species being as this species
which survives by collaborating and cooperating
reasoningly and by transforming the world
by acting upon it and transforming ourselves
in the process.
Anarchism, anarchist thinkers, wouldnít necessarily
reject that, but Marx in a sense carries a
somewhat more substantially philosophic account
with the implication that we cannot be understood
as anything else. Anarchism certainly relies
on a view of human being as social beings,
and that carries an implication, less obvious
than it is in Marx, that we are better suited
to corporation collaboration then we are to
individual self-interest.
This is not a naive idea that weíre inherently
good; the anarchist view is that when we recognize
our common humanity we do not need government.
According to anarchists, governments always
replace freedom with oppression and they make
it impossible - the very idea of government,
the very existence of government makes it
impossible to achieve any significant social
solidarity, which Kropotkin calls mutual aid.
Heís is one of great anarchist thinkers ñ
Count Pyotr Kropotkin.
But whatís so important about anarchism here?
Well, the point is that anarchism resists
the very idea of imposed authority of any
kind. Now according to anarchism, all government
replaces, always replaces freedom with oppression
and makes it impossible to achieve solidarity.
We have seen this in our analysis of the exercise
on Marxís.
We have seen it stated in relation to Marx,
we seen the recognition stated that that capitalist
production atomizes us and atomizes our sense
of ourselves to the point where even very
serious crises - mass unemployment, the mass
collapse of economies and the like - result
in not in revolutionary anger but in passivity.
The Economist, even the Economist, recognizes
that todayís responses to severe economic
insecurity and even collapse are populist
and xenophobic rather than, rather than collective
or directed against capitalism itself.
Well, we need to get back to anarchist thinking.
Social solidarity according Kropotkin is mutual
aid, and the 18 century English philosopher
William Godwin held that free individuals
could reach reasoned argument about how to
live and work together, and so we donít need
a higher authority. According to collectivist
anarchists, free and voluntary organization
is the best defense against the self-aggrandizing
tendency of the state and the corresponding
imperatives in capitalism.
Itís also the best alternative to it. Now
this is not, this has echoes of liberal thinking
- a permanent fear of the state, a permanent
fear that all public institution will result
in tyranny or continue to expand their power
unless we can hold them in check. But liberalism
has very little account of political economy
beyond either laissez-faire economics or some
form of modified capitalism in the form of
social democracy
But anarchist thinking on free and voluntary
organization has two main sources. One is
in the work of Peter Kropotkin, heís today
called Peter Kropotkin. He was Count Pyotr
Kropotkin, he was an aristocrat, a 19th century
Russian geographer, he travelled very extensively
in Russia and then went into exile, and during
this time he observed many different forms
of cooporation.
He was particularly impressed by impressed
by the watch makers in the Jura region in
Switzerland. They were self-employed craftsmen
and they organized themselves without any
authority or direction from above. In the
eastern region of the then Russian Empire,
a very long way from Moscow, Kropotkin also
saw how central administration funding, together
with ignorance, incompetence and corruption
destroyed ancient local institutions and practices.
The rich got richer, poor got poorer, and
the administrative system was suffocated by
boredom and embezzlement. Ward says here ñ
Iíve drawn this from Wardsí book on this
- similar literature can be found in almost
any other empire or nation state. Weíre not
unfamiliar with far-flung bureaucracies, which
suffocate, which destroy, which grow progressively
more corrupt ñ weíre not unfamiliar with
that almost anywhere in the world.
But Kropotkin never made, never made the mistake
of thinking people would naturally good. He
saw a potential for good in all human beings
and he concluded that human beings as social
beings. Weíre better suited to working together
possibly even for the common good than to
advancing our own self-interest. Kropotkin
also concluded that when people recognize
that, they cooperate better than they compete,
and then they do not need regulation by government
or control by government or any such thing.
According to anarchists, government replaces
freedom with oppression and makes social solidarity,
which Kropotkin calls mutual aid, impossible.
But this not have to be confined to smaller
localized activities. The scale of the work
or the system concern may well be relevant.
The railway networks of Europe and Asia, and
the postal systems of virtually the whole
world, coordinate their work, and they do
it so well that is possible to travel by rail
across two continents or send a letter from
anywhere to almost anywhere with minimal involvement
by government. They just get on with it and
do it.
Well, the Spanish examples also show more
things. Organization does not have to mean
bureaucracy. Even the British welfare state,
which is actually a nationwide range of services
and organizations arose not from the great
expansion of state services after the Second
World War, but from a vast network of local
mutual societies and friendly societies which
the British working classes created in the
19th century.
In fact the British National Health Service,
that is, the most loved and trusted institution
in the United Kingdom even more than the - it
is held even greater esteem and regard than
the monarchy - the National Health Service,
well, has its origins in the Tredegar area
of south Wales. The Tredegar Workmenís Medical
Aid and Sick Relief Fund, later called the
Tredegar Workmenís Medical Aid Society ran
from 1890 until 1995. It took a voluntary
contribution from every worker in the district
and it provided medical care to everyone who
lived within the district. The principle of
NHS is still precisely that. It is funded
from general taxation and all who are resistant
in the United Kingdom are entitled to free
treatment, sometimes including long-term care.
Scotland provides long-term free care, through
its local authority services if I am not mistaken;
it still does that. The man who created the
NHS was the MP for Ebbw Vale in Wales that
is constituency in which the town of Tredegar
lies he was called Aneurin Bevan, he was Labour
Minister for health ñ that his, the Labour
Secretary of State for Health, the minister
for health, and he created the NHS - and saw
it inaugurated in July 1948.
Well, the national organization of the NHS
of course has been anything but local, and
quite often both staff and patients virtually
on the UKís 64 million people are patients,
have often been reeuced to ñ well, helpless
bewilderment, sometimes worse, by a permanent
ferment of top-down reform and bullying managerialism;
this has had a lot of coverage at the British
national press and for the last two decades
or more it seems to have had the sole purpose
of ensuring that numerical targets and little
else are met.
This top-down control has been a consistent
process irrespective of the party in power
in the London. Some of those involved have
admitted mistakes, often too late; for example,
various hospital architects have acknowledged
that some of their designs, their hospital
designs, have been badly misconceived; even
some of the many management consultants brought
in have later recognized that at least some
of the damage is things, is the result of,
things they have done.
Well, it may be impossible to tell how many
millions of ordinary people have paid the
price for that, or what kind of price they
have paid. In addition, many on the British
political centre-left were badly shocked to
discover in the in the early 1980s and thereafter
that substantial portions of the British working
classes hated the very institutions which
had been meant to support them in leading
a decent life.
These institutions included the state benefit
system, local municipal authorities, the school
education system, and so on. Some of the political
activists involved belatedly realized that
the arrogance and high handedness which frequently
characterized such institutions made an enormous
contribution to public support for right-wing
political parties like the Conservatives ñ
whoíve taken major steps to abolish public
institutions and services. Instead, some on
the left have proposed very different institutions,
which are meant to work much more collaboratively
with the public. No serious anarchist would
be surprised by that, neither would they be
surprised that the body such as the European
Union has grown steadily more remote from
its own publics
The EU started in 1951 as the European Coal
and Steel Community, and even then it was
committed to the localizing principle of subsidiarity,
which is the principle is that EU law -which
overrides the member-statesí domestic law
- EU law and all government which is not covered
by the EUís own supranational institutions
should be implemented at the lowest and most
local level possible. If needed such functions
should such law and functions should be transferred
upwards to higher levels only with local consent.
Not all the institutions of the EU have colluded
in the process whereby the EU has become progressively
more remote from its own citizens. The European
court of justice has tried to, has tried to
preserve peopleís rights against their own
governments. For example, in the case of Marshall,
the ruling in 1986 was that Southampton and
South West Hampshire Health Authority (Teaching)
had breached the EUís Equal Treatment Directive,
because theyíd made a radiographer named
Marshall retire earlier than her male colleagues.
In the case of Foster versus British Gas 1990,
the European Court of Justice ruled that a
privatized former state-owned utility was
required to follow the Equal Treatment Directive.
In Francovich, 1991 the court decreed that
individuals whoíd suffered harm because member
states had failed to protect rights under
what was then European Economic Community
law could sue their own government for damages.
Now, thatís a way in which the European Court
of Justice Itself has protected rights at
very low levels of the whole EU system, 528
million people, 28 member states, and so on.
The principle of subsidiarity is something
that anarchist thinkers would no doubt approve
of; theyíd probably want very much more of
it as well.
Well, unfortunately certainof the EUís institutions
such as the European Commission have done
a lot destroy, to destroy the principle of
subsidiarity. For example, they have accepted
and implemented without hesitation and apparently
without public consultation major ideas puts
forward by the biggest corporation in EU ñ
such as, you know these ideas include the
single European Act, one of the most important
treaties within the worldís biggest trading
bloc. What does that do? It creates a single
market in goods and services, one of the most
significant pieces of legislation since the,
since the European Coal and Steel Community
was formed in 1951. Other proposals put forward
by the major corporations in the European
Economic Community and the EU include the
Channel Tunnel between the United Kingdom
and France, the Sweden-Denmark road bridge,
and the EU-wide road-building programme.
Now the European parliament is the only elected
body among EU all the EU institutions, but
it was created as an afterthought in 1979.
That is, well, 22 years after the formation
of the European Economic Community, 28 years
after the formation of the European
Coal and Steel Community. The European Parliament
cannot initiate legislation. That is done
by the civil service of the EU, namely the
European Commission; the European Parliament
can reject or amend draft EU law under a procedure,
called co-decision, but it allows the great
bulk of EU law through under a weaker process
called the consultation procedure - and that
gives it much less power; itís a much weaker
procedure. Well nevertheless, anarchist ways
of thinking, and of doing this, are much widespread
than current political discourse seems to
recognize. And they continue to have more
impact than we often acknowledge; even at
the height of the industrial revolution the
bulk of production was carried out not in
vast factories but in small workshops.
Electricity facilitated, facilitated decentralization
and another factor in decentralization was
mechanized transport. That is even a feature
of todayís so called advanced economies;
one of the few serious studies of small businesses
found that the owners were largely not thrusting
Thatcherites or Reaganites but people who
are more like creative rebels against, against
the idea of being an employer or an employee.
This again need be no surprise; in industrial
psychology, any number of studies have shown
that satisfaction in work and enjoyment of
work with clear implications for creativity
and productivity are centrally linked to autonomy
at work and the freedom to make informed and
authoritative decisions.
Well, just as importantly, the self-employed
often detest, I quote, ëthe whole modern
capitalist ethicí and tend to express their
commitments in terms of providing a good service
or doing a job that is in Wardís book, itís
a citation from someone called Thomson. Well,
this been tried. One of the most remarkable
attempts in the world to organize very large
numbers of people on explicitly anarchist
lines is the MondragÛn Corporation in the
Basque region of Spain - it borders France.
This was founded by a Spanish priest in 1956
and has employed over 80,000 people in different
businesses; that includes the production of
what we would consider industrial goods such
as domestic appliances. In 2013 MondragÛn
had global sales of 15 billion euros. It was
the tenth largest corporation in Spain.
It is in fact a federation of about a hundred
semi-autonomous cooperatives, and they contribute
- each of the contributing cooperatives - contributes
to joint initiatives, and they make larger
decisions together; managersí salaries are
capped at eight times workersí salaries.
The Economist has ñ and Leo Panitch have
both looked at capping salaries ñ Leo Panitch,
not the Economist, and concludes that it is,
it is only cosmetic. In the way MondragÛn,
an anarcho-syndicalist cooperative works,
it is central to - capping managersí salaries
is central to the ethos of the organization.
If workers have been made redundant by one
firm within the system, they have often been
re-employed by others within the federation.
MondragÛn has 15 research and development
centres and it has its own university, mainly
for business management studies.
Wworking schedules are adapted to give staff
time for significant family and other such
commitments, and it appears that in work the
staff have considerable autonomy in making
everyday decisions. Well, this leads us to
an area of life where anarchist thinking has
had considerable impact. Of course MondragÛn
recognizes the importance of ideas and shared
ideas and sharing the findings, but itís
often been held in great suspicion by the
major private sector corporations of Europe.
Itís quite likely that conservative Spanish
governments have viewed it with deep suspicion.
But there is an area of life where anarchist
thinking had had an immense impact, and that
is education. Anarchist philosophers always
have always taken education extremely seriously.
Proudhon saw education for work as a matter
of pride, because work was something to be
proud of. Itís a source of dignity and value,
and Proudhon also thought education had to
provide the young with wider accomplishments.
Kropotkin went further. He saw education as
essential for boys and girls. The Spanish
Anarchist Francesc Ferrer i Gu·rdia, also
called Francisco Ferrer, considered education
for emancipation as equally essential; education
for him was a liberating process. He had a
French counterpart, Paul Robin, who set up
a school, set up a school in which boys and
girls learnt all subjects - cooking, needlework,
metalwork - and they took part in all activities
together.
Some of that is creeping back into contemporary
education in many parts of the industrial
world. Itís appearing, particularly at junior
levels, in South Asia for example, and very
much in elite private junior schools.
But these ideas were decades ahead of their
time. Robin was explicitly an atheist. And
that seems to have been, seems to have been
too much for the French, or the French authorities
at the time, who were very mindful of the
power and influence of the Catholic Church.
But there was another French anarchist, called
SÈbastien Faure, who realized that the thing
to do at that time was to stay out of the
official education system, to have nothing
to do with it, and SÈbastien Faure set up
schools which had nothing to do with that
system.
Weíre not unfamiliar with such attempts in
India, perhaps in all of South Asia; these
have broadly been confined to elite sectors
of the education system because of the need
for self-funding - but youíll be aware that
certainly in Tamil Nadu moves are afoot to
alter and amend the entire ethos and functioning
of junior schools. That was started, that
process was started about 10 or 12 years ago,
when teachers were taken seriously - as they
said themselves for the first time - in planning
schools and discussing what happened in schools.
They started to be paid very much better and
they were trained to work in ways which an
anarchist would readily recognize, that is,
to set work make the work clear to the students,
to the pupils and let them get on with it
in groups while the teacher moves round assisting
and advising, and Iíve actually deen this
at work in a junior school in Tamil Nadu;
but whether that system is, well, continues
into the secondary system is less clear. I
donít know about it because I havenít seen
it or seen secondary schools.
But the fact is that the system in most State
schools in Tamil Nadu would be is precise
the kind of things that that anarchists will
recognize and very much approve of. The teacher
becomes a participant and someone to assist
and advise and not to tell. Of course the
continuing significance of exams results in
the whole Indian education system might make
- I say might make - a similar anarchist inspired
attitude or anarchist informed attitude in
the secondary schools more difficult to implement
for the time being, but it canít be ruled
out.
Well anarchist education thinking is had considerable
impact in the United Kingdom; within a century
anarchist thinking has transformed almost
all schools, especially primary junior schools,
and transformed them from near-prisons into
places where teachers see themselves not as
controllers but as guides and friends. Even
here, there are still differences between
libertarians and those who see themselves
as progressive; libertarians, for some decades
after 1960, often ran successful schools with
no set curriculum.
The self-described progressives often worked
in the formal system but were often were as
controlling as those whom they replaced; and
one change which anarchist thinking may have
helped to bring about long before the European
Court of Human Rights ruled against beating
in schools - corporal punishment - was, well,
dated from much earlier. It was ended in British
schools by that particular ruling in a particular
case over a school in the Isle of Man, but
it had been abandoned much earlier in other
parts of Europe and in Scandinavia, and may
have been facilitated by post-war cultural
changes - a much broader condition of social
equality, and so on.
But what are the other achievements of anarchist
movements? Among their Global achievements
were the worldwide protests in 1997 against
the 29 countries and various giant corporations,
which were involved in the multi-lateral agreement
on investment, the MAI. The MAI was leaked
in advance and it provoked widespread anger
that caused its abandonment. Needless to say,
governmentís corporations and corporations
revive the MAI, under the guides of the World
Trade Organization.
Currently the draft Tansatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership will extend even further
the so called right of businesses to sue any
country whose laws allegedly restrict the
right to make profits. ëRightsí has to be
understood in imagined inverted commas there.
The tribunals involved will be entirely independent
of any national legal system.
Now, these kinds of treaties amount to what
is been called a charter for the corporate
takeover of the world. The profits in question
would of course be imaginary or hypothetical
ones. At the time I wrote this, in 2016, the
European Parliament was debating the TTIP,
the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Ppartnership,
and members of the European parliament - 700
and more of them - were receiving enormous
numbers of protest mailings from constituents
asking them to reject it.
Well, youíll be familiar no doubt with issues
arising from the governmentís reactions,
from governmentís reactions to the World
Trade Organization; and their reactions to
the WTO protests confirmed the worth of anarchist
opposition to the very idea of the state.
After the protests in Seattle in 1998 and
1999, if I remember rightly, the protesters
gathered again at the WTOís later meetings
in Gothenburg in Sweden and Genoa in Italy.
But the Swedish and Italian governments - members
of the European Union and signatories to the
European Convention on Human Rights, both
States - turned both cities into fortresses
with blockades and barbed wire that is been
done at the WTO meeting in the United Kingdom
since then. The police became violent and
protesters were killed. Today, cities which
host WTO and G7 meetings are put under near
lockdown. The Soviet Union could not have
done it better.
Anarchist ideas are therefore much more widely
held than the dominant political discourses
seem to admit, and they merit more detailed
attention than they often get. We shall go
on in the next class to talk about in the
next lecture; weíll talk about mutualism
and other forms of anarchism.
Weíll then look at attempts to apply it and
weíll look at issues and problems arising
and where anarchism stands today. That will
probably take us another two classes or perhaps
three. So, we shall stop there for the moment
and weíll resume next time with mutualism.
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