by Isaac Puente
The National Confederation of Labor (CNT) is, so to speak, the channel for all the revolutionary strivings that the working class makes towards the realization of one specific goal: the installation of Libertarian Communism. This is a system of human co-existence that attempts to find a way to solve the economic problem without using the state or politics, in accordance with the well-known formula: From each according to his/her abilities, to each according to her/his needs.
The freedom movement of the working class progresses through suffering the bitter lessons of experience. From each setback it emerges rejuvenated and with fresh vigor. It is a force in the making, the moulder of the future. It bears within itself a seed of social perfectibility, and it bespeaks the presence of a striving that comes from deep within the human being, a striving because of which it cannot perish even were it to lose its way another hundred times.
The workers’ movement has come through barbaric repressions. For a long time it allowed itself to be seduced by the false-voices of reformism and by the siren songs of politics, which lead only to the emancipation of leaders and redeemers, who from being brothers turn abruptly into enemies.
The workers have been the target of too much preaching. Some have told them they need calm, others that they need culture, others training. According to the notions of those who would be their shepherds, the workers have never been mature enough to liberate themselves. If the situation is to continue, preparations will go on for all eternity: the only way the workers can shrug off the ignorance and cultural deprivation that the capitalist regime and the state assign them to is by means of revolution. Every partial freedom must cost just as much effort as total emancipation, if it is to be won collectively and not just by individuals.
If we look for ways of doing this without attacking the system, no resolution of the social problem is possible. It is like Columbus’s egg. If we keep on and on trying to balance the egg on one end, we will only waste a lot of time. We must resolve to flatten one of the ends by knocking it on the table, end so attack the actual shape of the egg itself.
The National Confederation of Labor acts as interpreter to the workers’ freedom movement, warning of reformist flannel and giving the blind alley of politics a wide birth. It has found a straight road, that of direct action, which leads directly to the installation of libertarian communism, the only path to freedom. There is no point in building up a powerful movement that will win the admiration both of its members and of outsiders, unless it achieves its goal of liberation. This is no vague ideal to cherish: it is a battlefront. The ideal is in the form of anarchism, which supplies the guidance and the motivating force.
Libertarian Communism is a society organized without the state and without private ownership. And there is no need to invent anything or conjure up some new organization for the purpose. The centers about which life in the future will be organized are already with us in the society of today: the free union and the free municipality.
The union: in it combine spontaneously the workers from factories and all places of collective exploitation.
And the free municipality: an assembly with roots stretching back into the past where, again in spontaneity, inhabitants of village and hamlet combine together, and which points the way to the solution of problems in social life in the countryside. (By “village” the author means a rural settlement of up to several thousand inhabitants. – Ed. )
Both kinds of organization, run on federal and democratic principles, will be sovereign in their decision making, without being beholden to any higher body, their only obligation being to federate one with another as dictated by the economic requirement for liaison and communications bodies organized in industrial federations.
The union and the free municipality will assume the collective or common ownership of everything which is under private ownership at present and will regulate production and consumption (in a word, the economy) in each locality.
The very bringing together of the two terms (communism and libertarian) is indicative in itself of the fusion of two ideas: one of them is collectivist, tending to bring about harmony in the whole through the contributions and cooperation of individuals, without undermining their independence in any way; while the other is individualist, seeking to reassure the individual that his independence will be respected.
Since by himself he can achieve nothing, the factory worker, railway worker or laborer needs to join forces with his colleagues, both to carry out his work and to protect his interests as an individual. In contrast, the artisan and the farm worker can live independently and can even be self-sufficient, as a result of which the spirit of individualism is deeply ingrained in them. Thus, the union meets the need for a collectivist organization, while the free municipality is better suited to the individualistic feelings of the peasant.
Poverty is the symptom and slavery the disease. If we went only by appearances, we would all agree that poverty ought to be singled out as the worst feature of present-day society. The worst affliction, however, is slavery, which obliges man to lie down under poverty and prevents him from rebelling against it. The greatest of evils is not capital, which exploits the worker, enriching itself at his expense, but rather the state which keeps the worker naked and undefended, maintaining him in subjection by armed force and by imprisonment.
Every ill that we deplore in society today (and it would be out of place to list them all here) is rooted in the institution of power, that is, in the state and the institution of private ownership, accumulation of which produces capital. Man is at the mercy of these two social afflictions which escape his control: they make him petty, stingy and lacking solidarity when he is rich and cruelly insensitive to human suffering when he wields power. Poverty degrades, but wealth perverts. Obedience consigns man to a state of prostration, while the authority deforms his sensibilities. Nothing has ever been the cause of greater tears or bloodshed than capital, with its fathomless appetite for profit. The whole of history is crammed with the crimes and tortures carried out by authority.
Accumulation of wealth, like accumulation of power by the few, can only be achieved at the cost of depriving others. To destroy poverty, and likewise to end slavery, the accumulation of property and of power must be resisted, so that no one takes more than s/he needs and no one is allowed to boss all the others.
Two fundamental drives.
By our very nature and because of the way we live, people have two strivings that cannot be suppressed: to bread, which is everything we need to meet our economic needs (such as food, clothing, housing, education, medical assistance and means of communication), and to freedom, or control over our own actions. External pressures of themselves do not hold any repugnance for us, since we bow to those exerted by nature herself. What does repel and revolt us is that such pressure should be arbitrary pressure, a whim of others. We do not mind a restriction if we believe it to be just, and provided that it is left up to us to be the judge of that. We do reject it, however, with all the force we can muster, if it is something imposed upon us without our having a say in the matter.
So lively and intense is this feeling for freedom (this ambition to be our own masters) that there is an old folk tale in which a nobleman forsakes the board, lodging and warmth of an inn and takes to the open road; he does this so as to conserve his freedom, for the price of his keep and comfort in the inn was to conform to its barrack-like discipline.
Libertarian communism must make it possible to satisfy economic need as well as respecting this wish to be free. Out of love for freedom, we reject any monastic or barrack-style communism, the communism of ant-heap and beehive, and the shepherd-and-flock type communism of Russia.
Prejudices:
To anyone reading this in a prejudiced way with their hackles up, all this must seem nonsensical. Let us examine the prejudices involved so that we help those who suffer from them to overcome them.
Prejudice number one: The belief that the crisis is merely temporary.
Capital and state are two age-old institutions; they are in a worldwide crisis that is progressive and incurable. These are two organisms which, like everything in the natural world, bear within their own decomposing selves the seeds of those organisms which are to take their place. In the world of nature there is no creation and no destruction- only transformation in everything. Capital is drowning in its own filth. Unemployment is constantly on the increase because consumption cannot match the rate at which production is expanded by machinery. The unemployed are the troops of revolution. Hunger makes a coward of the isolated individual but when that hunger is generally felt it becomes a source of rage and audacity. Subversive ideas are growing up among the working class and they are making headway. The state, too, suffocating amid its own machinations of strength. It finds itself compelled to set up ever more repressive forces and greater bureaucracy, heaping the deadweight of parasitism on to the taxes stolen from the taxpayers. One buttresses a building because it is threatening to collapse. The individual consciousness which grows more acute with each passing moment is openly at odds with the limits set by the state. The imminence of collapse has induced the state to reverse its historical evolution towards more democratic forms, in order to don the cloak of fascism in Italy and dictatorship elsewhere, including dictatorship of the working class in Russia. What has set the growing demands of Working class against the old institution of capital are make-or-break crises; the state, that old, old institution, now confronts the libertarian aspirations of the people. They will overwhelm it.
It is futile to cling to the old systems and to try to find palliatives or reforms, or to paper over the cracks, even should the palliatives be as seductive as Henry George’s “single tax”, for they come too late to breathe new life into a decrepit organism. Instead, the thought must be of what it is that is striving to be born, that seeks to replace what has to disappear, of those seminal forces trying to find a place in the life of society.
Prejudice number two: The Supposition that libertarian communism is a product of ignorance.
Because libertarian communion is championed by folk who are reputed to be uneducated and uncultivated, people who have no university diplomas, it is supposed that it is a simplistic solution that fails to take account of the complexities of life and the problems inherent in change on so vast a scale.
Collectively, the workers know more about sociology than the intellectuals; they are much more farsighted when it comes to solutions. Thus when we take the problem of the excessive numbers of professional people about, the only solution which occurs or suggests itself to, say, doctors or lawyers, is to restrict entry to the faculties, which is to say, ‘The vacancies have been filled. There is no room for anyone else.’ In so saying they consign the emergent generations who are making for the lecture halls in increasing numbers to other careers or else to stormy protests. And that solution is an absurd, a simplistic, a harmful one- hardly fitting for people who pride themselves on their superiority over others.
The workers, on the other hand, in accordance with their (buffetting in) the sociology books, dare to put forward a solution which is not confined to a single class, nor to a single generation of one class, but one that applies to all classes in society. A solution that qualified sociologists have already broached at scientific and philosophical level and one that today can hold its own against any theoretical solution to the social question, on the basis of ensuring bread and culture for all people.
If it is the ‘ignorant’ who enunciate that solution, it is precisely because for all their reputed learning, the intellectuals know nothing about it. And if the workers adopt it as their banner, the reason is that collectively the working class has a much more precise vision of the future and a greater breadth of spirit than all the intellectual classes put together.
Prejudice number three: The intellectual aristocracy.
This is the attitude that the people are not equipped to live a life of freedom and consequently are in need of supervision. Intellectuals seek to enjoy the same aristocratic privilege over the people as the nobility has had until now. They aspire to be the leaders and instructors of the people.
All that glitters is not gold. Nor is the intellectual standing of all whose fate it is to be deprived of education to be disdained. Many intellectuals fail to rise above the common herd, even on the wings afforded them by their diplomas. And, conversely, lots of working class people are the equals of the intellectuals in terms of talent.
University training for a profession in no way implies superiority, since such training is not won through open competition but rather under the protection of economic privilege.
What we call common sense, a quick grasp of things, intuitive ability, initiative and originality are not things that can be bought or sold in the universities. They may be found in illiterates and in intellectuals in equal measure.
For all its ferocious ignorance. an uncultivated mentality is preferable to minds that have been poisoned by privilege and eroded by the routine grind of learning.
Cultured they may be, but our intellectuals are nonetheless uncultivated in their sense of dignity, a sense that sometimes shines far brighter in folk who are supposed to be uncultured.
A clean job does not imply superiority any more than being in a profession does and it is simplistic and puerile to pretend that people in that sort of employment should direct and instruct those who are not.
Prejudice number four: The claim that we feel only contempt for art, science or culture.
Our position is that we cannot understand why it is that for these three activities to shine they have to rest upon poverty or human slavery. In our view they ought to be incompatible with such unnecessary evils. If, in order to shine, they needed the contrast with ugliness, with ignorance and with lack of culture, then we would declare here and now that we want none of them and we would have no qualms about uttering a heresy by saying so.
Art, science or culture cannot be bought with money or taken by power. On the contrary, if they have any value, they repudiate all subjection and defy subordination. They are born of artistic dedication, of talent, the drive to enquire and a taste for perfection as such. They are not conjured up by any Maecenas or Caesars. They flourish anywhere in spontaneous fashion and what they require is that no obstacle stands in their path. They are the fruits of what is human and it is naive to believe that anything is added to them by setting up, governmentally, any patents office or prizes for culture.
When the worker asks for bread and presses for justice and tries to emancipate herself, only to be met with the charge that she is going to destroy art, science or culture, it is only natural that she should be an iconoclast and cast down with one swipe that untouchable idol that is used to fix her in her slavery and in her poverty. And who said that art, science or culture would be in any way diminished by the advent of well-being and the enjoyment of freedom?
Prejudice number five: That we are not equipped to build a new life.
The new economic order needs technical assistance, such as exists between the specialist and the unskilled laborer. Just as today even the revolutionary forces co-operate in production, so tomorrow everyone will have to. That is, the new life is not to be judged by the abilities that exist now in society as a whole. It is not love of the bourgeoisie that induces the technician to work, but economic necessity. Tomorrow, what will induce everyone to co-operate in production will also be economic necessity, but an economic necessity that will be felt by all who are able-bodied citizens. We do not trust only in those who work out of devotion or virtue.
So we need not dazzle the world with our talents, nor our extraordinary gifts, which would be every whit as phoney as the gifts of politicians. We do not offer to redeem anyone. We do advocate a regime where it will not be necessary for people to be slaves in order to get them to produce nor will there be any call for poverty to make them succumb to the greed of capital where it will not be caprice or private and individual expediency that govern or direct, but where all of us will contribute to the harmony of the whole, each with their labor, in proportion to their strengths and their talents.
Prejudice number six: The belief in the need for a social architect.
This belief, that society needs a power to maintain order, or that a mass will dissolve in chaos unless there is a police force to prevent it, is a prejudice, that has been fostered by politics. What holds human societies together is not compulsion by the powers that be, nor the intelligent forsight of those in government, who always falsely imagine themselves to be possessed of this quality. What holds societies together is the instinct of sociability and the need for mutual aid. Furthermore, societies tend to assume ever more perfect forms not because their leaders so choose, but because their leaders so choose, but because there is a spontaneous tendency towards improvement among those who compose them, an inborn aspiration of this kind in any group of human beings.
By the same wrongheaded idea we credit the growth and development of a child to the care of the parent as if growth and maturity were due to some external cause. But growth and development are ever present in any child without anyone needing to induce them. The important thing is that no one should impede or obstruct them.
The child is taught and educated in the same fashion: by natural inclination. The teacher may take the credit for the child’s gift of being able to assimilate and be formed, but the fact of the matter is that the child learns and is educated even without anyone to direct him, or her, provided that no obstacles are placed in his or her way. And in rational pedagogics (That is, “child centred education” -Ed.), the primary role of teachers is to immerse themselves in the biologically humble task of clearing the path and removing the obstacles that stand in the way of the child’s inclination to assimilate information and to form itself. Self-educated people provides ample evidence that the teacher is not an indispensable partner in the process of learning.
We might say the same about medicine. The doctor can claim the credit for curing a patient and the public at large may believe them. But what is really responsible for the cure is the spontaneous tendency of the body to restore its own balance, and the body’s own defense mechanisms. The doctor best does the job when, again with biological humility, they merely remove the obstacles and impediments that stand in the way of the restorative defenses. And on not a few occasions the patient has recovered in spite of the doctor.
For human societies to organize, and to perfect that organization, there is no need for anyone to instigate. It is enough that no one obstructs or hinders. Again, it is naive to want to improve on the human and to seek to replace natural human tendencies with the contrivances of power or the waving of the conductors baton. With biological humility we anarchists ask that these organizing tendencies and instincts be given free rein.
Prejudice number seven: Placing knowledge before experience.
This is like wanting dexterity to precede training: skill to precede apprenticeship: practical experience to precede attempts or calluses to come before hard work.
We are asked from the outset to come up with a flawless system, to guarantee that things will work this way and not that, without mishap or error. If learning to live had to be done this way, then our apprenticeship would never end. Nor would the child ever learn to walk, nor the youngster to ride a bicycle. On the contrary, in real life things happen the other way around. Once begins by making a decision to work and through that work one learns. The doctor begins to practice while not yet master of this art, which is acquired through confrontation, error, and many failures. Without prior training in domestic economy, a housekeeper can keep her/his family’s heads above water through good management of an inadequate wage. One becomes a specialist by emerging from dullness little by little.
Living in libertarian communism will be like learning to live. Its weak poins and its failings will be shown up when it is introduced. If we were politicians we would paint a paradise brimful of perfections. Being human and being aware what human nature can be like, we trust that people will learn to walk the only way it is possible for them to learn: by walking.
Prejudice number eight: Politicians as intermediaries.
The worst of all prejudices is the belief that an ideal can be brought into being through the intercession of a few, even though those few may not wish to be known as politicians. Politicians content themselves with placing an inscription on the outward face of a regime and penning the new guidelines in the constitutional documents. Thus, it has been possible to pass off the Russian system as communism; and it has been possible to present Spain as a Workers’ Republic where the number of workers of all classes is eleven million (Out of a population of 24 millions. – Ed.) If it were up to the politicians to bring libertarian communism into being we would have to make do with a regime which would in no way qualify as either communist or libertarian.
As against the juggling and swindling of political action, we advocate direct action which is nothing other than the immediate realization of the idea in mind, the making of it a tangible, real fact and not some abstract written fiction or remote promise. It is the implementation by the whole itself of an agreement made by the whole, without putting itself in the hands of messiahs and without putting any trust in any intermediary.
The more we have recourse to the use of direct action and steer clear of intermediaries, the more likely will be the realization of libertarian communism.
The economic organization of society
Libertarian communism is based on the economic organization of society, economic interest being the only common bond sought between individuals in that it is the only bond on which all are agreed. The social organization of libertarian communism has no aim other than to bring into common ownership everything that goes to make up the wealth of society, namely, the means and tools of production and the products themselves and also to make it a common obligation that each contribute to that production according to their energies and their talents and then to see to it that the products are distributed among everyone in accordance with individual needs.
Anything that does not qualify as an economic function or an economic activity falls outside the competence of the organization and beyond its control. And, consequently, is open to private initiative and individual activity.
The contrast between organization based on politics, which is a feature common to all regimes based on the state, and organization based on economics, in a regime which shuns the state, could not be more radical nor more thorough. So as to bring that contrast out fully we have set out the following comparative scheme.
[Continued in Libertarian Communism pt. 2]
