Social Anarchism, Individualist Anarchism, the State and Leninism

Posted on June 4, 2009, filed Under Rebel Legacies, WSA. Leave a Comment

A Reply to the International Socialist Organization
by Tom Wetzel (Mar 12, 2009) (from my ZNet blog)

I was prompted to write this by Paul D’Amato’s two recent articles in Socialist Worker criticizing anarchism
(http://socialistworker.org/2009/02/27/refusing-to-be-ruled-over), and
(http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/06/marxist-view-of-the-state) but this will also give me the
opportunity to provide an explanation of some basic social anarchist ideas. I take it that
social or Left-anarchism and libertarian socialism are the same thing. Thus I use the
phrases “social anarchism” and “libertarian socialism” interchangeably.

Read more

Spanish Dock Workers Build Union Without Bureaucrats

Posted on December 29, 2008, filed Under Rebel Legacies. Comments Off

by Don Fitz

This article was published in ideas & action #11, Summer, 1989.

Containerization has devastated port labor throughout the world. Spanish struggles over containerization have been unique becausea “socialist” government has spearheaded port reorganization and it has met stiff resistance from the revolutionary union of longshoremen, La Coordinadora. Coordinadora’s unique combination of hiring hall job rotation, industrial unionism, and Spanish anarcho-syndicalist assemblyism has earned it a reputation as one of the most democratic labor organizations anywhere in the world.

The Technological Marvel

Maritime unions have historically been strong in Spain because ports are a nerve center for its economy. At one time, longshoring provided jobs for 20,000 men. They worked in tight-knit groups, making sure that cargo was hauled in and stacked properly. But the days of lifting bundles of cowhides, rolling barrels, and wheeling crates on dollies are two decades past. Cargo is now packed into 40′ x 8′ x 8′ containers (the smaller sizes are 20′ long). Straddle carriers, giant forklifts and cranes load containers into ships or unload them directly onto trucks and trains.

 “The unity maintained during our difficult strike [in 1976] taught us that this unity was too precious to be destroyed by endless sloganeering and sectarianism. We understood that our decisions could not be delegated to union bureaucrats.”To hand over our proletarian responsibility to representatives is to throw away our need as a class to participate in social transformation. We realized that we would never arrive at the social revolution through leaders or liberators. Those caught up in and distracted by the obligations of their positions and the representative function they flaunt end up distancing themselves from those they represent. As they are not affected by the same problems, troubles or struggles, they end up almost unable to to recognize them. The estrangement is inevitable.

“We want this to be an organization of unity and struggle which shuns bureaucratization and bosses. All decisions are to be arrived at through the assembly. No one is obligated to belong to it, neither are they excluded from it. Being dockers is what counts.” — OEPB (Barcelona affiliate of La Coordinadora)

Read more

The anarchist origins of May Day

Posted on December 29, 2008, filed Under Rebel Legacies. Comments Off

TODAY IT IS just another bank holiday in the UK and is not even recognized in the United States. Not many people know why May Day became International Workers Day and why we should still celebrate it. One more piece of our history which has been hidden from us. Read more

ITALY 1920

Posted on December 29, 2008, filed Under Rebel Legacies. Comments Off

When 600,000 workers seized control of their workplaces

The following article was originally presented as a talk at the Conference on Workers’ Self-Organization in St. Louis in 1988. © Tom Wetzel

During the month of September, 1920, a widespread occupation of Italian factories by their workforces took place, which originated in the auto factories, steel mills and machine tool plants of the metal sector but spread out into many other industries — cotton mills and hosiery firms, lignite mines, tire factories, breweries and distilleries, and steamships and warehouses in the port towns.

But this was not a sit-down strike; the workers continued production with their own in-plant organization. And railway workers, in open defiance of the management of the state-owned railways, shunted freight cars between the factories to enable production to continue. At its height about 600,000 workers were involved.

This movement blew up out of a conventional trade union struggle over wages. But the wage demands were only the official occasion for the fight; the real aspirations and desires that motivated the workers involved in this struggle go much deeper.(1) Read more

Workers Power and the Russian Revolution

Posted on December 29, 2008, filed Under Rebel Legacies. Comments Off

A review of Maurice Brinton’s For Workers Power

By Tom Wetzel

I was attracted to radical politics in the late 1960s/early ’70s when I was in my twenties. Most of the people who were drawn to serious revolutionary politics back then ended up in Leninist organizations of some sort, if only for a time. Third World revolutions were one influence. Various Marxist-Leninist parties had come to power based on guerrilla struggles, in places like China and Cuba, and this augmented the claim of Leninism that it was “successful” in charting a way to a post-capitalist future.

But it seemed obvious to me that workers did not have power in production in the various Communist countries. They’re subordinated to a managerial hierarchy. Thus, I reasoned, workers must be a subjugated and exploited class in those countries.

A work I found particularly helpful in the ’70s was Maurice Brinton’s The Bolsheviks and Workers Control. This clear-headed and well-researched little book was an indispensable source of arguments to explode the myth of the Bolshevik party building “proletarian power” in Russia. AK Press has now re-issued this booklet as part of an anthology, For Workers Power. Brinton was the main writer for the London libertarian socialist group Solidarity. This anthology collects in one place many of Brinton’s writings, including The Irrational in Politics and Paris: May 1968. In this review I’ll mainly focus on the Russian revolution. Read more