Anarcho-communism

Radical geographers have been preoccupied with Marxism for four decades, largely ignoring an earlier anarchist tradition that thrived a century before radical geography was claimed as Marxist in the 1970s. When anarchism is considered, it is misused as a synonym for violence or derided as a utopian project. Yet it is incorrect to assume anarchism as a 'project', which instead reflects Marxian thought. Anarchism is more appropriately considered a protean process that perpetually unfolds through the insurrectionary geographies of the everyday and the prefigurative politics of direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary association. Unlike Marxism’s stages of history and revolutionary imperative, which imply an end-state, anarchism appreciates the dynamism of the social world. In staking a renewed anarchist claim for radical geography, I attend to the divisions between Marxism and anarchism as two alternative socialisms, wherein the former positions equality alongside an ongoing flirtation with authoritarianism while the latter maximizes egalitarianism and individual liberty by considering them as mutually reinforcing. Radical geographers would do well to reengage anarchism as there is a vitality to this philosophy that is missing from Marxian analyses that continue to rehash ideas–such as vanguardism and a proletarian dictatorship–that are long past their expiration date.

Abstract

This thesis asks “does existence need to be regulated by the State?” The answer relies on “legal anarchism”, an interdisciplinary and unconventional research project based on multiple methodologies (mostly criminal law, criminology, and philosophy) with a specific language. It critically analyzes and consequently rejects State law because of its unjustified and unnecessary nature founded on unlimited violence and white-collar crime (Chapters 1-4), on the one hand, and suggests some alternatives to the Governmental legal system founded on agreement and peace (Chapter 5), on the other hand. It furthermore takes into account the elements of time and space, which means the ecological, local, national, regional, and international aspects of the legal system, in its analysis, critiques, and models.

Keywords: existence, State, repression, legal system, law, punishment, anarchism, legal anarchism, anarchist alternatives

Synopsis of Thesis

The dissertation aims to demonstrate that the State is neither justifiable nor necessary. In approaching the question of whether “existence needs to be regulated by the State”, it focuses on anarchist theories, which conventional legal scholarship misunderstands or ignores, by putting forward arguments based on “legal anarchism”. The critique focuses on criminal law due to its crucial position in justifying and supporting the need for Government as the most important and solicited institution of modernity. Divided into five Chapters, the dissertation aims to understand both the epistemology and necessity of the State according to anarchist thinking. As such, the thesis canvasses the opinions about the legal system consistent with the individualist, socialist, capitalist, and synthesist libertarians. It questions why all anarchist schools of thought, except the minimalists (questionably believing in a minimal State close to anarcho-capitalism), argue against the State’s nature and justification as the exclusive source of law and order. We cannot indeed understand an anarchist society without considering these critiques of Governmental epistemology and necessity. This society struggles to avoid the overwhelming State violence and corruption that is left unchallenged, if not furthered, by the legal establishment. State legal systems are actually impotent toward the white-collar criminals, including State actors themselves, but tough vis-à-vis the blue-collar criminals. 
The research strategy engages with very diverse anarchist thinkers from the left to the right sides of the political spectrum, and from the traditional to the modern schools. In order to examine their theories and alternatives to Government, legal anarchism categorizes them into individualist (e.g., Stirner, Armand, and James Walker), socialist (e.g., Godwin, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Goldman, Berkman, Bookchin, Chomsky, Falk, and Zerzan), and capitalist anarchists (e.g., Friedman, Rothbard, Hoppe, and Stringham), without denying their degree of permeability or synthesis insomuch as they can simultaneously share certain characteristics, principally, of anarchism, individualism, socialism, marketism, and religion (e.g., Proudhon, Spooner, Tolstoy, Tucker, and Chartier). Legal anarchism does indeed use a synthetic methodology to treat the relationship among Government, humans, and non-humans, since, as various libertarian literatures emphasize, Government has monopolized the regulation of all life and death through a sophisticated system of law and punishment. Despite the fact that legal anarchism, as a dependent discipline, relies on anarchist and legal literatures, it, as an independent discipline, has its own autonomy and liberty to analyze, criticize, or develop them with its specific terminology.     
To appreciate the anarchist analysis and critique of State law requires the understanding of several key concepts central to legal anarchism. Legal anarchism defines these terms according to its synthetic methodology without limiting itself to the specific author. The key concepts include legal anarchism, existence, and the State. Legal anarchism is a multidisciplinary project exploring and challenging the conceptual and practical implications of the State and its various institutions in a fundamentally different way. It is concerned with critically analyzing the materialistic and psychological elements of law, like the role of “law addiction” and capital, both indoctrinated and ensured by conventional approaches to legal education and lawyering. State authority actually survives and develops by not only legal or illegal violence, but also propaganda. Legal anarchism regards existence as encompassing all of human and non-human living within the cosmos. This cosmic definition of existence is observable throughout the libertarians’ critiques of Government (Chapters 1-4) as well as their models (Chapter 5), due to their consideration for the life of humans and non-humans in relation to the universe. Legal anarchism describes the State as an illegitimate institution inasmuch as it does not really build upon its citizens’ consent or democracy, but upon several despotic mechanisms, particularly taxation, legalism, and militarism.               
The analysis demonstrates that State authority is neither theoretically nor practically justified. That is, neither divine representation, social contract, voting, the ethos of obeying the law, the monopolization of legitimate violence, nor the defense of liberties and rights, can save the State. It is illegitimate because it imposes itself upon the individual, society, and nature while enforcing its rules without any real agreement. First, legal anarchism demonstrates how the overregulation and brutalization of existence through sanctions produces pains for existence while guaranteeing a luxury lifestyle, founded on income inequality, for the elites. Then, it analyzes how State law produces more problems for humans and nature (e.g., pollution, the destruction of individual and social liberty as well as mutuality) than solutions. The anarchist scholars point to accepted practices of legal education and lawyering because they indoctrinate the students and produce obedience to the law, corruption, sexism, racism, corporatism, and environmental degradation. After that, legal anarchism examines why the anarchists regard the State and its legal apparatus as a stigmatizing and repressive institution toward its dissidents whereby it further delegitimizes itself in violation of its own constitutional laws.       
Due to Government illegitimacy and problems, legal anarchism concludes the necessity of its premises as the foundation for governance by advocating certain legal models focusing on individual and social agreement and liberty as well as considering the environmental and international issues of governing. These alternatives substituting the State defend an anarchist society relying on peace, decentralization, direct democracy, federalism, equality including gender equality, and ecology at communal, national, and international levels. They are however contested, particularly around questions of property rights. There is much disagreement among the libertarians about the goals and strategies of establishing an anarchist alterative or self-governance. For instance, legal anarchism shows that the marketing models of Rothbard, Friedman, Chartier, and Stringham are close to the egoist models of Stirner, Walker, and Tucker because of disregarding or ignoring the social, international, and environmental solutions that the socialist models of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin, Bookchin, Kaczynski, Chomsky, Falk, and Zerzan advocate. Unlike the socialist anarchists, the anarcho-capitalists have built their models exclusively upon the individual’s economic interest or private property, which either seriously damages or totally denies the value of the society and nature at local or international level. If certain free market anarchists, like Rothbard and Chartier, have analyzed some legal issues of the environment, their analysis has simply reduced nature to private property.               
In the end, I articulate my own suggestions and alternatives for how humanity and nature can live peacefully and harmoniously without any central Government, even though some elements of the old order relying on governmentality (e.g., the principles of criminal law) would somehow exist in the new order, but certainly not in a degree that would violate human and non-human dignity and liberty. For example, I conclude that putting the ideas of anarchism into practice, according to the principle of choice, needs more studies and critiques with a positive presentation and stimulation in academia, especially in the law school, and the mass media without fixing them in a dogmatic framework. As such, the dissertation constitutes my possible contribution to legal anarchism, its efficiency, improvement, and future to facilitate a better and safer life for humans and non-humans as well.

The essay (ostensibly a book review) is a critique.  It relates Noam Chomsky's Cartesian philosophy of language to his affirmation of an objective, universally binding morality and to his derivative affirmation of the objective moral reality of human rights.  It is also a critique of Chomsky's version of anarchism, which is found to have only a minimal basis in classical anarchist theory, and which is in an antagonistic relation to most contemporary anarchism, especially post-left anarchism.  Also criticized are Chomsky's views on political and industrial democracy.

F*ck May 68, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Radical Past from 1968 to Today

Session 1: History is a Weapon

June 8, 2018

Department of History, University of Liverpool

https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/09/04/circumnavigating-the-past-foreclosing-the-future-commemoration-of-the-radical-past-in-the-amnesiac-present/

This thesis resolves the dualism of a scientistic-deterministic Marxism and a critical-emancipatory Marxism by reinstating Marx's dialectical materialist (social-natural) ontology. Marx is shown to reconcile the two great wings of the philosophical tradition, subjectivity (will and artifice) and objectivity (reason and nature) via a praxis conception that accents the mediation of human social practice. The reinstatement of Marx's materialist dialectics establishes Marx within the tradition of socialism from below, affirming a principle of self-emancipation that is of general significance with respect to human beings as co-agents participating in a ceaselessly creative universe. Applying this dialectical integral viewpoint to specific social relations, Marx is shown to have developed a powerful practical critique of the capital system. I shall demonstrate that the point of Marx's emancipatory project was to facilitate the recovery of human subjectivity from the alienated forms within which it has come to be expressed, thus affirming conscious, creative human agency in a self-made social world. The genuine sociability of the socio-historical subject in the process of completing itself is thus affirmed against the unsocial and even anti-social external sociality associated with the atomised subject of capitalist society. I shall further argue that Marx could only go so far conceptually and theoretically in order to leave space for the reality-changing constitutive power of praxis, grounded in and bounded by a materialist (social-natural) ontology. I shall argue that Marx belongs to the tradition of ‘socialism from below’, a tradition which emphasises democratisation as a process based upon the principle of self-emancipation. This tradition is defined against the tradition of ‘socialism from above' premised on theoretico-elitist models of theory and practice. I argue that the abandonment of the principle and the practice of self-emancipation lies behind the distortions and deviations of Marxism in the twentieth century. To demonstrate this clearly it is necessary but not sufficient to expose the failures of party political and state socialism. The thesis, therefore, also identifies some deep-rooted conceptual problems in the Marxist tradition, highlighting those principles which remain pertinent to emancipatory struggles in the modern world. Marx is shown to have made the move from theory to practical struggles in order to transform the world from within its own material sphere.  Marxism can, in this sense, reclaim its relevance as a viable critical emancipatory-revolutionary project capable of being a factor in the transformation of society. And it is as such that Marxism remains the most intellectually and politically cogent hope we have in the struggle for liberation against alienative and exploitative power relations.

The thesis divides into five parts, each of which could serve as a stand-alone book in its own right. It is possible to read each of these different parts (or books) according to one's interests and concerns. At the same time, there is a unifying thread and consistency of purpose which advances a coherent view of Marx's conception as an active and integral materialism.

Part 1 Marx on the Postmodern Terrain
Part 1 sets the ‘crisis of Marxism’ in the context of the ‘crisis of Modernity’. Here I distinguish between the different views that have historically been discernible within Marxism in its dominant twentieth century formulations, emphasising Marx’s emancipatory commitment and making the case for Marx’s class analysis in light of the postmodern and post-marxist reaction against Marxism. I argue for an open Marxism based on critique, praxis, and materialist dialectics as against a closed Marxism that emphasises economic determinism, structure over agency, fetishism and alienation. I show that for Marx the world is objectified subjectivity, a field of materialist immanence. I argue that, rather than writing theory, Marx developed a critique of capital’s social metabolic order of alien control. As against the fetishisation of structures and categories and the theorisation and naturalisation of complexity, Marx shows how we may see through and break through the fetish systems of politics, power and production and recover our subjectivity. The ‘philosophy of praxis’ is thus defined against the contemplative-passive approach to knowledge.

Part 2 Active Materialism
This part can be considered central and foundational in the sense that it defines the materialist dialectic and ontology of Marx and Engels, avoiding the tendency to divide the philosophical-humanist Marx from a scientistic-naturalist Engels in order to explain the divide that opened up between a Western Marxism accenting freedom, culture, and creative agency on the one hand and the reductive, mechanical, and economist conceptions associated with the Second and Third Internationals. That division will itself be treated as a reproduction of the dualisms which express the inner contradictions of bourgeois thought and society – rationalism and moralism, naturalism and culturalism, scientism and emotivism. A marxist dialectics deriving from Marx's reconciliation and transcendence of philosophical idealism and materialism is show to reconcile the two great wings of the philosophical tradition – objectivity and subjectivity. A crucial part of the argument involves a positive evaluation of Engels' attempt to extend the dialectic to nature, showing how this extension is perfectly in keeping with the integral conception of Marx's social-natural ontology. The loss of the natural dialectic is shown to skew the character of the social dialectic, losing the anchoring of praxis in reality and inviting a reversion to idealism on the one side and relapse into mechanical materialism on the other.

Part 3 Revolutionary-Critical Praxis
This part argues for Marx’s critical and transformatory ‘philosophy of praxis’ as against the contemplative-passive approach to knowledge. I show how Marx’s praxis entails the democratisation of politics, philosophy, and power, subverting alienation, fetishism and determinism. I argue for a dialectic of structure and struggle, showing how values are central to Marx’s dialectic. I show how Marx incorporated the active side of idealism into his materialist conception.

Part 4 Agency and Structure
Part 4 employs Marx’s active and affirmative materialism against naturalism and positivism. The argument examines capitalist crisis as a crisis transformative potential, demonstrating socialism as an immanent potentiality for Marx, whose realisation required the self-development of proletarian autonomy and subjectivity.

Part 5 Alienation and Rationalisation
Part 5 develops Marx’s teleology of labour to make the case against the alienating separations and dualism of the capital system . This part compares and contrasts Marx’s critique of alienation with the rationalisation thesis of Max Weber, showing how the substantive irrationality and unnatural spirit of capital's fetish relations expresses a class rationality that can only be overcome by locating the problems not in an ahistorical reason – the rationalism of bourgeois thought, inviting an impotent moralism in respose - but in an alienated system of production. I show how Marx affirms the everyday social world of reciprocity and solidary exchange against the violence and tyranny of abstraction. In the process, I develop a concept of social self-determination as against capital's objective determinism, overcoming the monopolisation of power/alienation of control under the capital system through an emphasis on practical-sensuous experience embodied in the conscious, collective control of social relations.

I review the book The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics (2012) by Deric Shannon, Anthony J. Nocella II and John Asimakopoulos. This book is a collection of essays written by various authors who fall within the Libertarian Socialist tradition. This is the short version of the review which appeared in print, a lengthy version has been posted online through our website, see here :

https://syndicalist.us/2020/10/20/accumulation-of-freedom-writings-on-anarchist-economics/

Introduced to spiritualism around the age of fourteen when apprenticed as a master saddler in Eastern Bohemia, František Kupka was also inducted into animal magnetism while working as a “successful medium” in both Prague and Vienna in spiritualist séances.  So successful was Kupka that he was able to earn his living as a medium sufficiently to pay for his art classes at both the Prague and Viennese Academies and to support his study of alchemy, astrology and theosophy.  Adept at going into trances, Kupka was able to perform as a conduit of ‘psychic energy’ purportedly passing between the world of living humans and those of the dead or of spirits. He also seems to have been aware of the ways in which animal magnetism could be used to heal the body, particularly through the attachment of magnets to it and the stretching out of hands above the body to direct magnetic fluid in ‘passes’ in order for ‘emanation’ − a term often used by Kupka − to be discharged. While his experiences as a medium were intensified by Kupka’s exposure to Buddhists, Spiritualists and Theosophist in Vienna and Paris, his knowledge of magnetism was able to grow in new dimensions when he came into contact with the intensive investigations of its power over the body and unconscious mind conducted by neurologists, scientists and parapsychologists in Paris at the fin-de-siècle.

By the time that Kupka arrived in Paris, far from animal magnetism having long abated, as is so often assumed, the opposite had ensued. Not only was it flourishing at Salpêtrière, Bicêtre, Hôtel Dieu and the Charité, but it was also practiced by the physicist and parapsychologist, Hippolyte Baraduc; the astronomer and psychic researcher, Camille Flammarion; the physician who founded the Nancy Suggestion School, Auguste Liébault, and such parapsychologists as Colonel Albert de Rochas and Émile Magnin. Given its extensive practice alongside the burgeoning of electromagnetism, radioactivity and Flammarion’s ‘cosmic magnetism’, this period has been aptly called neo-magnetism. As it thrived, neo-magnetism intersected with Spiritism, Mediumism, Theosophy, Neo-Lamarckian Transformism, Bergsonian vitalism and the new sciences of electromagnetism, radioactivity and X-rays in their utopian aspirations for corporeal regeneration and superconsciousness. It also intercepted with Kupka’s identity as a Buddhist, Theosophist and medium, as well as an anarcho-communist who endorsed Élisée Réclus’ and Pieter Kropotkin’s theories of a decentralized political economy based on mutual aid and neo-Lamarckian evolutionism and who pursued a dialectical art praxis based on “propaganda of the deed”.

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943

This index of my major forthcoming work In the Shadow of a Hurricane presented below (updated September 2023 to include South Asia and Palestine, and again in June 2024 to include East Timor and Andorra) and detailing all the anarchist and similar organisations discussed in my half-million-word text should alone lay forever to rest the false notions that "anarchists don't organise" or that it is purely a European and North American phenomenon.

English:  Peter Kropotkin was one of the most theorists of anarchism, a respected scholar and a leading representative of the so-called Russian (Eastern) Darwinism . Merging political and scientific ambition by the “anarchist prince” underlaid his scientism and was an assumption for making a critical analysis of existing socio-economic reality in the light  of its influence on the biological and moral condition of humankind . The Russian anarchist was convinced about the destructive influence of conditions produced by the state and capitalism which he found as the fundamental cause of human degeneration . In this context, Kropotkin’s political proposals may be seen as a try to overcome a progressing both biological and moral crisis of humankind . The aim of this article is to present the mentioned analysis and to demonstrate the influence and similarities of Kropotkin’s project to the so-called theory of degeneration that was popular in the second half of XIX century.


Polski: Piotr Kropotkin był jednym z najważniejszych teoretyków anarchizmu, a także szanowanym naukowcem oraz czołowym przedstawicielem tzw . darwinizmu rosyjskiego (wschodniego) . Łączenie ambicji politycznej i naukowej przez „anarchistycznego księcia” legło u podstaw jego scjentyzmu, a także stanowiło asumpt do dokonania krytycznej analizy istniejącej rzeczywistości społeczno-ekonomicznej pod kątem jej wpływu na kondycję biologiczną i moralną gatunku ludzkiego . Rosyjski anarchista był bowiem przekonany o destrukcyjnym wpływie warunków generowanych  przez  państwo  i  kapitalizm,  które  miały  stanowić zasadniczą  przyczynę  degeneracji  człowieka .  W  tym  też  kontekście wysuwane przez Kropotkina propozycje polityczne postrzegać można jako próbę przezwyciężenia postępującej zapaści, zarówno biologicznej, jak i moralnej, ludzkości . Celem niniejszego artykułu jest przedstawienie wspomnianej analizy, a także ukazanie wpływu i podobieństw kropotkinowskiego projektu z popularną w drugiej połowie XIX w. tzw. teorią degeneracji

Świat Idei i Polityki, t. 18

The complete Lightning Storm Mind: Pre-Ancientist Meditations, extensively illustrated with images by Michel Varisco, is forthcoming from Autonomedia.  The few excerpts included here were published in Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol 6, No 1 & 2 (2016): 55-56 in an issue on "The Mediterranean Imaginary."

Résumé : En Espagne, pour préserver l'alliance antifasciste avec les républicains et autres forces de gauche, notamment avec l'Union générale des travailleurs (UGT) d'obédience socialiste, la Confédération nationale du travail (CNT) renonce en juillet-août 1936 à son objectif d'instaurer le communisme libertaire, pourtant longuement discuté et adopté lors de son congrès en mai. Toutefois, la base militante procède dès le mois d'août à la collectivisation ou socialisation des moyens de production, revendiquée depuis le XIX e siècle. Face aux exigences d'une économie de guerre et en raison des concessions faites, le fédéralisme autogestionnaire des premiers jours cède vite la place à une centralisation d'inspiration productiviste et à une bureaucratisation syndicale, qui déroutent les militants anarchistes. Les conquêtes sociales du mois d'août sont grignotées, le syndicat se transformant en un nouveau patron toujours plus exigeant à l'égard des travailleurs. Après un détour par les résolutions des congrès relatives à la collectivisation et à la définition du communisme libertaire, l'article analyse les limites de la transformation révolutionnaire dans l'industrie du cuir à Barcelone, où la CNT était en position de force, ce qui n'était pas le cas sur le plan national, mais où elle s'est malgré tout alignée sur l'UGT.
Abstract
In July-August of 1936, in order to preserve the antifascist alliance with the republicans and other left-wing forces, especially the socialist General Union of Workers (UGT), the Spanish National Confederation of Labour (CNT) renounces its aim to establish the libertarian communism, despite lengthy discussions and approval during its May congress. However, from August, the militant base carries out the collectivization or socialization of the means of production that had been called for since the XIXth century. Due to the requirements of a war economy, and because of the concessions made, the federalist joint worker-management control established at the beginning is soon replaced by a productivist centralization and a union bureaucratization, that throws out the anarchist militants. The social advances of August are gradually eroded, and the union becomes a new boss demanding ever more from the workers. After examining the congress resolutions about collectivization and the definition of the libertarian communism, this article analyses the limits of the revolutionary transformation in the leather industry in Barcelona where the CNT was predominant, as opposed to the national scene, but where, despite all, changes conformed to the line of the UGT.

This text was written as a preface for the new edition of “Pour un municipalisme libertaire,” the French translation of “Theses on Libertarian Municipalism,” published by the Atelier de Création Libertaire in Lyon, and also appears on my Changing Suns Press and PM Press blogs.

Besides the biographies of the outstanding personalities before or after the instauration of the communist regime in Romania, we would like to submit the life and the activity of a communist member during illegality. Despite the fact that he was not an elite leading member, after the accesion to power of the communists, Bernard Zukerman surprise with his fight for the cause of communism. He represents one of the communists who activated during illegality and he can be integrated with those who had an upside-down destiny.
With this study we would like to mark out his activity during the time when the Communist Party from Romania was illegal. From the entire period Bernard Zukerman was emprisoned, our attention is restraind on the description of Aiud prison, document dating from 2nd November 1967 which we reproduced it fully.
This paper had two parts. The first one creates a short portrait of Bernard Zukerman, based on archival sources. The second one is a representation of Aiud prison in the interwar period written in 1967. The document published above is important in the information that provide. It is also an evaluation of a professional revolutionary’s life, as it was seen by himself.

Keywords: Communist Party of Romania, Bernard Zukerman, illegality, communism, Aiud prison.

INDEX:
1. INTRODUCTION
2. ON AUTHORITY
3. ON ELECTIVE POSTCAPITALIST EXPERIMENTS AND THE REJECTION OF AUTHORITY
4. ON THE REJECTION OF POLITICS AND WORKERS' EMBOURGEOISEMENT
5. ON THE POLITICAL DIFFERENCES AMONG POSTCAPITALISTS
6. ON MONEY
7. ON VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE: THE LAW OF VALUE
8. ON "COST THE LIMIT OF PRICE"
9. CONCLUSIONS: THE MARKET MECHANISM