THIS WAY UP

(Part Two of 'Everybody's Happy Nowadays', Part One here.)

”History has just begun”
- The Ex

“Let's change the future from here”
- Atari Teenage Riot

”Nobody will give you freedom, you have to take it”
- Meret Oppenheim

(The story so far: Back when our side fought the class war more acutely, we had near-universal benefits, pensions and healthcare, and better protection in the workplace. Now we're fighting less, and by a remarkable coincidence all of that's being eroded. But how did we come to be losing like this? And even then wasn’t it that we didn’t have it good, just less bad? How come we ever put up with this situation in the first place?) 

It’s notable how in practice people slip back and forth between saying “we live freely in a democracy” and “but you can’t ever touch the rich, why bother trying?”, despite them being so clearly contradictory. But the puzzle’s soon solved. It’s a matter of starting off with the obvious-sounding conclusion then going back to the working-out. Both assert nothing is to be done, so we might as well stay sitting where we are. Which takes us to the real question. Why the need for such ‘rationalisations’?

While the thing they’re busily not saying is “capitalism’, the thing they are busy saying is “human nature”. This is known as the naturalistic fallacy, the notion that if something is that’s proof in itself it out to be. To want to change things is to go against some fundamental order, like defying gravity.

In a classic example, in the film ‘Dr. Zhivago’ the revolutionary Pacha (played by Tom Courtney) curtly insists “people will be different after the revolution”. And if we’re presented at all in the mainstream media it’s usually as some form of this - equal parts fanatical and unworldly.

Yet there’s abundant evidence of mutual aid being practiced. What, for example, about food banks? Their spread is often taken as an inevitable consequence of hunger. Yet people must set them up, others must donate to them and still others volunteer in them. You could look at these examples and assume the truth’s the very opposite. We are not greedy, its just the greedy telling us we are. So our nature must not be bad but good.

But ultimately that just makes the same mistake the other way up. Yes, history shows there were those who risked their own lives to hide those in danger from Nazis. But it shows others grassing them up, even - in no small numbers - murdering them themselves, in order to take their property. It’s not enough to find a few surface examples, and then try to apply some universal rule.

When faced with such reductive simplicities we shouldn’t reverse but transcend them. We need to reject altogether the confining notion we are limited to some kind of “nature”. Nature is here being used as a synonym for essence, or set of inherent qualities, as if we’ve been made in a mould. In this sense it can only be applied to objects. Geologists classify rocks according to their structure, and the job’s done. Whereas even other animals have a culture, in that they can adapt or innovate, choose to do one thing or another.

But to go back to the Pacha quote, the thing is – he’s right. People would be different. After so seismic an event as a revolution, how could they not? ‘Human nature’ isn’t natural at all. It’s human, by definition. It is, and always has been, a social construct. We make our nature, by creating its conditions.

Our bodies are quite literally composed of what we consumed through our lives. An archaeologist can come across human remains and, by analysis of its bone and teeth, deduce where and how that person lived. Should our minds be any different? Isn’t our upbringing, the people we’ve met and our experiences of life, the best guide to understanding what makes us ourselves? Doesn’t that sound more credible than us being like sticks of seaside rock, with the same few words written right through us? And why should this not also apply collectively? History books talk freely of how, for example, life became different after the Second World War.

Zoologists how now effectively given up studying animals in captivity, as it’s so unconnected to their behaviour in the wild. Yet Sociology has done nothing but study humans in captivity since its inception. As Marx said “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.”

Besides, isn’t there a bizarre twist to this? While it’s supposedly a foolish fancy to imagine we can “change human nature”, the existence of Capitalism itself proves the opposite. Capitalism replaced Feudalism, a quite different system of social organisation which required people to adopt a quite different “nature”. For the main argument it uses against us to be true, it couldn’t be here to make it in the first place.

So wage labourers under capitalism act and think as wage labourers, just as peasants think and act as peasants and tribespeople as tribespeople. Limited historical perspective can hide this truth from us, but once pointed out it becomes obvious. They call us hopeless idealists, when we’re the real materialists! 

So this mean a communist society would reshape us until we we’re all neat nuggets of altruism, slaving selflessly for the pubic good, scrubbed clean of any traces of individual identity? No of course it doesn’t! But then such a parodic notion was never anything to do with communism in the first place.

We need to ask, all this supposed individualism, but what’s in it for us? We want communism precisely because we are the ones who will benefit from it, because we will gain control of our lives not lose it. It’s your boss at work who tells you “there’s no I in team”, when he wants you to work harder for no more reward. It’s us who tell you there is an I in communism.

The legendary Pop Group liked to sing “only you can be your liberator”. And the way we live now, putting yourself at the centre of your life is in itself virtually a radical act. But you can’t carry out that act alone, you need to work in accord with others or you’ll be easily beaten down. It may sound a paradox. But it’s because we’ve always been told an inherent division exists, between ‘the individual’ and ‘society’, a chasm which we must leave to wise heads as something only they can manage. Might there be times conflicts can arise? Of course. Is it inherent? Effectively, the opposite. ‘The individual’ needs ‘society’, and vice versa.

Marx and Engels always insisted “the free development of each becomes the condition of the free development of all.” Bakunin was more eloquent still: “no tree ever brings forth two leaves that are exactly identical. How much more will this be true of men, men being much more complicated creatures than leaves. But such diversity, far from constituting an affliction is… one of the assets of mankind. Thanks to it, the human race is a collective whole wherein each human being complements the rest and has need of them; so that this infinite variation in human beings is the very cause and chief basis of their solidarity.”

And there’s a second way their argument is self-defeating. It may be true that none of us are selfless saints. But then what does that say about the wisdom of handing vast reserves of power and wealth over to a few individuals, in the hope they then use some of that back for the betterment of the rest of us? Or making some order-givers on the assumption they’ll legislate for the greater good?

The most infamous example of this is the orange goon Trump. Remember how every “sensible” political pontificator was telling us that first securing the nomination, then assuming the Presidency would lead him to become “more Presidential”, the burden of office straightening him out. Of course it was the opposite. Being born into such a position of power was the very thing which had made him such a grasping psychopath. So, strangely enough, granting him more power didn’t prove much of a cure. Its like saying the cure for alcoholism is more booze.

But as ever he’s just a more egregious example of a general rule. Power corrupts, we see the evidence all around us. It’s true to say that it couldn’t do so unless we were corruptible. But the sensible answer to that is - let’s minimise the chances of corruptibility!

Okay, you reply, but whose going to do the work?

The answer in brief is – who do you see doing it now?

You hear all the time people complaining against (real or, more commonly, imagined) “scroungers” and “shirkers”. They say they want to see these “idlers” getting a job, contributing to society, doing something useful. Yet if you ask the self-same people whether they feel they are contributing or doing something useful in their own jobs, you’re either met with a stupefied look or a diatribe over how much they hate the whole valueless experience. And that disconnection is the very point. Work is so awful for me, why should others get to escape it?

Almost everybody knows the Marxist phrase that we’re “alienated from the means of production”. And of course it’s very true. The factory worker who tightens widgets all day, or the call centre operative who ceaselessly repeats their script, both feel disassociated from what they do. This remains the case even if they’re in one of the few remaining jobs which have an actual social value. We’re doing things not of our choosing, under conditions not of our making, simply so we can survive. How is that likely to make us feel?

But Marx didn’t stop there, where everybody thinks he did. He went on to describe how the situation also left the worker alienated from him or her self, was unable to interact with the world in a way they chose, was therefore unable to fulfil themself. We don’t just live in a world where the things we create and enable don’t belong to us. We live in a world where, in a material sense, we don’t belong to us either.

There’s a thing you have which you must sell, if you’re to get by in the world. And that thing you must sell is you. Ever seen a thing you used to own, disconnected from you, for sale in a shop window? Now imagine that thing is you. Estranged from even your own self, of course you come to feel estranged from others.

The paradox is almost unparalleled. We are the engine of it all, every day we are the fuel which obligingly pours itself in - and only then can the machine run. But we appear to ourselves as the passengers. It’s the backbreaking business of labour, combined with the passive feeling of being strapped in your seat.

As Malatesta commented: “Someone whose legs had been bound from birth but had managed nevertheless to walk as best he could, might attribute his ability to move to those very bonds which in fact serve only to weaken and paralyse the muscular energy of his legs…. Just imagine if the doctor were to expound… a theory, cleverly illustrated with a thousand invented cases to prove that if his legs were freed he would be unable to walk and would not live, then that man would ferociously defend his bonds and consider as his enemy anyone who tried to remove them.” That’s where we are.

Exploitation and alienation are the two fists that maintain the abusive relationship we endure with capital. Yet alienation has a particular twist. Alienation is simultaneously a form of psychological damage and the justification for that damage, the gaslighting voice that tells us this abusive relationship is all we have so we should cling to it.

Yet, as that great philosopher Homer Simpson said, “it’s a crummy system, but what you gonna do?”

The first step to overcome this alienation is to act for ourselves. A Reclaim The Streets flyer for an action in support of the (then striking) London Tube workers craftily modelled itself on the Tube map handouts. Under the header ‘Mind The Gap (Between What is Possible and What Capitalism Allows)’ they said:

“If we want another world we’ve got to stop maintaining this one through our action and inaction. The power of our rulers is based on the fact that they have separated us from each other, and we act as alienated individual workers and as passive consumers. By endlessly repeating the same patterns – paying our fares and bills, going to work, watching the world unfold on TV – we recreate the world every day. Today we attempt for a brief period to upset the normal pattern, to feel the power that we have when we act together… Workers can bring this world to a halt.” 

It’s a good first step. Yet life is more complicated and, unfortunately but inevitably, to talk about what communism is necessity compels us to start with what it isn’t. This goes beyond the inevitable distortions of black propagandists. The sad truth is that very few people alive today claim to be communists and very few people even know what communism is. And sometimes this seems particularly true among those who claim to be communists.

Mention the word and expect the Soviet Union to be thrown in your face. Even today, thirty-five years after its passing. There are those able to see the obvious truth that it wasn’t at all communist, some even able to grasp the more important point that it was capitalist. But mostly they still cling to the notion that ‘central planning’ becomes at some point antithetical to capitalism. Then, when you ask them where Marx says such a thing, they’ll hurriedly change the subject. This fixation with central control is what Bordiga called “the mistaken thesis”: 

“Constructing industrialism and mechanising things is supposedly the same as building socialism whenever central and ‘national’ plans are made… The difference between the employment of mechanical forces in a capitalist society and in a socialist one is not quantitative, it does not lie in the fact that technical and economic management passes from restricted circles to a complete circle. It is qualitative and consists in the total overthrow of the capitalist characteristics of the use of machines by human society, something much more thoroughgoing and which consists in a ‘relationship between men’ in opposition to the cursed ‘factory system’ and the social division of labour.”

And Marx himself said the very opposite to the words so often stuffed in his mouth: “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.” (Okay, “man” should be “human”, he was writing a while ago.) His conception of Communism was “a free association of producers under their own conscious and purposive control.”

The revolutionary subject is not the plan but ourselves. Inasmuch as there is such a thing as revolutionary plans, its because we make them. We make them ourselves and make them for ourselves. We are not ancillary or subservient to them. They are subservient to us.

But what would this free association of producers actually look like? How do these high-sounding ideas fare against reality?

Most people seem to assume there’s an intrinsic link between authority and organisation. Fascist societies might have been repressive, but you can’t deny they got things done. Whereas anyone who’s actually studied actual fascist societies knows they were effectively the opposite - fractious, chaotic and corrupt. The famous formulation that Mussolini made the trains run on time was a baseless propaganda line, still repeated now all these decades later. Whereas during the Spanish revolution, anarchist workers collectivised the Barcelona trams - and they did run on time.

This is George Orwell's description of the workers' militias he encountered during that time, as recounted in 'Homage To Catalonia':

“The essential point of the system was social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious…. each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. 

”…there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society....”

”Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never 'work', but as a matter of fact it does 'work' in the long run… 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness - on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square.” 

”The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear. And it is a tribute to the strength of 'revolutionary' discipline that the militias stayed in the field at all. For... there was nothing to keep them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be shot - were shot, occasionally - but if a thousand men had decided to walk out of the line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript army in the same circumstances - with its battle-police removed—would have melted away.”

A more nuts-and-bolts explanation of the working mechanisms of workers’ collectives in Spain states... 

“...the individual collective was based on a mass assembly of those who worked there. This assembly nominated administrative staff who were mandated to implement the decisions of the assembly and who had to report back to, and were accountable to, that assembly... So, in general, the industrial collectives were organised from the bottom-up, with policy in the hands of workers’ assemblies… [which] were widely attended and regularly held... if an administrator did something which the general assembly had not authorised, he was likely to be deposed at the next meeting.”

I’ve picked the Spanish revolution because it’s the best known example. But there’s frequent examples of such things throughout history, Wikipedia gives a brief list here. 

Let’s spell out clearly something which shouldn’t really need saying - this is not some magic cure-all which, as soon as unleashed, dispenses with all ills. The problems, issues and debates which came up in Spain and elsewhere have been widely discussed, should anyone want to read about them.

Nevertheless, the examples above give widespread practical examples of something we’re always being told is an impossibility. It is, it might be argued, somewhat in the interests of those currently controlling our lives to tell us that we couldn’t do the job better ourselves. When, most of the time, we’d be harder pressed to do it worse.

But of course we no longer live in 1936. Historical accounts of this period may make for compelling narratives, but as guides for action today do they hold any real relevance? Accounts of the more recent anti-austerity movement in Spain inevitably focus on their negatives, or on their likely effect on electoral politics. Yet popular assemblies not only reappeared, arranged along broadly the same lines, but in the same neighbourhoods – for example at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.

The CNT, a revolutionary union still in existence, said of these:

”The organizational formulas developed in these mobilizations prove the viability of direct participation through assemblies for taking decisions that channel our aspirations and demands and make us overcome individualism. We become protagonists, rather than spectators of a system based in representation and delegating authority, which erases our individuality. Assemblies, a rotating microphone, working groups, responsibility, capacity, organization, self-responsibility, coordination, involvement and visibility are the collective teeth that move our gears, capable of challenging the institutions… We continue to build at the same time as we disobey. The protest continues!”

Next time! Tune in for our final thrilling instalment...