Tuesday

Electoralism

Whether I wanted to give voting advice. To write that as social ecologists we should form a front with the Greens and Social Democrats. That was the question I got from someone. I had to think carefully about what I wanted to do with this. I generally think that too many left-wing people have too many expectations of electoralism. Taking part in elections is not something you do lightly and I have already been thinking that for a long time. In specific circumstances and with a well-balanced campaign and electoral program I will welcome it. The key to this lies in the municipality, the local political arena. Of course that does not mean that I just want to give up on other political arenas. I abhor a toxic atmosphere in parliaments for example, and I think that a lot needs to be done to avoid that kind of atmosphere in parliaments.

I have quite a few critical reservations about the Provo movement of the sixties, which in my opinion alienated workers too much and had too many illusions about the qualities of rebellious youth. But what the Provos did understand was that abuse of power in electoral objectives and the results thereof is best avoided. And so the Amsterdam Provos proposed a rotation principle. Elected members of the Amsterdam city council of Provo had to return their seat to the movement after a year, after which another member of Provo could take that seat for a year to represent the interests of the rebellious Provos. Provo did not exist for long and in the mid-sixties only won one seat in Amsterdam. But the successor of Provo called Kabouter had four in the city council of Amsterdam not much later.

As for voting advice: I can imagine that a voting boycott during elections can have its advantages. In a fraudulent, unfair election campaign for example. However, I can also imagine that a voting boycott sometimes does not help at all, or can have an unintended perverse effect.

Friday

Decision-Making Processes

Here you can find an excerpt of a book written by Janet Biehl at the end of the nineties. The book is called Libertarian Municipalism. The Politics of Social Ecology.

Many alternative people, especially those of a libertarian orientation, reject majority rule as a principle for decision-making because after a vote is taken, the view of the majority becomes the established policy for the whole community and thereby gains the force of law to some degree. Inasmuch as the community as a whole must conform to the decision, they argue, quite aside from individual predilections, majority rule is coercive and therefore inconsistent with individual freedom. In this view, as stated by historian Peter Marshall, “the majority has no more right to dictate to the minority, even a minority of one, than the minority’ to the majority.”

The form of decision-making most commonly proposed as an alternative is the process of consensus, which, unlike majority rule, supposedly preserves personal autonomy. In a consensus process, no decision is finalized until every member of the community agrees with it. Even one dissenter can obstruct its passage. Such obstruction is all to the good, these libertarians believe, if the dissenter’s own will differs from the view of the majority—such a person has the unconditional right to veto a decision.

Consensus decision-making has its strong points, and it may well be appropriate for small groups of people who are very familiar with one another. But when larger, heterogeneous groups try to make decisions by consensus, serious problems often arise. By prioritizing the will of the individual, the process allows small minorities, even a minority of one, to thwart decisions that the majority of the community supports. And individuals will dissent, for not every community member will agree with every given decision; nor should they do so. Conflict is endemic to politics, a sine qua non, indeed a circumstance of its existence, and dissenters are (fortunately) ever-present. Some individuals will always feel that a particular decision is not beneficial, either to their own interests or to the public good.

But communities that govern themselves by a consensus process often reach consensus by manipulating dissidents into going along with the majority position, or even coercing them sub rosa, using psychological pressure or making discreet threats. This type of coercion may not happen in public view—it could, and often does, happen outside the scrutiny of assembly. But it would be no less coercive for that, and it would be more pernicious.

When the issue in question comes up for a vote, the coerced or manipulated dissenters tend to let themselves go on public record in favour of the measure, perhaps to avoid offending the majority—despite their strong opposition to it. In that case, their very real dissent is no longer a matter of public record, a respected if failed effort. Indeed, their dissent would be erased as if it had never existed, much to the detriment of the group’s political development.

Alternatively, if dissenters cannot be pressured to change their vote, they may be successfully pressured into declining to vote at all. That is, they may “choose” to withdraw from the decision-making process on that issue—to “stand aside,” in the jargon of the consensus procedure. But this choice, in effect, nullifies the dissenter as a political being. It resolves the problem of dissent essentially by removing the dissenter from the political sphere and eliminating the dissenting view from the forum of ideas.

By insisting on unanimous agreement, consensus either intensifies conflict to the point of fracturing the community, or else it silences dissent altogether. Rather than respect minorities, it mutes them. A far more honourable and morally healthy way of handling dissent is to allow dissidents to vote openly, with high visibility, in accordance with their beliefs, with the prospect of altering the decision in the future and potentially fostering the political development of the community.

In a community where decisions are made by majority rule, the minority does indeed have to conform to the decision of the majority, lest social life disintegrate into a cacophony of fractious individuals. But the minority retains the crucial freedom to try to overturn the decision. It is free to openly and persistently articulate its reasoned disagreements in an orderly manner to the other community members, in order to try to persuade them to reconsider the decision. By dissenting, even passionately, the minority keeps an issue alive and lays the groundwork for altering a bad decision and becoming the majority in its own right, hopefully advancing the political consciousness of the community.

Dissenters will and should always exist in a free society, if it is not to sink into stagnation; at issue here is whether they will have the freedom to express their dissent. Democratic decision-making—by majority rule—assures dissenters of that freedom, inscribing their dissent in the community records as public testimony to their position.

Sunday

Benjamin Pauli and 'the New Anarchism' in Britain and the United States

'The New Anarchism in Britain and the United States: Towards a Richer Understanding of Postwar Anarchist Thought' is an interesting essay written by Benjamin Pauli in 2015. Pauli : "This article challenges the assumption that the post-war era was relatively insignificant in the development of anarchist thought. In fact, many of the most important figures within the post-war anarchist milieu in Britain and the US were concerned with questions of theory as well as practice, and their thought comprises a distinct and coherent ideological configuration of anarchism." Benjamin Pauli succeeds quite well in describing the ideas and informed practices of what he sees as 'the New Anarchism' taking a form after WWII. Still, I miss some things in it, like writing about the influences of other social ecologists than Murray Bookchin in Britain and the US, or the influences of anarchafeminist thinking in these countries (to mention only two of the currents that had quite some influence in the post-war anarchist movement of Britain and the USA). It would also have been interesting to find out how Emma Goldman influenced this 'New Anarchism'. Instead of that, Pauli has focused a bit too much on the political ideas of not only Murray Bookchin but also those of Herbert Read, Paul Goodman, Colin Ward and Noam Chomsky.


Saturday

On Communalism - short introductions




Here is my own take on it: 
If you want to understand more about communalism, texts of Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl or websites like those of New Compass and Institute for Social Ecology would be the best way to go. Communalism is quite close to social anarchism but less interested in individualist or anarchosyndicalist thinking. Unfortunately, communalism will be often confused too much with the democratic confederalism of Abdullah Öcalan but that's just not the same thing, even when Öcalan has been quite influenced by the communalist ideas of Murray Bookchin.


On the idea 'dictatorship of the proletariat'

Something I wrote today: 'Not all forms of communism will defend the idea 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Council communism has not defended that idea, to give just one example. Marx and Engels called the Commune of Paris (1871) the dictatorship of the proletariat, but it rather was a democracy. Marx wanted to give the power to the proletariat, being the majority of the people. But a dictatorship rather is a minority of people having the only power. Like in the Soviet Union, where there was only a party saying it represented the proletariat, trying to legitimize its dictatorship that way. In fact, there never was a dictatorship of the proletariat in history. 'The proletariat' is just an abstraction of a group of people not at all homogeneous.'


Mark Restall, who once was active in Social Ecology London, replied to this. 
That's incorrect about council communism, e.g. see Pannekoek in Workers Councils: http://libcom.org/library/workers-councils-1-pannekoek




My reply was this: 'Well, dictatorship of the proletariat can not be identical with the labor democracy of council organization. But I guess you are right about this in some way. I seem to remember indeed now council communists advocating for 'a dictatorship of the proletariat.'

Wayne Price also replied to what I wrote. In an email to an online discussion list he stated this:

Hello Rafa,

I agree with your statement that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never existed, and the implication that it never could exist.  Yet your brief statement on the subject makes an error.

You present the definition: "a dictatorship rather is a minority of people having the only power." This is the current definition. But in Marx's day the phrase "dictatorship" was also used to mean the rule of a colleciive body such as a parliament, the "people," the "democracy," or a reference to the classical "dictator" of ancient Rome where someone was termporarily given power to deal with an emergency, but expected to step down after the crisis was over.  

In Hal Draper's Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution: Vol. III, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Draper examines all 12 times Marx or Engels used the term, "dictatorship of the proletariat."  He shows pretty conclusively that Marx used the term to mean the "rule of the working class," without any specific implication of how that rule would be organized, let alone any assumption that it would be authoritarian.  Marx specifically counterposed the idea of the dictatorship of a popular class to the idea of the followers of Blanqui of the dictatorship of their minority revolutionary party.  And, as you state, Engels referred to the ultra-democratic Paris Commune as "the dictatorship of the proletariat."

Draper's (shorter) book, The "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" from Marx to Lenin, has a chapter which summarizes his conclusions from the earlier book.  It goes on to show how the term "dictatorship" was twisted to mean the rule of a minority party or just one person, mainly in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.  Of the post-Marx Marxists, virtually only Luxemberg used the phrase to mean the workers' democratic class rule.  (Draper is known to have been biased against anarchism, but his analysis of Marxism is pretty much accurate in its details.)

None of this denies the authoritarian elements of Marx's program:  that the working class should organize itself to take over the centralized state (either by elections or by revolution) and use it to nationalize and centralize the economy. However much Marx aimed at a socialist democracy, this program was bound to lead to state capitalism and bureaucratic rule, as the anarchists pointed out at the time.

Solidarity,
Wayne

And then also Mason Herson-Hord replied: 
Rafa, you write that "dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be identical with the labor democracy of council organization." I don't believe this is true -- this is precisely what council communists argued was the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the failed German Revolution many council communist militants used the phrases "dictatorship of the councils" and "dictatorship of the proletariat" interchangeably. They believed that the council system was the ideal institutional form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And in my reading of council communist texts I have never come across one who rejected the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is a fundamental concept to Marxist politics, and those that adopted the label of council communist during the time when it was a living movement were all staunchly Marxist to a fault.




Sunday

My most recent texts...

My most recent text in English is a book review. “Enlightenment and Ecology: The Legacy of Murray Bookchin in the 21st Century” (Black Rose Books, 2021). You can find it here. And here is one I wrote just before the covid crise broke out in Belgium (didn't see that coming unfortunately, to be honest): 'The Future of Social Ecology in Belgium'.

Monday

Belgian climate movement still growing

Yesterday the largest climate march ever in Belgium took place. Large climate protests have been attracting many young people for almost two months now, even when many people of all ages are in the streets protesting. With the ecology movement (or climate movement) becoming a large mass movement in Belgium, I have noticed that the ideas of Murray Bookchin and other social ecologists have become even more relevant than before. It's not only the ecological Left that is on the rise in Belgium but also the ecological Right. Yes, the Right is slowly becoming environmentalist too. Even when it rather keeps close connections with industrial lobby groups (investing in fossil fuels or other things that are harmful for the planet) and climate scepticists. The Belgian Right is becoming more interested in "nuclear energy solutions" and new climate technology (whether it already exists or not), stopping overpopulation, electric cars and climate taxes (for the rich as well as the poor).

Sunday

An interview with feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

on Liberal Cannibalism

Murray Bookchin on science

'Yes, I'm a product of Western culture; I believe in the importance of rationality, and yes, I believe that science is a way of arriving at the truth about objective reality. That hardly means that I think the world should be turned into a huge factory or a scientific laboratory, or even that science is the exclusive way to learn about reality. It's true that scientists can be bought and sold as easily as stockbrokers and lawyers, but science is also a very solid way of learning about reality, and it can't be regarded as totally conditioned by social factors, including bourgeois interests.' Murray Bookchin, 1999