The political formation of revolutionaries of my generation and the one immediately preceding it was deeply affected by our experience of the Russian revolution. For the first time in history the working class of a vast country had taken power, abolished the domination of capital, and begun to construct a new society – a society which, before the eyes of the world proletariat, could become a new society, a socialist society.

Revolutionaries today are, of course, still aware of the historical significance of the Russian revolution and of its impact on the twentieth century. At the same time, however, because of the bureaucratic degeneration which has superimposed itself on the conquests of the October revolution, it no longer acts as a concrete inspiration to the international workers’ movement, and particularly to the proletariat of the imperialist countries.

The difference is sharply illustrated by an opinion poll which was recently conducted in France to investigate what proportion of the population were in favour of socialism and which ‘model’ of socialism they would choose. More than half those interviewed wanted a socialist society but less than five per cent declared themselves for a society modelled on the Soviet Union. In a country where the French Communist Party (PCF) receives some 20 per cent of the popular vote, these figures are extremely revealing. Even amongst militants of the pro-Moscow Communist Party, the form of social organisation which prevails in the Soviet Union has evidently lost its appeal as a model – an ideal to be extended throughout the whole world.

What is more, it is precisely this sort of development which gives the neo-reformist parties of Western Europe a basis on which to justify their right opportunist policies. They declare that the Russian road to socialism is not applicable to Western Europe but, in so doing, they deliberately seize the opportunity to confuse two quite distinct issues. By reducing the ‘peaceful road to socialism’ and the model on which to build socialist society to one single question, they attempt to win workers to an automatic acceptance of the former through their rejection of the latter.

The great influence of the concept of workers’ self-management in the Western European labour movement also flows from the same basic fact. It is influential precisely because the majority of wage-earners want a socialist society, accept the necessity of transforming the framework of society; and are instinctively – and, in the case of a small layer, consciously – searching for an alternative to the Soviet model.

Should Revolutionary Marxists Support Self-Management?

The idea of self-management is, from the very start, a confused one. What most people instinctively understand by it is a society in which relatively small groups, like workers in a single factory, organise all aspects of the running of their individual units. Health workers or teachers, for example, would thus organise at the level of their hospitals or schools, while consumers would be organised in boroughs or districts.

Quite clearly, this simplistic view of self-management is not of Marxist origin, but rather has its roots in Proudhon and anarcho-syndicalism. This goes a long way towards explaining why the initial reaction of revolutionary Marxists has been, almost everywhere in Europe, one of suspicion and even outright hostility. Confronted with the choice between ‘bureaucratic socialism’ and ‘self-management socialism’, we have tended to reject both alternatives in favour of a third one of our own.

In retrospect, it seems to me that this was an intellectually, psychologically and, above all, politically incorrect reaction based upon an underestimation of the resonance which the conception of self-management would find in the West European labour movement and particularly in its left wing. This is why, several years ago, we agreed to change our line of attack. Now we say that not only do we fully support the idea of self-management but that it is, in fact, we alone who are for real self-management. Other projects which have been put forward of piecemeal self-management or by Proudhonist and anarcho-syndicalist currents constitute no more than a mere façade of real self-management. They simply give workers the illusion of self-management while actually obscuring a whole series of fundamental questions about the dynamics of economic and social existence in our epoch.

Our basic position, then, is that we squarely reject the type of bureaucratic socialism in which the working class does not really exercise power, and fully support the idea of self-management to the extent that it embodies one very simple and fundamental premise: the workers must exercise power at all levels of society – at the level of the factory, at the level of the economy, in the non-productive spheres of social life and, above all, at the level of the state.

Self-Management Cannot Be Reduced to Workers Managing Their Individual Factories

This leads us to a fundamental critique of those who advocate socialist self-management within individual factory units which, in practice, essentially amounts to no more than workers organising production and the allocation of the social surplus at the level of their factories. Proponents of this sort of self-management are, at best, utopians and, at worst, the sort of leaders who, realising what this sort of ‘self-management’ means, use it for their own ends.

The best example of this is, indubitably, that developed by the Titoists in Yugoslavia, who have created an illusion of self-management which they equate with the distribution of decision-making powers among the mass of producers and consumers. On the one hand, they insist (and this is the very latest version of Titoism) that self-management is taking place not only at the level of the factory but even in each workshop and on each assembly-line, while, on the other, they insist even more strenuously that this must be counterbalanced by the ever-greater concentration of political power in the hands of the Yugoslav League of Communists and in their hands alone.

It is clear in this case that the fragmentation of the workers’ economic power is a necessary precondition for the bureaucracy to retain a monopoly of power. These are just two sides of the same coin. It is precisely through posing such a totally atomised caricature of self-management on a scale which renders it impotent that the bureaucracy can deprive the workers of political power at the level of the economy as a whole and concentrate it in their own hands.

This is why we maintain that to restrict self-management to single factories, let alone workshops or assembly-lines, is to reduce it to a mere façade.

We Shall Inherit a Technology with a Powerful Centralising Tendency

The present level of the productive forces corresponds to a specific technology. We are not worshippers of this technology and, at the risk of seeming revisionist, I would say that, unlike comrade Lenin, we do not admire Taylorism or the assembly line and, above all, that we do not consider this to be the only possible form of advanced technology. It is a bourgeois myth that there is no alternative to the technology presently utilised in production. It is true that this technology is the one which provides the highest return on capital, but this does not make it the only one possible. It is quite possible to conceive of a scale of technologies based on any particular level of political and economic development. For the engineers and technologists of the colonial revolution this is often posed as an immediate problem. For example, in Cuba, where there aren’t enough oil-based resources, the economists, inventors, engineers and chemists were faced with the need to develop in place of a petro-chemical industry a sucro-chemical industry, that is to say a chemical industry based upon the waste products of sugar. Similar examples of technological innovations and revolutions are to be found in any other colonial or semi-colonial country.

It is, however, clear that while (in common with the anarchists) we hope one day to have a technology which allows relatively reduced units (to use Engels’ formulation) of 20,000 or 30,000 producers and consumers to live not autarchically but in such a way that they can control most of their affairs autonomously, present-day technology does not allow for this.

To look at a couple of examples: electrical generating stations which employ 200 or 300 workers and technicians supply electricity to half a million people; one single machine can produce enough paper to satisfy the needs of one and a half to two million people. It is quite untenable to suggest that the economic problems related to this production can be resolved at the level of 200 or 300 people just because they happen to work in this particular factory. In the case of this sort of factory, the way in which its production is distributed and the needs it must satisfy does not only concern the producers but also all the workers who are going to consume its products. There is absolutely no reason why workers in an electrical generating station should be given the right to dictate decisions concerning electricity which will be consumed by millions of workers.

There exists thus today, in the technology that the working class will inherit from capitalism on the day it takes power, a powerful centralising tendency, a tendency which is neither inevitable nor eternal and which can probably be pushed right into the background in the course of constructing a classless society. It is, however, precisely the technology which we inherit from capitalism with which we will have to start building a new society. In this context, it is absolutely utopian to want to fragment economic decision-making to the level of what can be decided in a single factory.

The Choice Is Not Between ‘Bureaucratic Centralisation’ and ‘Decentralised Self-Management’

Very many economic decisions concern whole series of social groups infinitely larger than a single firm; these decisions must be taken at the level of these groups – in other words, they must be centralised in a democratic way. We are proponents of democratically-centralised self-management or, to put it another way, of planned self-management, not because we are centralisers by nature but because it’s a matter of an objective necessity which corresponds to the realities of economic life.

This centralisation is inevitable because it is inherent in the anarchy of the present system, and independent of our desires. The choice we actually have is a fundamental one: unless economic centralisation is carried out in a conscious, that is to say planned and deliberate, way, it will arise in a spontaneous, anarchic way behind workers’ backs.

The choice, therefore, is not between ‘bureaucratic centralisation’ and ‘decentralised self-management’. The real choice which will confront us in the economic sphere after the overthrow of capitalism will be the choice between democratically-centralised self-management based upon socialist planning and a so-called ‘socialist’ market economy in which the laws of the market continue for the most part to enslave the workers.

For this reason, we attack the Proudhonist proponents of self-management restricted to such-and-such a factory. We contend that they are lying to the workers when they say that it’s enough to give workers decision-making power at the level of the factory to create a real de-proletarianisation. What is the point of giving workers the power to make decisions when this turns out to be a mere sham and when the decisions taken at factory level are continuously revised and overturned by the operation of market laws – that is, by the spontaneous centralisation which occurs through these laws when it is not effected through the planning of the economy as a whole.

Let’s look at a simple example: investments in a particular branch of industry – the production of shoes. There are only two alternatives. On the one hand, one can try to draw up a socialist plan. An assessment is made of needs (making allowances, of course, for a certain amount of stock and export) and of productive capacity. If there is a discrepancy between the two, then the productive capacity must be increased; that is to say, investment must be increased so that needs can be satisfied.

On the other hand, one can neglect to draw up such a plan. Each factory producing shoes or, for that matter, electric motors, decides its investment autonomously with the familiar consequences of over- and under-production. There is only the most infinitesimal probability that the decisions taken separately in 20,000 or 30,000 factories will accurately satisfy needs. This is why a so-called ‘socialist’ market economy, in which self-management is limited to the level of the factory, is doomed to reproduce a whole series of the evils of capitalism, including its greatest attack on the working class – unemployment. It is only necessary to look at the Yugoslav example to see that this is the case.

This is why we are in favour of democratically-centralised and planned self-management, or, to get to the root of the problem, of economic power exercised at the level of the class as a whole, and not exclusively, or even mainly, by each tiny sub-group of that class.

The Survival of Competition Means the Division of the Working Class

However, the matter does not rest there. Not only is self-management limited to the level of the factory, workshop or assembly line an illusion from an economic point of view, in that the workers cannot implement decisions taken at this level against the operations of market laws, but, worse still, the decisions taken by the workers become more and more exclusively restricted to decisions about profits, as can be clearly seen in Yugoslavia. The fundamental principle underlying self-management, which is the liberation of labour, whereby workers dominate the process of production, decide for themselves the speed of the assembly line and the organisation of work in the factory, and which is part and parcel of the sort of socialist society we are trying to build, is unrealisable in an economy which allows the survival of competition.

As the Yugoslav example shows only too clearly, the survival of competition imposes certain unavoidable imperatives on the units of production. They are faced with an unenviable decision. On the one hand, they can accept the logic of rationalisations: reduction of the labour force, speed-up, and so on. On the other, they can reject this logic, thus condemning certain units of production to operate at a loss and to pay wages far below average rates.

The only solution to all these questions is to regulate industry at a social level, thus allowing for an effectively planned economy consciously run by the working class as a whole, and for the process of de-proletarianisation to advance.

Class Power Not ‘Group-Power’

The basis of the problem which I have attempted to elucidate is, thus, quite simple: for us, the notion of the class power of the proletariat exists in a very real sense precisely as class power and not the power of groups. To a large extent, these two conceptions are mutually exclusive. The more power is given to groups, the less is the power of the class as it is split into groups fighting amongst themselves.

So here we have another consequence of the reintroduction of competition on the road to socialism: given a market economy and autonomous decision-making by productive units, there will be competition with groups of workers from different factories competing with each other, often very fiercely. From the outset factories do not have the same productivity so, if they compete with each other and each factory retains what it calls the ‘fruits of its labour’, what it is in fact keeping is itsrevenue determined by its initial financial situation. Whether its initial endowment in terms of fixed capital, tools, machinery, equipment and even local situation was a matter of luck or of social factors, there is no possible justification for those who are fortunate enough to work in above-average factories to enjoy an economic advantage over those who are employed in below-average factories.

If the decision-making and advantages of each particular factory are left to the workers of that factory to deal with (even if, as in the case of Yugoslavia, a token ‘national solidarity tax’ is levied), a situation of blatant inequality is created within the working class, and when there exist blatant inequalities, it follows that the collective struggle of the working class as a whole for its common interests is broken down by the internecine struggles of different groups of workers.

It is, thus, to deceive the workers to lead them to believe that they can manage their affairs at the level of the factory. In the present economic system, a whole series of decisions are inevitably taken at higher levels than the factory, and if these decisions are not consciously made by the working class as a whole, then they will be made by other forces in society behind the workers’ backs.

At What Level Should Decisions Be Taken?

It may seem that what I am saying is similar to the arguments used by the CGT (the French Communist Party trade union) in its polemics against the CFDT (the socialist trade union) and socialist self-management current. This is not at all the case. It is not a matter of counterposing an ideal of ‘bureaucratic centralisation’ to the myth of ‘self-management in one factory’; rather, it is a question of challenging the apparently inevitable choice presented by the limited framework of the debate between bureaucratic centralisation and decentralisation in a market economy. It is a matter of defending the real Marxist solution of democratically-centralised self-management.

We do not support centralisation for its own sake. We don’t at all believe that centralisation implies the necessity of a new division of labour within the working class between a small group of managers, professional administrators and bureaucrats on the one hand, and the majority of the working class on the other, incapable of centralising its own management in a democratic way. We support democratically-centralised, planned self-management also as a manifestation of workers’ democracy organised around interconnected workers’ councils as broadly-based as possible to involve the maximum number of workers in the exercise of power.

If we reject the idea that the most democratic form of self-management is that based on the individual factory, it is because it is only in a complex structure where self-management takes place at all levels of economic and social life that it is possible to involve the maximum number of workers at different levels of decision-making. We have a very simple formula to apply in this context: decisions must be taken at the level where this can be done most effectively. It is unnecessary to call a European congress of workers’ councils to work out a bus timetable for Coventry; the workers of Coventry are quite capable of working that out for themselves without the interference of any bureaucratic institutions. There’s no need to organise a national congress of workers’ councils to organise production in a particular workshop: the workers in that workshop are quite capable of sorting that out on their own.

On the other hand, when it comes to making decisions about investment in the shoe industry, or how to fight pollution of waterways, then a national or even international congress of workers’ councils isnecessary, since this sort of decision can only be taken at a national or international level. This is what we mean when we talk about the articulation of decision-making bodies. In economic matters each decision must ideally be taken at the level at which it can be most effectively and efficiently implemented.

Defining a Framework of Relative Constraints

Obviously, there are certain constraints which detract from this conclusion. I have been very critical of the Yugoslav example, but it is not necessary only to speak badly of it. By comparison with the Stalinist experience it represents a great step forward and one which allows us to give a convincing answer today to that form of bourgeois demagogy, which is still the most prevalent ‘refutation’ of socialism, that the workers cannot and, what is more, do not want to run their own firms. Look at Yugoslavia, one can reply, they’ve now been doing it for 20 years! We have a lot of criticisms and we would do it differently, but all the same, they have proved that it’s possible.

In this sense, Yugoslavia presents us with a very positive experience and one which we mustn’t be pushed into condemning more strenuously than the bureaucratic organisation of industry in the Soviet Union. This said, however, the Yugoslav example allows us to distinguish a whole series of necessary constraints for the effective functioning of an articulated system of self-management of the kind I have outlined above. Let us take two examples.

I have just said that the organisation of production in a particular workshop must be the concern of the workers in that workshop. This remains true but it is necessary to be more precise: this must take place within a framework of social labour legislation which will have been established by a national, or even international, congress of workers’ councils. If the workers in a workshop want to work a 54-hour week, I see no reason why they should be allowed to; a certain framework must be worked out nationally to limit the amount of local variation.

The same goes for the Coventry bus system. When I said that the workers of Coventry would have a free hand in deciding how to run their own transport system, this must obviously be seen in the context of the total allocation of funds for public transport in England as a whole and, more specifically, for that particular part of England. If this condition were not imposed, then a decision taken on the question of transport in Coventry could impose a whole series of de facto priorities on the national plan. This would, in turn, limit the sovereignty of the working class as a whole in the allocation of resources. These constraints, therefore, are absolutely indispensable to the exercise of workers’ poweras a class rather than the power of various sub-groups which could neutralise, or even undermine, the power of the class as a whole.

‘Imagination to Power’

Despite the concrete examples, what I have just said might still seem rather abstract. This is because we are all prisoners of a particular ideology and a particular way of looking at economic existence and even everyday life; our education has accustomed us to the actuality of capitalist society. We are all prisoners of conceptions of the way life is organised which correspond to the reality of capitalistsociety.

The students at the Sorbonne in 1968 wrote on the walls the slogan ‘L’imagination au pouvoir’ – ‘Imagination to Power’. They expressed what is for revolutionaries a very profound axiom: it is necessary to exercise an enormous amount of imagination today, in the context of capitalism, to begin to conceive of a totally different form of economic reality in which a whole series of social attitudes, which don’t even exist today, will become part of the everyday life of the producers who constitute the vast mass of the population in the advanced capitalist countries.

Let us again look at an example. The comrades who wrote the manifesto of the ex-Ligue communiste, revising Lenin’s old formula, explained that socialism is soviets plus automation. For my part, I would go even further and argue that in the second half of the twentieth century, socialism is soviets (that is to say workers’ councils), automation and television. In television, we have at our disposal an instrument of direct democracy quite unthinkable for Marx, Lenin or even Trotsky, for the simple reason that none of these comrades could know anything about television and none of them could have invented it!

Today we live in a world at a specific level of technology and we must assess the extent to which its various forms could be put to the service of workers’ democracy – of a totally different form of economic organisation. It would be eminently possible, for example, to organise a national conference of workers’ councils in the shoe industry, the proceedings of which could be simultaneously relayed to all factories in that sector. It would then be possible, if one of the delegates said something which didn’t correspond with the mandate given him in his particular factory, for the comrades in that factory to pick up the phone, ring up the conference, and say, ‘Comrade, you’re lying’, or equally, ‘You are betraying us, you’re not putting our line and we intend to deal with you immediately.’

Here we have the basis for a qualitatively more advanced implementation of an old conception of Marx and Lenin: the possibility of recalling elected delegates who fail to stick to their mandate. Previously, such a recall could only be effected after an interval; with the use of television outlined above, it would be possible to exercise the right of recall not after the event, but instantaneously by simply lifting the phone and giving a report directly to the people at the conference.

One only has to consider the techniques which the bourgeoisie uses today in its TV shows, quizzes and parlour games as a means of passing the time and of ‘tranquillising’ the masses, to realise the amazing potential of television as an instrument of real mass communication. Just think how such techniques could be applied to the organisation of economic and everyday life. What a phenomenal instrument of direct democracy it could be! To my mind, there is absolutely no reason why our conception of self-management should be any less democratic than one based on self-management at the level of the individual factory. Quite the converse is true, for our conception is related to the taking of the really fundamental decisions.

Measures to Undermine Bureaucratic Tendencies

We deliberately prioritise the question of reducing the working-week and of workers’ participation in economic and social life and decision-making, rather than make it a priority to involve all of them in harder and harder and more and more exhausting manual work, as certain Maoists propose.

These comrades tell us that a real workers’ power has been established in China just because the workers participate, from time to time, in meetings to discuss questions of management, and the management participates in manual labour for one day a week. What this implies, in reality, however, is the perpetuation of a division of labour between those who produce and those who manage, and it is precisely this division which constitutes the basis for bureaucratisation and which we want to overcome as quickly and as completely as possible.

This is why we prioritise a radical reduction of the working day (in industrially advanced countries, at least, half-day working should be introduced immediately after a socialist revolution) so that the workers will have the time to occupy themselves seriously with the management of their own affairs.

This, of course, does not mean that any particular worker should spend his whole time rushing from conference to conference; this would mean that he would not be working anymore and, consequently, would again perpetuate the division of work and management. Quite the contrary! To the measures elaborated by Marx in his writings on the Paris Commune and by Lenin in State and Revolution as means of fighting bureaucratisation, we should add a new one in our socialist constitution: on all the highest organs of economic and political power, that is to say, the national and international congresses of workers’ councils, there must be a certain minimum proportion of workers still involved in production who only attend the congress for a few weeks of the year. In order to constitute an effective weapon against bureaucratisation this proportion must be fixed at a very high level – between, say, two-thirds and three-quarters of the delegates.

This last point is well illustrated in relation to Yugoslavia. Often the majority of delegates on workers’ councils at factory level have been workers. At regional congresses, delegations from the workers’ councils often include some 30 to 40 per cent of workers actively engaged in production. When from time to time there is a national congress of workers’ councils – maybe every 15 years (Yugoslav bureaucrats are evidently very cautious!) – only two or perhaps three per cent of the delegates will be really [1] technicians, clerical workers or supervisory staff. This isn’t necessarily the result of some plot; rather it is the inevitable result of a 48-hour week and of leaving intact a form of economic organisation quite unconducive to any ongoing involvement of workers in the management of their affairs.

A reduction in the working day, however, is not the only necessary material precondition for the workers to take the running of society and the economy into their own hands. There are several others which are very important.

A Completely New Type of Education Is Required

Radical changes will be necessary in education. The whole framework of the educational system will have to be transformed so that the whole of the working class is assured of at least a certain minimum of social, cultural and all-round technical education. It will be necessary completely to rethink the whole social role of education.

Today, there exists a particular model of education in which one spends either between 10 and 13 years or between 16 and 25 years being educated. This isn’t a model fixed for all time; it is quite possible to conceive of a completely different sort of education spread over the whole of adult life, involving a continuous development in workers’ abilities and skills.

To give credit where credit is due, this is one of the few spheres in which the Soviet economy has introduced significant changes; it is certainly the case that the Soviet Union is the most advanced country in the world when it comes to the amount of effort put into generalising education and training of workers. The intentions behind this achievement, unfortunately, were not so inspiring: the Soviet system is geared to the promotion of individual workers who are in this way permanently detached from the working class; what else is the situation of a worker who, upon finishing his studies, becomes a technician and aspires to the bureaucracy? The social and ideological climate of Soviet society is not conducive to the endurance of a sufficient degree of class solidarity for a worker who has gained some technical qualifications to consider himself still, above all, as a member of the working class. Thus this technical education, although more widespread in the Soviet Union than anywhere else in the world, exists, even there, at the expense of class solidarity and exclusively for the sake of permitting the promotion of individuals.

Political Parties and Self-Management

The second crucial question, then, is that of the social and, above all, political dimensions of self-management. Immediately, we are posed with a problem: is self-management compatible with the existence of working-class political parties? Can it be reconciled with the sorts of political struggle which we know within the framework of bourgeois democracy?

In tackling these questions, before we even consider anything else, it is necessary to dispel for once and for all the Stalinist myth that each social class can only be represented by one political party, and, hence, since only one party can represent the proletariat, that there is only room for one political party in the process of building socialism. This sort of sophistry has nothing in common with Marxism or Leninism. For a start, it is clearly shown by history that since social classes are not politically homogeneous they are often represented by not one but several different parties; furthermore, the process of building socialism is an entirely new one, giving rise to completely new problems of economic, political, social, cultural, biological and moral policy. To believe that any one person – whoever it might be – can produce all the necessary answers out of a hat is just to deceive oneself and, what is more, to demonstrate an incredible naivety.

On the contrary, we must vindicate the conception of competing ideas and tendencies, of political struggles for choices and options not envisaged in the ‘sacred texts’ of Marxism. If we got together all the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, and some of Rosa Luxemburg’s for good measure, we’d have quite a little library but we would by no means find all the answers we needed there. Enormous problems are thrown up in the process of constructing a socialist society and it is only going to be through political struggle, theoretical and ideological debate and practical experience that these will be resolved. For this reason, socialist political democracy is absolutely essential to minimise wastage, to reduce the numbers of errors made and, above all, to cut down to a minimum the time taken to rectify mistakes.

A second argument which must also be refuted is one put forward by a pseudo-self-management current. They tell us that if political parties continue to exist, they will manipulate meetings and that the congresses of workers’ councils will not be real congresses of councils but rather congresses of political currents who will waste their time in sectarian wrangling. Political parties, they say, will take decisions behind the workers’ backs. We would argue that this again is a myth: what are really manipulative are congresses where large numbers of worker-delegates take part in unprepared and unstructured debates. In such debates, real decision-making is impossible because the options are not clearly articulated. The workers can choose between three, four or five propositions which are put to them but they can’t choose between a thousand, especially if these are put forward in the form of shouted interruptions or demagogic outbursts. The absence of parties, of organised workers’ tendencies, which could come to congresses with clear proposals, platforms and programmes, would simply put a premium on demagogy and prevent workers from choosing between coherent and clearly-formulated positions.

This is why self-management is impossible without real socialist democracy, which also must imply not only the right to vote and the existence of trade unions independent of the workers’ state, but also the jealous safeguarding of freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, organisation and demonstration for the workers.

In essence, the possibility of workers making real decisions depends on their access to real information – to contradictory information – without any limitation or monopoly; this, in turn, can only be realised if various political currents are allowed to formulate proposals and make them known for the workers to accept or reject. This is a model many times more democratic than that thrown about by many proponents of ‘self-management socialism’ who, by retaining a market economy on the one hand, and restricting the freedom of political organisation for currents inside the workers’ movement on the other, would create an inevitable tendency towards new monopolies and new forms of alienation for the whole of the working class.

Socialism in One Factory?

For those of us brought up in the struggle against the idea that it is possible to build socialism in one country, the conception of ‘molecular self-management’, of ‘mini-socialism in one factory’ has little attraction. Some currents, however, defend these sorts of positions and attribute our positions to dogmatism; they argue that unless workers gain experience of management before the socialist revolution, they will not be able to learn from one day to the next, upon the transfer of power. The experience of small-scale self-management under capitalism, they explain, is useful education and preparation. Many examples are quoted, some of which are not without value. There is the much-vaunted case of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in Glasgow. Here was a case of a firm which had collapsed under the management of the bosses, when it was taken under workers’ management the results were, however, disastrous. After a while, the workers themselves were forced to create the very redundancies amongst themselves which they had been trying to stop the bosses from enforcing when they took over the yards.

There have been many examples of workers’ cooperatives that went wrong, there have even been some that have ‘succeeded’ – in capitalist terms that is! All that they have succeeded in, however, has been to transform themselves into profitable capitalist enterprises, operating in the same way as other capitalist firms.

There are some examples, however, which allow us to go into this question more deeply, and for which revolutionary Marxists require a more developed response. I will intentionally consider the most paradoxical of such examples, which is to be found today in Francoist Spain. The Mandragore company employs 12,000 workers in a series of workers’ cooperatives in the Basque country and is Spain’s largest manufacturer of refrigerators. The firm is self-managed and, at first sight, it seems a phenomenal success. The workers have disposed of the foremen, reduced the line speeds and introduced a whole series of measures to create better working conditions such as implementing a 37 to 38-hour working week. Despite all this, the firm remains very profitable; apparently it is a spectacular economic success.

But this is not all. Taking account of the classical critiques which Marxists have made of workers’ cooperatives, a rule has been introduced to the effect that wages in the factory cannot exceed by more than 10 per cent the wages paid in that part of Spain, so that the firm doesn’t take on an exploitative relationship with the rest of the working class. This would otherwise become almost inevitable in the case of successful productive units, as the example of certain Israeli kibbutzim illustrates very clearly. Such units have become collectives of capitalists which even go so far as employing workers without letting them enter the cooperative, and paying low wages while keeping for themselves their shares in the prosperity of the cooperative. Any possibility of this has, thus, been eliminated in the Mandragore cooperatives.

Why, given all this, should we conclude that this has been anything but a valuable experience? The answer is quite obvious and, in the case of Mandragore, it almost hits one in the face; none of the successes at Mandragore could have been achieved within the framework of a capitalist economy without the acquiescence of the banks, of all the economic institutions and above all, the state, which in this instance is not even a bourgeois democracy but a dictatorship. Without this acquiescence the Mandragore experiment would not survive a single day! A firm which employs 12,000 workers and produces refrigerators for almost half the Spanish market quite clearly requires a continuous credit facility from the banks. It is integrated into the banking system and is thus dependent on the backing of the central bank in consort with local and regional banks. It can only exist to the extent that it is tolerated by the capitalist regime as a whole. For this reason, there is no way in which it can pose any solutions for the working class as a whole. It is an experience which is tolerated by the bourgeoisie because of the local relationship of forces until such a time as a conflict arises, at which point it will either have to capitulate or it will be suppressed.

It is, therefore, dangerous for the working class to become involved in this type of experience; at the very best it can constitute a ‘pilot scheme’ for a tiny minority, the effect of which is to divert the energy of the working class from a dynamic of ever-extending struggles to one dominated by requirements of ‘production’ which has nothing in common even with syndicalism, let alone revolutionary Marxism.

When the boss wants to create redundancies and the workers respond by occupying their factory, by transforming their passive strike into an active one by seizing ‘booty’ as they did at the Lip watch factory in France, we must see these developments as forms of struggle and ways in which consciousness is raised, and not as economic solutions. In this context, it is necessary to determine what actions are most favourable to the concentration of effort on the extension of the struggle rather than on the solution of technical problems of production and distribution which inexorably lead along the road to sectorial interests which will ultimately come into conflict with the interests of the working class as a whole.

Prepare the Workers Today for Self-Management Tomorrow

Does this mean that we reject any notion of preparing workers now for the problems of self-management they will face after the revolution? Absolutely not; a working class which has only had experience of strikes for higher wages and electoral campaigns will find itself at a considerable disadvantage when it is confronted with the task of running the economy at a regional, national and international level. We realise that preparation and education are essential for these tasks, but this will not be achieved through dead-end attempts at mini-self-management under capitalism. The working class will prepare itself for self-management through the struggle for workers’ control and the self-organisation of its struggles. When workers begin to exercise control over the capitalist management of their factories, to take control of their unions, to take the organisation of strikes into their own hands with the greatest possible degree of workers’ democracy, they are enrolling themselves into the only real school of self-management which is open under capitalism.

This education in practice will not be limited to gaining technical knowledge in preparation for self-management but will also concern the central precondition for this self-management: the raising of their capacity for self-organisation and for struggle – the raising of their collective class consciousness and solidarity.

Vivir la utopía es un documental de 1997, producido por TVE y dirigido por Juan Gamero, en el cual se describe la experiencia anarcosindicalista y anarcocomunista vivida en España que transformó radicalmente las estructuras de la sociedad en amplias zonas del bando republicano, evento denominado revolución española, durante la guerra civil de 1936-39.

Consta de 30 entrevistas con sobrevivientes anarquistas de la revolución española, cuyo testimonio muestra la labor constructiva de la revolución social y los antecedentes históricos del movimiento libertario español. Esta labor constructiva significó según el documental la organización decolectividades agrícolas de alrededor de 7 millones de campesinos, 3000 fábricas y empresas colectivamente autogestionadas en lasciudades, la unión de 150.000 milicianos anarquistas contra el fascismo, así como lasactividades culturales, educativas y el movimiento Mujeres Libres de mujeres contra elpatriarcado.

Anarquistas entrevistados: Miguel Alba, Ramón Álvarez, Federico Arcos, Marcelino Bailo, María Batet, Severino Campos, Francisco Carrasquer, Miguel Celma, Valerio Chiné; José España, José Fortea, Juan Giménez, Antonio Lahuerta, Concha Liaño, Fidel Miró, Aurora Molina, Heleno Molina, Conxa Pérez, Suceso Portales, Dolors Prat, Ximo Queirol, Maravillas Rodríguez, Juan Romero, Manuel Sanz, Liberto Sarrau, José Sauces, Josep Serra Estruch, Antonio Turón, José Urzáiz, Antonio Zapata.

Producción

Las cámaras de TVE estuvieron grabando en la sede de la Fundación de Estudios Libertarios Anselmo Lorenzo (FAL). Durante meses, las cámaras recorrieron la geografía peninsular de la Iberia y parte de Francia, haciendo entrevistas y tomando imágenes de libros, carteles, folletos, fotografías. La música es del cantaor flamenco El Cabrero y de Paco del Gastor.

Hacen de voz en off Maribel Sanchez-Maroto y Manuel Carvajal, y alternándose a las entrevistas de los anarquistas se incluyen voces del dictador Miguel Primo de Rivera, de su hijo Jose Antonio e imágenes del libertario Juan García Oliver.

 

Since the Communist Manifesto was written, the struggle for world socialism has taken on extremely diverse forms, the content of the struggle varying from case to case. The type of transitional society from capitalism to socialism that Marx (in the Critique of the Gotha Programme) or Lenin (in The State and Revolution) envisaged, has not yet been reached anywhere.

Since those days, some very big problems have arisen, concerning the content of a society evolving towards socialism its economic, political, cultural, even its moral content There is very little unanimity about these problems on the part of revolutionary Marxists or socialists of any shade.

In this essay I shall try to develop a series of ideas about the way in which the fight for the victory of the socialist revolution and the ensuing socialist appears to us today, under present historical conditions.

When we talk about ‘the struggle for socialism’ we have to make a distinction. There are two separate phases: the struggle for the taking of power and the struggle for the building of socialism.

The ‘struggle for the taking of power’ is the fight for the revolution, i.e. for an abrupt qualitative change in the evolutionary process – the kind of change which, however brief, is always typical of an objective revolutionary crisis.

This kind of situation poses the replacement of the existing social order by new property relations and new social relations.

An ‘objective revolutionary situation’ can spring up in all kinds of ways, created by a complex process of interaction of different objective conditions; for this to occur, there is no need of a pre-existing ‘revolutionary party’ to act as a catalyst.

Under present concrete historical conditions an ‘objective revolutionary crisis’ can arise as the result of, say, a nationalist war against imperialist intervention or occupation, as a result of a serious social crisis, or as a result of the electoral victory of an alliance of parties claiming to be socialist and campaigning on the basis of an advanced anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist programme.

During and after the second world war there were mass mobilisations and large mass movements whose initial objectives were national ones, like those of the resistance in nazi-occupied Europe (Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, etc.), or the African and Asian movements which fought against overt imperialist intervention or occupation (the FLN in Algeria, the Vietminh-Vietcong in Indochina, etc).

The situation created by these movements had a logic and a dynamic that led them to evolve rapidly towards objectives that were not only national but social too, and unleashed a genuinely revolutionary process.

Resistance and war can grow into social revolution. But these exceptional conditions are not theonly ones which can provoke an ‘objective revolutionary situation’ or create a ‘revolutionary opening’ (i.e. a rapid evolution towards such a situation).

For several years now in several European countries. we have seen situations escalating into major national revolutionary crises, where the question of the ‘struggle for power’ has been posed (and thus also the possible victory of the ‘revolution’).

May 1968 in France, the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969 in Italy, the situation in Britain in 1972 during the long miners’ strike, are varying examples of that kind of situation.

The common characteristic of these examples is as follows: it is the advanced capitalist countries that are involved; it is not a time of major economic crisis; but in spite of this, a conjunction of numerous interacting factors has created either an ‘objective revolutionary situation’ or a possible rapid evolution towards such a situation.

What are these factors?

In some cases there has been the ‘confrontation’ movement of young people and other new social layers (scientists, technicians, intellectuals, etc.) as well as the broad masses of the traditional working class being mobilised.

In the case of Britain there was also the civil war in Ireland and the difficulties of British imperialism in Rhodesia all this in the context of an economic situation where there was heavy inflation and a million unemployed. But even in Britain, the major revolutionary crisis which loomed during the great miners’ strike and which brought the conservative government to within a hairsbreadth of its downfall, was not primarily the result of a major economic crisis, but rather the result of an ensemble of interacting factors which are typical of a social crisis and not simply an economic one.

But an ‘objective revolutionary situation’ could equally come about as a result of the electoral victory of parties claiming to be socialist, as is the case in Chile at the moment and could be the case in a country like France or Italy.

This kind of situation is both the result of a pre-existing revolutionary escalation, of a long process marked by multiform mass struggles, and at the same time the cause of a speeding-up process in the maturation of the revolution. I shall come back to this point.

Even more forms are possible, inasmuch as reality is complex, rich, and is always providing unforeseen combinations. For example, there is in Peru at this moment a military government which has achieved power as a result of the extreme right and the revolutionary left neutralising each other. Thus it is a ‘Bonapartist’ solution, but it has undertaken profound reforms which have undoubtedly involved a ‘revolutionary opening’. It is up to the genuine revolutionary forces of the country to exploit this conjuncture, to prevent the bureaucracy from turning into a reactionary and retrogressive sclerosis, and to prevent counter-offensives by the oligarchy or other reactionary forces allied to imperialism.

Objective conditions, therefore, can create a revolutionary situation or at any rate a revolutionary opening, whether or not there is a subjective revolutionary factor with a mass base. But these conditions alone are not enough for the situation to evolve in some sort of automatic way towards ‘victory’; they are not enough to finish off the process that has been begun, to provoke, at some given point in its evolution, the qualitative leap which is the absolutely indispensable characteristic of a real revolution.

To accomplish this leap, the masses have to build their own power in the meantime, so that they will have the means to defeat the counter-offensive of reactionary social forces, which in some form or other is inevitable.

Therefore, during this phase, the ‘struggle for socialism’ is summed up as the struggle for ‘revolution’ and ‘power’, on the basis of the fundamental concept, justified by history, that revolution is not a totally evolutionary process, nor is ‘power’ the arithmetical sum of partial conquests.

At a given moment of the process the point is to pass from one quality to another, from the ‘part’ to the ‘whole’, from evolution to revolution by a ‘leap’, an abrupt change.

What, then, are the conditions which would lead to the victorious outcome of a ‘revolutionary opening’, to a situation that really is ‘objectively revolutionary’?

It is here that the subjective factor becomes important – the programme, the tactics, the organisation.

Inasmuch as revolution is a qualitative change of social reality towards a given end, it is a voluntaristic project, carried out by men won over to that end. Revolution is not an aggregate of socio-economic measures, worked out and applied by a State techno-bureaucracy.

Revolution i.e. the successful conclusion of a revolutionary process that has already begun – demands mass mobilisation and mass organisation, with the maximum conscious participation of the masses in all the measures which fulfil the content of a revolution.

Any government, party or union calling itself socialist has to ensure the real participation of the masses. If the masses only participate through the agency of various mediating devices that merely bear their name, they cannot effectively participate. Participation can only be expressed in the way they construct and operate their own power, in all spheres.

If this kind of process tales place, the masses can fulfil an existing revolutionary situation and move to defend it, deepen it and bring it to a successful conclusion.

But what is the meaning of ‘mass participation’, more precisely?

Let us take an example, of a basic kind – wage demands.

It is not enough for unions and political parties to formulate the demands and direct the struggles. Recent experience in both the workers’ movement and other social movements (youth, women, etc.) has shown that the new generations everywhere want to be able to contribute directly, both in formulating demands and in the actual running of the struggle.

This wish is deeply held; it does not seek to deny that parties and unions are absolutely necessary, but simply to modify their function.

Their role has to be seen in terms of the help which they can and should provide for workers, young people, women, so that these social layers can participate to the full in the elaboration of demands and the management of the struggle, together with the representatives of party and union.

This, for example, is the significance of the movement of shop-floor delegates working in close alliance with the general assembly of workers, which has been characteristic of recent experience in Italy, Britain, France and elsewhere.

This, too, is the significance of the ‘student control’ which student youth would like to see applied in universities and schools – the co-management of these institutions by pupils and teachers, in the context of a radical reform of education.

This also is the more general significance of the ‘social control’ over working conditions and their social repercussions, which is sought by various social layers. Of course, this kind of control cannot be adequately fitted into the framework of a society that remains essentially capitalist and therefore hierarchic, authoritarian and oppressive.

But the tendency towards this kind of control has already been mapped out, even in societies which are still typically capitalist: capitalism is increasingly preoccupied with the problems resulting from the resistance of workers and young people to the working and general living conditions that are imposed on them in these societies.

Where a country is involved in some kind of revolutionary process, the question of mass participation becomes crucial.

Let us take two distinct types of eventuality: a major national crisis, or the creation of a ‘revolutionary opening’ following the formation of a government calling itself socialist. Contemporary experience can supply examples of both.

A major national crisis can arise when various social layers are mobilised simultaneously, as in France in May l968

Schools, public services and enterprises were occupied by student youth, civil servants, workers, and working people generally. In the space of a few days a large, advanced capitalist country found itself paralysed by the effect of strikes and occupations. In some places there were limited experiments in ‘self-management’, but generally it was a case of passive occupation. A state of dual power appeared.

From the revolutionary point of view, the problem was how to pass from the ‘partial power’ which the masses held to ‘total power’.

This could have been made enormously easier if the masses had been ready to combineoccupation of the enterprises with the management of them, under their own armed protection in the form of workers’ and citizens’ militias.

But there was a lack of the ideological preparation necessary to raise the revolutionary process to a higher level. In addition, the mass workers’ organisations ‘were taken unawares by the revolutionary crisis, and they made no effort to release this kind of consciousness. Quite the opposite.

The second kind of eventuality is more complicated and more interesting. This is the election of a “workers’ government” into power. A political party enjoying the confidence of the masses, if it is ‘legally’ elected has a certain length of time in which it is unlikely that there will be a direct test of strength with its social opponents. This can provide a ‘revolutionary opening’. But for this to come about, a simple election victory in itself is not enough: there must also be a real escalation in the radical mass movement, which can somehow force its traditional political organisations to fight on an advanced anti-capitalist programme, and to consider themselves bound by that programme.

For example, if the British Labour Party won an election victory in a more or less ‘normal’ period, this would not necessarily amount to a ‘revolutionary opening’ in the country; in practice, indeed, it might mean simply that a political organisation with a socialist programme and a base in the working class would just continue to manage ‘capitalist business’.

But if the Labour Party came to power as a result of the kind of national circle that Britain went through during the miners’ strike of 1972, and if the Conservative Party were forced to resign under the pressure of this crisis, it would mean the birth of a different objective conjuncture, and would force the Labour Party to undertake far-reaching anti-capitalist reforms.

There is yet another kind of eventuality, which we shall deal more closely with. This is where an extremely radical objective situation already exists, where a ‘workers’ government’, elected in an exceptional situation, is thus endowed with a real revolutionary dynamic.

In this case, the issues revolve around the following major problem. How, once the revolutionary process has been unleashed, do you go from such a situation to a real victory? How, in other words, can the revolution be not only ‘begun’ but also ‘achieved’?

The answer to this lies in the democratic participation of the masses, and in the kind of relationship they have with the government that claims to be ‘theirs’.

To start with, this kind of government generally begins by applying the ‘structural reforms’ that were in its programme. The most important of these are ‘nationalisation ‘and agrarian reforms(the latter question has never yet been solved anywhere).

The aim of nationalisation is to remove the ownership of the country’s principal means of production (banks, industries, commerce) from the hands of big foreign or indigenous capitalists and transfer them to the whole ‘nation’.

This transfer of ownership is carried out by the State, which is supposed to represent the interests of the national community. But the State is a mere abstraction: the social reality of the State can only be grasped if it becomes concrete.

The State is not an autonomous, self-determined structure hovering over the social and property relations of a particular regime. It is the fully conscious expression of the collective interests of the dominant class in a particular society, and takes the form of an articulated series of institutions.

Therefore, to bring something under state ownership does not mean to ‘nationalise’ it (‘nationalisation’ in the sense of ‘socialisation’, where ownership is transferred to the ‘nation’, the whole society).

New property relations can only become new social relations if there are also new forms of management.

To bring something under state ownership, simply by having the workers get their wages from the state rather than from private bosses, is not sufficient to transform social relations in a socialist sense. There is an additional need – the right of workers in state-owned enterprises to manage these enterprises by themselves, through the democratic organisation of a labour collective including the entire productive personnel of the enterprise.

This is the only kind of measure which will interest working people, which will help them to understand that their social status has undergone a real revolution, and which will get them to organise their output better once their labour is really free. It is also the only kind of measure which ensures that they will defend this major conquest to the utmost, against any attempt made by retrograde forces to return to the ‘napoleon’, authoritarian, hierarchic ‘model’ of private enterprise.

Where the agricultural economy is concerned, the case for a real transformation of social relations is similar.

In any country with an ‘agrarian problem’, i.e. where a large amount of the cultivable land belongs to a small landowning oligarchy and there is an enormous mass of poor or completely landless peasants, the question of radical reform becomes urgent.

Agrarian reform has multiple aims: to raise the standard of living of the majority of the population; to enlarge the internal market; to procure the necessary materials for developing (especially light) industry; to avoid importing products which can be supplied by the country’s own economy; to feed the population better.

No developing country can realty ‘get out of the rut’ in a balanced way without the existence of a dynamic agricultural economy

Therefore, the necessity for undertaking a radical agrarian reform has extremely important ramifications which are both social and economic.

But what sort of agrarian reform?

If the large estates are expropriated and divided up (free or at a price) into small plots For the landless peasants, without the State helping them to regroup into co-operatives for production and distribution. then the danger is that a mass of small peasants will be created who have a low productivity and who will inevitably fall to the combined exploitation of the banks, merchants, industrialists, and the State. If on the other hand, large State farms are set up, there is the same danger that productivity will fall, since the peasants have no material or moral incentive for this type of cultivation. Both capitalist countries and those in the process of building socialism have given us plenty of experience of both these dangers.

If agrarian reform is to succeed, it has to be carried out with the conscious voluntary participation of the people who work the land.

It is, of course, absolutely necessary that large-scale, collectively worked farms should be set up – but it is also necessary that they are democratically managed by their workers’ collective.

This kind of management can be defined in two ways: as self-management, or as the co-operative of self-managed production. In the first instance, the land belongs to the whole nation; in the second, it belongs to individual peasants but is still collectively worked by the production co-operative.

But in both instances, management must be in the hands of a collective, democratically organised by the agricultural workers, and it must have as much State aid as possible at its disposal.

The worst mistake of all is to transform the large estates which dominate agriculture into state-owned enterprises where the workers will simply be state wage-earners.

For the peasants to have an interest in working the land properly and increasing their productivity, they must feel that they have some direct connection with the running of things, in a moral sense as well as a material one.

The same principle also applies in the organisation and improvement of the social services andeducation.

Investment in education must be geared to providing permanent education for the whole population – not just general education but political and technical education as welt. If this goes hand in hand with achievements in the economy proper, it will ensure that the economy develop in a rapid but balanced way, as will social life as a whole.

One of the most fundamental tendencies of our time is the progressive incorporation of scienceand culture into the productive forces of society. Knowledges are permanently being recycled, while qualifications become increasingly necessary. Hence the necessity for permanent educationand continuous training which would, however, not be merely technical or specialised but generaltoo.

This kind of revolution in the educational system cannot come about as the result of reforms handed down from above. It must be the result of the effective participation of teachers, students and representatives of the social collectivity.

Of course, nationalisation, agrarian reform, and educational reform are not enough to ensure the victory of the revolution and a transition to socialism. However radically these measures interact, they have to be inserted into a more far-reaching programme. But once a revolutionary process has been unleashed they can give it a tremendous dynamic. The democratic participation of the broad masses of people is the most important subjective factor in bringing about the victory of the revolution.

Obviously this ‘victory of the revolution’ cannot be the simple result of a peaceful, evolutionary process, within the integral framework of traditional bourgeois democracy or the old State institutions. At a given moment there will be a decisive confrontation of some form or other, where the conservative forces allied with imperialism will be obliged to transgress that traditional framework and provoke a social mutation, a qualitative change.

Only at that point will we be entering a new phase, where the “working people’s government” is really established, where the struggle to ‘build socialism’ can be waged more freely.

At this point the period of ‘dual power’ is over, the resistance of hostile social forces is broken, and the power of the working people begins to express itself not only in the form of a government that rules in their name, but also – and primarily – in the shape of institutions and organs which are directly representative of the working people.

Furthermore, the future of such a regime depends precisely on the relations between the directand indirect forms of working people’s power.

The indirect forms are the State, political parties and unions, which take on the power of working people and citizens by delegation. The direct forms are those with which working people and citizens directly manage their social life, the enterprises, social services, the schools, at all levels.

The indirect forms are not necessarily synonymous with the real power of working people and citizens, for they are institutions managed by social groups who gradually, because of their function, acquire a special status in relation to the masses.

This status inevitably involves material and functional privileges which encourage the growth of a bureaucracy, a new social layer. This is the most serious danger that lies in wait for a State evolving towards socialism.

Of course, there are fundamental objective conditions which encourage the growth of a bureaucracy a low economic and cultural level, arid the prolonged confinement of these experiences within a restricting national framework.

But countries already involved in building socialism have shown us that there is a very importantsubjective factor to add: that is, the absence of any critique of the traditional idea of the State, parties and unions in their relations with the working people, and the lack of sufficient theoretical consideration of these problems.

The most widespread image of a so-called ‘socialist’ regime is one of state ownership and planned economy, directed by the ‘revolutionary’ party. Ultimately, this means the virtual fusion of State and party, with the unions reduced to the role of a transmission belt for State requirements aimed at the working people. Since the State is axiomatically defined as ‘socialist’ and the party as ‘revolutionary’ the schematic conclusion is that these institutions are the same thing as the power of the working people and citizens.

Of course, this was never the conception of Marx, or Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin or Trotsky.

The Bolsheviks, for example, had initially envisaged a multi-party system, even a multi-party government, as well as the existence of a system of ‘soviets’, of ‘councils’, which would assume some power directly. But circumstances quickly led them to govern virtually by themselves through their party, which, unconsciously but in real terms, fused with the State apparatus and restricted the soviets to a subordinate and increasingly nominal role.

Lenin’s heirs have theorised this state of fact into the ‘model’ of a ‘regime building socialism’. However, while it is true to say that Marxism is (among other things) the most suitable scientific method for understanding the sociological reality of capitalism and demystifying all its categories, values and institutions, the same critical penetration must then be applied to analysing and demystifying the sociological reality of post-revolutionary regimes too.

Truth being concrete, we can do without the kind of schematic generalisation which says that the post-revolutionary structure of the State parties and unions is identical with the real, direct power of the working people. This has nothing to do with scientific sociology; it is an ideological aberration. New sociological strata, new contradictions and new antagonisms will subsist in these societies for a whole historical period. They cannot be wished away as mere trifles.

We must insist that Marxist analysis and critique be permanent, insist on the permanent process of the socialist revolution.

In the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, the State runs the danger of becoming bureaucratised and defending the specific personal interests of the new bureaucratic caste, though at the same time it defends the general interests of the new social regime. In the latter respect it is partly the State of the working people, but only by delegation and mediation (and therefore in a restricted, deformed way).

Once the ‘revolutionary’ party comes to power, the danger is that it will go through a qualitative change and play the same role towards the working people as the State does.

As for the unions – if they yield their autonomy to the State and the parties, not to mention their primary rote as defenders of the working people’s interests (which is necessary even in a so called ‘socialist’ or ‘workers’’ state), the danger is that they will become a virtual mouthpiece for the bureaucracy, an appendage to the State and the parties.

None of this means that one has to declare oneself against the idea of the State, political parties and unions, and take refuge in the so-called ‘anarchist’ mythology, building models of the ‘perfect’ society which are quite arbitrary inasmuch as the appropriate historical conditions for it do not yet exist. All it means is that the indirect forms of ‘working people’s power’ must not be exclusively or systematically favoured, at the expense of the direct forms. For it is the direct forms themselves which systematically favour direct management of social life, in all spheres and at all levels, by the working people and citizens in general.

This is the system of ‘self-managed socialism’.

In the sphere of economics, self-management means that the enterprises and the land belong to the whole nation and are managed, more and more directly, by their democratically organised working people’s collective.

Manual and intellectual workers are grouped in such a way as to be able to run their units of production by themselves.

The way they organise themselves depends on the kind of enterprise it is; on the general way in which the society as a whole has evolved; and on the level of material and cultural achievement so far reached.

This means that self-management does not spring up in a ‘perfect’ form, all at once; it is a process that stretches out over a whole historical period.

At the beginning, the working people manage those operations which do not demand a very high degree of scientific or technical specialisation; for operations that do demand this, it will be simply a question of controlling them, for some time.

Self-management cannot all at once eliminate the age-old distinction between qualified andunqualified, manual and intellectual workers, nor can it get away overnight from a position where some specialists demand an exorbitant reward for their services, out of proportion with their real labour.

However, while these specialists are necessary for the running of a large modern enterprise, they will be placed under the control of the working people’s collective and will work for the collective, just as at present they work for and under the control of the bosses.

The basic issue is to put the real power in the enterprise into the hands of a democratic working people’s collective.

At the base of this collective would be the Working People’s Assembly, which would elect aWorking People’s Council with its own executive organ: the two latter would take up the day to day running of the enterprise on the basis laid down by the Working People’s Assembly and under the supreme control of that assembly. It must be kept in mind that the working people’s collective should include all those productive personnel in the enterprise who accept this method of organisation. The only exceptions to this are the necessary specialists who cannot be part of the collective because they exclude themselves – e.g. by demanding exceptionally high pay. Their services will still be hired at this high price, but they will work under the control of the collective as if they were working for a boss.

The labour collective will become more and more homogeneous (Marx wrote about the ‘collective worker’, referring to the gradual fusion between manual and intellectual labour, between technique and science, which he saw the capitalist economy evolving towards); and the totality of its members will reach a continually higher level of qualification. But this can only take place if the following two measures are applied from the beginning: a mode of payment based on the ‘labour supplied’; and the permanent education of the working people – education that is general, technical and political at the same time.

Where a society is in the process of building socialism but for some length of time cannot avoid using the methods of the money market economy, the mode of payment is an extremely important element.

For a mode of payment to be fair, it must be based on the ‘labour supplied’ by everyone, i.e. it must be based on the amount of wealth created by labour. This does not happen in the capitalist system, where the wage only represents a part of the wealth produced; nor does it happen in those States in which capitalism has been abolished, where pay is arbitrarily fixed, without any direct reference to the criterion of how much wealth is being produced.

Of course, the objection may be raised that this criterion (which Marx referred to in the Critique of the Gotha Programme as the most appropriate for the period of transition) is a difficult one to establish, since wealth is actually produced by the whole ‘collective worker’, which includes not only manual workers but intellectual ones as well (qualified engineers, experts, researchers, etc.); and that since mechanisation and the automation of labour have been progressing so rapidly, as science is more and more organically incorporated into the productive process, value and surplus-value are crystallising an increasingly complex social labour. Nevertheless, it still holds true that wealth is the product of social labour, and that the payment of everyone must he based on the criterion of the labour supplied.

It is up to the working people themselves to determine, democratically, not only the organisation and operation of labour in the enterprises, but also their pay-rises, on the basis of agreements reached by the enterprise and within the framework of national agreements.

It is also up to the working people to make the necessary outlay from their income to meet the needs of the whole society.

If the wage system is to be properly abolished, the criterion of ‘the amount of labour supplied’ has to be established. The citizens and working people themselves have to disentangle the complexity of the ‘social labour’ in which the labour supplied by each individual is integrated; this can be done by means of democratic decisions, from the level of the enterprise up to the highest levels of national administration.

With this method of payment differentials will not vanish immediately. But it can help to soften them, restrict their range and make sure that the benefits of an increase in productivity are fairly distributed.

It would also he the best stimulus to productivity. Each worker would feel, both that he was being paid according to his own contribution to the social labour, and that he was automatically benefiting from the general increased productivity of that social labour.

Any arbitrarily determined method of payment that has no clear relation to the amount of labour supplied and its productivity, only serves to maintain the feeling of ‘unfairness’ and to sap the productive effort of the working people.

There is no excuse for systems which compel the workers to increase their labour by invoking the ‘ideal’ of socialism and using moralistic phraseology, without giving working people the chance to really participate in management and in the wealth that issues from their labour. Those who defend such systems are the unwitting spokesmen for privileged bureaucratic layers, perpetuating the proletarian condition of the broad mass of working people.

The other reform which has to be applied is the radical reform of education again from the beginning, and again with the aim of the effective abolition of the proletarian condition.

The purpose of this is to get rid of the lack of education (inculture) of the mass of working people, to end the current division between ‘qualified’ and ‘unqualified’, between ‘intellectual’ and ‘manual’ workers, between people with so-called ‘qualities of leadership’ and those who simply ‘carry out instructions.

In this sense, education is the prerequisite of a truly socialist society where it is not just the formsof property which are affected but the quality of social relations too. But education also affects the evolution of productive forces and the repercussions of this evolution in turn on the qualitative composition of the working class and working people in general.

We have already stressed the fact that the dominant trend in the evolution of the modern economy has been the gradual incorporation of science into the productive process in the form ofbasic research, applied research and higher technology.

Hence the necessity for constantly higher qualifications from an increasing number of working people, at the expense of the number and importance of ordinary labourers.

But in the context of the capitalist system this remains simply a trend. Its accomplishmentdepends upon the destruction of that system and of the principles of authority, hierarchy, subordination and dualism which puts capital in control over working people.

In a society evolving towards socialism permanent education is a viable possibility for reasons which are both fundamental and conjunctural, which touch both on the essence of socialism and on the means of achieving it.

On the one hand permanent education is necessary to help the working people to manage their social life at all levels and in all spheres (the aim of socialism).

On the other hand, only a constantly improving level of qualification can dynamise the economy, modernise it and increase productivity.

The permanent education of working people must be thought of in its overall essence, i.e. as being general, technical and political at one and the same time, so that not mere specialists are formed but polyvalent subjects, citizens developing in a balanced way, capable of controlling and managing their social life.

Education must be considered an integral part of the social labour of every member of society; a distinction can be made between direct productive labour and educational labour, but both should be paid for by society.

In other words, a radical reform of education signifies the division of the time for social labour into two parts: a time devoted to direct, productive labour, and a time devoted to educational labour. This is the real ‘cultural revolution’ that has to be accomplished. Its development, its extant and its forms depend on the context in each concrete example.

But the most important thing is to commit oneself to this from the very beginning, to start abolishing the proletarian condition in the field of education too.

Self-management is a ‘global’ system which cannot be limited to the economy alone or to the level of the enterprise, each acting on its own.

Ultimately a socialist economy might be composed of several large ultra-modern enterprises in each sector of the economy, within the framework of democratic social planning at a national level. But for quite some time it will be a question of dealing with a multitude of enterprises in each sector, working under varied conditions. It is this extreme disparity (among other things) which necessitates our still using the methods of the money market economy, and which shackles real planning (defined as the semi-automatic administration of balanced social development).

The latter kind of planning would suppress in real, economic terms (rather than in an arbitrary, administrative way) the after-effects of capitalist society in the areas of the market, money, payment for the amount of labour supplied, value and surplus value – that is, an economy which still needs to measure its progress, balance its development and stimulate productivity by means of the market, money and labour.

During the period of transition, the guiding line in the economic sphere must be to socialise a dominant sector in each branch of the economy by reason of its concentration, modernity and productivity, and to encourage the voluntary co-operation of the other, smaller enterprises with state aid of all kinds. When we use the term ‘socialise’, we are talking about property which iscollective, and under workers’ management.

Self-management is not an aggregate number of enterprises acting each for itself and in uncontrolled competition. self-management is integrated at the level of the economy into a national social plan, which is applied and worked out democratically. This presupposes a radical rethinking of the idea of rigidly centralised planning in a state-owned economy.

In the economic sphere, the purpose of the plan is to determine the general conditions under which the self-managed enterprises can act and ccordinate their efforts in relation to the ultimate interests of society as a whole. We use the term social rather than economic plan to stress the fact that the plan seeks the balanced overall evolution of the society towards socialism, and that this affects the determination of so-called economic aims; the real aim of the plan is to satisfy the real social needs of the working people and citizens, with decisions made democratically from the bottom up and vice-versa, in a process of interaction which is constantly readjusting the objectives sought, even while the plan is being executed.

Therefore, there is no absolute incompatibility between self-management, the plan and the necessary utilisation of, not exactly the ‘market’ In the capitalist sense, but the methods of the money market economy.

The function of the plan is to establish an equilibrium between self-management and the use of such methods, and to ensure that there is a general direction towards the broadest and quickest possible development of the socialised sector of the economy.

In any such plan the economic and administrative decentralisation of the country will play a very important part.

The country should be thought of as a combination of communes and regions, divided not simply for the sake of administrative control but also because they are homogeneous, coherent economic-administrative unities which favour the balanced development of the country.

The communes and regions will also be self-managed, self-governed by the working people and citizens, and will have sufficient financial means to develop their own plan within the general framework of the national social plan.

This kind of radical reform of local government would be a very important measure for the developed countries, not just developing ones.

It would lay the basis for a real democratisation of the new state, with favourable social and economic repercussions which would benefit the whole country.

Where underdeveloped countries are concerned, communal reform can be combined with agrarian reform and self-management to provide a very powerful lever so that the enormous unused mass of the peasantry can participate in local government; the stimulus will be provided by objectives which are democratically defined at commune level and which will have a direct, palpable effect on the standard of living of the local population.

This is how the overall articulation of the self-managed society takes shape, as it evolves towards an authentic socialist regime. Socialisation, not just state ownership of enterprises and farms,agrarian reform, communal reform, educational reform, democratic planning – these are the elements of a structure which it will need a long time to achieve, but which must be tackled from the beginning, with the ‘global’ conception of them as the point of departure.

In the light of all this, the struggle for socialism would appear to be inseparable from the struggle for self-management. The self-management strategy, both before and after taking power, is the only one capable of mobilising large masses of citizens and working people, as it offers them effective participation in the revolutionary process through all its stages.

Parties, union and governments which refer to the working class, to ‘the people’ to socialism, must devote themselves to the task of getting this participation to work, so that the revolution ‘begun’ will end in victory, and so that afterwards a new regime will be built that avoids the disastrous results of bureaucratic sclerosis.

It is true that the masses aspire to ‘direct democracy’, that they seek to suppress the multiform alienation which they are subjected to in their social life. But existing social relations are based not merely on having but also on knowing and being able, all of which are hoarded by small minorities; they are based on centuries-old concepts of hierarchy, authority, on the dualism between ‘leaders’ and ‘led’. This means that the masses are unable to build social self-management immediately, by themselves, at all levels of social life. For some time they will need the mediation of political parties, unions and other organs, just as the society as a whole will need, for some time, a central power, a ‘state’.

But the real objective of the social revolution is not just to change property relations, but tochange the quality of social relations, the real status of productive man and the citizen in society. Effective steps towards this have to be undertaken from the beginning: the progressive application of socialist self-management, in all spheres and at all levels of social life.

This process is the apprenticeship of socialism, defined as the increasingly direct management of social life by its citizens and working people.

Self-management is the upbringing (pedagogie) of socialism and the upbringing of itself; it teaches itself and perfects itself in being applied.

The application of self-management must not be postponed on the excuse that the working people and citizens are still not fit to manage their social life and that one has to go by stages: a first stage under the state, parties and unions which assume the essence of the masses’ power while the latter content themselves with a measure of control; and a second stage during which the masses will be ‘instructed’ and introduced to the tasks of management.

This kind of reasoning belongs with the bureaucratic deformation, where power is conquered in the name of socialism and the masses and inevitably leads to the stratification of a bureaucracy which gradually becomes omnipotent.

The formation of a bureaucracy is a barrier across the path from a state where the masses merelycontrol to one where they manage.

Self-management is the most direct, the most stubborn enemy of the bureaucracy, the negation of the bureaucracy par excellence.

The whole barbaric past of humanity is based on exploitation and the subordination of some people by others. This fact continues to condition our behaviour, consciously or unconsciously, quite independently of our adherence to this or that ideology. There is almost overwhelming resistance to the birth of new social relations abolishing authoritarianism, hierarchisation, subjugation, dualism.

Some of this resistance comes from the ranks of socialists and revolutionaries. This is why the struggle for self-managed socialism will be a ‘long march’, but an absolutely necessary one.

The task for those who claim to be the vanguard is to ensure that the new ‘power’ is not centralised in the hands of an ‘elite’ in the state, parties and unions, but that it is diffused as widely as possible among the mass of working people and citizens. Their task is to give the utmost systematic, clear and conscious encouragement to all the creative initiative through which the masses express their profound aspiration to become the true subjects of their own history, to manage their social life directly, by themselves.

Only then will there be a future for socialism ‘with a human face’ and this is the only kind of socialism which will be worth the long, persevering, sacrificial struggle ahead.

Alternative globalization movements in the global North, from their high point in the Quebec City mobilizations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas in 2001 to the present, have been faced with the challenge of rebuilding and finding new ground on which to re-mobilize since the political reaction set in following the 9/11 attacks which derailed momentum and caused many mainstream elements (especially labor unions) to disengage and demobilize (where not playing to the forces of “law and order” reaction). One effect of the post-9/11 freeze (it has been more than a chill) has been the drift away from grounded community (it was never much involved in workplace organizing), outside of some important cases such as indigenous land struggles, as in Ontario and British Columbia, and some direct action anti-poverty movements (like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty). Instead much organizing has followed certain lines of flight — crucial in the formation of alternative globalization movements from the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 — to online activism (in indymedia, hacking, social media, and so on).

In some ways radicalism has continued and developed more consistently, or even fully, online than it has offline in community organizing. Partly, this is an effect of the surveillance apparatus and protest policing that has aggressively targeted “on the ground” movements.

The cyber sphere has provided some spaces for maneuver not available in the streets or in the hood. On the one hand, movement commentators have noted the decline of movements in the period after 9/11 up to the moment of brief resurgence manifested in the Occupy encampments. On the other hand, the cyber disobedients have offered some inspiration and reason for hope. Indeed, the networks of the web have been perhaps uniquely important in allowing for some ongoing activity connecting social movement organizers during the period of decline and dissipation of struggles. Indeed, this is always an important task — maintaining movements through inevitable low periods of struggle and sustaining some capacity for collective re-emergence and revival as possibilities for an uptick of struggles open up.  This was perhaps more difficult in periods prior to the development of the web when opportunities for communication, skill sharing, and resource circulation were more limited or localized and when demoralization within face-to-face circles could finish a movement.

The future potential of movements in struggle will rely in part on the growing convergence, even symbiosis, of the cyber disobedients and the direct actionists of the streets. Even more important will be the grounding of this action and organizing in specific workplaces and neighborhoods in ways that challenge fundamentally relations and structures of ownership, control, and exploitation.

Counterpower

Cyber anarchy represents a real form of counterpower as discussed by autonomist Marxist Antonio Negri. For Negri, a counterpower involves three distinguishable aspects. These are resistance (against the old power); insurrection; and what he calls potenza, or that which is constitutive of a new power (or constituent power).

Popular accounts of social struggle tend to focus on the insurrectionary aspects of cyber disobedience, or sometimes (rarely) give a sense that there is resistance being undertaken, but never on the potenza of this practice. Never, either, is it hinted at that there is, in fact, a counterpower in play. That is perhaps not too surprising given the hegemonic function of media and state discussions of online activism.

Where insurrection pushes resistance to innovation, potenza or constituent power expresses new projects of life. For Negri: “And, whereas the insurrection is a weapon that destroys the life-forms of the enemy, constituent power is the force that positively organizes new schemas of life and mass enjoyment of life” (2008, 140). This is not a replacement of existing power (in the sense of the Leninist workers’ state). It is not to take over the reins of the old power. Rather it is to develop new, alternative forms of organization and production — of the commons, of life.

Resistance to the dominant power must be built from the bottom if it is to contribute to the expression of a counterpower. As Negri suggests: “Resisting it from the bottom means extending and building into the resistance the ‘common’ networks of knowledge and action, against the privatization of command and wealth. It means breaking the hard of exploitation and exclusion. It means constructing common languages, in which the alternative of a free life and the struggle against death can emerge victorious.” (2008, 147)

The building of resistance from the ground up and the manifestation of potenza requires the development, maintenance, and extension of shared resources and organization. That is, it requires the construction of what Shantz (2010) has termed infrastructures of resistance. Infrastructures of resistance are those resources that sustain communities in struggle (through food, child care, education, shelter, and so on) while also allowing for the intensification of struggles.  In previous periods, important infrastructures of resistance have included union halls, working class newspapers, mutual aid societies, anarchist free schools, and so on.  In the present period many of the infrastructures of resistance in poor and working class communities have been destroyed or dissipated after decades of neoliberal assault and the professionalization and legalization of union structures and practices.

The decline of infrastructures of resistance has been accompanied by, and in part caused by, the drift of resistance into “activism,” detached from communities of the working class and oppressed. Activism stands as the separation of social and political action into a distinct realm — most typically symbolic street protests — taken up and managed by “activists.” The activists tend to be more privileged, at least economically and culturally, having had professional training in post-secondary institutions, and are not necessarily intrinsically connected with the communities they seek to represent or “defend.” At the same time they tend to fall back on specific, familiar, activist repertoires to express their dissent (marches, demonstrations, banner drops, and so on).  Media savvy their politics are typically symbolic and geared at “awareness raising” or the venting of anger — each geared towards achieving coverage in the media. Protest actions tend to be of a consumerist nature (including against social service agencies) rather than on the basis of directly experienced exploitation in the workplace or labor market.

While this has limited, and in a sense detached and weakened, social struggles, the limitations of such political action (mirrored by the drift of unions into contract management and lobbying) show the need to (re)build infrastructures from the ground up. This includes the tech infrastructures wielded by the cyber disobedients.

Return to the roots: On Cyber Syndicalism and Workers’ Control

In thinking about the context for survival of connectivity and extension of cyber disobedience it is perhaps worthwhile going back to the future, once again. Perhaps too much of cyber activism, and activism in general, has moved online (in hacking, info releases, DOS attacks and so on). One outcome has been a certain loss of connectivity — of the type that connects cyber disobedience with real world material networks in specific contexts of grounded struggle — in workplaces and communities of the working classes and oppressed. Perhaps what is much, if not most, needed is a return to the material context of cyber production (and distribution).

In this there is much to be re/learned by a return to the organizing practices and perspectives of the cyber Wobblies of TAO Communications. Due to the fetishization of the “new,” which has become a driving mania of the global cyber age, TAO members sought to embrace something with a bit more history and substance, even if viewed as rather old or passé, the anti-authoritarian revolutionary politics of anarcho-syndicalism, or revolutionary unionism. TAO (a playful acronym for variously The Anarchy Organization or The Apples and Oranges and others) wanted to push against the closing window of the open (non-enclosed) web by opening up sourcecode and access, securing any and all worker-owned and operated access, and cultivating an internationalist network based on mutual aid and sharing rather than profit.

TAO workers sought to maintain and defend autonomy and be able thereby to extend support, infrastructure, and relative security to radical communications. As workers, secretaries and coders for student, labor, and environmental groups, the emphasis was placed on social struggle, on bodies in the workplaces, communities, and streets, rather than so-called “virtual” reality.   TAO traveling organizers denied the Internet’s very existence (as a mythologized space free from labor and class), and spoke instead about ownership of the means of production and other such sticky aspects of old-fashioned materiality.

Several projects were initiated or taken forward to secure gains in struggle.  Among the most important or durable of the online efforts has perhaps been A-Infos.  A-Infos was a mailing list gleaned from various paper addresses the Toronto publication Anarchives had gathered since the 1960s, joined with the e-list established by the I-AFD in Europe, and supported by Freedom Press, which has operated out of London since Kropotkin and others started it in the 1880s.  A-Infos came to be carried on its own server within the TAO matrix, and its multiple lists and digests distribute news “by, for, and about” anarchists to over 1200 subscribers in at least 12 languages, with substantial daily traffic, as well as print and radio reproduction around the world.  A-infos became the most important daily news source on anarchist activities.  It has been crucial in posting anarchist calls for participation in various struggles continuing to today.

Other projects supported by TAO with more or less success include:  The Student Activist Network, the Direct Action Media Network (an unfortunately defunct precursor to the Indymedia conglomerate), PIRG.CA (public interest research groups in the Canadian context).  Recent solidarity projects include work with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Esgenoopetitj (colonial name: Burnt Church) First Nations, CUPE 3903 (strike-winning teaching assistants at York University), and numerous groups formed to oppose imperialist wars after September 11.  From the original single machine, TAO came to operates at least eight boxes, serving the needs of more than 1000 members, a spread of organizations and individuals, who self-manage thousands of lists, hundreds of web pages, as well as databases.  Besides basic shell access without advertisements or space quotas, organized TAO workers have provided secure access to web-based e-mail, secure online communications, and more.

 

In 1999 TAO workers joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) with the intention of forming a branch amongst telecom workers in the Toronto area.  It was believed that this would solidify syndicalist and co-operative structures, help with the rotation of job tasks, improve benefits for TAO workers, and generally raise class consciousness, particularly in the on-line arena where labor is too often made invisible and victimized by speed need.

TAO members, crucially, saw themselves first and foremost as tech workers involved in a specific, if shifting, mode of production, wielding specific means of production, and connected through particular relations of production. Their impetus was a primal (rather than neo) one. It was the impetus of the worker struggling to overcome exploitation, gain or maintain control of one’s production, and determine the nature of their work (and livelihood), and the conditions of their communities.

The most significant possibilities of cyber disobedience do not rest with direct action hits on state or corporate targets. There is a potential for real power in the collective actions of hacktivists as tech workers directly, and collectively, at the point of production, as TAO workers suggested almost at the beginning of the popular web. During times of a strike of tech workers everyone can see whose labor makes the wi-fi and internet possible. When that labor is withdrawn the system literally goes offline. With growing areas of states and capital entirely dependent on cyber infrastructures, any collective action by tech workers can have a dramatic impact, threatening the basis of command and profit and starkly posing questions of ownership and control.

Even more than collective strike actions, hacktivists can contribute to the remaking of tech resources for purposes that serve a tech (and social) commons as Squire suggests:

The potential, though, does not end with bringing IT systems down. Their role as the experts in the configuration and use of IT infrastructure also means that IT workers, organised as part of the working class, have the potential to reshape some of the existing IT infrastructure so that it can be used by, for and in the interests of the working class as a whole – removing copyright restrictions on online data or remodelling for-profit websites so that they are freely accessible to everyone, for example. IT workers can play a role in reclaiming the online commons. (2013, n.p.)

As TAO members argued more than a decade ago, hacktivists must come to see themselves as tech workers who have specific skills that can be used, not only reactively or as activists, but constructively and productively. This is a constructive anarchy involved in the building of infrastructures of resistance (Shantz 2010). The possibilities for organizing on a class basis as tech workers over issues of exploitation and control of labor may expand as tech work becomes more and more deskilled and/or devalued. This is an ongoing process of what some commentators refer to as the “proletarianization” of tech work (Squire 2013).

The possibilities for a better alternative emerging — in place of the authoritarian forms of what might coalesce as neo-fascism or prison-industrial capitalism — are dependent upon rooted material forms of organization and the preparatory building of the infrastructures of resistance. Tools and practices of cyber disobedience will be important parts in the day- to-day work of these infrastructures of resistance and in their construction, but they are not a substitute for the organizations, resources, and relationships that make up infrastructures of resistance themselves. This is what the early TAO organizers understood clearly, but which many later generations of cyber activists have lost track of.

Cyber anarchists, and activists more broadly, need to devote more attention to affirming what they want — what they are for rather than what they are against — and preparing conditions, providing means, by which it might be realized. Direct action in tech workplaces, and organized efforts toward workers’ control can secure these means — indeed, they will not be secured without syndicalist organizing in tech industries.