Why Anarchists Don't Go In Politics...

[Havet]

A common reaction to Anarchism is that Anarchists should use political means, that they should play the game, in order to obtain some measure of change. An argument of this sort:

“As an Anarchist, you should stop all this fussing about, and instead you should become a politician, and try to change things properly”

But this is complete insanity, it’s raving lunacy. You can fully see its lunacy if you apply it to another area:

“As someone who is against abortion, you should stop protesting and making all this fuss. Become an abortion doctor and try to reform the AMA from within.”

If you told this to any anti-abortion activist, they would think you were mocking them in a very clumsy way or that you were grandiosely retarded. It would really take someone of a great stupidity to even conceive of such an argument, let alone have the complete lack of humour necessary to say it out loud without laughing. Or like this:

“If you’re against slaughterhouses, you should start your own slaughterhouse, kill a whole bunch of animals, make a lot of inroads in the industry, and use your influence to get other slaughterhouse owners to be more humane.”

Eventually, you’d get slugged in the face, and I wouldn’t blame whoever did it. And yet the argument is used for gradualism and against revolutionary action, with a straight face. Why do we even accept this as being anything but raving lunacy?

To a lesser extent, people who tell Anarchists to vote and “make their voices heard” fall into the same fallacy.

I really hope I don’t have to explain why this is insane: people who are fighting against what they perceive as a great evil have no interest in perpetrating it themselves. As an Anarchist, I have absolutely no desire to participate in the exploitation inherent in the political system. Voting, for instance, is an act of delegated coercion, even if one votes for a “good” cause or for the eradication of a “bad” law (all laws are bad by definition, but eradicating certain “bad” laws only brings the others to the fore). To ask Anarchists to vote is to basically ask them to stop being Anarchists.

Read the rest here (http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/why-dont-you-go-in-politics/)

[SocialismOrBarbarism]

A common reaction to Anarchism is that Anarchists should use political means, that they should play the game, in order to obtain some measure of change. An argument of this sort:

“As an Anarchist, you should stop all this fussing about, and instead you should become a politician, and try to change things properly”

But this is complete insanity, it’s raving lunacy. You can fully see its lunacy if you apply it to another area:

“As someone who is against abortion, you should stop protesting and making all this fuss. Become an abortion doctor and try to reform the AMA from within.”

If you told this to any anti-abortion activist, they would think you were mocking them in a very clumsy way or that you were grandiosely retarded. It would really take someone of a great stupidity to even conceive of such an argument, let alone have the complete lack of humour necessary to say it out loud without laughing. Or like this:

“If you’re against slaughterhouses, you should start your own slaughterhouse, kill a whole bunch of animals, make a lot of inroads in the industry, and use your influence to get other slaughterhouse owners to be more humane.”

Eventually, you’d get slugged in the face, and I wouldn’t blame whoever did it. And yet the argument is used for gradualism and against revolutionary action, with a straight face. Why do we even accept this as being anything but raving lunacy?

To a lesser extent, people who tell Anarchists to vote and “make their voices heard” fall into the same fallacy.

I really hope I don’t have to explain why this is insane: people who are fighting against what they perceive as a great evil have no interest in perpetrating it themselves. As an Anarchist, I have absolutely no desire to participate in the exploitation inherent in the political system. Voting, for instance, is an act of delegated coercion, even if one votes for a “good” cause or for the eradication of a “bad” law (all laws are bad by definition, but eradicating certain “bad” laws only brings the others to the fore). To ask Anarchists to vote is to basically ask them to stop being Anarchists.

Read the rest here (http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/why-dont-you-go-in-politics/)

I like Marx's response...


Indifference to politics

By Karl Marx

The working class should not form a political party, and should not, under any circumstances, undertake political action, since to combat the state is to recognize the state, which is contrary to eternal principles. The workers must not strike, since to make efforts to increase one's wages or prevent them from being reduced is to recognize wages, which is contrary to the eternal principles of emancipation of the working class!
"If in the political struggle against the bourgeois state the workers only manage to wrest concessions, they are making compromises, which is contrary to the eternal principles. One must therefore scorn any peaceful movement, as the English and American workers have the bad habit of doing. The workers must make no effort to establish a legal limit to the working day, since this is like making compromises with the bosses, who could then only exploit them for 10 to 12 hours instead of 14 to 16. They must not even bother to have the employment of children below the age of 10 in the factories forbidden by law, since in this way they are not putting an end to the exploitation of children under 10 years of age, and are thus making another compromise, which prejudices the purity of the eternal principles.
"Still less should the workers desire that, as in the America republic, the state whose budget is drawn from the working class should be obliged to provide elementary education for the children of workers because elementary education is not complete education. It is better that the working men and women should not know how to read and write or count, than that they should be taught by a teacher of a state school. Far better that the working class should be afflicted by ignorance and 16 hour's drudgery than that they eternal principles should be violated!
"If the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms, if the workers substitute their revolutionary dictatorship for the dictatorship of the bourgeois class, they are committing the terrible crime of lese-principle, for to satisfy their own base everyday needs and crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie, instead of laying down arms and abolishing the state they are giving it a revolutionary and transient form. The workers should not form individual unions for each trade, since they thereby perpetuate the division of social labor found in bourgeois society. This division which disunites workers is really the basis for their present servitude.
"In a word, the workers should fold their arms and not waste their time in political and economic movements. These movements can only bring them immediate results. Like truly religious people, scornful of everyday needs, they should cry, full of faith: 'May our class be crucified, may our race perish, but may the eternal principles remain unstained!' They should, like pious Christians, believe in the words of the priest, despise earthly blessings and think only of earning paradise. For paradise read THE ABOLITION OF SOCIETY, which will one day arrive in some small corner of the world, no one knows how or by whose efforts, and the mystification will be exactly the same.
"Until this famous abolition of society arrives, the working class must behave decently, like a flock of well-fed sheep, leave the government in peace, fear the police, respect the laws, and provide cannon fodder without complaining.
"In practical everyday life the workers must be the most obedient servants of the State, but inside themselves they must protest energetically against its existence, and show their profound theoretical disdain for it by purchasing and reading literary treatises on the abolition of the state. They must moreover take good care not to offer any resistance to the capitalist order apart from holding forth on the society of the future in which the odious order will have cease to exist!"
No one would deny that if the apostles of indifference to politics were to express themselves in such a clear manner, the working class would soon tell them where to go and would feel highly offended by these bourgeois doctrinaires and displaced gentlefolk who are stupid or naive enough to forbid them every real method of struggle because all the arms to fight with them must be taken from existing society, and because the inevitable conditions of this struggle do not unfortunately fit in with the idealist fantasies these doctors of social science have deified under the name of liberty, autonomy and anarchy. But the working-class movement is so strong today that these philanthropic sectarians no longer dare to repeat for the economic struggle the great truths they have incessantly proclaimed on the political struggle. They are too pusillanimous to apply them yet to strikes, combinations, and trade unions, to the laws on female and child labour, and on the reduction of working hours, etc., etc.
Now, it remains to be seen whether they are capable of appealing to the fine traditions, to modesty, to good faith and the eternal principles!
Since the social conditions were not sufficiently developed to permit the working class to form a militant class, the first socialists (Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon and others) were inevitable bound to subscribe to dreams of the ideal society of the future and condemn all such attempts as strikes, associations and political movements undertaken by the workers to bring some improvement to their lot. But if we have no right to reject these patriarchs of socialism, just as the chemists have no right to reject their fathers, the alchemists, we must at least avoid repeating their mistakes, which if committed by us would be inexcusable.
Later, however - in 1939 - when the working-class political and economic struggle had acquired a fairly marked character in England, Bray - a disciple of Owen and one of those who had found mutualism considerable earlier than Proudhon - published a book entitled Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy.
In one of the chapters, which deals with the inefficacy of all the remedies it is hoped will be achieved by the present struggle, he submits to bitter criticism all the movements, whether political or economic, of the English working class, condemning the political movement, strikes, the reduction of working hours, legislation on female and child labour in the factories, since all this - according to him - instead of of enabling us to pass out of the present state of society, keeps us there and only intensifies the antagonisms.
Now we come to the oracle of these doctors of social science, Proudhon. While the master had the courage to energetically condemn all economic movements(coalitions, strikes, etc.) that were contrary to the redeeming theories of his mutualism, he encouraged the working-class political movement by his writings and his own personal participation: his disciples do not dare to openly condemn the movement, In 1947, at the time when the master's major work Systeme des contradictions economiques appeared, I confuted his sophisms against the working class movement. Nevertheless, in 1864, after the Ollivier law, which accorded the French workers the right to combination in such a limited matter, Proudhon returned to his task in his book Political Capacities of the Working Classes, published a few days after his death.
The attacks of the master were so the state of the bourgeoisie that the Times, on the occasion of the big tailors' strike in London in 1866, did Proudhon the honour of translating him and condemning the strikers with his own words. Here are a few examples from it.
The miners of Reve-de-Gier had gone on strike and the soldiers had come hurry to return them to reason.
The authority that had the miners of Reve-de-Gier shot [Proudhon exclaims] was in an unfortunate position. But it acted like the ancient: Brutus standing between his paternal love and his duty as consul: he had to sacrifice his sons in order to save the republic. Brutus did not hesitate, and posterity dare not condemn him.
As long as the proletariat has existed, on cannot recall a single case of a bourgeois having hesitated to sacrifice his workers to save his own interests. What Brutuses the bourgeois are!
No, there is no right to combination, just as there is no right to fraud or theft, just as there is no right to incest or adultery.
It must be said, however, that there is certainly a right to stupidity.
What then are the eternal principles in the name of which the master hurls his abracadabra excommunications?
First eternal principle:
Wages determine prices.
Those who have not the faintest notion of political economy and do not know that the great bourgeois economist Ricardo in his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1817, refuted once and for all this traditional error know that remarkable fact of English industry, which can offer its products at a price greatly inferior to that of any other nation while wages are relatively higher in England than in any other country in Europe.
Second eternal principle:
The law authorising combinations is highly anti-juridical, anti-economic, contrary to every society and order.
In a word, it is "contrary to the economic right of free competition".
If the master had been a little lest of a chauvinist, he would have wondered how it was that 40 years earlier saw a law so contrary to the economic right of free competition was promulgated in England, and how it is that as industry develops, and with it free competition, this law contrary to every society and order is imposing itself as a necessity upon the bourgeois states. He might have discovered this Right (with a capital R) only exists in the economic manuals published by the Ignoramus Brothers of bourgeois political economy, in which manuals one finds such pearls as the following: "Property is the fruit of labour." They omitted to say "of other people's" labour.
Third eternal principle:
Thus, under the pretext of raising the working class from so called social inferiority, it will be necessary to begin denouncing a whole class of citizens: the class of masters, entrepreneurs, bosses and bourgeois. It will be necessary to excite working-class democracy to scorn and hatred for these unworthy colleagues of the middle class, it will be necessary to prefer mercantile and industrial warfare to legal repression, and class antagonisms and the state police.
In order to prevent the working class from emerging from its so-called social inferiority, the boss condemns the associations formed by the working class which make it a class antagonistic to the respectable category of bosses, entrepreneurs and bourgeois who certainly prefer, like Proudhon, the state police to class antagonisms. In order to avoid displeasing this respectable class in any way, the good Proudhon advises the workers (until the coming of the mutualist society and despite the great inconvenience caused them) "liberty or competition, our only guarantee".
The master preached indifference to economics in order to safeguard liberty or bourgeois competition, our only guarantee. The disciples preach indifference to politics in order to safeguard bourgeois liberty, their only guarantee. If the early Christians, who also preached indifference to politics, needed the helping hand of an emperor to change them from oppressed into oppressors, the modern apostles of indifference to politics do not believe their eternal principles oblige them to abstain from the pleasures of the world and transient privileges of bourgeois society. And yet we must recognize that it is with a stoicism worthy of the Christian martyrs that they put up with the 14 to 16 hours of work with which the factory workers are overloaded!

[Forward Union]

We are not against working within government on moral grounds. If you are, then you're no different from a religious zealot. We're against it beacause it doesn't work, if it did work, we ought to be the strongest proponents of it.

I can't think of any significant reform which has ever occored which was not achieved through the mass organisation of the working class (or the oppressed faction in question) Nor can I think of any lasting, successful left-wing infiltrations into bourgeoisie democracy. This point needs to be hammered, and any glimpse of history will back it to the fullest. We want to create change, not enter parliament, it's one or the other.

What I think we need to show, is that we can actually produce change, be serious, comitted and effective.

Unions for example, are organs of the working class, potentially powerful ones which are not necessarily anything to do with bourgeoisie democracy. Not only these, but also residents and tenants associations. These can, through direct action (strike, occupation, effective demonstration etc) produce lasting benefits and most importantly empowerment for the working class. These bodies are the only ones capable of producing change, which will then certainly be reflected in parliamentary discussion, and which they may pass off as their own initiative; but was of and for the working class.

[Havet]

We are not against working within government on moral grounds. If you are, then you're no different from a religious zealot. We're against it beacause it doesn't work, if it did work, we ought to be the strongest proponents of it. I am against working within the government on "moral" and practical grounds. I know it doesn't work, I know of people who have tried it and failed miserably.


This point needs to be hammered, and any glimpse of history will back it to the fullest. We want to create change, not enter parliament, it's one or the other.

What I think we need to show, is that we can actually produce change, be serious, comitted and effective.

Unions for example, are organs of the working class, potentially powerful ones which are not necessarily anything to do with bourgeoisie democracy. Not only these, but also residents and tenants associations. These can, through direct action (strike, occupation, effective demonstration etc) produce lasting benefits and most importantly empowerment for the working class. These bodies are the only ones capable of producing change, which will then certainly be reflected in parliamentary discussion, and which they may pass off as their own initiative; but was of and for the working class.

Yeah, you've basically defended my post. It is far more cost-effective to create change by direct action than to enter parliament.

What I was basically coming at is that only engaging in direct action might pay off better in the long run than engaging in both direct action and parliamentary action.

[Forward Union]

I am against working within the government on "moral" and practical grounds. I know it doesn't work, I know of people who have tried it and failed miserably.

So even if working within the government could quite effectively bring down all government and create workers control, you'd be against it on moral grounds. Well that's fucking great isn't it.

[Trystan]

I am against working within the government on "moral" and practical grounds. I know it doesn't work, I know of people who have tried it and failed miserably.


Sorry to do the whole Godwin's Law thing, but do you not think that it would have been morally right, say, to ally with the British and American governments in defeating the Nazis in WW2? Even if the states of Great Britain and the USA were undesirable, in that particular context it would have been quite right to ally with them (on moral grounds).

[Havet]

So even if working within the government could quite effectively bring down all government and create workers control, you'd be against it on moral grounds. Well that's fucking great isn't it.

In your particular case, if creating worker's control could actually be achieved by using parliamentary politics, then I wouln't oppose it (because, after all, now it would be the practical thing to do, you know)

My only moral objection to using parliamentary politics is that, in the end, it doesn't achieve what one wished to practice.

[Havet]

Sorry to do the whole Godwin's Law thing, but do you not think that it would have been morally right, say, to ally with the British and American governments in defeating the Nazis in WW2? Even if the states of Great Britain and the USA were undesirable, in that particular context it would have been quite right to ally with them (on moral grounds).

I think it would have been morally right. Check my post above (i wrote it without knowing you had replied)

also, why hasn't anyone commented the tags for this thread yet? :P

[Robert]

“
As an Anarchist, you should stop all this fussing about, and instead you should become a politician, and try to change things properly”


Okay, don't do it properly. Do it improperly. Just do something besides telling everyone who disagrees with you how crazy or stupid they are. It's feckless and unfriendly.

Reformists at least give it the old college try.

[Havet]

“

Okay, don't do it properly. Do it improperly. Just do something besides telling everyone who disagrees with you how crazy or stupid they are. It's feckless and unfriendly.

Reformists at least give it the old college try.

Of course we are assuming the word properly means something most anarchists find proper. The word proper was used in the context of brainwashed politics, which unfortunately most people believe.

Reformists at least keep the old state of affairs, while no actual profound change is ever made. Why? Because profound change cannot happen by vote or referendum, that is why it's profound. It would require a major ideological revolution or a major physical revolution, which can be instantaneous or gradual, but nevertheless you'll certainly won't vote the capitalists and politicians out of power.

[yuon]

Anarchists are essentially political. That is, they have opinions on political things, and wish to change politics fundamentally.

Anarchists are also essentially anti-political. Anarchists oppose parliaments (the only person who can truly represent me, is myself), governments, capitalist political parties (toe the line, or leave), etc.

The thing is though, anarchists aren't opposed to certain aspects of the current structure, as a means to oppose and change that structure. We would strongly oppose any attempt to get rid of the right to a lawyer in court for example, and don't mind, sometimes, voting (especially in local elections, or referendum).

What anarchists really want is change, but, anarchist change. After all, the means are the ends. There are two lines of thought on this, one (which is correct, I believe is not a correct "anarchist" opinion), opposes statist dictatorships that might bring about anarchism, because they don't work. The other, opposes dictatorships, because they are un-anarchistic.

[Havet]

The thing is though, anarchists aren't opposed to certain aspects of the current structure, as a means to oppose and change that structure. We would strongly oppose any attempt to get rid of the right to a lawyer in court for example, and don't mind, sometimes, voting (especially in local elections, or referendum).


Of course, it is prudent to not allow that things get worse, even if anarchists have to work "within the system" until actual anarchy is achieved.

[Forward Union]

In your particular case, if creating worker's control could actually be achieved by using parliamentary politics, then I wouln't oppose it (because, after all, now it would be the practical thing to do, you know)

My only moral objection to using parliamentary politics is that, in the end, it doesn't achieve what one wished to practice.

So your moral objection isn't moral, it's practical :cool:

[Havet]

So your moral objection isn't moral, it's practical :cool:

i suppose so, hehe. After all, you did give a practical example. So it's natural i looked at it from the cost and benefit of what one had to practice and what on could achieve.