Anarcho-socialism, like socialism in general, is hard to define. In writing this I will likely get opposition from self-styled anarchists, socialists and communists that will claim that what I am writing about is not the system that they advocate. This is probably inevitable since there are a number of definitions for anarcho-socialism and a number of sub-sects. For the purposes of this essay I am going to concentrate on the social system advocated by Noam Chomsky and his followers and discussed in detail in the Anarchist FAQ. I will start with the core principles and proceed to examine the logical and moral implications that follow from them. First I will examine the motivations behind the system, explain the theory, and then proceed to analyze the necessary logical and moral problems that arise from it. I will finish by providing historical examples of the results of anarcho-socialism during the Spanish Civil War to demonstrate that the behaviors predicted by the logical analysis play out in reality.
Theory
Anarcho-socialism has much the same motivation as classic Marxist socialism and welfare state socialism: egalitarianism. Quite often self-styled anarcho-socialists express a desire to completely tear down the existing social order. A profound distaste for so-called “bourgeois culture” is usually part of the mix. Typically capitalism and private property are blamed for all social ills.
The theory behind anarcho-socialism has two main principles. The first is that all hierarchy is a form of oppression, and the second is that private property is a form of hierarchy. Private property in the anarcho-socialist view is the absolute worst form of oppression. Private property necessarily creates hierarchy, at least in terms of relationships to specific pieces of property. If one person owns something, then another person is necessarily deprived of it. This is intolerable. So ownership it is both hierarchical and anti-egalitarian. Another claim is that the modern nation state is set up specifically to protect the private property of the exploiting classes. In their view the state as it exists now is a pro-private property institution rather than an institution that systematically attacks private property. In fact, anarcho-socialists assert that without the state private property could not exist. Anarcho-socialists also promote the concept of “wage-slavery” which equates working for a boss in a capitalist system with chattel slavery since, as they see it, the only other option is starvation.
The kind of society that anarcho-socialists advocate usually involves some form of collective property ownership and so-called “democratic control” of the means of production. In practice this would mean communal farms and factories run by so-called “worker’s councils.” It is often difficult to see how this system differs from classical Marxism. The only substantial difference is that anarcho-socialists claim that this form of social organization will occur naturally and spontaneously when the state falls, and the state will necessarily fall when capitalism falls. Marxists at least acknowledge that a group of people acting as a state is necessary to force people to abide by these kind of communal property arrangements.
This system is replete with logical and moral errors. I would actually say that this ideology is so full of errors and inconsistencies that believing in it is almost an intellectual crime. While proponents claim it to be an anarchist, egalitarian and anti-authoritarian ideology, anarcho-socialism is in fact one of the most tyrannical and controlling systems imaginable. People that promote it tend to have tyrannical and controlling personalities as well. If you have ever tried to have a conversation or a debate with a person that advocates this style of anarchism, you will know what I mean. It is not an accident that anarcho-socialists often praise mass-murdering communists like Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara or that they associate with thugs like Hugo Chavez. It is also not an accident that while claiming to be against the state in theory, anarcho-socialists tend to support it in reality. Anarcho-socialists will usually protest and even riot at any hint of the possibility of cuts to any state program. Noam Chomsky has openly said that people should support and even strengthen the state because it is the only weapon that “working people” have to defend themselves from “private tyrannies” like big corporations.
Property and aggression
In any society people have to make decisions about how resources are disposed of. The people that do this are in effect the owners of these resources. For people to survive some natural resources must become human property one way or the other. Any action that disposes of property or denies someone else the right to dispose of property is in and of itself a property rights claim. In order to deny property rights one must necessarily assert them. If a group of people calling itself “the community” or “society” or the “worker’s council” can do this, why can’t anyone else? If property rights are denied until the decision on their disposition has been ratified by society, who has decided that this must be the case? The decision to structure society this way must logically come prior to any decision by society as a whole. Someone or some group at some point must make a decision that is not ratified by society. So in order to create a society in which individuals are denied the right to make decisions about the use of any piece of property without first securing the consent of society, an individual or group of individuals must first make a decision about the use of every piece of property without first securing the consent of society. In order to realize their ideals anarcho-socialists would have to take actions that are not only contradictory to their principles, but that they would forcibly forbid others from taking.
While I don’t know what Chomsky or any other anarcho-socialist ideologues would say about the non-aggression principle, they certainly define aggression differently than everyone else. They stand the usual conceptions of property and aggression on their head. Anarcho-socialists claim that appropriation, possession and defense of private property by homesteaders, producers and owners — as well as using that property for profit — must be defined as aggression against “the community” or “society” at large. Therefore the seizure and use of private property and produced goods by non-homesteaders, non-producers and non-owners must be an act of defense. This inverts the natural order such that the expropriation of homesteaders, producers and owners is not an unethical act of aggression, but rather a moral imperative. Self-defense by an individual thus becomes a crime. Defense of property thus becomes theft.
Not only is this an inversion of the moral order, it is inconsistent from the point of view of anarcho-socialists themselves. Anarcho-socialists are opposed to what they see as arbitrary claims of property-ownership backed by nothing but force. They claim that all current property titles are necessarily based on acts of violence at some point in the past. All property is based on violence, therefore it is arbitrary and illegitimate. Yet they would re-create this exact situation on an even greater scale. They claim the right of “the workers” to expropriate all current title holders and redistribute all property. But how is it determined which worker or group of workers may lay claim to what piece of property? How could such a determination be anything but arbitrary? And how could the claim be realized if not by force? Once again we see that to bring about their ideal society anarcho-socialists would have to act contrary to the principles they claim. They would have to engage in exactly the behavior that they claim to be evil when done by others. They would have to make arbitrary claims to property and back them with force. If the fact that the current distribution of property is the result of violence is a grave moral problem, the solution cannot be yet another round of violent redistribution.
Any attempt to bring about an anarcho-socialist society would necessarily result in mass violence followed by total collapse. First, all previously homesteaded and owned property would be seized and used by non-owners and non-producers. This would likely be very violent. Second, no new property would be homesteaded and put to productive use because it would be subject to the same predation. There would be nothing to gain from being productive. There would be no advantage to working rather than looting. Anarcho-socialist values would essentially make looting rather than working a moral imperative for everyone. Not only would this strip away any incentive for individuals to produce for themselves, such production would in fact be viewed as immoral and would attract violence. As soon as all previously produced goods were used up the system would either have to be adjusted or everyone would starve to death.
The State by any other name
Anarcho-socialist theories do not provide an adequate definition of the state or have a good conception of statism. They tend to avoid the subject altogether, for good reason. What is the state? The state is a group of people that act as ultimate decision makers and have a monopoly on the “lawful” initiation of force over a given area. What is “lawful” is, of course, defined as such by the people claiming to be the state itself. Statism is a kind of human behavior. It is the behavior of controlling others with force and threats and claiming a moral right to do so. Anarcho-socialist ideals require a group of people behaving exactly like a state in order to be implemented. Usually they call their state “the community” or the “worker’s council,” but it is just another state. Opposition to the current state is not the same thing as a rejection of the behavior of statism.
A society without people disposing of private property is impossible. Anarcho-socialists, like all socialists, must bend to reality and admit this. To deal with this fact they have made up the categories of “exploitative” and “non-exploitative” property. But of course, if there is going to be a categorical distinction between these two kinds of property, it must must apply to all individuals and it must be enforced or it is meaningless. Who gets to decide what is “non-exploitative” property or not? Can just anyone decide? If so, what happens if people disagree? What system is used to choose? And who decides that? It falls into a turtles all the way down problem. If there are going to be these kinds of rules about who gets to have what, how much and what kind, there must be a person or group of people that decide on and enforce these rules. In other words, there must be a state. The society cannot be called anarchist or egalitarian any longer. There will necessarily be an inequality of power between the people that make and enforce these decisions and everyone else.
Democratic control of the means of production also necessitates a group acting as a state. Who will administer the elections and enforce their outcomes? What about the people that are voted down when it comes time to vote on what to produce? Can they still be said to be part-owners of the means of production anymore? What about people who act in opposition to decisions of the collective and start using property the way they want to? What happens to them, and who decides? And how was it decided that it would be that way? What about people that want to enter in to voluntary contracts with others to perform labor for them? What about people that just want to do their job and go home? Will they be allowed to do this? Or will they be forced to take part in councils and communes and abide by the decrees of those in power? Democracy of any sort necessarily creates conflict and inequality of power between majorities and minorities. The more areas of life that are controlled by democracy the more tyrannical the majority will become.
Authority vs. individual rights
If the voluntary trading of labor for money is prohibited, are people in an anarcho-socialist society allowed to own their own bodies? It would seem that logically anarcho-socialism, like all systems of collective ownership, must inevitably deny the individual’s right to self-ownership. If the group owns everything in common the group must own the labor power of each individual as well. The group cannot allow the individual to sell his labor or personally profit from it in any way. This would constitute stealing from the rightful owners of everything. The group, more specifically the group of people claiming to act on behalf of the group (the state), must use violence or threats of violence to enforce the group’s claim to the labor of each member. This is slavery in fact, not the imagined slavery of voluntarily trading labor for money (also known as working for a wage). This must necessarily lead to tyranny. In practice such a society would probably end up looking little different than the Soviet Union.
If private property is defined as hierarchical and therefore immoral, then to be consistent anarcho-socialists cannot allow it to exist anywhere. They must force everyone to be a part of their collectives. To do otherwise would be to completely accept the institution of private property and to respect the individual’s right to choose. But this is precisely what those that promote individual freedom, private property and free markets argue for. If anarcho-socialists allow individuals to own capital, profit or trade their labor for money anywhere on earth they are betraying their own principles. To say you can have a capitalist society over here on your property, and on our property we will have an anarcho-socialist commune is to accept not only the existence but the morality of private property. What then is the point of being an anarcho-socialist? For an anarcho-socialist to say that he will not initiate force against property owners would be to give up the entire game. Anarcho-socialism is necessarily a totalitarian ideology. Abolishing private property cannot be a halfway measure.
People that respect other people recognize the right of other individuals to be owners of property and make decisions about how resources that they own, including their own labor power, are disposed of. They also respect the right of others to live communally if they choose to do so on their own property. Totalitarian collectivists are just the opposite. People that claim to act on behalf of collectivist societies must elevate themselves above everyone else and give themselves the exclusive right to control property. They must also give themselves the exclusive right to police their subjects and use violence and terror to maintain their rule. Any individual or group that would deny the right of other individuals to own property, trade and work for their own profit must necessarily be tyrannical, hierarchical and violent. The choice really is between property and tyranny. There is no way all individuals can be policed to make sure no one is using property in prohibited ways, trading for profit or selling their labor without a group of zealous authoritarians in total control.
Anarcho-socialists may object that the force used to maintain collectivism is not initiated because people will have voluntarily chosen to be a part of this communal system and abide by the rules. The problem is that saying this implies that individuals have the right to choose whether or not to be a part of the system in the first place. Anarcho-socialsits cannot possibly recognize such a right. In reality anarcho-socialists are not bothered by the initiation of force or violating the rights of individuals at all. They cannot be and still hold to their principles. Some argue that once people have been re-educated to hold different values, violence will not be necessary to maintain anarcho-socialism. People won’t want to do anything but work for the betterment of their fellow man in their imagined utopia. Or so they say. But why do they assume that their value system is so superior that they have the right to impose this re-education on humanity? This is nothing more than a tired repetition of the “new socialist man” argument that socialists of all stripes trot out when they are confronted with the fact that there are other people in the world that do not wish to live as they would have them live.
If you doubt the fundamentally tyrannical and controlling nature of those that promote this ideology, take a look at the Anarchist FAQ. This is the authoritative document on anarcho-socialism in their own words. Note the sheer volume of “correct” ideas and beliefs that are required of those that follow this ideology. Just like with orthodox Marxists, deviation from the party line is not tolerated.
History and real life
While there are no current examples of a functioning anarcho-socialist society, there are some private businesses, such as the Red and Black Cafe in Portland, Oregon, that claim to be run as anarcho-socialist collectives. A lot of food co-ops and organic farms are worked at and frequented by upper middle-class intellectuals that fetishize this ideology and like to play at being a part of an anarchist commune. This is just self-delusion. In reality these organizations are private businesses on private property that have instituted some kind of employee profit sharing plan. They are still fundamentally capitalist enterprises. The means of production are privately owned and they must profit to maintain themselves. There is more to anarcho-socialism than employee profit sharing.
The most famous example of an attempt at bringing about an anarcho-socialist society took place during the Spanish Civil War. During that war, so-called “anarchist” militias known as the CNT and the FAI took control of the regions of Catalonia and Aragon in Spain. When the CNT militia took over urban areas they initially allowed the workers to take control of the factories where they had previously been “enslaved.” They actually allowed “worker’s self management” in the beginning. However, they soon discovered to their horror that the newly “liberated” workers tended to behave like real human beings rather than class-conscious “anarchists.” They treated the factories like private property and ran them for their own profit. As economist Bryan Caplan explains in his essay The Anarcho-Statists of Spain:
[A]fter being told that the workers now owned the means of production, the workers often took the statement literally. What is the point of owning the means of production if you can’t get rich using them? But of course if some workers get rich, they are unlikely to voluntarily donate their profits to the other members of their class. This seems elementary upon reflection, but only practical experience was able to reveal this to the economic reformers of the Spanish Revolution.
[P]ractical experience gradually revealed a basic truth of economics for which theoretical reflection would have sufficed: if the workers take over a factory, they will run it to benefit themselves. A worker-run firm is essentially identical to a capitalist firm in which the workers also happen to be the stockholders. Once they came to this realization, however dimly, the Spanish Anarchists had to either embrace capitalism as the corollary of worker control, or else denounce worker control as the corollary of capitalism. For the most part, they chose the latter course.
And in the words of CNT militia leader Ricardo Sanz:
[T]hings are not going as well as they did in the early days of the [revolutionary] movement… The workers no longer think of workings long hours to help the front. They only think of working as little as possible and getting the highest possible wages.
As we would expect given the above analysis, the “anarchists” found this situation intolerable. In reaction they began to institute a strictly controlled centralization of industry. According to Burnett Bolloten, author of The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution:
[T]he Anarchosyndicalists, contrary to common belief, were not without their own plans for the nationwide control and rationalization of production. Rootedly opposed to state control or nationalization, they advocated centralization – or socialization, as they called it – under trade-union management of entire branches of production.
[S]ocialization would eliminate the dangers of government control by placing production in the hands of the unions. This was the libertarian conception of socialization, without state intervention, that was to eliminate the wastes of competition and duplication, render possible industrywide planning for both civilian and military needs, and halt the growth of selfish actions among the workers of the more prosperous collectives by using their profits to raise the standard of living in the less favored enterprises.
So while the militias claimed that they were not implementing state control of production, the distinction was purely semantic. They behaved exactly like a state in substance and called it something else, just as the above analysis would predict.
In the rural areas the militias were not willing to take the same risks they took in the cities. They attempted to institute total agricultural collectivism immediately. As Bolloten explains:
Although no hard and fast rules were observed in establishing libertarian communism, the procedure was more or less the same everywhere. A CNT-FAI committee was set up in each locality where the new regime was instituted. This committee not only exercised legislative and executive powers, but also administered justice. One of its first acts was to abolish private trade and to collectivize the soil of the rich, and often that of the poor, as well as farm buildings, machinery, livestock, and transport. Except in rare cases, barbers, bakers, carpenters, sandalmakers, doctors, dentists, teachers, blacksmiths, and tailors also came under the collective system. Stocks of food and clothing and other necessities were concentrated in a communal depot under the control of the local committee, and the church, if not rendered useless by fire, was converted into a storehouse, dining hall, cafe, workshop, school, garage, or barracks. In many communities money for internal use was abolished…
Bryan Caplan continues:
Many people fled for fear of their lives. Their land was seized almost immediately. After all, who but a “fascist” would flee? The expropriation of land from anyone too terrified of the new regime to even wait to see what their new life would be like provided the nucleus for the collectives.
And according to the CNT’s own propaganda newspaper:
We militiamen must awaken in these persons the spirit that has been numbed by political tyranny. We must direct them along the path of the true life, and for that it is not sufficient to make an appearance in the village; we must proceed with the ideological conversion of these simple folk.
Here again we see the militias behaving as a totalitarian communist state. We see the militia leaders exhibiting exactly the kind of controlling, tyrannical mindset that we would expect given the previous analysis.
When we look at the events of the Spanish Civil War — which is lionized by anarcho-socialists as a triumph and the best realization of their program to date — we see that despite their supposedly high ideals, these so-called “anarchists” ended up creating an authoritarian, totalitarian, militaristic, hierarchical and bureaucratic state. They maintained this state through acts of violence and terror. Far from being counter-intuitive, this is just what we would expect given the analysis of the principles that they were working from.
We can thus conclude from both theory and history that an anarcho-socialist society would be impossible to achieve in reality without tyranny and mass violence. Total collectivism and the abolition of private property necessarily require the behavior of statism, no matter what label the individuals that promote it use for themselves.
For a while I had almost forgotten about the whole issue of global warming. It seems that it has really died down in the press over the last year. Public skepticism has been growing and the climategate emails have made at least some kind of dent in the orthodoxy. At least it has seemed to be a little safer to express skepticism about the issue over the last year. Or maybe I was just paying less attention. In any case, I was reminded of it today when saw this howler of an article in the official propaganda organ of the US Government. It would seem that the purpose of this article is an attempt to remind people that despite bitter cold and a huge blizzard today in the eastern US, not to mention colder than average winters in the US and Europe for the last 5 out of 7 years, Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is still real and it is still out there.
