Socialism is not a religion but a method of understanding and changing the world. This is a speculative essay on how socialism may perhaps organise its decision making and should not be treated as party policy as our position is that when socialism is established, how it is organised will be determined by the majority at the time and not in advance by a small group as ourselves. We are also sure that there will be many adaptations to suit particular conditions and specific situations, taking into account the history, the geography and local customs.
Marx’s theory of socialist revolution is grounded on the fundamental principle that “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.” Marx held to this view throughout his political activity, and it distinguished his theory of social change from that of both those who appealed to governments and industrialists to change the world for the benefit of the working class and of those who relied on the determined action of some enlightened minority of professional revolutionaries to liberate the working class.
There is an enormous confusion in the use of the term “socialism.” It is mistakenly identified with state control and police rule. Socialist emancipation is incompatible with any state ownership or party rule, and true socialisation of the means of production requires true participation of all citizens in social decision-making. Socialist society is based on the free association of all individuals who work together to produce the goods necessary for their collective well-being. All will work according to their capacities and their needs will be fully satisfied. It is through such a free association, when labour in all its aspects becomes controlled by the workers themselves that production will rest not upon decisions of the planners, but of the freely determined wishes of the producers themselves. Socialism will have no need of the irrational remnants of a past age, such as prices, money or wages. The socialist view is that the future will see the rise of a free association, a society wherein neither class nor government shall exist. Socialism is a society of the free and equal, the rule of the people. Each individual, with all his or her distinctive abilities and needs, is at the same time a social being. One becomes human only in society. Need for personal freedom goes together with the need to be recognized and esteemed in the community to which one belongs. Socialism presupposes a conception of mankind as a being capable of free creative activity, who brings to life the individual’s potential and at the same time satisfies the needs of others. The whole purpose of the socialist struggle for universal human emancipation is to create different conditions, different social structures, under which this potential can be brought to life.
Firstly, the means of production and means of other socially necessary activities must not remain the monopoly of any particular social group (bourgeoisie, bureaucracy, technocracy); they ought to be socialised not turned into the property of the state. The realm of democracy is not only the political sphere but the whole sphere of public life – production, education, scientific research, cultural activities, health service, etc. This is possible under the conditions of a thorough decentralisation. There is no need for any concentration of power in the hands of professional politicians. A form of democracy without professional politics is councils-democracy or self-government. Work has reached the point where it is now possible both to satisfy the needs of all individuals and to reduce the necessary working hours to a level which will allow everybody truly to participate in communal activities and decision-making processes.
Socialisation of the means of production is the transformation of private property into common social property. To be common social property means: (a) to belong to the society as a whole (b) to be put at the disposal of the community the fruits of such work to provide for individual and collective social needs. The justification for the socialisation of the means of production is that those means were actually produced by social work, by the accumulated, unpaid surplus work of hired producers over a long period of time. What makes socialisation a truly democratic act is the effective introduction of worker’s self-management. The assembly of all people (in small communities), or the council composed of delegates (in large ones) become responsible for the making of decisions regarding all issues of production, distribution and communal life.
Marx's conception of what a fully democratic system would be like seems to had been influenced by events in France. Here's how he described the Paris Commune of 1871 which he held up as an example of how the working class should exercise political power once they had won control of it:
"The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time..In a rough sketch of national organization, which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents."
The democratic organisation of all people as citizens of the world would need to operate through different scales of social co-operation. Locally, in town or country, we would be involved with our parish or neighbourhood. Even now, there are many thousands of men and women throughout the country who work voluntarily on parish and district councils and in town neighbourhoods for the benefit of their communities. But these efforts would be greatly enhanced by the freedoms of a society run entirely through voluntary co-operation. Such local organisation would be in the context of regional co-operation which could operate by adapting the structures of present national governments. Whilst some departments such as Inland Revenue and the Treasury, essential to the capitalist state, would be abolished, others like Agriculture and the Environment could be adapted to the needs of socialist society and could be part of regional councils and would assist in the work of implementing the decisions of regional populations. With the abolition of the market system, communities in socialism will not only be able to make free and democratic decisions about what needs to be done they will also be free to use their resources to achieve those aims. Communities will be free to decide democratically how best to use those resources. Small units could be run by regular meetings of all the workers. In the cases of large organisations these could be run by elected committees accountable to the people working in them. In this way, democratic practice would apply not just to the important policy decisions that would steer the main direction of development, it would extend to the day-to-day activities of the work place.
Some anarchist advocates hold that all big systems are intrinsically bad and that all those activities that require them (for example, industrial manufacturing, air transport, even big cities) ought to be abandoned according to some. Murray Bookchin, an exponent of what he called libertarian municipalism has
countered:
“....I don't want to go back to the past. I am not a primitivist...I think that the main causes of our problems lie in social relations — in capitalism, the nation-state — and in the commodification of all things and relations. If we organized social life along cooperative and humanistic lines, technology could be one of the major solutions to our problems. Primitivists believe we have too much civilization. I believe we're not civilized enough. Some primitivists are even against "society," but I think that without society you are not a human being. They believe in personal autonomy, I believe in social freedom. They seem to believe that there is a "natural man," an "uncorrupted ego," which civilization has poisoned. I believe that competition and other class and hierarchical relations have corrupted society, and that we need instead a cooperative civilization...”
Bookchin goes on to explain:-
"Democracy is something that anarchism often seems to have problems with. This is one area in which I differ with authentic anarchists, who emphasize an individual ego and the fulfillment of its desires as the overriding consideration. Many anarchists reject democracy as the "tyranny" of the majority over the minority. They think that when a community makes decisions by majority vote, it violates the "autonomy" of the egos of the individuals who voted in the minority. They seem to think that somehow those who voted against a decision, because they are "autonomous," shouldn't have to follow it.
I think that that idea is naive at best and a prescription for chaos at worst. Decisions, once made, have to be binding. Of course minorities should always have the right to object to majority decisions and to freely voice their own views. Majorities have no right to try to prevent a minority from voicing its views and trying to win majority support for them.
The question is, what is the fairest way to make community wide decisions? I think majority voting is not only the fairest but the only viable way for a face-to-face democratic society to function, and that decisions made by majority vote should be binding on all the members of the community, whether they voted in favor of a measure or against it.
And unlike many anarchists, I don't think a particular individual or municipality should be able to do whatever it wants to do at all times. Lack of structure and institutions leads to chaos and even arbitrary tyranny. I believe in law, and the future society I envision would also have a constitution. Of course, the constitution would have to be the product of careful consideration, by the empowered people. It would be democratically discussed and voted upon. But once the people have ratified it, it would be binding on everyone. It is not accidental that historically, oppressed people who were victims of the arbitrary behavior of the ruling classes — "barons," as Hesiod called them in seventh-century B.C. Greece — demanded constitutions and just laws as a remedy...”
Decentralisation has a number of shortcomings, such as:
(1) The absence of necessary coordination leads to waste of natural resources, inefficiency. Some important social activities require common natural and human resources, division of roles and unique direction. These include energy production, public transportation, large-scale production of goods, protection of the natural environment, production of indispensable raw materials, defense.
(2) A low level of productivity based on small scale technology requires more labour. Many important human needs can not be met with small scale technology.
(3) Small scale social organisation and reduction of needs makes many rare, specific human skills redundant. Specialised scientific research, fine arts, cannot be supported by small, self-reliant communities.
(4) The inevitable social-psychological consequence of a narrow, provincial mentality returning after capitalism’s cosmopolitanism where any return to parochial forms of life and thought would constitute a major retrogression. The idiocy of rural life, as Marx described it.
(5) Decentralisation does not automatically eliminate domination and oppression. One huge, faceless bureaucracy may be merely replaced by a number of small, personal, petty tyrants. Far from being more beautiful, the small master may be more inconsiderate, arbitrary and sadistic.
Rather than decentralisation, many prefer a federated system of organisation in the sense of a union of communities (regions, provinces, cultural organisations) which collaborate as equal partners while preserving a high degree of their autonomy. Certain issues can be resolved only in a global way; for example, efforts to improve the quality of the natural environment. In a world of growing interdependence, federalism appears to be the optimal way of transcending parochialism and localism. A federation is possible when all communities have an interest in cooperation, in sharing resources and goods. The basic assumption of the federation is that it is a free creation of the parts rather than a primary whole that determines the conditions of its parts. No matter how high a degree of coordination in a union of this type, it does not have any dominating center because none of its component units aspires to domination, and/or because all of them strongly resist any such tendency. The stability of such a federation depends on a balance of two opposing forces.
One works irreversibly toward greater identity and uniformity; the other maintains diversity and preserves specific communal traditions and cultural values.
In the same way in which an individual experiences a community as an indispensable social environment when he or she freely acts and develops in it, a community willingly accepts a larger society as its natural environment when it can freely develop within it, autonomously decide on its specific problems, equally participate in the solution of issues common for the whole society, and when it can collaborate with other parts without being abused or exploited by any of them. In fact the level of coordination among parts can be higher in a federation then in a centralist system. What makes it a federation is equal distribution of power regardless of the size, and full political, economical and cultural self-determination.
One difficulty is difference in size and population. If ordinary democratic rules would be applied, a bigger and more populous federal unit would have a larger electorate, a larger number of representatives in the federal self-governing body (federal assembly) and, consequently, more power. Purely quantitative and representative democracy must be corrected in order to diminish the importance of numbers and to protect the interests of the minorities. There must be a political culture that combines autonomy with solidarity. An association would fall apart if its constituent communities would pursue only their selfish, particular interests; fight all the time; and squeeze out half-satisfactory compromise solutions. The purpose of a common political culture would be to provide a consensus in basic premises for any conflict resolution. Such basic premises are, first, agreement about ultimate preferences, other conditions being equal; second, agreement about which ultimate preferences have priority when other conditions are not equal, and when they happen to be mutually incompatible. When a federal unit, for selfish reasons, raises a particular issue, it will be invited to justify it with reference to generally accepted principles. Dialogues cannot be won with short-sighted, self-centered policies. It is true that these policies can be stubbornly defended once one escapes the field of rational and moral discourse and turns to formalistic legal rationalization. After all, it is conceivable that, using its veto power, a part may blackmail the rest of the society. But in such a case either the particular discordant leadership would lose the support of its own constituency and would be recalled, or the federation’s social fabric would collapse, and it would practically fall apart. One of the basic purposes of living in any community is mutual aid, support of the whole for any of its parts when coping with a problem that exceeds its own powers. It is important to note here that while “aid” appears to be a one-way operation, a humanitarian act, it is, in fact, an expression of reciprocity. It turns out to be a rational thing to do, a matter of mutual interest.
Often seen as the most difficult problem of a socialist revolution is bringing to life self-government as the new form of democracy, the problem of the transcendence of the state - the “withering away of the state”.The practical meaning of the transformation of government into self- government may be spelled out in the following way:
(a) The members of a self-governing body, at any level of social organisation, are directly elected by the people or delegated by a lower-level organ of self- government. The procedure of election is fully democratic: no candidate can have any privileges because of his or her professional role, past merits, or backing by existing political organisations.
(b) The members of a self-governing body are elected for limited intervals of time; the principle of rotation strictly observed and it excludes perpetuation of the power of professional politicians.
(c) The members of self-government are directly responsible to their electorate. They are obliged to regularly give account to the community which they represent and are subject to recall. They articulate the needs of the community, but also by finding ways to reconcile particular interests of the community with interests of other communities and the society as a whole. The institution of self-government excludes authoritarian leadership. The will of the people must count all the time, and the use of force is out of the question. But it does not follow that the roles are simply reversed and that elected representatives have no other alternative but to follow blindly every twist and turn of the mass current. In case of conflict they will make an effort to prevail due to the strength of their arguments – or else they will resign. The road to becoming a career politician is closed. And the community is strongly motivated to have an able representative.
(d) Representatives must not enjoy any material privileges which would produce undesirable social differences, lowers the motivation of the representatives as well as the morale of the community, and eventually leads to the creation of a new alienated social elite.
(e) An organ of self-government constitutes the supreme authority at the given communal level. That is where it differs from analogous organs of participation, co-management, or workers-control which have only advisory, consultative, or controlling functions and, at best, only share authority with the political bureaucracy, capitalists, or the techno-structure. “Self-governing” institutions presuppose the elimination of all ruling classes and elites; professional-technical management must be subordinated to them. They create basic policy, formulate long range goals, establish the rules and control the implementation of accepted policies.
(f ) While there might be a plurality of organisations that mediate between people and self-governing institutions, none of them must be allowed to dominate the institutions of self-government. They can play useful and, indeed, necessary social roles: to express specific group interests, to politically educate people, to mobilise them for alternative programs of development, to contribute to the creation of a powerful public opinion. But none of them must have control over the institutions of self-government. Whatever the personal affiliations of individual elected representatives, their loyalty must go directly and fully to the people whom they represent, and not to any mediating organization.
(g) All power of self-governing bodies is delegated to them by the people from the given field and is not allocated from the center. When social power is alienated, all decision-making goes from the top to the basis of the social pyramid. When it is not, it is always the lower level of social organization, closer to the base, which decides how much regulation, coordination and control is needed at the next higher level. According to such a decision, a certain amount of power is, then, delegated. In such a way the authority of a central federal assembly rests on that of district or regional assemblies, and all of them are eventually authorized to decide on certain issues by the councils of basic working organizations and local communities. Learning from experience in a quickly changing world will give rise to changes of the whole structure. The problem is not central decision-making as some anarchists may argue but the source of authority for it. In self-government, power originates with the councils in the independent social communities, even when a considerable amount of it has been delegated to central self-governing institutions.
If self-government is to replace the state in all its socially necessary functions, it has to embrace a network of councils and assemblies constituted at several levels of social reality and on both territorial and productive principles. One would have to distinguish clearly among at least four levels:
(1) Basic organs of self-government in most elementary working and living communities;
(2) Organs of self-government in larger associations – enterprises, communes;
(3) Organs of self-government for whole regions and branches of social activity;
(4) Central institutions of self-government for the global society.
1. The basic level of self-government is characterised by direct democracy. Each individual has the right (although not an obligatory duty) to directly participate in decision- making in most elementary units of social life. Thus the individual has a chance to express and affirm oneself not only as a citizen, but also as a producer and a consumer (the last in a most general sense, with respect not only to material goods but also culture, natural environment and communal activities).
2. The next level is constituted by councils of larger working associations and the assemblies of larger local communities (communes). Here referenda and assemblies of all workers or residents maybe the forms of direct democracy. Councils composed of the elected representatives practically become the highest authority in the area or enterprise. But they are strictly responsible to the given community. However, they are limited in their decision-making by the existing legislation and accepted policies of the higher-level organ of self-government. In a true system of self-government the laws are not merely imposed from the center. The centre has been delegated power to pass them, therefore they can be revoked once they stop serving any useful social purpose.
3. Another intermediary level is constituted, on the one hand, by the coordinating self-governing boards for whole branches of activity ( industry, energy, agriculture, transportation, etc.); on the other hand, by regional organs of self-government coordinating the development of all communes from a definite area. Once a bourgeoisie and bureaucracy have gone from the historical stage, the purpose of better organisation, coordination and direction is no longer to increase efficiency in the struggle against another nation or region, not to control the market. The main purposes of coordination are now the elimination of waste, reduction of friction, joining forces for the solution of ecological problems, mutual aid and solidarity, aid for accelerated growth of the weak and underdeveloped.
The central organ of self-government – a federal assembly or congress of people’s delegates – must integrate both networks, one covering various types of activity, the other various territorial communities. There are a variety of forms possible for their inner organization, but all of them have to take into account the following three necessities:
The first is to reconcile the particular interests of various types of activity with the particular interests of various regions.
The second is to reconcile particular interests of both professional and regional groups with the common interest of the whole society.
The third is to preserve the unity of authority in order to secure efficiency and reduce wasteful inner conflicts, but at the same time to separate powers – in order to prevent dangerous concentration of powers in the hands of an oligarchy or a single dictator.
One possible solution is to have three different chambers: one composed of the delegates of all workers councils; another constituted by the delegates of all communes; a third composed of the directly elected representatives of all citizens. The former two would approach issues from the point of view of particular professional or regional interests. The third would mediate between them from the point of view of general interests of the whole society.
One of the most difficult problems of any democracy is how to preserve unity of purpose and protect the general interest without making it overwhelmingly strong. The classical liberal solution has been to separate legislative, executive and judiciary power – this is an achievement of lasting value. However at a much higher level of social organisation public institutions assume some new powers, e.g., regulation and planning of work and the overall control of the implementation of adopted projects. All these powers should be separated. This can be done, for example, by creating a council composed of elected members of the Assembly for each of these powers. Each member of the Assembly would thus participate in protecting a certain interest in one of the chambers, and would also participate in the execution of one specific power in one of the Assembly’s councils.
Bookchin explains:-
"...The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality — the city, town, and village — where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy. We can transform local government into popular assemblies where people can discuss and make decisions about the economy and society in which they live. When we get power at the neighborhood level in a town or city, we can confederate all the assemblies and then confederate those towns and cities into a popular government — not a state (which is an instrument of class rule and exploitation), but a government, where the people have the power. This is what I call communalism in a practical sense. It should not be confused with communitarianism, which refers to small initiatory projects like a "people's" food cooperative, garage, printing press — projects that often become capitalistic when they don't fall apart or succumb to competition by other enterprises.
People will never achieve this kind of face-to-face democratic society spontaneously. A serious, committed movement is necessary to fight for it. And to build that movement, radical leftists need to develop an organization — one that is controlled from the base, so that we don't produce another Bolshevik Party. It has to be formed slowly on a local basis, it has to be confederally organized, and together with popular assemblies, it will build up an opposition to the existing power, the state and class rule. I call this approach libertarian municipalism...
... We live in a very confusing time. Sometimes people look for easy answers to complex questions. If a machine or item functions poorly, it is easy to blame technology rather than the competitive corporations that try to make money, or to blame people's attitudes rather than the mass media that shapes people's thinking, or to say we should go back to old ideologies — Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, orthodox Marxism, orthodox anarchism, even orthodox capitalism — for solutions.
People need new ideas based on reason, not superstition; on freedom, not personal autonomy; on creativity, not adaptation; on coherence, not chaos; and on a vision of a free society, based on popular assemblies and confederalism, not on rulers and a state. If we do not organize a real movement — a structured movement — that tries to guide people toward a rational society based on reason and freedom, we face eventual disaster. We cannot withdraw into our "autonomous" egos or retreat to a primitive, indeed unknown past. We must change this insane world, or else society will dissolve into an irrational barbarism — as it is already beginning to do these days."
Instead of centralised power and competition, socialists advocate decentralisation and cooperation. Decentralised communities can be federated horizontally, thus ensuring stability through a low center of gravity rather than the precarious, ever-shifting power configurations of top-down rule. Anarchism does not demand a “one size fits all” model, and therefore embraces the organic rather than the mechanical.
In The Relevance of Anarchism to Modern Society, Sam Dolgoff writes:
“Federation is the coordination through free agreement – locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. A vast coordinated network of voluntary alliances embracing the totality of social life, in which all the groups and associations reap the benefits of unity while still exercising autonomy within their own spheres and expanding the range of their freedom.”
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