Revolution

Closer integration of food-producing operations with city areas would enable more democratic social control of production, and make a population more resilient to loss of favor with its ruling powers. Revolutions typically occur, or at least are consummated, in cities. Kropotkin states in Conquest of Bread that the Paris Commune fell in part because insufficient attention was given to questions of food supply. People who were hungry did not go to the barricades, and the Versailles troops entered the city with relative ease. Kropotkin advises that "the revolution needs bread"; this is identical to Napoleon's motto that an army marches on its stomach. Former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz once referred to the US as having a "food weapon," and the experiences of Cuba and Nicaragua reveal what awaits territories attempting to leave the capitalist orbit.

Every neccessity of life ultimately is dependent on access to land and associated productive faculties. This is why conservative and liberal thinkers alike have always esteemed private property as the bulwark of individual liberty.

However, for one person's liberty to be enlarged at another's expense is exploitation. As property is exchanged and accumulated, those left without property are eventually stripped of their liberties as well. Not even the most petit-bourgeois conservative or insipid neoliberal dares openly claim this as a legitimate result of market discipline.

It is a well-known principle, and schemes for defeating it are as old as the hills. Kropotkin makes a case that the ancient practice of burying tools and equipment with the dead may have been to prevent imbalances of possessions accumulating by heredity. The biblical Year of Jubilee was a mechanism for redistributing land at the end of a fifty-year cycle of permitted buying and selling. The Russian Obshchina is similar.

In the communist tradition, this is attempted by demonizing categorical and inalienable ownership (property) and substituting a usufruct principle (possession) of which all persons, theoretically, have equal enjoyment. But determining the nuts and bolts of equitable ways to hold and administer land and natural resources is a major challenge.

Another challenge is dislodging them from present inequitable patterns of tenure and use. The when and how of socializing property has always been a divisive issue. Do we have to "pass through a period" of state-disciplined private capital? or of state ownership? Should we try to buy the bosses out over time, or should land and workspaces just be seized directly?

I try to answer this by viewing the institution of property as a carpet upon which the ruling class, by definition, stands. They will not, of themselves, step off the carpet, nor can the carpet be pulled out from under them forthwith. What we must do to remove the carpet is first bunch up an edge of it to get a grip. Then slowly start rolling it up. If individual members start moving off because there's less space, or they just defect, ok. This solution allows people to work together regardless of whether they agree on the likelihood of a decisive struggle over the institution of property. If we eventually roll it all up without fuss, fine. But if there at some point has to be a good clean jerk to get the carpet, that's fine too.

By "revolution" I do not mean a misty and protracted voyage of subjectivistic self-reflexive group therapy. I use the word in its traditional sense of a historical discontinuity which not only changes 1;0c conditions, but decisively transforms the means of producing conditions. True change is not merely democratic control of these means, but democratic constitution of them. Changes made by a ruling power under pressure are not "revolutionary," no matter how well-meaning or even 1;0c popular.

Modern revolution, in essence, means completing the unfinished business of the French Revolution, which in the name of liberty and equality ended up replacing the class of nobility with the class of property, and of the Russian Revolution which in a way did something yet more grotesque; installing a new ruling class which used the name of the people to monopolize all means of production.

Although revolutions are in an important sense sudden phenomena, the first thing any serious revolutionary must consider is that any society spends the vast majority of its time in between them. Revolution does not happen because a small band of Nechaevtsi decide that they personally have had enough, but because people in general recognize that the gap between reality and desire is within their power to close. It happens when the tension between an official reality and an oppositional reality has grown explosive. The revolutionary must help oppositional reality grow.

Thus, our organizations must be multi-functional. We must help people cope with life under the present regime and build power to effect change, and prefigure the new world instead of just prosyletizing it.

A traditional and damning weakness of revolutionism is its hands-off, "no-blueprints" excuse when asked how future society might function. Liberalism has a reputation for being descriptively weak and normatively strong, radicalism for being the opposite. The "draft blueprints" of future productive and social relations have to be the provisional solutions we find for our present problems. This is called building the new society in the shell of the old. We hope the shell can thus eventually be split open. Defending such embryonic structures and extending them into stable institutions will depend on future conditions, and it is here that we may finally plead agnostic. But we have to be proactive and act in the present, if for no other reason than to create tension with it.

Earlier I referred to a "neo-Narodnik" praxis of development. The Narodniks were Russian left-populist intellectuals of the 19th century who tried to foment revolution by "going to the people" (xozhdenie v narod) to do education and organizing. They were correct in addressing themselves directly to the peasants, but were often regarded with suspicion and bemusement because they never successfully confronted their own identity as outsiders. Also, agrarian populism often has a pan-social egalitarian spirit which may obscure class distinctions. This I see as resulting from the class origins of the Narodniks themselves, and which we may see reproduced in some modern bourgeois development organizations.

Calling something "neo-", in the friendly way, is usually an attempt somehow to recuperate its traditional errors. Martinez-Alier seems to be looking for an "appropriate ideology" that subjugated peoples can counterpose to the "ecomanagerial social Darwinism" prevailing among scholars in the industrial centers. He asks "will it find a base in the peasantry?"

To answer that, we will just have to wrestle with the traditional questions of what it means to be an outsider offering help, understanding, or advice to communities of struggle. This awareness should also result in a development politics that does not appeal to a mythic and fraudulent class homogeneity. That is my intuitive anarchist interpretation of Martinez-Alier's neo-Narodism.

This is not the time or the place for me to burn down prevailing ideological and philosophical notions of "development." For now, I am just throwing out the statement that we need some way to evaluate actions and results in terms of desires and values. Development, in a suitably rehabilitated form, can be a useful concept for discussing this. The following is a sketch of what I think anarchist "development" activities should be.

Gustav Landauer taught that the state was not a thing, but a condition. This is a mouthful of itself, which we will not now go into. Practically, though, he believed the state could only be overcome when social functions are fulfilled by autonomous collective relationships contracted extraneously to state power.

Seeing capitalism as a set of conditions, we might propose, more or less by definition, that its overcoming lies in the establishment of democratically managed capital circuits independent of authoritarian regimes of accumulation.

Therefore, a very broad strategy, involving a large possible range of projects, would be to separate life-supporting and capital-forming production from market governance and place it directly at the service of human need. This is an example of "dual power," or establishing institutions that operate in parallel with state-corporate power and train themselves to take up social functions as, progressively or suddenly, it loses control.

A common critique of this is that the parallel institutions will end up acting as ersatz social service agencies, effectively mopping up after state power. There is a pressure in this kind of work to try and resemble bourgeois organizations in order to get funding, publicity, or recognition by something-or-other. I have seen this critique borne out in practice.

Simply put, the way to avoid this error is by maintaining and promoting a deliberate political identity. The projects must not be just some kind of alternative economics, but a form of propaganda by the deed. Neither principles nor results are sufficient of themselves; they belong together.

I realize the trouble I am asking for by using this term, but I think it is apt. Even among anarchists, propaganda by the deed is often considered a euphemism for bombing and assassination. The idea was that by drawing blood you could inspire others to draw more blood, kind of like a flock of chickens that pecks a wounded member to death over a single drop. This practice has more or less been discredited.

According to some scholars, the term did originate from early dual-power strategies. The heart of the principle is that successful action is contagious. Anarchist propaganda seems to orbit around depictions of things worth having, but I think we would do better by having things worth depicting.

Dual power is not purely a technical or pragmatist approach. In addition to being a response to current problems, it can create latitude for more politicized struggles such as strikes. An autonomous material base of support would allow people more freedom to bite the hand that feeds them.