anarchy, socialism, and slavery

It is only necessary to understand what anarchist “liberty” means. Proudhoun wrote: “The principle of liberty is that of the Abbey of Theleme [in Rabelais]: do what you want!” and the principle meant: “any man who cannot do what he wants and anything he wants has the right to revolt, even alone, against the government, even if the government were everybody else. “the only man who can enjoy this liberty is a despot; this is the sense of the brilliant insight by Dostoyevsky’s Shigalev: “Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”

The basic reason is the same: Anarchism is not concerned with the creation of democratic control from below, but only with the destruction of “authority” over the individual, including the authority of the most extremely democratic regulation of society that it is possible to imagine. This has been made clear by authoritative anarchist expositors time and again; for example, by George Woodcock: “even were democracy possible, the anarchist would still not support it… Anarchists do not advocate political freedom. What they advocate is freedom from politics…” Anarchism is on principle fiercely anti-democratic, since an ideally democratic authority is still authority. But since, rejecting democracy, it has no other way of resolving the inevitable disagreements and differences among the inhabitants of Theleme, its unlimited freedom for each uncontrolled individual is indistinguishable from unlimited despotism by such an individual, both in theory and practice.

The heart of “Debsian socialism” was its appeal to, and faith in, the self-activity of the masses from below. Debs’ writings and speeches are impregnated with this theme. He often quoted or paraphrased Marx’s “First Principle” in his own words: “The great discovery the modern slaves have made is that they themselves their freedom must achieve. This is the secret of their solidarity; the heart of their hope…” His classic statement is this:
“Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing you cannot do for yourselves.”

He echoed Marx’s words of 1850:

“In the struggle of the working class to free itself from wage slavery it cannot be repeated too often that everything depends on the working class itself. The simple question is, Can the workers fit themselves, by education, organization, cooperation and self-imposed discipline, to take control of the productive forces and manage industry in the interest of the people and for the benefit of society? That is all there is to it.”

Can the workers fit themselves? . . . He was under no starry-eyed illusions about the working class as it was (or is). But he proposed a different goal than the elitists whose sole wisdom consists in pointing a finger at the backwardness of the people now, and in teaching that this must always be so. As against the faith in elite rule from above, Debs counterpoised the directly contrary notion of the revolutionary vanguard (also a minority) whose faith impels them to advocate a harder road for the majority:

“It is the minorities who have made the history of this world [he said in the 1917 anti-war speech for which Wilson's government jailed him]. It is the few who have had the courage to take their places at the front; who have been true enough to themselves to speak the truth that was in them; who have dared oppose the established order of things; who have espoused the cause of the suffering, struggling poor; who have upheld without regard to personal consequences the cause of freedom and righteousness.”

This “Debsian socialism” evoked a tremendous response from the heart of the people, but Debs had no successor as a tribune of revolutionary-democratic socialism. After the postwar period of radicalization, the Socialist Party became pinkly respectable on the one
hand, and the Communist Party became Stalinized on the other. On its side, American liberalism itself had long been undergoing a process of “statification,” culminating in the great New Deal illusion of the ‘30s. The elite vision of a dispensation-from-above under the aegis of the Savior-President attracted a whole strain of liberals to whom the country gentleman in the White House was as Bismarck to Lassalle

The problem is, look at when slavery was abolished. It was chaos. Uneducated, nowhere to go, no further options for many than to do the same jobs they had been doing, now under the label of “freedom”. Revolution by IGNORANT working classes will have no benefit. The working class has to educate themselves, be given the opportunity to be other than the “barbarian mass”, be given the knowledge to stand up and and in one unified shout roar “NO MORE!”