Workers Solidarity Movement

Workers’ co-operatives have always been championed by sections of the left and wider labour movement - from their advocacy by 19th century Welsh social reformer and utopian socialist Robert Owens to Proudhon through to their existence in various state capitalist countries today such as Cuba. While workers’ co-operatives can provide a small example of anarchist ideas based on self-management, direct democracy and mutual aid in action, we should not be blinded by their contradictions and should query their effectiveness as a strategy for real revolutionary transformation.

In the last issue we had a missive from the future. It told us of the great changes in the post-revolutionary anarchist world. In this article of the future society series, I will focus solely upon an anarchist vision of a future economy. This is called participatory economics, often abbreviated parecon, a classless economic system proposed primarily by activist and political theorist Michael Albert and, among others, economist Robin Hahnel. The model was developed through the 70s and 80s and the first exclusively parecon books were published in 1991. Many of their early writings concentrated on what they perceived as flaws in Marxist and Marxist-Leninist theory.

Editors’ Note:
Much of our time as revolutionaries is spent on the routine of organising in the here and now – building a campaign, organising for a demonstration, planning for a trade union meeting….  Too often we don’t manage to take time to step back from the here and now and imagine or envisage what it’s all about.  But without dreaming, without imagining a future the daily humdrum can seem dispiriting.

Today the word "communism" is most often associated with the totalitarian one-party states of Soviet Russia or China. Nothing could be further from the anarchist goal of a stateless, free society. So the association of anarchism with communism seems, at first sight, perverse.

An mp3 talk on the Kibbutz movement in Palestine / Israel focusing on the radical and anarchist elements of it.

The Kibbutz (plural Kibbutzim meaning clustering) movement is a social movement with a long history and one that has numerous connections with Anarchism. It is comprised of many different ideologies and philosophies many with contradictory intentions, sometimes present in the same Kibbutz.

If we are to envision this world as an improvement over our current one, it will be absolutely necessary to retain the advances made during the industrial, and even more importantly the recent agricultural revolution. To fail to do so would be no less than mass genocide. The productive capacity of the world in terms of food, goods and services is enormous. In order to feed the hungry and cloth the naked, we will need an efficient system of production allocation and distribution.

Today a social revolution that took place seventy years ago is remembered by libertarian socialists as an example of how our ideas can work. The Spanish revolution came closer to realising the possibilities of a free stateless society on a huge scale than any other revolution in history. (Image: Anarchist Milita woman during the revolution) 

Anarchism essentially sees a free society where everybody has the opportunity to live as they want as achievable. But what does that mean in practice, and how do we get there.