PRACTICAL ANARCHISM

Anarcho-syndicalism, on the other hand, concentrates on industrial organisation. This article is based on the idea that neither strategy is doing as well as it could, and discusses a different approach. What if we concentrated on projects which gave working class people an immediate benefit - for example, housing advice, food distribution, community centres etc?

Anarcho-syndicalism aims to offer people this kind of practical benefit. The idea is that working class people will put a lot more energy into unions than any other kind of political activity. Unions are at least potentially run by and for working class people, able to win on a regular basis, etc. As far as it goes, this is undeniable.

Look at the average demonstration in your city. Is it workers or is it uni[versity] students? Is it democratic or is it run by (self-elected) stewards? Does the government give in? Does anyone even think it's going to achieve anything, or are they just making themselves feel better? Even if it did win, would it have an obvious benefit for the average working class person? And even then, who would take credit - politicians, Trotskyists, the self-appointed leaders? Is there any point to it at all, except to give the Trotskyists a new crop of recruits? Can you imagine anyone with a job, a family, not enough time and too many worries giving any time at all to the average campaign? Even with the union movement in its present sorry state, anyone can see that unionism is much more attractive than traditional campaigning to any worker in their right mind.

However, anarcho-syndicalist groups are supposed to offer real benefits, not just theory. But unionism needs a lot of people to work. Anarcho-syndicalist groups, at least in the English-speaking world, are all pretty small: too small to start a meaningful union or to change the direction of an existing union. So they can't do anything until they get bigger. So they offer theory not real benefits!

Food Not Bombs distributes free vegan food to homeless people. A lot of FNB groups at least involve local anarchists. Unlike unions, an FNB group doesn't need many people.

FNB groups are totally independent, but there are some overall problems. As the name would suggest, FNB concentrates on pacifism. The original aim seems to be to overcome "the violence within". This implies blaming ordinary people - if only working class people were pacifists, there'd be no nuclear weapons.

The second problem is one of charity. There's a definite divide between the people who dole out the food and the people who take it. There doesn't seem to be an emphasis on self-organisation.

I think we can combine the best of both streams: the anarcho-syndicalists' emphasis on benefiting working class people, and the aim of eventually forming unions for revolution. And FNB's emphasis on projects which are public, immediately beneficial, and can be carried out by small groups (not that small-scale projects are better. It's just that most local groups would be too small for anything else).

Some arguments against this approach are:

1. We need bigger groups. It's a bit much to expect a group of three people to start a food distribution project. However, there's no need for that. For example, one idea is to gather all the information you can on housing, unemployment rights etc, and distribute it through existing anarchist publications. Where I live, there are heaps of places which give this information out for free. However, they mostly don't get to all the people that can use it. So there are projects which don't need many people.

2. You can't involve the whole community and be specifically anarchist - so you have to be either a charity, a non-anarchist group, or a front group. This seems to be common sense. But I think there's a way out. My idea is for anarchist groups to start openly anarchist projects.

However, we also help local communities set up their own projects - provided they're democratic, not a charity, not a Trotskyist front etc. A few people will probably want to join us, but most won't (for a few years anyway). If Trotskyists or Christians try and take these groups over, we give the locals advice on how to spot this and stop them. If we're encouraging self-organisation, and the other lot are just trying to wreck it (I don't think this is too cynical given their record), it's obvious that our ideas will be listened to and theirs won't. So, we can keep groups specifically anarchist and spread our ideas, and yet involve the maximum number of people in a genuinely democratic way.

3. Campaigns can achieve more. It's true that a successful campaign will achieve more than a single piece of mutual aid. But it isn't a fair comparison. For example, Melbourne Food Not Bombs has five events per week. How many groups can run five successful campaigns even in a year? And guarantee that they'll be successful, and that no one will steal the credit, and that their gains won't be legislated away when they publicity dies down? None. Even very successful campaigns, like the Poll Tax campaign in Britain, don't seem to have really helped the anarchist movement in the long run.

4. You'd be abandoning class struggle. If a mutual aid project was fairly successful (and FNB shows that this is quite plausible), three things might happen. The government might ignore it, in which case we can spread our ideas as well as build up respect. Or the government might shut it down. The government can break up a demonstration and claim the demonstrators were 'violent', 'out of control' etc. If they did that to a child-minding service, do you think people would believe them? Or, they could try and shut it down and fail - the best of both worlds. Successful mutual aid projects could generate campaigns - campaigns where people would have an obvious stake in the anarchists winning.

5. You'd be giving governments an excuse to cut services. The government isn't going to let the anarchists take over providing services. They'd save a bit, but they'd send a message that communities can survive without governments, that anarchists care about ordinary people, and that governments don't. They're evil, not stupid.

I'd love to lose this debate. I'd like someone to say 'mutual aid might be better than what we have now, but such-and-such is much better'. However, it seems a lot better than no change. Isn't 100 years long enough to test a theory? The conditions are right for anarchism - Leninism's collapsed, capitalism can't deliver, and we have groups all over the world that are small, but big enough to put these ideas into practice. We can cash in on this, or we can wait another century.

James Hutchings (Sydney, Australia)
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