libertarian socialism

Libertarian socialism is an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist political current that emphasises self-governance and workers' self-management. It is contrasted from other forms of socialism by its rejection of state ownership and from other forms of libertarianism by its rejection of private property. Broadly defined, it includes schools of both anarchism and Marxism, as well as other tendencies that oppose the state and capitalism.

With its roots in the Age of Enlightenment, libertarian socialism was first constituted as a tendency by the anti-authoritarian faction of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), during their conflict with the Marxist faction. Libertarian socialism quickly spread throughout Europe and the American continent, reaching its height during the early stages of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and particularly during the Spanish Revolution of 1936. Its defeat during these revolutions led to its brief decline, before its principles were resurrected by the New Left and new social movements of the late 20th century.

While its key principles of decentralisation, workers' control, and mutual aid are generally shared across the many schools of libertarian socialism, differences have emerged over the questions of revolutionary spontaneity, reformism, and whether to prioritise the abolition of the state or of capitalism.

Political principles

Libertarian socialism strives for a free and equal society, aiming to transform work and everyday life. Broadly defined, libertarian socialism encapsulates any political ideology that favours workers' control of the means of production and the replacement of capitalism with a system of cooperative economics, or common ownership. Libertarian socialists tend to see the working class as agents of social revolution, reject representative democracy and electoralism, and advocate for self-organisation and direct action as means to engage in class conflict.

Anti-authoritarianism

Libertarian socialism has a grassroots and direct democratic approach to socialism, rejecting parliamentarism and bureaucracy. Libertarian socialists advocate the empowerment of individuals to control their own lives and encourage them to voluntarily cooperate with each other, rather than allow themselves to be controlled by a state. Libertarian socialists therefore uphold civil liberties such as freedom of choice, freedom of expression and freedom of thought.

In contrast to authoritarian forms of socialism, libertarian socialism rejects state ownership and centralisation. Instead it upholds a decentralised model of self-governance, envisioning free association based on co-operative or participatory economics. Some libertarian socialists see such systems as complementary to statism, while others hold them to be an alternative to the state.

Libertarian socialists tend to reject the view that political institutions such as the state represent an inherently good, or even neutral, power. Some libertarian socialists, such as Peter Kropotkin, consider the state to be an inherent instrument of landlordism and capitalism, therefore opposing the state with equal intensity as they oppose capitalism.

Anti-capitalism

Libertarian socialism views corporate power as an institutional problem, rather than as a result of the influence of certain immoral individuals. It thus opposes capitalism, which it sees as an economic system that upholds greed, the exploitation of labour and coercion, and calls for its overthrow in a social revolution.

Libertarian socialists reject private property, as they consider capitalist property relations to be incompatible with freedom. Instead, libertarian socialism upholds individual self-ownership, as well as the collective ownership of the means of production. In the place of capitalism, libertarian socialists favour an economic system based on workers' control of production, advocating for a system of cooperative economics, or common ownership. They also advocate for workers' self-management, as they consider workers able to cooperate productively without supervisors, whether appointed by employers or by the state.

They also tend to see free trade as inevitably resulting in the redistribution of income and wealth from workers to their corporate employers. They advocate for the elimination of social and economic inequality through the coercive expropriation of property from the wealthy.

History

The roots of libertarian socialism extend back to the classical radicalism of the early modern period, claiming the English Levellers and the French Encyclopédistes as their intellectual forerunners, and admiring figures of the Age of Enlightenment such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. According to Mikhail Bakunin and Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, while authoritarian socialism had its origins in Germany, libertarian socialism was born in France. The modern foundations of libertarian socialism lay in the utopian socialism expounded by Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and Henri de Saint-Simon, who envisioned a democratic socialism guided by communitarianism, moralism and feminism.

Emergence

Libertarian socialism first emerged from the anti-authoritarian faction of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), after it was expelled from the organisation by the Marxist faction at the Hague Congress of 1872. The libertarian socialist Mikhail Bakunin had rejected Karl Marx's calls for a " dictatorship of the proletariat", as he predicted it would only create a new ruling class, composed of a privileged minority, which would use the state to oppress the working classes. He concluded that: "no dictatorship can have any other aim than to perpetuate itself, and it can only give rise to and instill slavery in the people that tolerates it." Marxists responded to this by insisting on the eventual "withering away of the state", in which society would transition from dictatorship to anarchy, in an apparent attempt to synthesise authoritarian and libertarian forms of socialism.

This put libertarian socialists into direct competition with social democrats and communists for influence over left-wing politics, in a contest which lasted for over fifty years. Libertarian socialism proved attractive to British writers such as Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, and William Morris, the latter of whom developed a kind of libertarian socialism based in a strong critique of civilisation, which he aimed to overthrow and replace with what he called a "beautiful society". Morris drove the development of impossibilism, which became increasingly concerned with the bureaucratisation and moderation of the socialist movement, leading to the establishment of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

By the early 20th century, libertarian socialists had gained a leading influence over the left-wing in the Netherlands, France and Italy and went on to play major roles in the Mexican and Russian Revolutions. In India, the libertarian socialist tradition was represented in the early twentieth century anti-colonial movement by Bhagat Singh.

Russian Revolution

Russian libertarian socialists, including anarchists, populists and left socialist-revolutionaries, led the opposition to the Tsarist autocracy throughout the late-19th century. They created a network of both clandestine and legal organisations throughout Russia, with the aim of overthrowing the Russian nobility and bringing land under the common ownership of the mir. Their agitation for land reform in the Russian countryside culminated with the establishment of rural soviets during the 1905 Revolution.

Anarchists also organised among the urban proletariat, forming clandestine factory committees that proved more attractive to revolution-minded workers than the more reformist trade unions favoured by the Bolsheviks. During the 1917 Revolution, in which libertarian socialists played a leading role, the Bolsheviks changed tack and adopted elements of the libertarian socialist programme in their appeals to the workers. But by 1919, the new Bolshevik government had come to view the libertarian socialists as a threat to their power and moved to eliminate their influence. Libertarian socialist organisations were banned and many of their members were arrested, deported to Siberia or executed by the Cheka.

The Revolutions of 1917–1923 ended in defeat for the libertarian socialists, with either the social democrats, the Bolsheviks or nationalists rising to power. Libertarian socialists responded by reevaluating their positions, emphasising mass organisation over intellectual vanguardism and revolutionary spontaneity over substitutionism. They also came to conceive the " dictatorship of the proletariat" as a form of class power, rather than as the dictatorship of a political party. Many Marxists of the period were attracted to this position, including Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Antonie Pannekoek in the Netherlands, Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain, György Lukács in Hungary and Antonio Gramsci in Italy.

Spanish Revolution

Libertarian socialism reached its apex of popularity with the Spanish Revolution of 1936, during which libertarian socialists led "the largest and most successful revolution against capitalism to ever take place in any industrial economy".

In Spain, traditional forms of self-management and common ownership dated back to the 15th century. The Levante, where collective self-management of irrigation was commonplace, became the hotbed of anarchist collectivisation. Building on this traditional collectivism, from 1876, the Spanish libertarian socialist movement grew through sustained agitation and the establishment of alternative institutions that culminated in the Spanish Revolution. During this period, a series of workers' congresses, first convoked by the Spanish Regional Federation of the IWA, debated and refined proposals for the construction of a libertarian socialist society. Over several decades, resolutions from these congresses formed the basis of a specific program on a range of issues, from the structure of communes and the post-revolutionary economy to libertarian cultural and artistic initiatives. These proposals were published in the pages of widely distributed libertarian socialist periodicals, such as '' Solidaridad Obrera'' and '' Tierra y Libertad'', which each circulated tens of thousands of copies. By the outbreak of the revolution, the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) enjoyed widespread popularity, counting 1.5 million members within its ranks.

During the revolution, the means of production were brought under workers' control and worker cooperatives formed the basis for the new economy. According to Gaston Leval, the CNT established an agrarian federation in the Levante that encompassed 78% of Spain's most arable land. The regional federation was populated by 1,650,000 people, 40% of whom lived on the region's 900 agrarian collectives, which were self-organised by peasant unions.

Although industrial and agricultural production was at its highest in the anarchist-controlled areas of the Spanish Republic, and the anarchist militias displayed the strongest military discipline, liberals and Communists alike blamed the " sectarian" libertarian socialists for the defeat of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. These charges have been disputed by contemporary libertarian socialists, such as Robin Hahnel and Noam Chomsky, who have accused such claims of lacking substantial evidence.

Decline

Following the defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, libertarian socialism fell into decline. Left-wing politics throughout the world came to be dominated either by social democracy or Marxism-Leninism, which attained power in a number of countries and thus had the means to support their ideological allies. In contrast, Hahnel argues, libertarian socialists were not able to gain influence within the labour movement. At a time when reformist trade unions were consistently winning concessions, the libertarian socialists' anti-reformist message gained little traction. Their platform of workers' self-management also failed to appeal to industrial workers. Until the 1960s, libertarian socialists were limited mostly to making critiques of authoritarian socialism and capitalism, although Hahnel asserts that these arguments were largely overshadowed by those from neoconservatives and Marxists respectively.

New Left

Libertarian socialist themes received a revival during the 1960s, when it was reconstituted as part of the nascent New Left. This revival occurred largely unconsciously, as new leftists were often unaware of their libertarian socialist predecessors. The concepts of grassroots democracy, workers' control, solidarity and autonomy were thus reinvented by the new generation. They also picked up the principles of decentralisation, participatory democracy and mutual aid. These libertarian socialist themes drove the growth of the New Left, which by this point was disillusioned by the mainstream social democratic and Marxist-Leninist political groupings, due to the capitalistic tendencies of the former and the rigid authoritarianism of the latter.

Sociologist C. Wright Mills, who displayed strong libertarian socialist tendencies in his appeals to the New Left, reformulated Marxism for the modern age in his work on '' The Power Elite'' (1956). Wilhelm Reich's Freudo-Marxist theses on the authoritarian personality were also rediscovered by the New Left, who developed his programme for individual self-governance into a libertarian system of education used by the Summerhill School. Drawing on the Freudo-Marxist conception of civilisation as "organised domination", Herbert Marcuse developed a critique of alienation in modern Western societies, concluding that creativity and political dissent

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