1974 – Ⓐ narchiv.ist

The Anarchist Collectives (1974)

Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939

Author(s)

“What are these basic principles of workers’ self-management?
Let us go through them briefly.
By definition, “self-management” is self-rule. It excludes rule over others–domination of man by man. It excludes not only the permanent, legally sanctioned authority of the state through its coercive institutions but demands the very extirpation of the principle of the state from within the unofficial associations (miniature states) of the people : from within the unions, from the places of work, and from within the myriad groupings and relations which make up society.
By definition, “self-management” is the idea that workers (all workers, including technicians, engineers, scientists, planners, coordinators–all) engaged in providing goods and services can themselves efficiently administer and coordinate the economic life of society. This belief must of necessity be based upon three inseparable principles :
1) faith in the constructive and creative capacity not of an elite class of “superior” individuals but of the masses–the much maligned “average man”;
2) autonomy (self-rule);
3) decentralization and coordination through the free agreement of federalism.
By definition, “self-management” means that workers are equal partners in a vast network of interlocking cooperative associations embracing the whole range of production and distribution of goods and the rendering of services. It must of necessity be based upon the fundamental principle of free communism, that is, the equal access to and sharing of, goods and services, according to needs.
The contemporary significance of the Spanish Revolution lies not so much in the specific measures improvised by the urban socialized industries and the agrarian collectives (most of them outdated by the cybernetic-technological revolution) but in the application of the fundamental constructive principles of anarchism or free socialism to the immediate practical problems of the Spanish social revolution.
These principles are beginning to be understood more and more today. It is hoped that this collection will contribute to that understanding.”
Sam Dolgoff

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Society against the State (1974)

Author(s)

Pierre Clastres

“Primitive societies are societies without a State. This factual judgment, accurate in itself, actually hides an opinion, a value judgment that immediately throws doubt on the possibility of constituting political anthropology as a strict science. What the statement says, in fact, is that primitive societies are missing something – the State – that is essential to them, as it is to any other society: our own, for instance. Consequently, those societies are incomplete ; they are not quite true societies –
they are not civilized – their existence continues to suffer the painful experience of a lack – the lack of a State – which, try as they may, they will never make up. Whether clearly stated or not, that is what comes through in the explorers’ chronicles and the work of researchers alike: society is inconceivable without the State; the State is the destiny of every society.
One detects an ethnocentric bias in this approach; more often than not it is unconscious, and so the more firmly anchored. Its immediate, spontaneous reference, while perhaps not the best known, is in any case the most familiar. In effect, each one of us carries within himself, internalized like the believer’s faith, the certitude that society exists for the State. How, then, can one conceive of the very existence of primitive societies if not as the rejects of universal history, anachronistic relics of a remote stage that everywhere else has been transcended ? Here one recognizes ethnocentrism’s other face, the complementary conviction that history is a one-way progression, that every society is condemned to enter into that history and pass through the stages which lead from savagery to civilization.
[…] But the assertion of an obvious evolution cannot justify a doctrine which, arbitrarily tying the state of civilization to the civilization of the State, designates the latter as the necessary end result assigned to all societies.”
Pierre Clastres

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Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939

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Contents

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Contents