ORGANISE! for class struggle anarchism |
60p Summer 1996 Issue 43 (Free to Prisoners) |
REVIEWS
FINDING TIME: ONE STEP BEYOND THE TYRANNY OF WORK.
This pamphlet comes at a time when the struggle against the Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) is beginning to hot up. Indeed, this piece of legislation, the compulsive nature of which is written into its very name, symbolises the question around which Finding time revolves: how our time is spent (or rather, squandered) in the service of the market.
Workhouse
The contrast with the 60s and 70s, or even those still relatively liberal countries like Denmark, is blamed squarely on deliberate policy rather than untameable market forces. Unsurprisingly, the aim of this policy has been to boost profits. It has had three facets: the creation of mass unemployment, for example through privatisation of State-owned industries, the weakening of union rights and power, aided by the first factor; and an increasingly stringent benefits regime.
These changes have had profound effects on the psychological climate as well. Indeed, changing attitudes, such as that of expecting to have "a job for life", has been an avowed aim of free market ideologists like the Tories. What this has actually meant is the creation of an atmosphere of insecurity and stress running through the lives of the working class, whether in "permanent" or temporary employment, or struggling on the dole. thus the basis for resistance is undercut by the fear of falling through each successive level.
Beyond Leisure
As things stand, those who demonstrate a certain freedom in their lives, like New Age Travellers for example, tend to be reviled. It's suggested that this is partly through envy of the contrast they present to lives of "working and shopping". However, the travellers' importance in this context is only a symbol of escape from the global market and the State-much more is needed for the transformation of a society which, as Jope shows, demoralises and exhausts the majority.
It is in his examination of the means by which changes might be brought about that anarchists will find most to question. Though the pamphlet has strong libertarian and egalitarian elements (e.g. advocating the active unity of the employed and unemployed) there is a tendency towards reformism in this last part of the discussion. For example, making the Jobseekers Allowance payable at its full rate in any period of unemployment, and creating a legal offence of "industrial coercion" with the aim of "constraining exploitative employers". But as well as recognising the improbability of the current Opposition pursuing these aims, Jope stresses that they are not advocated as end in themselves. Rather, they would be to excite the desire for more freedom and shift the consensus of today's unquestionably diminished hopes, which regard the market and the State as eternal. What anarchists deny is the idea that this system can be infinitely reformed, to the point where true freedom and justice exist. but reforms are useful insofar as they show that change is possible, and employ methods that build general confidence and this, I think, is the intended message.
In the end, the chief value of Finding Time is the attempt to tackle some basic questions of human purpose, rather than its tentative solutions. This is done very successfully, in a clear, informative and thoughtful style. Find the time to read it.
To document further developments with the JSA, and to assist the resistance to it, a newsletter called the Clock Stops Here is also available. Send an SAE to the same address as for Finding Time.
Norman Jope. 16pp. 1 pound. Memes Press. Available from 38 Moleswortah Road, Plympton, Plymouth, Devon PL7 4NT.
Jope begins by noting how 70s talk of the Leisure Society has been abandoned. On one hand, there are many now who work excessively long hours and/or do unpaid overtime: in 1992, 15% of British workers toiled for 48 hours or more per week. On the other, for the millions unemployed, their rights to any kind of income or to go into a job of their choosing have been increasingly eroded and restricted. The JSA exemplifies this. In 1979, leaving a job "without just cause" meant that benefit would be suspended for 6 weeks. The JSA provides for such suspension lasting up to 6 months.
Jope goes on to ask fundamental but often neglected questions as to what kinds of work (and how much of it) we actually need done, and what could be eliminated. As he points out, most people want to engage in purposeful and enjoyable activity. Even the "leisure Society" would be a misnomer for one in which the work/leisure divide had thus been abolished as a result of the overthrow of the capitalist economy. But whether "work" or "leisure", the common denominator is time: our present lack of control over it and our need to gain such control in order to have a free, humane society.
As Bookchin himself says "Stated bluntly: Between the socialist pedigree of anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho communism...and the basically liberal, individualistic pedigree of lifestyle anarchism... there exists a divide that cannot be bridged unless we completely disregard the profoundly different goals, methods, and underlying philosophy that distinguish them." In this blistering attack on lifestylism, individualism and primitivism, this veteran of the libertarian movement pulls out all the stops. His constant affirmation of the revolutionary, social and collective core of Anarchism throughout this booklet warms the cockles of the heart of any Anarchist Communist worth their salt. Bookchin seems concerned that this revolutionary core is being eroded to the point where the word anarchy will become part of the chic bourgeois vocabulary of the coming century naughty, rebellious, insouciant but deliciously safe. This pessimism is not borne out by a look at the facts. Bookchin appears to be referring to the Anglo-Saxon Anarchist scene, although he seems to believe this process is also going on in for, example, the Latin countries. Now admittedly the so-called Anarchist movement in the United States and Canada is diabolical. This reviewer remembers well the American and Canadian "Anarchists" who turned up to the Trieste International Anarchist conference who sickened many East and West European comrades there, not to mention those who turned up for the Class War International event. But even so there do exist groups and individuals on the other side of the Atlantic who do profess some kind of class -struggle anarchism. Shouldn't Bookchin bear this in mind and make reference to them as a counter-weight to the individualists and lifestylists he describes? Similarly, Bookchin seems remarkably ignorant of the Anarchist movement in Ireland and Britain. Is he not aware that the majority of Irish Anarchists hold class struggle views, as does the Scottish Anarchist Federation. Is he not conscious of the fact that the number of class struggle anarchists in England and Wales have increased dramatically in the last 2 decades? Why no reference to any of the organisations and papers that espouse such views? And what about the movement in the rest of Europe? It would be preposterous to regard it as predominantly lifestylist!
Alternative
Nevertheless this pamphlet is a welcome addition to the arguments in favour of what Bookchin defines as social anarchism and against the latter day individualism which he believes started taking hold with the defeat of the 60s counter-culture. He notes: " No less than Marxism and other socialisms, anarchism can be profoundly influenced by the bourgeois environment it professes to oppose, with the result that the growing "inwardness" and narcissism of the yuppie generation have left their mark upon many avowed radicals. Ad hoc adventurism, personal bravura, an aversion to theory oddly akin to the antirational biases of postmodernism, celebrations of theoretical incoherence (pluralism), a basically apolitical and anti-organisational commitment to imagination, desire, and ecstasy, and an intensely self-oriented enchantment of everyday life, reflect the toll that social reaction has taken on Euro-American anarchism over the past two decades".
Now, Bookchin was involved in various attempts at radicalising the counter-culture in the 60s, to his credit. But perhaps his involvement has made him a mite indulgent . Whilst admitting the counter-culture's "shortcomings" he fails to say what they are. Certainly individualism and self-centred pursuit of pleasure can be discovered to a lesser or greater extent in the sayings of counter-cultural figureheads like Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. The impact of decades of reaction since then should not obscure the fact that these tendencies were already there and that little attempt was made to counterpose a class struggle perspective.
Bookchin, in his often brilliant diatribes against the Primitivists, fails to emphasise the other side of the coin. Productivism, production for production's sake, one of the chief maxims of capitalism, is one of the mechanisms that the Primitivists, no matter how wrong-headedly and in such a mistaken way, are rebelling against. In castigating the anti-technology and anti-civilisation stances of Primitivism, one feels that Bookchin errs too much in the other direction. Certainly he fails to sufficiently address himself to the problem of unbridled Production. Similarly , whilst agreeing with his denunciation of the anti-civilisation poses- and indeed poses are what they often are- of the primitivists, Bookchin fails to emphasis what this reviewer feels is of utmost importance. The primitivists have substituted the Civilisation of the last few thousand years with a call for the destruction of Civilisation. Well, I go along with them on this. Except that I want to substitute a new Civilisation, based on values nurtured in the libertarian movement and starting to develop now with a culture of resistance, not the end of civilisation per se. Bookchin fails to explain that a future society would mean a new Civilisation, transcending, and indeed destroying this one.
Democracy
Bookchin vaunts democracy as "not antithetical to anarchism". But we in the ACF feel that this ambiguous term, so often used to mobilise the masses to go to war for capitalism and the State and to counter the Western Powers' struggle with the Soviet bloc, cannot be used without confusion. Some of Bookchin's "disciples" have used his call for "libertarian municipalism" to run as candidates for City Council elections. Indeed in Canada, some of these "disciples" have run on "libertarian" tickets for Quebec nationalism. Now, Bookchin, has vigorously denounced nationalism and support for "National liberation" in this book, and the views of his "disciples" should not be mistaken for his own. But he really needs to clarify just what he means by his slogan "Democratise the republic, radicalise the democracy". Is he in favour of "libertarian municipalism " of the sort where "libertarians" capture the local State (and end up being captured by it)? As he states, he has lost the view that the working class is the revolutionary subject of history, that is, that it is destined to bring about the radical overthrow of capitalism. In doing so, he appears to have dug himself into the hole of libertarian municipalism, out of which it seems difficult for him to get out.
Despite these criticisms, this booklet is well worth reading for arguments against the erroneous ideas of Stirner and Nietzsche. Indeed, Bookchin quite correctly points out that Emma Goldman, despite avowing an anarcho communist ideology, was a Nietzschean "cheek to jowl in spirit with individualists". His brisk attacks on the likes of L. Susan Brown, Hakim Bey, George Bradford and John Zerzan should be read by all serious Anarchists who are looking for a coherent revolutionary answer to the confusion of these thinkers.