St. Imier.

 

150 years on, St Imier is thriving

             

          July 19th sees the first sessions of a five-day celebration of anarchist thought in the Swiss border town that hosted the visionaries of a definitive, and historic, break with Marxism.
         St Imier is as far as history tells, one of those legendary events which would mark the moment in which anarchism finally nailed itself to the extra-Parliamentary path. In the years since Proudhon famously asked What is Property? and declared himself an anarchist in 1840 the movement had, for the most part, been travelling alongside and debating with more statist positions, most famously through the First International, to which famous libertarian intellectuals such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin belonged.
         But in the wake of the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, amid increasing political rancour between Bakunin and the more authoritarian tendencies rallied around Marx, both Bakunin and a second leading anarchist, James Guillaume, were expelled causing an irrevocable split.
        The following year two organisations, the Italian Federation and Swiss Jura Federation, went on to organise an alternative international congress – St Imier. A veritable who’s who of the time’s famous anarchist organisers from Errico Malatesta to Jean-Louis Pindy were part of delegations from Spain, Italy, France, the US and Switzerland, which passed four key resolutions:

1. A rejection of the increasingly authoritarian and centralised nature of the First International,
2. A pact of friendship to stand against such authoritarian behaviour in future,
3. A declaration that the proletariat’s first duty was to destroy all political power, including the party form,
4. That the task of emancipation could only be carried out through the free federation of all producer groups, based upon solidarity and equality.

          That declaration, spread across the continent in the following weeks, months, and years, would go on to form a core of anarchist thought in Europe.

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Poverty and Hunger, The Necessities Of Capitalism.

        To those who need a little explaining as to how capitalism and poverty go hand in hand, and why poverty is necessary for capitalism to function, you could do worse than read the article by Simon Springer, of the Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada,  called Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger:

          Poverty is rooted in the accumulation of wealth, a process that plays out through the dispossession of the many so as to secure excess for the few. While this insight is commonly assigned to Karl Marx (1867) and particularly his understanding of primitive accumulation set forth in the first volume of Capital, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1890) had worked out the contradictory underpinning of capitalism several decades earlier with his inquiry into the principle of right and of government, where he declared “property is theft!” Indeed, the very possibility of poverty, and its expression as famine, is rooted in the institution of property itself. If famine requires a combination of political, production and market shocks” as Alex De Waal (2017) argues, then it is a construction of capital-ism, unfurled when and where it is deemed appropriate by state elites holding the reigns of power. For Peter Kropotkin (1906: 220),“ it was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating ‘surplus value,’ of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was poverty that that made capitalists.” I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I can't help but want to know what made poverty? Kropotkin (1906: 220) provides a partial answer when he suggests that,“ if the number of poor rapidly increased during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions and wars that followed the founding of States” .So we are starting to see a picture where capitalism and the state come together as indeed they always have as a dialectics of violence. Through the process of violent expropriation, people were taught to accept“ the principle of wages, so dear to exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly practised” (Kropotkin, 1906, p. 220). The history of capitalism accordingly suggests that poverty is always and only ever the effect of property, for in its historical and ongoing wars of plunder (Le Billon, 2012), capitalism seeks to secure the right of proprietorship. In order to create poverty it was first necessary to establish property. It was in the form of dispossession that deficiency, deprivation, and destitution first became possible. Consequently, in its most rudimentary form, capitalism is a process that ensures the production of hunger. As Kropotkin (1906:178) put it, “the threat of hunger is man's best stimulant for productive work” and to secure the lock on that cage, one must be stripped of all possession and removed from their connection to the soil, where the material basis of life is appropriated by private interest. In de Waal's account of famine I was particularly impressed with his refusal of the general pornography of violence that exists. Famine isn't as direct as mass execution in gas chambers, and so its slow temporal burn (Nixon, 2011; Springer, 2012) and diffuse geographical embers receive far less attention (Springer, 2011). Yet to me this is precisely what makes famine so compelling. If the original definition of genocide advanced by Rafael Lemkin “ dedicates more detail and space to …the use of starvation as an in-strument of extermination, persecution and inhumanity, than to mass killing” as De Waal (2017) argues, then indeed this should tell us something quite profound about famine as an instrument of control. With this being the case, then perhaps capitalism can be understood as the systemic and pervasive spectre of genocide, for privation of the majority is precisely what capitalism procures as a state of permanent being. This condition is produced through the private appropriation of all material needs land, water, housing,food, and tools the result of which is both the institutionalization of property, and a widespread reliance on wages as people are stripped of their ability to subsist off the land. One is enslaved by This system, where refusing it means starvation. The only thing that prevents our genocide is the acceptance of wages, an agreement that secures our political value. Without this exchange our lives are rendered useless to capital.

Read the full article HERE:
    Please cite this article in press as: Springer, S., Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger,

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Federalism.

Colin Ward. 

      Trying to make sense of what is going on, and what is possible in Brexit Europe and elsewhere, is difficult. Our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, pours out a spew-river of one directional doom, nonsense and exaggeration, from the pundits of the opposing camps, the Brexiters and the Remainers. producing confusion, disillusionment and boredom, among the general public.

 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

        Perhaps to get a grasp of what is happening and what is possible we should go back to 1992 and Colin Ward's "The Anarchist Sociology of Federalism".

 Peter Kropotkin.

       Needless to say, in efforts for unification promoted by politicians we have a multitude of administrators in Bruxelles issuing edicts about which varieties of vegetable seeds or what constituents of beefburgers or ice cream may be sold in the shops of the member-nations. The newspapers joyfully report all this trivia. The press gives far less attention to another undercurrent of pan-European opinion, evolving from the views expressed in Strasbourg from people with every kind of opinion on the political spectrum, claiming the existence of a Europe of the Regions, and daring to argue that the Nation State was a phenomenon of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, which will not have any useful future in the twenty-first century. The forthcoming history of administration in the federated Europe they are struggling to discover is a link between, let us say, Calabria, Wales, Andalusia, Aquitaine, Galicia or Saxony, as regions rather than as nations, seeking their regional identity, economically and culturally, which had been lost in their incorporation in nation states, where the centre of gravity is elsewhere.

In the great tide of nationalism in the nineteenth century, there was a handful of prophetic and dissenting voices, urging a different style of federalism. It is interesting, at the least, that the ones whose names survive were the three best known anarchist thinkers of that century: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. The actual evolution of the political left in the twentieth century has dismissed their legacy as irrelevant. So much the worse for the left, since the road has been emptied in favour of the political right, which has been able to set out its own agenda for both federalism and regionalism. Let us listen, just for a few minutes, to these anarchist precursors.

 

"Liberal today under a liberal government, it will tomorrow become the formidable engine of a usurping despot It is a perpetual temptation to the executive power, a perpetual threat to the people's liberties. No rights, individual or collective, can be sure of a future. Centralisation might, then, be called the disarming of a nation for the profit of its government ..."

Proudhon

First there was Proudhon, who devoted two of his voluminous works-------

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Mikhail Bakunin. 

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FAQ by Iain McKay.

‘Everything you ever wanted to know about Anarchism, but were afraid to ask’ with Iain McKay.

Wednesday 20^th March, 7pm
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    Iain McKay is the author of the encyclopaedic two-volume set ‘ An Anarchist FAQ’ which sets out to cover all aspects of the Anarchist tradition, in terms of theory, history and practice. He has also written an extensive introduction to the 2011 AK Press published ‘Property Is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader’, and is currently completing work on a new translation of the writings of Bakunin.

    Housmans are very happy to welcome Iain, who will be starting off the evening by flying through a brief history of Anarchism and highlighting the major traditions within it, before opening it up to the floor for questions and discussion. Whatever your current understanding  of Anarchism, this is a chance to ask questions, share knowledge, and raise your and others awareness in a friendly setting.

Event informationHousmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
King's Cross
London N1 9DX
Tel: 020 7837 4473www.housmans.com

Entry £3, redeemable against purchase.
Nearest tube: King's Cross

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MORE ON THE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT.

         Since this is 2012, International Year of the Co-operatives, another view on the co-operative movement. This time from 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.

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VOTE FOR ANARCHY?

      Is this the answer that anarchists have been looking for? It certainly is a novel approach towards that anarchist society. Which party in Britain should we anarchists vote for to bring about that new society we have been struggling for over the last couple of centuries. The Con/Dem coalition of millionaires is certainly bring about the destruction of society, what will rise from the ashes of British society?

AT LAST

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