Bakunin’s Advocacy of Worker Co-operatives

The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had a strange, contradictory attitude towards co-operatives. In his article ‘On Co-operation’, Bakunin argued that they could actually harm the workers’ movement. He was highly critical of those founded on what he considered to be bourgeois principles for two reasons. Firstly, they could collapse, leaving the workers involved demoralized and poorer than before. And secondly, if they were successful, they elevated a small group of workers to the bourgeoisie while other workers, what he called a fifth estate, were exploited by them. At the same time, he passionately supported co-operatives as a means of empowering the workers and as the beginning of the future socialist society he looked forward to.

In his article ‘Geneva’s Double Strike’ he wrote

Let us organize and enlarge our Association, but at the same time let us not forget to consolidate it so that our solidarity, which is our whole power, may become daily more real. Let us build our solidarity in study, in labour, in public action, and in life. Let us become partners in common ventures to make our life together more bearable and less difficult. Let us form as many cooperatives for consumption, mutual credit, and production as we can, everywhere, for though they may be unable to emancipate us in earnest under present economic conditions, they prepare the precious seedes for the organization of the future and through them the workers become accustomed to organizing their own affairs.

In Robert M. Cutler, ed. and trans., Mikhail Bakunin: From Out of the Dustbin: Bakunin’s Basic Writings 1869-1871 (Ann Arbor: Ardis 1985), p. 148.

And after laying out his criticisms of ‘bourgeois’ cooperatives and their advocates in ‘On Cooperation’, Bakunin then turns to promoting them. He wrote

We want cooperation too. We are even convinced that the cooperative will be the preponderant form of social organization in the future, in every branch of labour and science. But at the same time, we know that it will prosper, developing itself fully and freely, embracing all human industry, only when it is based on equality, when all capital and every instrument of labour, including the soil, belong to the people by right of collective property. Therefore before all else, we consider this demand, the organization of the international strength of the workers of all countries, to be the principal goal of our great International [Working-Men’s] Association.

Once this is acknowledged, we hardly oppose the creation of cooperative associations; we find them necessary in many respects. First, and this appears to us even to be their principal benefit at present, they accustom the workers to organize, pursue and manage their interests themselves, without any interference either by bourgeois capital or by bourgeois control.

It is desirable that when the hour of social liquidation is at hand, it should find many cooperative associations in every country and locality; if they are well organized and above all founded on the principles of solidarity and collectivity rather than on bourgeois exclusivism, then society will pass from its present situation to one of equality and justice without too many great upheavals.

Cutler, Mikhail Bakunin, p. 150.

I don’t believe in a radical transformation of society like Bakunin, who was an ardent revolutionary. But I would like more cooperatives to be founded, and this to become, with various other forms of industrial democracy, the dominant form of industrial organization. Working people should be able to organize and empower themselves so that they can resist the power of big business and Conservatism, which has stripped them of rights at work and even the promise of secure, well-paid jobs. There is a problem in that cooperatives can be less economical than capitalist enterprises, but the success of the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain shows that this is not necessarily the case. And cooperatives and industrial democracy, if done properly, will empower the workers and help break down the current class system and the increasingly oligarchical nature of business and politics.

Socialism and Equality in the Programme of the International Workingmen’s Association

Last week I put up a piece arguing that one of the main differences between genuine socialism and Nazism and Fascism, which at times included socialist elements or affected socialistic postures, is that Socialism also demanded equality. Karl Kautsky in his writings stated that socialists supported the working class as the way to equality and the classless society. If this could be done better without socialism, then the latter would have to be discarded. Article 6 of the Preamble to the General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association, agreed at the Geneva congress in 1866, explicitly included racial, national and religious equality. Bakunin gives the rules in the Preamble in his piece on ‘The Organisation of the International’ in Mikhail Bakunin: From Out of the Dustbin: Bakunin’s Basic Writings 1869-1871, Robert M. Cutler, ed. and trans. (Ann Arbor: Ardis 1985), pp. 137-44. They were

1. The emancipation of Labour should be the work of the labourers themselves;
2. The efforts of the workers to emancipate themselves should lend themselves to the establishment not of new privileges but of equal rights and equal obligations for everyone, and to the abolition of all class domination;
3. The economic subjection of the worker to the monopolizers of primatery materials and of the instruments of labour is the origin of all forms of slavery: social poverty, mental degradation, and political submission.
4. For this reason, the economic emancipation of the working classes is the great goal to which every political movement should be subordinated as a simple means;
5. The emancipation of the workers is not a simply local or national problem; on the contrary, this problem is of interest to all civilized nations depending for its solution upon their theoretical and practical circumstances;
6. The Association and all its members recognize that Truth, Justice, and Morality must be the basis of their conduct toward all men, without regard to colour, creed or nationality;
7. Finally the Association considers itself obliged to demand human and civil rights not only for its members but also for whoever fulfills his obligations; “No obligations without rights, no rights without obligations”.

Pp. 142-3, my emphasis.

I realise that there are exception to this rule. The Fabians were fully behind British imperialism and the Boer War, and Marx and Engels had deeply unpleasant views about how certain nations – the Celts and the Slavs – were reactionary and due to disappear from history. And I think its probably fair to say that it has only been after the great social changes in the 1960s that feminism and anti-racism have been more than the concern of a few intellectuals both within the Labour movement in Britain and outside it.

But nevertheless, the I.W.M.A’s programme does show a commitment to social equality was present in the working class movement from very early on, a commitment that continues to inspire and motivate socialists and working people today striving for a better world. A world without Fascism, which will try to take on some of its aspects in order to suppress real socialism.

19th Century Campaigns for Trade Union and Working Class Representation in Parliament

One of the issues that desperately needs to be tackled is the electoral disenfranchisement of the working class. The existing political parties have, to a greater or lesser extent, adopted neoliberal economics and concentrated on gaining middle class support to the exclusion of the working and lower middle classes. In the case of the Conservative party, this has meant little difference in the way the party fundamentally sees itself. It has always represented industry and the traditional social hierarchy against the working class, although under the influence of Thatcher its policies have become much more extreme. New labour, however, aimed at gaining middle class support while neglecting the very people it was formed to fight for in the first place.

I am planning to write a much longer post about the formation of the Labour party, and how it was explicitly formed by trade unions and various Socialist parties and organisations, such as the Independent Labour Party, the Social-Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society, to represent the interests of the working class in parliament. The aspirations of trade unionists and working people to be represented in parliament goes back long before the official foundation of the Labour party. Many were active in the Chartist campaigns for the enlargement of the Franchise.

London Radicals and the Mid-Victorian Campaign for Votes for Working Men

Henry Pelling, in his A History of British Trade Unionism, 4th Edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1987) notes in many areas artisans had held the freeman’s franchise before the Great Reform Act of 1832. This was particularly true of Liverpool in the 1790s, where local politicians were careful to win the support of the Shipwrights Society.

The first time a trade union candidate stood for election to parliament was in 1852 when William Newton of the Engineers Union stood as the Radical candidate for Tower Hamlets. He did not, however, have the support of his union, and only polled a thousand votes, which was insufficient to get him elected. Nevertheless, this marked the entry of working people into parliamentary politics.

Pelling goes on to describe the way the trade unions again became active in the 1860s campaigning for the further extension of the voter to include the working class:

In the early 1860s, however, a number of factors brought union officials into politics. They had already been drawn into an unprecedented public debate about the merits of unionism at the time of the London builders’ strike, which revealed the existence of a number of potential allies of trade unionism among the professional classes. There were, for instance, Christian Socialists such as J.M. Ludlow and Thomas Hughes, who were both barristers, and there were Positivists, that is, adherents of the positive social philosophy of the Frenchman Auguste Comte, such as Professor E.S. Beesly of University College, London, and another barrister called Frederic Harrison. Several of these men had been involved in the preparation of the report on trade unions presented to the 1860 meeting of the National Social Science Association. Contact with such sympathizers, and the desire to reciprocate their support by helping them in any parliamentary elections that they chose to fight, were no doubt factors pulling Applegarth and his colleagues more fully into the political arena. But in any case, the union leaders felt not only that they could benefit from political activity but also that they had a right and a duty to participate. This view was clearly expressed in an Address to the Trade Unions published by a newly founded body called the Manhood Suffrage and Vote by Ballot Association, and actually written either by Applegarth [Robert Applegarth, secretary of the Amalgamated Carpenters] or by George Howell, a young bricklayer who shared his views:

We do not wish you to relax one iota of your efforts in reference to the amelioration of our social condition … Nor do we wish to turn our trades societies into political organisations, to divert them from their social objects; but we must not forget that we are citizens, and as such should have citizen’s rights. Recollect also, that by obtaining these rights we shall be able more effectually to secure our legitimate demands as Unionists. (Pp. 50-51).

Pelling notes that members of Applegarth’s organisation and supporters were in the reception committee which welcome the great Italian nationalist, Garibaldi, when he visited London in 1864, supported the North against the South during the American Civil War, and that a number joined the International Workingmen’s Association. Most of the London union leaders also fully participated in campaign of the Reform League, formed in 1865, to gain the vote for working men. A committee of trade union supporters was formed to assist Thomas Hughes when he stood as a Radical for Lambeth. Other politicians were also assisted by trade union support, such as Joseph Cowen in Newcastle, who was greatly aided by John Kane of the National Association of Iron-Workers. (pp.51-2).

The Bristol Trades Council and the Entry of Working Men into Parliament and on the Council

In Bristol in the 1880s the local Trades Council turned away from supporting the Liberals and started campaigning for the direct representation of working men in politics. David Large and Robert Whitfield describe the campaigns of the trades council in Bristol on behalf of working class representation in their pamphlet, The Bristol Trades Council 1873-1973 (Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Assocation 1973):

Nevertheless, by 1885 the Council had become dissatisfied with the meagre results of this policy. It was well aware that for some time there had been a growing agitation in the city for direct representation of labour on local bodies and eventually in parliament. Consequently it issued a stirring invitation to ‘fellow workmen’ to subscribe 1/- a year to create a great ‘Local Labour League’ to achieve this. The Council urged that the distinguished part played by the T.U.C. Parliamentary Committee in shaping legislation had demonstrated ‘The Royal Right of British Workmen to seats in the British Senate’ and now when ‘the long neglected Tillers of the Soil were about to exercise the vote for the first time, ‘the toilers of the town should fraternize with them and ‘be astir’ to take hold of what was within reach, seats on local bodies even if running a candidate for parliament was still out of their reach. The Council’s call was heeded. The Labour League was established and in 1886 scored its first success when John Fox, a prominent member of the Trades Council, was returned unopposed in the school board elections to the chagrin of the Liberals, who had done all they could to take him under their wing and prevent him standing as a Labour candidate. A year later a more spectacular victory was won when R.G. Tovey, who doubled the role of secretary to the Trades Council and the Labour League, became the first labour councillor by winning St. Paul’s. (p. 6).

At the moment there is considerable debate over the demographic representation of ethnic and minority groups in parliament. MPs and various political and civil rights organisations outside parliament, like Operation Black Vote, are keen to see more Black and Asians MPs in line with the size of their communities in the British population, along with far more female MPs. However, parliament is still predominantly upper and very middle-class. This should be changed as well. More working people should be voted into parliament to represent the needs and aspirations of their class, rather than the increasing narrow interests of a middle class, neoliberal elite.