3. Basic Principles of Socialist Society

Socialist society implies the organization by people themselves of every aspect of their social life. The establishment of socialism therefore entails the immediate abolition of the fundamental division of society into a stratum of order-givers and a mass of order-takers.

The content of the socialist reorganization of society is first of all workers’ management of production. The working class has repeatedly staked its claim to such management and struggled to achieve it at the high points of its historic actions: in Russia in 1917–18, in Italy in 1920, in Spain in 1936, in Hungary in 1956.

Workers’ Councils, based on the place of work, are the form workers’ self-management will probably take and the institution most likely to foster its growth. Workers’ management means the power of the local Workers’ Councils and ultimately, at the level of society as a whole, the power of the Central Assembly of Workers Council Delegates.{7} Factory Councils (or Councils based on any other place of work such as a plant, building site, mine, railway yard, office, etc.) will be composed of delegates elected by the workers and revocable by them, at any time, and will unite the functions of deliberation, decision and execution. Such Councils are historic creations of the working class. They have come to the forefront every time the question of power has been posed in modern society. The Russian Factory Committees of 1917, the German Workers’ Councils of 1919, the Hungarian Councils of 1956 all sought to express (whatever their name) the same original, organic and characteristic working class pattern of self-organization.{8}

Concretely to define the socialist organization of society is among other things to draw all the possible conclusions from two basic ideas: workers’ management of production and the rule of the Councils. But such a definition can only come to life and be given flesh and blood if combined with an account of how the institutions of a free, socialist society might function in practice.

There is no question of us here trying to draw up “statutes,” “rules,” or an “ideal constitution” for socialist society. Statutes, as such, mean nothing. The best of statutes can only have meaning to the extent that people are permanently prepared to defend what is best in them, to make up what they lack, and to change whatever they may contain that has become inadequate or outdated. From this point of view we must obviously avoid any fetishism of the “Council” type of organization. The “constant eligibility and revocability of representatives” are of themselves quite insufficient to “guarantee” that a Council will remain the expression of working class interests. The Council will remain such an expression for as long as people are prepared to do whatever may be necessary for it to remain so. The achievement of socialism is not a question of better legislation. It depends on the constant self-activity of people and on their capacity to find within themselves the necessary awareness of ends and means, the necessary solidarity and determination.

But to be socially effective this autonomous mass action cannot remain amorphous, fragmented and dispersed. It will find expression in patterns of action and forms of organization, in ways of doing things and ultimately in institutions which embody and reflect its purpose. Just as we must avoid the fetishism of “statutes” we should also see the shortcomings of various types of “anarchist” or “spontaneist” fetishism, which in the belief that in the last resort working class consciousness will determine everything, takes little or no interest in the forms such consciousness should take, if it is really to change reality. The Council is not a gift bestowed by some libertarian God. It is not a miraculous institution. It cannot be a popular mouthpiece if the people do not wish to express themselves through its medium. But the Council is an adequate form of organization: its whole structure is such that it enables working class aspirations to come to light and find expression. Parliamentary-type institutions, on the other hand, whether called “House of Commons,” or “Supreme Soviet of the USSR,” are by definition types of institutions that cannot be socialist. They are founded on a radical separation between the people, “consulted” from time to time, and those who are deemed to “represent” them, but who are in fact beyond meaningful popular control. A Workers’ Council is designed so as to represent working people, but may cease to fulfill this function. Parliament is designed so as not to represent the people and never ceases to fulfill this function.[2]

The question of adequate and meaningful institutions is central to socialist society. It is particularly important as socialism can only come about through a revolution, that is to say, as the result of a social crisis in the course of which the consciousness and activity of the masses reach extremely high levels. Under these conditions the masses become capable of breaking the power of the ruling class and of its armed forces, of bypassing the political and economic institutions of established society, and of transcending within themselves the heavy legacy of centuries of oppression. This state of affairs should not be thought of as some kind of paroxysm, but on the contrary as the prefiguration of the level of both activity and awareness demanded of men in a free society.

The “ebbing” of revolutionary activity has nothing inevitable about it. It will always remain a threat however, given the sheer enormity of the tasks to be tackled. Everything which adds to the innumerable problems facing popular mass action will enhance the tendency to such a reflux. It is, therefore, crucial for the revolution to provide itself, from its very first days, with a network of adequate structures to express its will and for revolutionaries to have some idea as to how these structures might function and interrelate. There can be no organizational or ideological vacuum in this respect and if libertarian revolutionaries remain blissfully unaware of these problems and have not discussed or even envisaged them they can rest assured that others have. It is essential that revolutionary society should create for itself, at each stage, those structures that can most readily become effective “normal” mechanisms for the expression of popular will, both in “important affairs” and in everyday life (which is of course the first and foremost of all “important affairs”).

The definition of socialist society that we are attempting therefore requires of us some description of how we visualize its institutions, and the way they will function. This endeavor is not “utopian,” for it is but the elaboration and extrapolation of historical creations of the working class, and in particular of the concept of workers’ management. The ideas we propose to develop are only the theoretical formulation of the experience of a century of working class struggles. They embody real experiences (both positive and negative), conclusions (both direct and indirect) that have already been drawn, answers given to problems actually posed or answers which would have had to be given if such and such a revolution had developed a little further. Every sentence in this text is linked to questions which implicitly or explicitly have already been met in the course of working class struggles. This should put a stop once and for all to allegations of “utopianism.”[3]

a. Institutions that People can Understand and Control

Self-management will only be possible if people’s attitudes to social organization alter radically. This in turn, will only take place if social institutions become a meaningful part of their real daily life. Just as work will only have a meaning when people understand and dominate it, so will the institutions of socialist society only become meaningful when people both understand and control them.[4]

Modern society is a dark and incomprehensible jungle, a confusion of apparatuses, structures and institutions whose workings almost no one understands or takes any interest in. Socialist society will only be possible if it brings about a radical change in this state of affairs and massively simplifies social organization. Socialism implies that the organization of a society will have become transparent for those who make up that society.

To say that the workings and institutions of socialist society must be easy to understand implies that people must have a maximum of information. This “maximum of information” is something quite different from an enormous mass of data. The problem isn’t to equip everybody with portable microfilms of everything that’s in the British Museum. On the contrary, the maximum of information depends first and foremost in a reduction of data to their essentials, so that they can readily be handled by all. This will be possible because socialism will result in an immediate and enormous simplification of problems and the disappearance, pure and simple, of most current rules and regulations which will have become quite meaningless. To this will be added a systematic effort to gather and disseminate information about social reality, and to present facts both adequately and simply. Further on, when discussing the functioning of socialist economy, we will give examples of the enormous possibilities that already exist in this field.

Under socialism people will dominate the working and institutions of society. Socialism will therefore have, for the first time in human history, to institute democracy. Etymologically, the word democracy means domination by the masses. We are not here concerned with the formal aspects of this domination. Real domination must not be confused with voting. A vote, even a “free” vote, may only be – and often only is – a parody of democracy. Real democracy is not the right to vote on secondary issues. It is not the right to appoint rulers who will then decide, without control from below, on all the essential questions. Nor does democracy consist in calling upon people electorally to comment upon incomprehensible questions or upon questions which have no meaning for them. Real domination consists in being able to decide for oneself, on all essential questions, in full knowledge of the relevant facts.

In these few words “in full knowledge of the relevant facts” lies the whole problem of democracy.[5] There is little point in asking people to pronounce themselves if they are not aware of the relevant facts. This has long been stressed by the reactionary or fascist critics of bourgeois “democracy,” and even by the more cynical Stalinists[6] or Fabians.{9} It is obvious that bourgeois “democracy” is a farce, if only because literally nobody in contemporary society can express an opinion in full knowledge of the relevant facts, least of all the mass of the people from whom political and economic realities and the real meaning of the questions asked are systematically hidden. But the answer is not to vest power in the hands of an incompetent and uncontrollable bureaucracy. The answer is so to transform social reality that essential data and fundamental problems are understood by all, enabling all to express opinions “in full knowledge of the relevant facts.”

b. Direct Democracy and Centralization

To decide means to decide for oneself. To decide who is to decide is already not quite deciding for oneself. The only total form of democracy is therefore direct democracy.

To achieve the widest and most meaningful direct democracy will require that all the economic and political structures of society be based on local groups that are real, organic social units. Direct democracy certainly requires the physical presence of citizens in a given place, when decisions have to be taken. But this is not enough. It also requires that these citizens form an organic community, that they live if possible in the same milieu, that they be familiar through their daily experience with the subjects to be discussed and with the problems to be tackled. It is only in such units that the political participation of individuals can become total, that people can know and feel that their involvement is meaningful and that the real life of the community is being determined by its own members and not by some external agency, acting “on behalf of” the community. There must therefore be the maximum autonomy and self-management for the local units.

Modern social life has already created these collectivities and continues to create them. They are units based on medium-sized or larger enterprises and are to be found in industry, transport, building, commerce, the banks, public administration, etc., where people in hundreds, thousands or tens-of-thousands spend the main part of their life harnessed to common work, coming up against society in its most concrete form. A place of work is not only a unit of production: it has become the primary unit of social life for the vast majority of people. Instead of basing itself on geographical units, which economic development has often rendered highly artificial, the political structure of socialism will be largely based on collectivities involved in similar work. Such collectivities will prove the fertile soil on which direct democracy can nourish as they did (for similar reasons) in the ancient city or in the democratic communities of free farmers in the United States in the 19^th century.

Direct democracy gives an idea of the decentralization which socialist society will be able to achieve. But an industrially advanced free society will also have to find a means of democratically integrating these basic units into the social fabric as a whole. It will have to solve the difficult problem of the necessary centralization, without which the life of a modern community would collapse.

It is not centralization as such which has made of modern societies such outstanding examples of political alienation or which has led to minorities politically expropriating the majority. This has been brought about by the development of bodies separate from and “above” the general population, bodies exclusively and specifically concerned with the function of centralization. As long as centralization is conceived of as the specific function of a separate, independent apparatus, bureaucracy is indeed inseparable from centralization. But in a socialist society there will be no conflict between centralization and the autonomy of local organizations, for both functions will be exercised by the same institutions. There will be no separate apparatus whose function it will be to reunite what it has itself smashed up, which absurd task (need we recall it) is precisely the function of a modern bureaucracy.{10}

Bureaucratic centralization is a feature of all modern exploiting societies. The intimate links between centralization and totalitarian bureaucratic rule, in such class societies, provokes a healthy and understandable aversion to centralization among many contemporary revolutionaries. But this response is often confused and at times it reinforces the very things it seeks to correct. “Centralization, there’s the root of all evil” proclaim many honest militants as they break with Stalinism or Leninism in either East or West. But this formulation, at best ambiguous, becomes positively harmful when it leads as it often does – either to formal demands for the “fragmentation of power” or to demands for a limitless extension of the powers of base groupings, neglecting what is to happen at other levels.

When Polish militants, for instance, imagine they have found a solution to the problem of bureaucracy when they advocate a social life organized and led by “several centers” (the State Administration, a Parliamentary Assembly, the Trade Unions, Workers’ Councils and Political Parties) they are arguing beside the point. They fail to see that this “polycentrism” is equivalent to the absence of any real and identifiable center, controlled from below. And as modern society has to take certain central decisions the “constitution” they propose will only exist on paper. It will only serve to hide the reemergence of a real, but this time masked (and therefore, uncontrollable) “center,” from amid the ranks of the political bureaucracy.

The reason is obvious: if one fragments any institution accomplishing a significant or vital function one only creates an enhanced need for some other institution to reassemble the fragments. Similarly, if one merely advocates an extension of the powers of local Councils, one is thereby handing them over to domination by a central bureaucracy which alone would “know” or “understand” how to make the economy function as a whole (and modern economies, whether one likes it or not, do function as a whole). For libertarian revolutionaries to duck these difficulties and to refuse to face up to the question of central power is tantamount to leaving the solution of these problems to some bureaucracy or other.

Libertarian society will therefore have to provide a libertarian solution to the problem of centralization. This answer could be the assumption of carefully defined and circumscribed authority by a Federation of Workers’ Councils and the creation of a Central Assembly of Councils and of a Council Administration. We will see further on that such an Assembly and such an Administration do not constitute a delegation of popular power but are, on the contrary, an instrument of that power. At this stage we only want to discuss the principles that might govern the relationship of such bodies to the local Councils and other base groups. These principles are important, for they would affect the functioning of nearly all institutions in a libertarian society.

c. The Flow of Information and Decisions

In a society where the people have been robbed of political power, and where this power is in the hands of a centralizing authority the essential relationship between the center and the periphery can be summed up as follows: channels from the periphery to the center only transmit information, whereas channels from the center to the periphery transmit decisions (plus, perhaps, that minimum of information deemed necessary for the understanding and execution of the decisions taken at the center). The whole set-up reflects not only a monopoly of decisional authority, but also a monopoly of the conditions necessary for the exercise of power. The center alone has the “sum total” of information needed to evaluate and decide. In modern society, it can only be by accident that any individual or body gains access to information other than that relating to his immediate milieu. The system seeks to avoid, or at any rate, it doesn’t encourage such “accidents.”

When we say that in a socialist society the central bodies will not constitute a delegation of power but will be the expression of the power of the people we are implying a radical change in all this. One of the main functions of central bodies will be to collect, transmit and disseminate information collected and conveyed to them by local groups. In all essential fields, decisions will be taken at grassroots level and will be notified to the “center,” whose responsibility it will be to help or follow their progress. A two-way flow of information and recommendations will be instituted and this will not only apply to relations between the Administration and the Councils, but will be a model for relations between all institutions and those who comprise them.

We must stress once again that we are not trying to draw up perfect blueprints. It is obvious for instance that to collect and disseminate information is not a socially neutral function. All information cannot be disseminated – it would be the surest way of smothering what is relevant and rendering it incomprehensible and therefore uncontrollable. The role of any central bodies is therefore political, even in this respect.

Basic units 2