The Poverty of Statism. Anarchism versus Marxism A debate by Bukharin Nikolai & Fabbri Luigi & Rocker Rudolf

Author:Bukharin, Nikolai & Fabbri, Luigi & Rocker, Rudolf [Bukharin, Nikolai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ChristieBooks
Published: 2013-01-09T08:00:00+00:00

RUDOLF ROCKER

Anarchism and Sovietism

Anarchism: Its Aims and Means

Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our time, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the present capitalist economic order anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour, which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social union. In place of the present state organisations with their lifeless machinery of political and bureaucratic institutions, anarchists desire a federation of free communities that shall be bound to one another by their common economic and social interests and shall arrange their affairs by mutual agreement and free contract.

Anyone who studies at all profoundly the economic and political development of the present social system will easily recognise that these objectives do not spring from the utopian ideas of a few imaginative innovators, but that they are the logical outcome of a thorough examination of the present day social maladjustments, which with every phase of the existing social conditions manifest themselves more plainly and more unwholesomely. Modern monopoly capitalism and the totalitarian state are merely the last terms in a development that could culminate in no other results.

The portentous development of our present economic system, leading to a mighty accumulation of social wealth in the hands of privileged minorities and to a continuous impoverishment of the great masses of the people, prepared the way for the present political and social reaction, befriending it in every way. It sacrificed the general interests of human society to the private interests of individuals, and thus systematically undermined the relationship between man and man. People forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should be only a means to ensure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism. The two mutually augment each other and they are fed from the same source.

The economic dictatorship of the monopolies and the political dictatorship of the totalitarian state are the twin outgrowths of the same social objectives, and the directors of both have the presumption to try to reduce all the countless expressions of social life to the dehumanised tempo of the machine and to tune everything organic to the lifeless rhythm of the political apparatus. Our modern social system has split the social organism in every country into hostile classes internally, and externally it has broken the common cultural circle up into hostile nations in such a way that both classes and nations confront one another in open antagonism and their ceaseless warfare keeps the social life of the community in continuous convulsions. The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.