Starts off reminding me not to believe in sweeping generalisations, before she proceeds to make some. Self-awareness is important.
Thesis is that all genuine revolutions are built by federations or networks of local decision-making bodies (like councils). Hmm yes GB would agree.
In March 1917 the Russians had a revolution and got rid of the Tsar. Subsequently they had a system of government where you had a duma (which was basically a parliament like ours) and soviets (which were genuinely democratic worker conucils which federated). Most of the moderates were for the duma, and the radicals (bolsheviks, anarchists, left-socialists) were for the soviets.
Unfortunately, the bolsheviks were led by Lenin who did not want workers power, but personal power. After another revolution, in October, Lenin and the Bolsheviks centralised power at the top of the soviet structure, and disenfranchised the more-local ones that they weren’t in charge of, and arrestedand killed and outlawed a lot of non-bolsheviks. :(
Sometimes people argue that this was necessary to have a socialist revolution, but the thing is they’d already had a socialist revolution! And then their leaders did a bait-and-switch and made it into an authoritarian state. Embarassing and tragic!
Soviets minus hierarchy and centralisation good, basically. Soviets with hierarchy and centralisation turns out can be co-opted and now you have the USSR.
There was a civil war with a lot of sides about all of this, but the Bolsheviks won :(. Then Stalin happened and killed a lot of bolsheviks, most of the ones facsism hadn’t killed a few years previously.
Important point: - Lenisism is Lenin, - Marxist-Leninism is actually Stalinism (Stalin wanted to ape the appeal of Marx and Lenin) - Trotskyism is what Stalin did not like
So as an anarchist, Killjoy liked the decentralised, democratic soviets and is sad all this happened. I agree!!
And I see why William Gillis prefers free trade as the alternative to hierarchies of councils distributing resources.
The leftist project in the early 20th century was the empowerment of local councils (or soviets, or unions). Germany in 1918, the Limerick Soviet in 1919, the CNT it Catalonia.
These days we think democracy extends up to the doors of the workplace, gets encoded in your contract, and then stops. it does not need to be like this.
Nowadays we don’t think like this as much (but i try to!). Historical socialists were obsessed with, like, the dignity of good work and individual empowerment. They’d rather all own what you make, and then share it. Different to Capitalist and capital-C communist propaganda.
This is why collective farms were good, until they got imposed from above.
Co-operativism is getting at this in the modern day, and have long roots. In the US South from 1886 and 1891 a group called the Colored Farmer’s Alliance and Cooperative Union (CFACU?) worked to break the sharecropping system that had replaced slavery but still kept Black people subservient.
Industrial argriculture destroyed this and most other arrangements of working the land, but it proved more resilient and supported farmers through the transition.
Federation of Southern Cooperatives works to this day to keep farmland in Black hands through coop models. Cool!
And they’re federated into a group called Seed Commons. Its a cooperative of loan funds who work together to get money into the hands of cooperative businesses. Resources are pooled but decisionmaking is shared and automony is local. Bottom-up.
I’d like to start a co-op cafe+infoshop. That would be nice. One day…
We also have Zapatistas, which started as Marxist-Leninist and has ended up a federation of local councils, often indigenous-led and so on. They’ve been going for a long time and are pretty cool.
Good slogan: “Fighting for a world in which many worlds are possible”
Then we have Rojava in Southwest Asia in North-and-East Syria which is trying to be bottom-up and pluralistic in a very difficult warzone. They do this by empowering local councils which then coordinate with one another to build a larger society.
This happened because the leader of the Marxist-Leninist Kurdish liberation group started reading anarchist literature whilst in prison and decided to model his government on those ideas instead. Since he was in charge, he could do that haha.
Uh oh, Margaret says “There is a reason that this… works. …[because it is] in alignment with the human psyche”. Hmmmm
Okay I guess it does tend to emerge by itself. We know we need to work together, and that we are all equal.
How do we do this? Probably have to determine the answers togother, anew, each time with our particular local context.
Must avoid co-option!
Imagine if there was a federation of coops across Nottinghamshire. Sumac center, and others. That would be cool.