Pie in the Sky “Voluntary Federation”, or Working Class Democratic Discipline?

Another Letter to the Green Liberty Caucus

Dear GLC,

John Spritzler is someone who seems to be a member of your caucus. He seems to be an anarchist, though he styles himself an “egalitarian”. This seems to be a broadly humanist movement, which strongly avers from any form of class conflict or even analysis.

In his own mind, if not in fact, he is the leader of a vast movement for “egalitarianism” which he knows can spring into being, just as soon as he snaps his fingers and blows away all other contenders for the mantle of left libertarianism, with the superior logic invested in his (curious) doctrine.

John is a frequent article-writer to whose substack account I subscribe. We agree on many things, and he can actually write intelligently, especially when he critiques the we existing, “oligarchic” order. We also disagree on some very important issues. One of the most annoying things he continually repeats, is that Lenin and Trotsky were driven inexorably to create a one party state, via their frame up the Left SRs for the murder of Count Mirbach, smash the Kronstadt rebellion, etc. What drove them to this? It was not Lenin’s Blanquist ideology. Nor was it the pressure of imperialism. No, it was the mere fact that they accepted the class analysis of existing, capitalist society by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. By showing that capitalism made the majority of people in this society “have-nots”, Marx and Engels dictated to their followers that they must have only contempt...for these very same have-nots. Once stupified by the alienated capitalism labor process, they must always remain so: and thus a self-styled socialist “workers” party must forever more tell them what to do, and shut them up or even kill them when they don’t obey orders. This, according to John, was the Gospel of Karl and Fred.

This is ignorant, anticommunist tripe, something I might hear from the right wing Bloviators who attend our meetings, at the Manhattan Metropolitan Republican Club, of the NYC Medical Freedom Alliance meetings (despite this drivel, the practical activists who attend actually do get some work done, on occasion).

For John, however, the costs of class analysis simply outweigh, at least in John’s minds, whatever benefits might accrue. A silly Marxist might say (see below) that Marxist class analysis can help us left libertarians understand which class (the proletariat) will fight for the Good Society, which class will oppose it (the capitalist class), which class will waver (the middle class).

Nope! All of that is too dehumanizing! Let’s just hope that people, no matter what their class background, will flock to the sacred cause of Egalitarianism!

To any Marxist, the petite bourgeois, as well as dysfunctional, nature of such sentimental claptrap is obvious. But not too John—because John has freed himself from all such analytic categories, so inherently stifling of his “egalitarian” bon vivacity!

Recently I’ve written two articles, letters to your caucus, addressing what I see as a crucial omission in yours and your presidential candidate’s program. Briefly stated, Emanuel is the only candidate in the race that has a strong critique of the Great Reset. He has, however, as I’ve pointed out, not provided a program to deal with this tremendous threat to humanity, perhaps because he does not want to advertise the fact that the only possible solution is a socialist one.

John replied to my second letter with an off-topic kind of litmus test, which I might paraphrase as follows, ‘Are you, or have you ever been, a supporter of my (utopian) belief in voluntary community federation? If you are, you have the right to call yourself a ‘genuine democrat’. If not, you don’t. You’re an advocate for oppressing the have nots, just like the Bolsheviks did!”

I looked at the articles he had written in support of his view. Instead of handling the issue as I should have—politely telling him that his question was off topic, but that I would deal with the matter he had raised in another article, or in a separate discussion with GLC, I took the bait. I told him, and some of you, that no, I do not agree with his notion that either his voluntary federation is either practical, nor democratic. Of course (knowing John’s penchant for baiting Marxists as tyrants-in-embryo!), the conversation quickly degenerated into something quite ugly and insulting. Because I spoke of the need for inter-communal discipline—for a commitment by the communities, beyond voluntarism, to follow the directives of more central, delegated bodies (state, national, global), John implied that I supported Trotsky’s crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion.

I never said any such thing. Even in this rapidly degenerating conversation, I had already asserted my rejection of such Bolshevik tyranny.

I then insisted that we “wrap up” this conversation. Which we did. And I promised to write another article, addressing John’s utopian schemes for voluntary federation of local communities.

That’s what I want to do, here and now.

John lays out his scheme in his article, “What is Egalitarianism?” The key passage, with which I take issue, is as follows:

Non-local assemblies can, in turn, send delegates to form a non-local assembly corresponding to an even larger region, and these non-local assemblies can, in turn, do likewise so that regional planning and coordination can be achieved on as large a scale as desired, even globally if people wish. Still, non-local assemblies do not write laws; they only craft proposals for consideration by the assemblies from which their members were sent as delegates. Back and forth consultation and negotiation between assemblies at lower and higher levels either results eventually in a proposal that meets the approval of a sufficient number of local assemblies to be implemented, or else no new plan or policy is implemented. This is how large scale order is achieved by mutual agreement, rather than by the anti-democratic invalid authoritarian principle that says "you must obey the highest level governmental body, no matter what."ⁱ

Critical questions naturally arise from this. Why is it only “authoritarian” for the non-local, delegate assembly to be sovereign over the majority will of the local community; and yet not be authoritarian for the majority will of the community, to be sovereign over the will of the individual. In other words, if we conceive freedom to be the absolute sovereignty of one, and not the other, then why Kropotkin, and not Stirner? There is potential in either situation for the will of each—the will of the individual, the will of the local community—to be negated. So why is one authoritarian, but the other, the realm of freedom?

Spritzler thereby reifies the will of the community, but the reality is that both at the level of the non-local, and at the local, the will of the individual is being “refined”, “distilled”, and to some measure, diminished. This refinement increases from the lower level, to the higher: from the individual, to the global soviet, at each level.

Democracy must rely upon such a process. For their our decisions whose scope is quite outside the scope of a local community. This is especially true during a revolutionary era. A democratic socialist revolution cannot permit each and every local community to go its own way. John attempts to resolve this by saying that the revolutionary communities can form militias to keep the counterrevolutionary communities in line. But this is more pie in the sky. The exercise of authority, through settled, institutional structures, is absolutely necessary, especially during Revolution. As Friedrich Engels wrote in his “On Authority”:

… the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Even after the revolution, there will be times when the will of the local community, is that of violence and injustice toward other communities, or toward members of the community, whom the majority does not consider to be full, first class members of that community. Witness, the horrific genocide now perpetrated by the Israeli Zionist state, with pretty much the full support of the Palestinian Jewish population, against the Arab Palestinians? What about the pre-Civil War Southern U.S. “white republics”, and then the lynchings that occurred against the black members of Southern communities. Are we supposed to believe that such matters can be resolved, purely on a “voluntary” basis?

I do not, and neither did Marx and Engels, mean to support the idea of a “standing army”, to put down rebellion. But we need to have some standing “connective tissue” between the communities. We must somehow ensure that the will to revolution, socialism, social justice, etc. is universal.

The Bolsheviks had two solutions to this problem. One of them was to create a one party state. I have thoroughly critiqued this solution. They should not have done so. They should have respected the right of their initial partner party, the Left SRs, to rule officially over the country, because this Party, and not theirs, represented the majority.ⁱⁱ

But in the teeth of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks employed the second solution. And this was to fight like the devil to ensure that the Bolsheviks (it should have been a Left SR-Bolshevik coalition, but never mind!) gained control of every Russian province, to put down counterrevolution.

The popular Parties are the connecting tissue. They must rule democratically, of course. But they must fight politically to gain control of a revolutionary society. They cannot permit each and every province to make up their own minds whether they should accept, or not accept, the decisions of the Central Congress of Soviets. Connected together by the Revolutionary Parties, controlled by those Parties, they must carry out the will of their own delegated, “non-local assemblies”. Otherwise, there is the very real danger of chaos.

Notes:

iJohn Spritzler, “What is Egalitarianism?” at https://www.pdrboston.org/egalitarianism

ii“Was the Bolshevik Regime and Its Policies Marxist—or Blanquist?”, at https://bmccproftomsmith7.substack.com/p/was-the-bolshevik-regime-and-its