Revolution; down at the old anarcho-syndicalist café

Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue I know, I’m working on a slightly snappier name for the place, so bear with me…

Why a café? Well, they serve food there. And this is a blog all about food, no? But also, because, traditionally, the café was the preferred location where the revolutionaries would hang out. And also — and not co-incidentally — references the title of a seminal work on anarchism by Errico Malatesta, “At The Cafe”.

I’ve been reading even more books recently if that’s possible; the towers of the unread ones are reaching human heights now and carry very a real danger to life and limb were they to collapse. Some of them, fiction, as an antidote to — or to block out the news from — the hell-scape that is Plague Island England at the moment. Some to, I hope, widen my thinking or to add to that — often seemingly useless — body of knowledge that I’m carrying around inside my head in an — almost certainly — impossible attempt to both come up with a Grand Theory Of Everything whilst also planning to take part in the revolution that we so, so, desperately need.

Along with this as a (very truncated) shot of the ones that have percolated up to the top of the pile…

… I’ve also further ones by Iain Sinclair & Owen Hatherley to dive into.

NATIONALISATION

The goals of nationalisation are to dispossess large capitalists, redirect the profits of industry to the public purse e.g. for the public good and to establish a form of workers’ self-management as a precursor to the establishment of a socialist economic system.

ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

Anarcho-syndicalism is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought that views revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism as a method for workers in capitalist society to gain control of an economy and thus control influence in broader society. The end goal of syndicalism is to abolish the wage system, regarding it as wage slavery. Anarcho-syndicalist theory generally focuses on the labour movement. Reflecting the anarchist philosophy from which it draws its primary inspiration, anarcho-syndicalism is centered on the idea that power corrupts and that any hierarchy that cannot be ethically justified must be dismantled.

The basic principles of anarcho-syndicalism are solidarity, direct action (action undertaken without the intervention of third parties such as politicians, bureaucrats and arbitrators) and direct democracy, or workers’ self-management. Anarcho-syndicalists believe their economic theories constitute a strategy for facilitating proletarian self-activity and creating an alternative co-operative economic system with democratic values and production that is centered on meeting human needs. Anarcho-syndicalists perceive the primary purpose of the state as the defense of private property in the forms of capital goods and therefore of economic, social and political privilege. In maintaining this status quo, the state denies most of its citizens the ability to enjoy material independence and the social autonomy that springs from it.

I think the key phrase, at least for me here, is: “…power corrupts and that any hierarchy that cannot be ethically justified must be dismantled.”

To the barricades comrades.

This is very possibly my least coherent post ever but hopefully you get both where I’m coming from and where we all need to get to. I’ll try and post more regularly…

Further suggestions for the café anarchist reading list are

Rudolf Rocker- ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ or ‘the london years’

Alexander Berkman- what is anarchism

Emma Goldman’s bio

Kropotkin- conquest of bread

Damier- Anarcho-Syndicalism in C20

Bakunin – ‘god and state’