We Don't Want to be Working Class, but We Are: Reply to Andrewism

Anarchist YouTuber Andrewism presented something of a critique of working class centered politics in his most recent video, naming Anarcho-Syndicalism in specific as a form of working class politics which could serve certain important functions in the liberation of humanity from the domination of work, but would have to be supplemented by a wider communal approach of building and reclaiming commons and restructuring relations and forms of production. The gist of his argument is that work, understood as the activity which the non-propertied class of people under capitalism, must carry out in order to earn what they need to survive from the propertied class is a miserable one. The fact that the mass of humanity is forced to be workers in order to sustain themselves means that they must sacrifice themselves mentally and physically for the political-economic interests of the capitalist class. The labor movement organized itself from the beginning of world capitalism through organized labor associations (unions) to wrest important rights and concessions from capitalists, but most unions have been transformed into structures which mediate between the interests of workers and capitalists in order to preserve the system of work, rather than abolish it. This means that while Anarcho-Syndicalists, who seek to build a labor movement through revolutionary labor unions which ultimately take control of workplaces to abolish capitalism, put forward an approach which has some utility in overcoming capitalism, it must be supplemented by wider communal and social transformations that abolish work. The point of working-class politics should not be power to the working class, but the self-abolition of the working class.

This kind of critique of worker centered politics as potentially merely reproducing the class divisions which make the working-class subordinate to the capitalist class finds an echo in the "communization" approach of various western Marxists. The first thing to say however is that Andrewism doesn't seem broadly informed about the history of Anarcho-Syndicalism, or what it is Anarcho-Syndicalists actually propose. He cites the IWW as the main exemplar of the Anarcho-Syndicalist approach, but the IWW itself denies affiliation with Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism more generally. Even in its heyday in early 21st century America it was primarily made up of non-Anarchist syndicalists and Marxists, not Anarcho-Syndicalists. The real examples of historical Anarcho-Syndicalism are to be found in organizations associated with the Anarcho-Syndicalist International founded in 1922 and their forerunners in the French CGT, Argentine FORA, and Uruguayan FORU. Holding up the IWW as the main exemplification of Anarcho-Syndicalism historically, rather than the Spanish CNT-FAI which while connected to the IWA organized the largest scale experiment in Anarcho-Syndicalist practice ever in history really shows a lack of familiarity with the tradition one is trying to evaluate.

As such the main strategic objective of Anarcho-Syndicalism is not to take control of workplaces via general strikes, as Andrewism says, but to build a decentralist political, economic, and cultural movement of revolutionary labor associations open to all workers which, at the point of the revolution will take control not only of society's productive resources and the social process of production, but also the totality of social administration. This is why, as Andrewism himself states, Anarcho-Syndicalists organized outside the workplace historically via mutual aid societies and cultural associations such as in the French Bourse Du Travail and Anarcho-Syndicalists involved in the organizations of the IWA today (which from my accounting represents the largest organized presence of Anarchism throughout the world, rather than a minority as Andrewism claims) practice all of class unionism which essentially means building working class solidarity on Anarcho-Syndicalist lines wherever workers are, be it communities, or workplaces. Both British and Polish affiliates of the IWA organize for the interests of tenants as well as workers in the implementation of all of class unionism in their own local contexts. Similarly, despite repeated declarations to the contrary, Anarcho-Syndicalists have always been aware that the mainstream labor movement consists mostly of bureaucratic reformist unions which are controlled from above by union officials and function to produce a compromise between workers and bosses, rather than the overthrow of bourgeois relations of production. This is why Rudolf Rocker, perhaps the major theorist of Anarcho-Syndicalism, whom Andrewism cites, says that Anarcho-Syndicalists should implement a strategy of organizing within mainstream unions in so far as they represent workers' interests while at the same time building revolutionary unions outside them.

They are even aware of the undermining of organized labor through deindustrialization and the predominance in the west of precarious service sector labor (it should be noted that in the global south workers are still dominated in large part by extractive industry), Anarcho-Syndicalist historian Vadim Damier makes an analysis of these developments a theme in his history of Anarcho-Syndicalism. Andrewism doesn't really seem to appreciate how these defeats themselves open up new opportunities. A big obstacle to Anarcho-Syndicalist approaches to labor unions in the old labor movement as observed by Wallerstein, Hopkins, and Arrighi was that unions dominated by skilled labor sought political alliances to preserve the privileges of skilled labor relative to unskilled labor and the peasantry. The radical undermining of skilled labor in favor of precarious labor in the west removes this barrier of a labor movement dominated by skilled workers seeking political alliances to defend their relative privileges. It also seems obvious that the more mainstream unions are rendered toothless by capital flight and precarious labor the more credible more radical alternatives may become to the masses of people involved in class struggles, provided that this opportunity is seized by organized Anarcho-Syndicalists.

The 'supplemental' approaches advocated by Andrewism are also questionable. His other videos champion degrowth and the library economy as strategies for creating ecologically sustainable sharing of resources in a new commons. These approaches appear, at least to me, to miss the point of Anarchism. Degrowth is an approach to the ecological crisis which claims that the main driver of it is human rapaciousness for the production and consumption of material wealth. Thus, instead of constantly expanding production and producing more material wealth human communities should slow down production and refocus it on resource sharing and psychological fulfillment. The library economy, as advocated by Andrewism, is an application of this idea of resource sharing where instead of producing more and more for individual consumption resources are stored in sharing systems which lend them out for use while preserving them to be put back in the system and reused by others.

To me this looks not like Anarchism, but a form of radical republicanism. The point of Anarchism is not sharing resources. Anarchists do advocate the collectivization of control over social wealth and are thus socialists, but like all other socialists and even more than centralist socialists who seek to create socialism through top-down political power, the point of this collectivization for Anarchists is the freedom of human beings. It eliminates class distinctions so that everyone involved in the process of social production has means available to them, to the fullest extent possible, to associate and dissociate in mutually beneficial relations. Andrewism pays lip-service to free association, but I don't think its ultimately compatible with the library economy, or degrowth.

In order to maintain a library economy, communal obligations which, bind all individuals to resource sharing would have to be in force. These could not be left up to free agreement among producers, rather the long-term maintenance of such an arrangement across social contexts would require standardization which means test universally which individuals are allowed to access the common storehouse at all times. The labor of human beings would not be free and autonomous creative activity, but labor under the standardized notions of communal obligation which hold the library economy together. Things are made worse when we add the extra set of standardized constraints which is to reign in production and consumption along the lines prescribed by degrowth. Thus, we don't get a network of freely associated producers, but a social contract which enforces a radical form of equality under communal obligation. I call this radical republicanism because it is not different in content from the idea of social contract maintained by republican theorists like Rosseau who thought that just political power arises out of a uniformly majoritarian standard expressing a "general will". Anarchists like Bakunin famously mocked such a radical social contract because even in ensuring direct democracy and thus mass participation it fundamentally closes off under the notion of communal obligation any dissent from the will of the community.

Anarchists cannot supplement a comprehensive strategy for building a liberatory labor movement with the notion of the general will since this notion is completely repudiated by Anarchist philosophy. One may wonder how Anarchists deal with the ecological crisis absent such austere approaches to sharing social wealth, for these worries one can consult an earlier article of mine on ecologism. Barring that, I'll confine myself to a general remark on what Andrewism says about automation. He says that not all drudgeries can be automated, so they need to be shared among individuals involved in social labor equally. My question is simply..why? I imagine the stock response is that resources for technological advancement are finite and modern technology produces all kinds of pollution and exhaustion of resources that threaten sentient life.

I have two responses. 1; clearly technological advancement under capitalism is not geared toward maximizing sustainability for sentient life. We could replace fossil fuels with renewable sources right now, but since governments are under the sway of fossil fuel industry bourgeois governments can't enact meaningful policies to make the move. We are talking technological advancement for the needs of humanity, one of which precisely is resource sustainability and removing harmful pollutants. 2; the point of technological innovation is precisely doing more with less resource input. It thus seems crazy to suggest that a mode of production geared toward the rational meeting of human needs would for some reason stop short of automating some forms of drudgery.

Of course, the ultimate point of socialism and thus the ultimate point of Anarchism is the self-abolition of the working class. The self-emancipation of the working class requires the end of all relations of subordination between classes and thus of class society entirely since class stratification cannot exist without class domination. However, Anarchists have largely agreed with Marx's formulation that the historical subject which carries out the abolition of class society is the working class (this is what it means for the working class to abolish itself). This is because the working class is the only subordinate class in history which is brought together in association with a unified set of interests poised against the interests of the ruling class by the process of social production itself. This means the working class is uniquely historically disposed to realize its interest in the abolition of the market forces and property relations which force them to earn their subsistence by working under the orders of someone else through collective action. In short, Anarcho-Syndicalism stands in no need of supplement.

Sources
Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20th Century, Damier
History of Philosophy, Grayling
Antisystemic Movements, Wallerstein, Hopkins, Arrighi
Mikhail Bakunin and Social Anarchism, Eckhart
Fighting For Ourselves, Solfed
Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, Rocker
https://redandblackanarchists.com.au/what-if-we-ran-homogeneous-empty-time-how-the-library-economy-reinvents-capitalism/
https://postcomprehension.medium.com/democratic-confederalism-is-not-libertarian-socialism-de2b3d602b39
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYsC7fIfE2o&list=PL3wxiH0o_6WRno6Mow86qearAO6dmJWHa&index=15&pp=gAQBiAQB2AYIsAgC