radicalarchives

The “free” world is not free; the “communist” world is not communist. We reject both: one is becoming totalitarian; the other is already so.

Their current power structure leads inexorably to atomic war and the probable destruction of the human race.

We charge that both systems engender servitude. Pseudo-freedom based on economic slavery is no better than pseudo-freedom based on political slavery.

The monopoly of power which is the state must be eliminated. Government itself, as well as its underlying institutions, perpetuates war, oppression, corruption, exploitation, and misery.

We advocate a world-wide society of communities and councils based on cooperation and free agreement from the bottom (federalism) instead of coercion and domination from the top (centralism). Regimentation of people must be replaced by regulation of things.

Freedom without socialism is chaotic, but socialism without freedom is despotic. Libertarianism is free socialism.

_ _ _

These ideas are expanded upon in the provisional statement of the principles of the Libertarian League and in other literature that will be supplied free on request.

________________________________________________________________________________________

LIBERTARIAN LEAGUE
P.O. Box 261, Cooper Station
New York 3, N.Y.

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from View and Comments, #45 (Fall 1963), back cover [p 26]

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RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE: Earlier versions of this statement, which were somewhat shorter, were printed in previous issues of Views and Comments.

The overwhelming majority of people have no control over the direction or the use to which our lives are put. We fight for self-direction, self-initiation, self-management and the end to all bosses and leaders. We fight for economic freedom, where we can all enjoy the full leisure and wealth we produce, or are kept from producing.

Instead of government, which takes power from us and gives only the weakness of slavery, we propose the cooperative federation of equal people, full of the dignity which authorities and their functionaries deny.

Instead of taxation and the profit system which pretends to distribute wealth and resources in an equitable manner, we propose collective self-management of our surpluses, and collective rationing of any scarcities.

These collective decisions shall be made by popular assemblies, general and open to all. Thus constituted, all will have access to those with the knowledge of how to make, move or produce all things and services; and to those who actually have the needs to be met.

In other words, we will all have access to each other. No longer will bureaucracies isolate us from each other. Gone will be the leaders and the technicians who claim to know, or claim the exclusive expertise to be able to find out how to do everything from making match-books to bargaining for us, for our benefit.

Without the social distortion produced by tax and profit systems, we can cease the production which is a mere waste of time and resources; and which will suffocate everyone in the service of profit and the power accumulations of a very few ruling parasites.

We fight joyfully, irreverently, and resolutely against all hierarchies, all bosses and leaders, all mediating hierarchy. Bureaucrats are a doomed species.

We relate among ourselves as absolute equals, deserving of equal dignity in all things regardless of strength of mind and body. In federation we develop the audacity to change the world.

But no unity can be coerced. As heretics, we invite heresy. Any locality (self-defined) can veto any decision made on a more general basis as it applies to that locality. Dissenting minorities care not to be denied the means of adequate existence to maintain their intellectual, spiritual or physical independence. In the SRAFederation, dissenting minorities cannot be expelled, or denied recognition as anarchists, or even as members of the SRAFederation. Any resignation by a minority must be voluntary and a part of that minority’s process of self-determination.

We federate together to practice anarchist forms of relating among people for social and private purposes.

We practice now the forms we want to see develop further, along with new forms, in the revolutionary society we will help to build.

We federate together now to focus our strength for the maximum impact on society which our energy and numbers can create.

We federate now, not for our children, but so that we ourselves may enjoy the fruits of our efforts. If we do this, there will be a future for our children to build and shape in their own way.

The wreckers of the world — the profit takers, the leaders, generals, popes, and presidents, the authorities and their functionaries, the bureaucrats —  have been doing their worst to us for long enough! It must now end.

It is clear that an anarchist society lies in the future and not the past. Join with us for yourselves and your future.

(adopted by general assembly of the bulletin
April-August, 1972.)

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The affiliated groups, 7 in Canada and 18 in the US, are listed below the declaration:

ED-SRAF, Edmonton, Alberta
SRAF-Tucson, Tucson, Arizona
TUCSON ANARCHO-FEMINISTS, Tucson, Arizona
VAN-SRAF, Vancouver, British Columbia
NADA, Vancouver, British Columbia
BERKELEY SRAF, Berkeley, California
SRAF-LA, Los Angeles, California
SRAFprint, Mountain View, California
SF-SRAF, San Francisco, California
CC-SRAF, Chicago, Illinois
MAYDAY GANG, Evanston, Illinois
CIA, Ames, Iowa
MFA, Orono, Maine
SRAF-A^2, Ann Arbor, Michigan
MESABA SFAF, Cotton, Minnesota
FoM, Buffalo, NY
FREESPACE, New York City
HAL-SRAF, Halifax, Nova Scotia
SRAF, Toronto, Ontario
FRIENDS OF KROPOTKIN, London, Ontario
MAKHNO BRIGADE, Indiana, Pennsylvania
LIVING THEATRE, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
SEA SRAF#2, Seattle, Washington
MADISON SRAF, Madison, Wisconsin
MIL-SRAF, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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taken from Black Star Review, an anarchist publication of the Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, vol 1, #3; p 31.

Here Bakunin’s Socialism sets in with full strength: mental, personal, and social freedom to him are inseparable – Atheism, Anarchism, Socialism an organic unit. His Atheism is not that of an ordinary Freethinker, who may be an authoritarian and an anti-Socialist; nor is his Socialism that of an ordinary Socialist, who may be, and very often is, an authoritarian and a Christian; nor would his Anarchism ever deviate into the eccentricities of Tolstoi and Tucker. But each of these three ideas penetrates the other two an constitutes with them a living realisation of freedom, just as all our intellectual, political and social prejudices and evils descend from one common source – authority. Whoever reads “God and the State,” the best known of Bakunin’s many written expositions of these ideas, may discover that when the scales of religion fall from his eyes, at the same moment also the State will appear to him in it horrid hideousness, and anti-Statist Socialism will be the only way out. The thoroughness of Bakunin’s Socialist propaganda is, to my impression, unique.

From these remarks it may be gathered that I dissent from certain recent attempts to revindicate Bakunin almost exclusively as a Syndicalist. He was, at the time of the International, greatly interested in seeing the scattered masses of the workers combining into trade societies or sections of the International. Solidarity in the economic struggle was to be the only basis of working-class organization. He expressed the opinion that these organisations would spontaneously evolve into federated Socialist bodies, the natural basis of future society. This automatic evolution has been rightly contested by our Swiss comrade Bertoni. But did Bakunin really mean it when he sketched it out in his writings of elementary public propaganda? We must not forget that Bakunin – and here we touch on one of his shortcomings – seeing the backward dispositions of the great masses in his time, did not think it possible to propagate the whole of his ideas directly among the people. By insisting on purely economic organisation, he wished to protect the masses against the greedy politician who, under the cloak of Socialism, farms and exploits their electoral “power” in our age of progress! [[7]]

…

I say again: it is preposterous to think that Bakunin would have been a syndicalist and nothing else – but what he would have tried to make of Syndicalism, how he would have tried to group these and many other materials of revolt and to lead them to action, this my imagination cannot sketch out, but I feel that things would have gone otherwise, and the capitalists would sleep less quietly. I am no admirer of personalities, and have many faults to find with Bakunin also on other grounds; but this I feel, that where he was rebellion grew round him, whilst to-day, with such splendid material, rebellion is nowhere. South Africa, Colorado, are ever so hopeful events; but think what a Bakunin would have made of them – and then we can measure the value of this man in the struggle for freedom. [[11]]

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Max Nettalu, “Michael Bakunin” in Writings on Bakunin (London: Carl Slienger, 1976), pp 7, 11.

The book’s notes indicate that the essay was originally published in Freedom, June 1914.