Historically, we point to such examples of popular self-management as the neighbour assemblies ("sections") of the French Revolution, the soviets and factory committees of the Russian revolution, the collectives and unions of the Spanish revolution, the workers' councils of Hungarian revolt of 1956 and the factory occupations, assemblies and action committees of Paris, 1968. Today, the most obvious (and most revolutionary are the popular assemblies and factory occupations in Argentina and the Zapatista communities in Mexico. Then there are the various syndicalist unions fighting the class war across the world. All are examples of anarchy in action
But our ideas are being applied on smaller scale. For example, Lowick, a Cumbrian village, is establishing the first cooperative-run state school being told that their 150-year-old school must close in July due to falling rolls. Pupils were expected to travel up to 11 miles a day by taxi to the nearest school.
Campaigners for the school, including its pupils insist that the school is vital to the community. They dismissed the option of going independent, saying Lowick needs a state school and have come up with the idea of running it as a co-operative. The school would be state funded but run by the community. The school's headteacher said the school is the "focus of the community". The new school aims to provide more services, including adult learning, a centre for e-learning and child minding services.
They plan to call it the "Lowick Pioneers" school after the founders of the co-operative movement, the Rochdale Pioneers. In the words of one 10-year-old "We hope that having a co-operative school will help us do what the pioneers did - treat each other fairly and work together." While state funding is hardly perfect from a libertarian perspective, we can only hope that it works. A functional co-operative school could be a model for others to follow, a practical example that shows that rejecting nationalisation and privatisation is possible and viable.
The principles of co-operation can be applied everywhere -- in industry, housing, credit, consumption. Take the railways. Privatisation has (unsurprisingly) proven to be a failure. Re-nationalisation will simply change the boss. We should be arguing for workers' self-management as an alternative. Impossible? Far from it. Thanks to the syndicalist revolt of the 1910s, the railway unions used to call for workers' control rather than nationalisation. They can do so again. Unless we expose the fact that privatisation and nationalisation are two sides of the same (capitalist) coin the chances of a real anti-capitalist movement in this country will be slim.
This is not to suggest that we can reform capitalism away (the market places barriers to such hopes). Nor is it to blind us to the limitations in creating islands of anarchy within the sea of capitalism. It is simply to suggest that it is in our interests to support experiments in co-operation in the here and now as they show that anarchism is viable. But we must never forget that to fully develop, co-operatives must be part of wider social struggle and movement. Without this, capitalism and the state can easily tolerate them with no fear of challenge.
Therefore, while co-operatives are an important area for practical anarchy, they can be only part of our activity. The full potential of co-operatives can only come about with socialisation and that requires a revolution. We also need to build a wider social movement which creates the future society while fighting the current one. However, as part of building such a movement we should support co-operatives as a practical alternative to the nationalisation (i.e. state capitalism) raised by the left.
From Freedom
Fortnightly Anarchist Newspaper
7th February 2004
http://www.freedompress.org.uk