What is Libertarian Socialism?
Libertarian socialism is a wide family of left-wing ideas with two aims. One is to end private ownership of the means of production, so that workplaces belong to those who work in them. The other is to keep personal freedom safe by spreading power as thinly as possible. Its supporters think that both the market and the central state create bosses and followers. In their place they propose assemblies, councils, cooperatives and federations. Anarchism in its main forms belongs here, as do council communism, guild socialism and communalism.
Core beliefs
- Those who do the work should own and manage the workplace.
- Decisions should be made in local assemblies and carried upward by delegates.
- Freedom and equality support each other.
- Social change should come from self-organization and direct action, not from capturing the state.
- Any ruling hierarchy must prove it is needed, or be taken apart.
- Free communities can join in federations across borders.
History
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first to call himself an anarchist, and in the mid-1800s he backed cooperatives, mutual credit and federation. Mikhail Bakunin and his allies were expelled from the First International in 1872 after a fight with Karl Marx over whether workers should capture the state or abolish it. Peter Kropotkin then argued in works such as The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Mutual Aid (1902) that cooperation is natural to people and animals alike. In Britain, G. D. H. Cole and other guild socialists proposed self-governing trades. In Germany and the Netherlands, council communists wanted workers' councils instead of party rule. In the later 1900s Murray Bookchin developed communalism, built on neighborhood assemblies and ecology.
Variants
Anarcho-communism seeks common ownership with goods shared by need. Anarcho-syndicalism uses revolutionary trade unions to build the new society inside the old. Mutualism keeps markets but wants cooperatives and free credit. Council communism comes from Marxism but opposes the vanguard party. Guild socialism was a British effort to give each industry to a self-governing guild. Libertarian municipalism, or communalism, makes city and town assemblies the base of politics.
Criticisms
Free-market critics say that without prices and private property there is no reliable way to direct resources, and that group decisions can become slow or bullying. Marxist-Leninists say decentralized movements are too weak to survive attack, and that a transition needs a firm party or state. Liberals ask whether small communities can guard dissenters and minorities as well as courts and national laws do. Historians add that most experiments lasted only briefly, which makes the big claims hard to test.
In practice
Several episodes show the ideas in action. In the Paris Commune of 1871, recallable delegates ran the city for about two months. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936, unions took over factories and farms in parts of Catalonia and Aragon. Worker cooperatives around the world use similar principles of self-management. More recently, thinkers of communalism have influenced the local council system in the Kurdish-led region of northeast Syria, and the Zapatistas in Chiapas run autonomous communities. On the 12 axes it scores near the extreme of Public on Ownership, Democratic on Authority and Cooperation on Foreign policy.