Our Policy – Albert Meltzer (1942)

_{Albert Meltzer, photo by way of Phil Ruff}

From ‘War Commentary: For Anarchism’, Mid-September 1942, London, UK

The worthlessness of the many “saviours” now afflicting mankind is apparent to anyone of normal intelligence. Whether it is the schoolboy braggadocio of Mussolini or Churchill, the ruthlessness (concealing fear) of Stalin and Hitler or the empty phraseology of Petain and the Pope hiding a dearth of ideas, or whether it is the resurrected promises of all politicians about “after wards” and how sufferings are for “the duration” only, there is nothing in any of the current slogans for tomorrow for which any serious person can derive comfort for his or her future.

But scepticism is not enough, apathy is a sterile condition — any doctrine of fatalism only keeps things as they are, and assists those who do well out of the present system, quite as much as any blind faith in the ruling-class. The world demands a concrete programme of action. Already in parts of the world, in occupied Europe and colonised Asia, revolt has broken out. The revolt is against State tyranny, and this need not be obscured by the fact that in parts it bears a nationalist character. “Nature abhors a vacuum”, where there is no positive revolutionary programme any flag will do.

The European masses who have flung themselves at their Nazi overlords are not revolting for the sake of their monarchs and bosses in comfortable exile, not even where these have camouflaged themselves with the glamour of persecution, nor for the sake of a phrase called “the United Nations”.

Did such manifestations of open civil warfare appear in Germany’s occupied territory in the last war? No one can compare Belgium of 1914-18 with the lasting counter-terrorism of occupied Europe today. Similarly in India. The struggle in India may bear a nationalist veneer, but the masses did not revolt merely to change their masters; their struggle too is fundamentally the class struggle.

We put forward our own programme, not as a rival to any political party, but as a contribution to the spontaneous struggle of the people, the logical outcome of which is an opposition to all parties placing themselves as defenders of or successors to the State machinery. The only means of achieving freedom from the State machinery is by direct action of the workers. The daily struggle for better conditions, the necessary defence of civil liberties, and a struggle for freedom, must be made one and the same fight.

Wherever there is a place of work there is a battlefield for the struggle for freedom. In canteen, pithead; garage; deck, office, factory, shop, field, wherever there is a place of work there must be an assembly of the workers, a council of action, in the one meeting place which no dictatorship can destroy, for the purpose of carrying out a struggle for betterment (whether expressed in wages, conditions of living or working, or whatever other main issue, including the social question, as the Indians have declared a general strike on the “Quit India” issue, and the Luxembourgers a general strike on the anti-conscription and anti-assimilation issue.)

In every locality the assemblies must act together, as a representative body of the people: not a fake representation such as borough councillors and MP’s [Members of Parliament] afford, but a truly inclusive body of the organised industrial workers. In the local communes, assemblies of the industrial workers, and in federated industrial unions, this movement can become a militant expression of the will of the revolutionary workers, in spite of the trend to dictatorship, and it can continue to act (as the organised Spanish workers always did) even when dictatorships come into power.

The immediate aim must always be to force concessions from the ruling class, to secure betterment by strikes and industrial action; but the final aim must be nothing less than the taking over of the means of life by the workers themselves, the syndicalist conception of workers’ control of the places of work, directly, without the intervention of the State. The final lockout of the bosses and the establishment of free socialism is the only guarantee of freedom from State tyranny.

The issues today are not between rival states, but between all states on the one hand, and freedom on the other. All governments are moving to State tyranny, and the only means of resistance is industrial solidarity, the building of a new society in which the state will not exist.

As Anarchists, we do not ask people to “vote for us”, “put us in power” or anything of the sort. We put forward to all who believe in fighting, and not accepting, State tyranny, the logical outcome of whose beliefs is the abolition of all governments the method of building the class front.

A.M.