When Marx talked about the working class attaining socialism he used the phrase “the self-emancipation of the proletariat.” This can mean many things but most obviously it means that workers would seize control ofthe means of production and run them according to the the needs of their class or community. This phrase also defines what is not socialism. This proletarian self-emancipation is not by way of a vanguard of middle-class professionals who are essentially acting on behalf of the workers(i.e. representativedemocracy) despite that they are not from that class, nor is socialism the mere nationalization (herereferring to nation-statism), which just puts the power of production in the hands of state and thus keeps the manager-worker relation in tact. What can be found to be most faithful to Marx’s phrase inradial theory is the socialism of the guildsocialists, councilists and syndicalists, whodescribed a system workers councils linked by federations of other councils.This is very much theeconomic structure envisioned by the French libertarian socialist and nationalist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
This idea of direct workers control was named by the French anti-authoritarians of May ‘68 as autogestion, for the trend of thought clearly has some origins in France as early as Blanqui and the Communards. While the slogan and theory of workerspower is mostly associated with the Left, it is onlyfound on the far fringes(i.e. ultraleft, utopian, andlibertarian) of which these currents faithful to ithave very little to do with what is generallyconsidered the Left politically.But this isn’t the only place on the politicalspectrum that these ideas are found. These currentscan be best described as the ultraright (the mirrorimage of its compliment the ultraleft), though theyare often labeled incorrectly as ‘far-right’ and ‘fascist’ by liberal mainstream opinion.
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Since 1795, when Immanuel Kant published in his old age his treatise on”Perpetual Peace,” many have considered it an established fact that war is the destruction of all good and the origin of all evil. In spite of all that history teaches, no conviction is felt that the struggle between nations is inevitable, and the growth of civilization is credited with a power to which war must yield. But, undisturbed by suchhuman theories and the change of times, war has again and again marched from country to country with the clash of arms, and has proved its destructive as well as creative and purifying power. It has not succeeded in teaching mankind what its real nature is. Long periods of war, far from convincing men of the necessity of war, have, on the contrary, always revived the wish to exclude war, where possible, from the political intercourse of nations.
