Why An Everyday Manifesto? To Be Proactive!

Direct action has won countless gains for working people the world over. We used to have to work 14-hour days, seven days a week until workers came together and organised in trade unions and other associations, faced up to savage repression and successfully won the much better (but still totally inadequate) conditions and wages we have today. Mass direct action in this country only a little over ten years ago defeated Maggie Thatcher’s Poll Tax, while electoral efforts were fruitless [1]. While electoral ("political") activity ensures that we all become accustomed to following leaders and letting them act on our behalf, we support direct action as the best available means for preparing ourselves to manage their own personal and collective interests. Libertarian communists therefore argue that we need to reclaim the power which has been concentrated into the hands of the state. That is why we stress direct action. Through direct action, the people dominate their own struggles, it is we who conduct it, organise it, manage it. We do not hand over to others the task of self-liberation. That way, we become accustomed to managing our own affairs, creating alternative, libertarian, forms of social organisation which can become a force to resist the state, win reforms and, ultimately, become the framework of a free society. Such organisations often appear in times of struggle as community assemblies, factory committees, workers' councils, and so on. These organs of direct-democracy have been the most important element of revolutions over the past 250 years, although they were often usurped into representative institutions or crushed militarily. The embryo of a new society - community assembly in the Argentine uprising of 2001. One third of the population participated in the assemblies. We are in favour of collective, mass action. There is nothing more isolated, atomised and individualistic than voting in elections. It is the act of one person in a box by themselves, the total opposite of collective struggle. The individual is alone before, during and after the act of voting. Indeed, unlike direct action, which, by its very nature, throws up new forms of organisation in order to manage and co-ordinate the struggle, voting creates no alternative organs of workers’ self-management; nor can it, as it is not based on nor does it create collective action or organisation. It simply empowers an individual (the elected representative) to act on behalf of a collection of other individuals (the voters). This will hinder collective organisation and action as the voters expect their representative to act and fight for them - as if they did not, they would not vote for them in the first place! ... http://libcom.org/thought/introduction-why-an-everyday-manifesto

Note: http://libcom.org/thoug...