A brief refutation by Zach Foster
The philosophy known as Libertarian Socialism, also known as Social Anarchism and Leftist Libertarianism, is a “system” that advocates a non-bureaucratic, non-hierarchical, stateless society free of private property in the means of production. As utopian and intellectually impressive as this may sound to the willfully uneducated masses, the very definition of Libertarian Socialism is self-contradictory and already argues against the possibility of such a faulty system ever existing in the real world.
How can there ever be a version of socialism implemented that is free of bureaucracy and hierarchy? Furthermore, how can self-proclaimed Libertarian Socialists not call themselves full-fledged Communists? Socialism advocates the complete bureaucratic regulation of the means of production, of industry, and of property, while Communism takes it even further by eliminating private property and implementing a dictatorship of the proletariat. Because socialism is a system based on complete bureaucratic regulation of property and the means of production, Libertarian Socialists cannot escape bureaucracy. They might be able to justify the elimination of hierarchy by citing the fact that all decisions are made by small but better representative bodies such as municipal councils, trade unions, or workers councils (part of the sub-system known as Council Communism), and that all workers are equal, but the fact remains that the workers councils (or any other forms of “direct democracy”) are the form of government for the workers (the members of society), either locally or on a larger scale (it’s hard to imagine a larger scale of government when the utopian society of Libertarian Socialism is stateless), and since these councils are the “government” of the people, by the people, and for the people, then the councils are also the bureaucracy which is inescapable by the utopian Libertarian Socialist.
Furthermore, though the council members are fully representative of and completely equal with the workers, and can be “recalled” at any time, they can only be recalled in the purely democratic form of a popular vote, which in fact might not represent all the workers (voters), since some may be on the losing side of the vote and thus feel unrepresented by the workers council. On top of that, while the members of the workers council (the governmental body) are equal with the workers and recallable by them, until the hypothetical recall happens, the decisions of the council are the definitive decisive outcomes which will affect the lives of all the workers (all the members of this utopian society), thus making the common workers (those not on the council) powerless to a certain degree. The council also becomes the very authoritarian institution that controls the means of production and the livelihood of the workers. The workers in the council have power, while those not in the council do not. This tragedy resurrects the bourgeois model of the haves and have-nots. Here is where both hierarchy and authoritarianism exist, and such an existence is now an unavoidable truth even to the utopian “thinker.”
It may be possible to avoid the formation of states under this system, since for thousands of years the Native American tribes in North America and the Bedouin caravans of the Middle East lived without the formation of states, or at least the concept of states known to the Western world. Nonetheless, these tribes referred to themselves as nations or as peoples, and while they may or may not have practiced democracy and drawn borders for themselves, they still had a national identity (Cherokees were Cherokee, Creeks were Creek, Gabrielinos were Gabrielino, and Pashtuns were Pashtun), they still had a cultural identity, and every tribe had a system of government and laws. The Libertarian Socialist’s concept of “free association” is undermined by the fact of nature that humans naturally feel a need to belong to something, whether it is a state, a people, an organization, or a social class. In the awareness of one’s sense of belonging to a social class, Lenin coined the term “social patriotism.”
Part 2: "Free association" is impossible, and the dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship
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