The Historical Failure of Anarchism
Posted by Mike E on September 25, 2008
The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project
by Christopher Day (1996, Love and Rage Archive)
In the Spring 1996 issue of Workers Solidarity (journal of Ireland’s Workers Solidarity Movement) there is a review by Conor McLoughlin of Ken Loach’s excellent film on the Spanish Revolution, Land and Freedom. The review concludes that:
“(T)he factors involved in the defeat of the revolution would take an article in themselves to explain, ranging from the military power of the fascists (and their outside aid) to the betrayals by the communists and social democrats, and this is not my purpose here. What is important is that the social revolution did not collapse due to any internal problems or flaws in human nature. It was defeated from without. Anarchism had not failed. Anarchists had proved that ideas which look good in the pages of theory books look even better on the canvas of life.”
This quote neatly sums up the lessons that most anarchists seem to have drawn from the history of the anarchist movement. It also neatly sums up what is wrong with the anarchist movement. It is nothing short of a complete abdication of one of the most basic responsibilities of revolutionaries: the responsibility to subject the defeats and failures of the movement to the most thoroughgoing critical scrutiny.
Instead it takes a historical experience that ended in a crushing defeat, makes excuses for that defeat and offers the faithful reassuring platitudes that, all evidence to the contrary, the one true path of anarchism is vindicated by the experience.
When anarchists encounter this sort of thing in other ideologies they never fail to tear it to shreds. Does Communism bear responsibility for the heaping piles of corpses produced by Communist regimes? Is Christianity to be blamed for the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Witch Hunts? Of course. We judge ideologies by their practical results in peoples lives not by their pie-in-the-sky promises. Anarchism in Spain raised the hopes of millions that a classless stateless society could be achieved in the hear and now, lead them to the barricades to make it real, and failed abysmally. The Spanish people were condemned to fourty years of fascist rule because of the failure. And yet while the anarchist movement of the past half century has produced an extensive literature extolling the momentary successes of the Spanish Revolution in the creation of peasant and workers collectives, there has been almost no serious effort to analyze how the anarchist movement contributed to its own defeat. Blaming ones political enemies (fascists, Communists, or social-democrats) for behaving exactly as one would expect them to behave only further confuses matters. Betrayal, after all, is only possible on the part of someone trusted.
The Responsibilities of Revolutionaries
This paper is not primarily about the Spanish Revolution. Rather it is an attempt to pose some serious and difficult questions that I believe anarchism has irresponsibly avoided. It is addressed to those in the anarchist movement who are serious about making an anti-authoritarian revolution. It is not addressed to those who do not believe that such a revolution is possible. It is not addressed to those whose political horizons extend no further than establishing either a “temporary autonomous zone” or a semi-permanent bohemian enclave. Neither is it addressed to those for whom being a revolutionary means affecting a more militant than thou pose. The anarchist movement is filled with people who are less interested in overthrowing the existing oppressive social order than with washing their hands of it. This concern with ensuring the passage of ones soul to anarchist heaven can range from the obsessive efforts to purify ones personal habits to the sectarian refusal to join any group or organization that shows any sign of being a product of this society.
I believe that an enormous amount of human suffering is the direct consequence of the fact that the majority of humanity does not have control over the decisions that effect their lives. I believe that people are ultimately capable of exercising that control over their own lives. Consequently the revolutionary overthrow of the authoritarian institutions and social relationships that stand in the way of realizing that control is a necessary undertaking. People who are engaged in that project are revolutionaries and as revolutionaries I believe we have certain responsibilities. It is neccesary to speak of three of those responsibilities before getting into some of the thornier questions this paper aims to address.
To Win Freedom
The strength of anarchism is its moral insistence on the primacy of human freedom over political expediency. But human freedom exists in a political context. It is not sufficient, however, to simply take the most uncompromising position in defense of freedom. It is neccesary to actually win freedom. Anti-capitalism doesn’t do the victims of capitalism any good if you don’t actually destroy capitalism. Anti-statism doesn’t do the victims of the state any good if you don’t actually smash the state. Anarchism has been very good at putting forth visions of a free society and that is for the good. But it is worthless if we don’t develop an actual strategy for realizing those visions. It is not enough to be right, we must also win.
To Learn from the Past
People have been struggling for freedom forever. The single most valuable asset of the revolutionary movement is this experience. We are not the first people to grapple with the problem of how to make revolution and create a free society. We have an obligation to subject every chapter in the fight for freedom to the most searing analysis we are capable of. This is the only way that we can hope to avoid repeating the errors of the past. The anarchist approach to history, unfortunately, consists largely of looking for the lessons we want to find. The view of the Spanish Revolution critiqued above is a fairly typical example. This feel good approach to our own history (or to some imaginary prehistoric anarchist Eden) is generally coupled with a complete disinterest in the history of struggles that can’t be neatly contained within our own ideological borders (however any individual might define them). The result is a sort of hagiology: a timeless procession of libertarian martyrs to be invoked in political debates. How many anarchists once they have read an anti-authoritarian account of some historical episode actually go and read accounts from other perspectives? If our history were an uninterrupted train of successes this certainty that there is nothing to learn from others would be a bit more defensible.
To Have a Plan
Finally revolutionaries have a responsibility to have a plausible plan for making revolution. Obviously there are not enough revolutionaries to make a revolution at this moment. We can reasonably anticipate that the future will bring upsurges in popular opposition to the existing system. Without being any more specific about where those upsurges might occur it seems clear that it is from the ranks of such upsurges that the numbers of the revolutionary movement will be increased, eventually leading to a revolutionary situation (which is distinguished from the normal crises of the current order only by the existence of a revolutionary movement ready to push things further). People who are fed up with the existing system and who are willing to commit themselves to its overthrow will look around for likeminded people who have an idea of what to do.
If we don’t have a plausible plan for making revolution we can be sure that there will be somebody else there who will. There is no guarantee that revolutionary-minded people will be spontaneously drawn to anti-authoritarian politics.
The plan doesn’t have to be an exact blueprint. It shouldn’t be treated as something sacred. It should be subject to constant revision in light of experience and debate. But at the very least it needs to be able to answer questions that have been posed concretely in the past. We know that we will never confront the exact same circumstances as previous revolutions. But we should also know that certain problems are persistent ones and that if we can’t say what we would have done in the past we should not expect people to think much of our ability to face the future.
There is a widespread tendency in the anarchist movement (and on the left in general) to say that the question of how we are going to actually make a revolution is too distant and therefore too abstract to deal with now. Instead it is asserted that we should focus on practical projects or immediate struggles. But the practical projects or immediate struggles we decide to focus on are precisely what will determine if we ever move any closer to making revolution. If we abdicate our responsibility to try to figure out what it will take to actually make revolution and to direct our current work accordingly we will be caught up in an endless succession of “practical projects and immediate struggles” and when confronted with a potentially revolutionary situation we will be pushed to the side by more politically prepared forces (who undoubtedly we will accuse of “betraying” the revolution if they don’t shoot all of us). We will be carried by the tide of history instead of attempting to steer our own course. And by allowing this to happen again it will be we who have really betrayed the revolution.
The net result of the refusal to deal with what it will actually take to make a revolution is that anarchism has become a sort of directionless but militant reformism. We are either building various “counter-institutions” that resemble nothing so much as grungier versions of the social services administered by different churches; or we are throwing ourself into some largely reactive social struggle in which our actions are frequently bold and courageous, but from which we never build any sort of ongoing social movement (let alone a revolutionary organization).
The Theoretical Poverty of Anarchism
By the standards of these three responsibilities alone anarchism has been a failure. Not only has anarchism failed to win lasting freedom for anybody on earth, many anarchists today seem only nominally committed to that basic project. Many more seem interested primarily in carving out for themselves, their friends, and their favorite bands a zone of personal freedom, “autonomous” of moral responsibility for the larger condition of humanity (but, incidentally, not of the electrical grid or the production of electronic components). Anarchism has quite simply refused to learn from its historic failures, preferring to rewrite them as successes. Finally the anarchist movement offers people who want to make revolution very little in the way of a coherent plan of action. Projects, schemes, and reasons to riot abound — but their place in a larger coherent strategy for actually overthrowing the existing order is anybody’s guess.
Anarchism is theoretically impoverished. For almost 80 years, with the exceptions of Ukraine and Spain, anarchism has played a marginal role in the revolutionary activity of oppressed humanity. Anarchism had almost nothing to do with the anti-colonial struggles that defined revolutionary politics in this century. This marginalization has become self-reproducing. Reduced by devastating defeats to critiquing the authoritarianism of Marxists, nationalists and others, anarchism has become defined by this gadfly role. Consequently anarchist thinking has not had to adapt in response to the results of serious efforts to put our ideas into practice. In the process anarchist theory has become ossified, sterile and anemic. In the place of substantive political debate the anarchist movement has raised the personal quarrel to an art form. On the rare occasions that substantive issues are broached the response is invariably concerned more with the process by which they were broached or speculation on the character-structure of anybody who would question the received anarchist wisdom than with the political content of what has been said. This is a reflection of anarchism’s effective removal from the revolutionary struggle.
Bakunin’s brilliant predictions of the consequences of Marx’s statism have not become the foundation for a developing anti-statist praxis, but rather a hollow chorus of “we told you so.” One of the consequences of Marxism’s “successes” has been that there has been greater opportunity to see its limitations. One of the consequences of anarchism’s meager and short lived victories has been that many of our ideas have not been put to the test of practice. Once we are willing to accept that good anti-authoritarian intentions do not get us off the hook for the authoritarian consequences of anarchist incompetence it becomes possible to approach the whole historical experience of the revolutionary movement in a considerably less self-righteous frame of mind.
Once we acknowledge the historical failure of anarchism (which is not to repudiate our anti-authoritarian critique of other ostensibly revolutionary currents) we can begin the work of rebuilding a revolutionary libertarian movement.
Anarchism and the Revolutionary Movement
I believe that if we want to understand the moment we are in we need to understand ourselves as one part of a much broader revolutionary project of human liberation that everywhere around the world has either been defeated or is in retreat. The revolutionary movement is not defined by the embrace of a particular ideology, but rather by the objective movement of oppressed people resisting their oppression and fighting for a world free from oppression. Over time this movement has taken many twists and turns and has, at least ideologically, branched off in a number of directions. It has found expression through a variety of ideological forms (anarchism, marxism, feminism, revolutionary nationalism, liberation theology). At every moment in its history the revolutionary movement has contained the contradictions of the authoritarian society from which it is constantly being reborn. So its every theoretical and organizational expression has always contained both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, both liberatory and oppressive, both libertarian and authoritarian aspects and potentialities.
As anarchists we have tended to divide the left neatly into libertarian and authoritarian camps. I believe the terms of this division correctly identify the essence of the contradictions that constantly reappear in the revolutionary movement. But I also think that there has been a general tendency to make this division in a mechanical way. There is a tendency, for example, to view the split in the 1st International between Marx and Bakunin as setting the terms by which we analyze the whole intervening historical experience. As the inheritors of Bakunin’s anarchism we uphold the good works of all anarchists since him and ritualistically denounce the actions of all Marxists in the same period. The consequence of this is to blind ourselves to the counter-revolutionary elements in anarchist theory and practice and the legitimate accomplishments of many marxists (or other “authoritarian” currents).
In opposition to this mechanical or scholastic approach I believe we should look at the whole experience of the revolutionary movement dialectically. We need to identify the aspects of anarchism that effectively crippled it as a credible revolutionary alternative to marxism. We need to examine when and how liberatory currents asserted themselves within marxism. We need to look at the various questions that distinguish various currents within the revolutionary movement. We need to look at these questions not simply in the abstract but in the real historical conditions in which they arose and developed. We need to look not just at the few times anarchists have played a significant role in a revolutionary situation but at all the revolutions of the past century.
Many anarchists, of course, have been willing to embrace particular episodes (workers councils in post-WW1 Europe, Hungary ’56, the Shanghai Commune, France May-June ’68, Portugal ’74) in which explicitly anarchist forces were not major players, as part of the revolutionary libertarian tradition. Obviously this broadens the points of historical reference and is for the good. But the short-lived nature of each of these experiences means that by blaming the appropriate Stalinists or social-democrats for their betrayals, it is possible to avoid answering the harder questions sometimes posed more sharply by those episodes in which clearly defined libertarian forces did not participate.
Objective Conditions
It is practically anarchist dogma that every revolutionary situation has the potential to become an authentic libertarian revolution. On the basis of this position the failure of any situation to develop in such a direction is the consequence of the authoritarianism of the various ostensibly revolutionary organizations and parties. The suggestion that the “objective conditions” faced by various revolutionary movements account for the turns they took is routinely ridiculed by anarchists as simply making excuses for the crimes of those authoritarian forces. And certainly there is no shortage of cases in which the suppression of the workers movement, political executions, the imprisonment of dedicated revolutionaries, and so on have been dismissed with casual reference to the “objective conditions.” But this does not mean that objective conditions haven’t imposed insurmountable obstacles for the revolutionary movement.
Revolutionary situations do not present themselves to us only after we have made perfect preparations for them. They arise suddenly when the old order is unable to maintain its rule. It would be irresponsible in such situations not to try to carry out a thorough libertarian social revolution. But it isn’t neccesarilly the case that it is always actually possible to win everything we want. In this case the revolution will be confronted with choosing between different kinds of compromises or half-measures in order to “survive.”
The question that confronts revolutionaries is never simply whether the workers (or peasants) are capable of taking control of the means of production, and reorganizing production on democratic and libertarian lines (like the workers and peasants collectives in Spain). Nor is it even whether they are capable of establishing within cities and villages organs of self-government (as in the many cases of workers councils). From the Paris Commune to the Zapatista rebellion we know that these things can be done.
The question is almost always whether they can do these things over a prolonged period of time under conditions of war and general social breakdown. These are the conditions under which revolutionary opportunities are most likely to occur. It is precisely under these conditions that the limits of the revolutionary movement as a whole have revealed themselves.
Anarchists often like to pose the “social revolution” in contrast to the merely “political revolution.” For the purpose of distinguishing real social upheavals from mere coup d’etats this distinction might be useful. But almost all the “political revolutions” so criticized in fact involved significant elements of social revolution. More importantly it is impossible to imagine a “social revolution” devoid of all the features of a “political revolution.” A revolution is a struggle for power and is inevitably a messy affair. If we are not prepared for the fact that future revolutionary situations are going to present us with unpleasant choices then we are not really interested in making revolution.
Attitude Adjustment Time
I want to put forward here several connected propositions on the nature of the revolutionary project that I believe challenge some basic anarchist prejudices. The first proposition is that in a world characterized by gross disparities in the level of economic develoment as a consequence of imperialism it has simply not been possible to overthrow capitalism in most (if not all) of the imperialized countries. Revolutions in those countries have been of neccesity capitalist (and ususally state capitalist) revolutions that have swept away certain (horribly oppressive) pre-capitalist features of those societies and renegotiated the terms of capitalist exploitation.
The second proposition is that the achievment of a stateless classless society within the territorial limits of a single country (or otherwise defined territory) in a world of nation-states is impossible. Revolutions so confined to a national territory become national revolutions or are crushed. National revolutions can accomplish certain things but not others. The replacement of the old state apparatus with a new ostensibly revolutionary state is necessary to secure many of those accomplishments but we should have no illusions about such a state “withering away” on its own accord. It too will have to be smashed. One of the main things that national revolutions give people is experience in the process of making revolution and a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics of revolutions.
The third proposition (related closely to the second) is that a regular army can only be defeated by another army. Militias or other irregular forms of military organization alone, while capable of heroic resistance, will ultimately collapse before a regular army. The collapse of a national army (almost always precipitated by a military defeat) can create an opening for a revolutionary movement. But if that movement does not create its own army the old order will reconstitute its army or a foreign power will do it for them.
The fourth proposition is that only one class has the potential to overthrow capitalism — the international working class. It must act in conjunction with other classes and social movements to win and the participation of those forces is crucial to carrying out the most thoroughgoing social change, but the working class organized as a revolutionary class is the only single force without which the overthrow of capitalism is absolutely impossible. The fight against patriarchy and racial/national oppression within the working class is necessary for achieving unity within the class.
The rest of this paper will deal with these four propositions in light of the history of revolutions in the 20th century.
Unequal Development
Capitalism is a world system. If certain elements of capitalism appeared initially in the relative isolation of particular national settings, they only came together to form what we would recognize as capitalism as the result of the unparalleled global integration of trade that began in the 15th century with the European conquest of the Americas and domination of the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, and the establishment of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation complex. From its inception capitalism has enriched certain countries and enabled them to revolutionize production by looting and subjugating other countries to the economic needs of the ruling classes of the imperialist mother countries. Initially this relationship took the form of extracting wealth from largely self-sufficient societies. Over time it developed into a relationship of dependency in which the the imperialized countries were not only a source of raw materials but also crucial markets for finished goods. This dependency meant the deliberate destruction of the self-sufficiency of the imperialized countries. More recently certain imperialized countries have become centers of manufacture within a global market. Dependency on the imperialist centers has been maintained so far through control of developmental capital (the IMF and the World Bank) and the specialization of different types of manufacture in different countries.
The consequences of this unequal development for the project of anti-capitalist revolution are huge. Until recently the exploitation of much of the Third World was carried out through pre-capitalist economic forms (usually and imprecisely called semi-feudal) plugged into and subordinate to the world capitalist market. This meant that the antagonism between capitalism and the producers in much of the world took the immediate form of unequal distribution of land and the resulting super-exploitive landlord-tenant relations.
China is a good example of this. In other areas forced labor was used (as in many parts of Africa under colonialism) or plantation agriculture existed side by side with the peasant economy (as in Cuba). Capitalist forms of production constituted a small fraction of the economy and involved an even smaller fraction of the population. Moreover many of the capitalists involved in this small sector understood that the semi-feudal structure of the society and the domination of their country by the imperialists was an impediment to their own interests. They were potential allies of any peasant movement to seize the land and overthrow the landlords.
The Chinese Revolution must be understood in this context. It was overwhelmingly a peasant revolution that destroyed a very rotten old system, redistributed the land, and established China’s relative economic independence from imperialist domination. Only once these fundamental tasks had been carried out did it even become possible for the Chinese Communist Party to talk about what to do with China’s puny capitalist sector. The cities had been controlled by the Kuomintang and the only significantly industrialized region, Manchuria, had been under Japanese control. The industrial proletariat, such as it was, did not have either the experience or the organization to take matters into their own hands. Any move to do so would need the active support if not of the peasantry, then of the Communist Party.
Development of industry was crucial to solving a number of China’s most pressing problems. The lack of transportation and communications meant that famine-plagued regions were difficult to reach with relief. Mass production techniques were neccesary to meet the huge demand for the most rudimentary farm implements (ploughs, carts) and to raise agricultural productivity sufficiently to break the constant cycle of famine. Superficially it might seem like this is an argument that a problem with social-structural causes (famine) required only a technological solution. But the social-structural causes (feudal land structure and dependency on foreign manufactures) expressed themselves significantly in the low technological level of agrarian China. The land could simply not sustain its then current population without a technological as well as a social revolution.
In this context the section of the capitalists who had sided with the agrarian revolution were crucial. They concentrated technical and managerial expertise without which the development of new industry would have been impossible. To simply exproporiate them would have meant to drive them into the arms of the Kuomintang. Could the workers who had worked under them take up the slack and run existing enterprises? To a certain extent. But it should be kept in mind that in the wake of a civil war many enterprises were operating sporadically and the workers with the technical expertise to run them weren’t neccesarily easily found. More importantly the Chinese proletariat was hardly a mature class with a lengthy experience of common struggle informing its self-activity.
But the question wasn’t simply one of running the existing enterprises, it was one of dramatically and immediately expanding the industrial base to forestall famine and for that the expertise of the tiny capitalist class was indispensable.
Time was of the essence. The expansion of industry was also neccesary to prevent the masses of landless peasants who had crowded the cities as a result of famine and war from returning to a countryside that wasn’t prepared to absorb them. Furthermore there was a significant threat of foreign invasion or a U.S. backed Kuomintang invasion from Taiwan. During the Korean War MacArthur openly threatened to invade China.
Furthermore we need to confront the limited political capacities of the peasantry. Could the Chinese peasantry have abolished capitalist relations (wage labor in particular) and set about a non-capitalist process of development to solve their considerable problems? The peasantry had accomplished many things. On the village level they had taken over control of the administration of village affairs from the corrupt landlord elites and had carried out the dramatic redistribution of land. Leaving aside for the moment the crucial role of the Communist Party in these accomplishments we can note that this peasant control of administration extended to greater and lesser degrees upwards to the county or even provincial level. But as one moves up the hierarchy one encounters more and more reliance on the Communist Party cadres, and more and more reliance on educated cadres from non-peasant backgrounds.
We can interpret this fact two ways. On the one hand it is an expression of the ultimate dominance of the Communist Party and its regime by a relative handfull of intellectuals from middle-class or landlord backgrounds. On the other it is a simple reflection of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Chinese peasants were illiterate and that the literate supporters of the revolution (whether of non-peasant background or taught to read by the Party or the Peoples Liberation Army) were in the Party. These different ways of looking at the same fact are not contradictory. Together they reveal the class character the Chinese Revolution had and also why it probably couldn’t have had any other.
The Council Communist Anton Pannnekoek in his 1940 article “Why Past Revolutionary Movements Have Failed” linked the inherently capitalist nature of revolutions in the periphery to the problems of the proletarian revolution in the imperialist centers. He argued that the underdevelopment of Russia meant that the capitalist revolution there could not be carried out by the bourgeoisie but rather by a new bureaucratic capitalist class drawn mainly from the intelligentsia. This new capitalist class leveraged the prestige of the thwarted proletarian revolution in Russia to dominate the the revolutionary workers movement in the West and thereby diverting the self-organization of the proletariat in the most adavanced capitalist countries. This is one way in which the unequal devlopment of capitalism has resulted in the unequal devlopment of the revolutionary movement. Pannekoek doesn’t deal with the role of imperialist super-profits in effectively buying off at least a section of the workers movement, but that fact too must inform our understanding of why the 20th century has been characterized not by international proletarian revolution but by peasant-based national capitalist revolutions.
Only as an abstraction can freedom be absolute. In the real world freedom is always conditioned by the social context in which it exists. Freedom can not be defined simply in terms of the absence of constraint but must also refer to the power to make the decisions that affect ones life. It is impossible to rule a society if you don’t understand how it works. So, in a hunter-gatherer society that sort of power depends on different things than it does in an industrialized society. A crucial feature of class societies is that they deny the exploited classes access to the things they would need to rule. Revolutions in a certain sense are the process by which an oppressed class obtains those things. But, because class societies inevitably combine old and new methods of exploitation, different oppressed classes are better positioned to make the revolutionary leap and to take control of society.
In the 13th century the technological level of society was such that one could perhaps imagine the peasantry taking control of society as a whole and establishing some sort of agrarian communism. In the 20th century it is an impossibility (though Pol Pot gave it a shot). The peasant is enmeshed in a global system of capitalism, the deeper workings of which are obscured from the vantage point of life in a small village. In contrast the urban worker is exposed in a thousand ways to the complex operations of the world system. The problem of course is that, as a consequence of the unequal development of capitalism around the world, it has been the life conditions of the peasant and not the proletarian that have fueled the major revolutions of the century. But precisely because the peasantry as a class is so poorly prepared to administer a capitalist society (even an underdeveloped one), that those revolutions have ultimately carried new minority ruling classes to power.
Anarchism in One Country?
The Spanish Revolution and its supression demonstrated in the starkest terms one of the central problems of anarchism. The Spanish Revolution was the product not simply of the global class struggle, but of its particular features in Spain. A particular chain of events reflecting the particular character and history of Spain lead up to the moment when the Spanish peasants and workers were able to seize control of the fields, factories and workshops. Every revolution arises from the failure of a particular state in a particular moment. In Spain the Republican government crumbled in the wake of Franco’s military revolt. Power was lying in the street, and the anarchist movement, the most powerful force among the workers and peasants, took it.
I am emphasizing the particularly Spanish character of the Spanish Revolution to make clear the simple fact that while the Revolution was able to count on a certain amount of international solidarity, the conditions that had produced the revolution were not to be found elsewhere and therefore the prospects for the revolution to spread were limited. But that didn’t mean that the Revolution took place in isolation. Italian and German fascism sent trroops, arms, and planes to support Franco’s armies. The Soviet Union leveraged its support for the Republic for the creation and control of a counter-revolutionary regular army. If the Republican Government couldn’t subdue the Revolution and the fascists couldn’t drown it in blood there is no reason to expect that other foreign powers wouldn’t intervene. Their short-term interests in retrieving control over exproporiated enterprises and their long-term interests in preventing the Revolution from becoming an international example meant they would have no choice but to intervene militarily.
There are basically two reasons it is impossible to create a stateless classless society within the confines of single country. The first is economic and the second is military.
The economic reasons are important. As discussed above capitalism is a world system. This means that no country is self-sufficient. Obviously some countries have more or less potential for self-sufficiency, but certain problems are effectively universal. Some countries, as a consequence of their population, simply could not hope to meet their own food needs. This is the case for many of the smaller more densely populated industrialized countries. Some countries, as a consequence of their underdevelopment under colonialism, don’t have the means of producing manufactured goods (clothing, tractors, etc…) on which they depend. And practically all countries are dependent on at least a few strategic minerals that simply don’t exist within their borders. Chromium, for example, is neccessary for all sorts of machine parts. It is concentrated largely in Southern Africa. Similarly much of the world is dependent on foreign petroleum.
The point here isn’t that one can’t imagine the eventual creation of a self-sufficient economy within a particular country, but rather that the economies that revolutionaries inherit are not self-sufficient and the severing of international trade (by either the revolutionary forces or by foreign powers) will have very disruptive consequences. These are two-sided. First, industries that depend on foreign materials will stop functioning and people will no longer have access to goods that are only available from abroad. Second, economic sectors that produce for the international market, will either cease to produce or will produce goods for which there is no domestic demand.
The situation of Cuba is instructive here. Many of the economic problems that confronted the Cuban Revolution would have been just as present if that revolution had a libertarian character. Cuba’s economy was classically dependent. Sugar and tourism brought in the cash with which to purchase foreign goods including food, medicine, clothing, petroleum, and automobiles. In the intervening 37 years it is a scandalous consequence of the relations developed with the Soviet Union that Cuba has not converted its agricultural sector to become self-sufficient in food. The result is that Cuba now faces the same problem it would have faced then: how to make that conversion without access to foreign capital. The technology involved in growing, harvesting and processing sugar is not the same as that involved in producing rice or produce. It is not a simple matter to knock down all the sugar cane and begin growing grains and vegetables. It takes time to get a whole new kind of agriculture going. How are people going to eat in the meantime?
The practical answer inevitably is that dependence on the world market can only be reduced in steps. But so long as people are producing for the world market they can not be said to have smashed class society altogether — they continue to be exploited by an international capitalist class. To make matters worse the refusal of parts of the world market to trade (as in the case of the U.S. embargo of Cuba) drives down the price that the goods will command on the world market. The only way to recover that lost profit (for there is no point in engaging in international trade if it doesn’t generate profits that can be invested in making the country self-sufficient) is to raise the level of exploitation of the producers. Worse, the administrative apparatus of the revolutionary regime, whether it is called a “workers state” or “a federation of free collectives” is the body that must do the exploiting. Good intentions are feeble protection against the logic of the world market. How does the apparatus respond when the producers, entirely in the spirit of the revolution, say that they will not be exploited and go on strike?
This is precisely the dilemna that has confronted every revolution that has survived longer than a year. For avowed statists like Marxists it is not much of a dilemna. But for anarchists it is profound.
The second obstacle to the creation of a stateless classless society in a single country is military. Thoroughgoing social revolutions, even if contained in a single country, are a profound threat to the international capitalist order. Every such revolution that has not been crushed internally has had to face some degree of foreign military intervention. The motivations of the individual countries don’t even have to be so farsighted as the maintenance of world capitalism. Often enough the revolution threatens foreign investments that the foreign power decides it must defend. Even when this is not the case the turmoil of a revolution can seem like a golden opportunity for a foreign power to establish or widen its foothold in a country.
There is no reason to suppose that if the Russian Revolution had taken a different course (if the anarchists had gotten their shit together, or if the Soviets had been able to resist subordination to the Bolshevik Party structure), that it wouldn’t have faced invasions by 14 foreign powers in support of the Whites in the civil war.
It is impossible to repell a foreign invasion without a military force of ones own. Making war, even a war of resistance, has a certain authoritarian logic to it. War is about killing people and sending some people off to die so that others might live. It is, unfortunately, not mainly about killing the class enemy, but rather about killing the other oppressed people, often conscripts, who make up the enemies army. Even if one’s strategy depends on mutiny or mass defections within the enemies army it will still be neccessary to kill people. The reason is simple. Soldiers mutiny or defect in significant numbers only when the threat of being killed in battle is plausibly greater than the threat of being shot for insubordination. This is the smart thing to do. Therefore armies maintain their internal discipline in part by convincing their troops that being shot for insubordination is a certainty. For an army to fall apart it must face some sort of military defeat.
Anarchists sometimes claim that decentralized, non-authoritarian structures are inherently so much more efficient than centralized authoritarian ones that these principles should be applied to military operations. This is the express route to anarchist martyrdom. If anarchist principles can accomodate turning groups of human beings into efficient killing machines there is a problem. But if they can’t there is another problem. It is the second situation that we face: making war means compromising anti-authoritarian principles. In so far as a military forces has as its aim the defeat of other military forces within a given territory it is acting to create a monopoly on organized violence — a defining feature of the state. Is it possible to create a truly anti-authoritarian military structure that corresponds with the relative decentralism of a libertarian society and that is able to defend that society from external (or internal) military threats? I will try to answer that question in the next section.
The Revolutionary Army
The anarchist movement has basically two major experiences with trying to organize its military power in defense of its revolutionary gains: in Ukraine and in Spain.
The anarchist literature on the Ukrainian experience is considerably less extensive than that on the Spanish experience, but a couple points are worth making about it. While the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (Makhvovists) conducted massive collectivization of land in the zones of its control, the Ukrainian peasantry was not heavily imbued with anarchist thinking. The Maknovist movement rose up as a result of the Brest-Litovsk agreement in which the Bolsheviks ceded Ukraine to Austrian and German Imperialism. But like the rest of the old Russian empire Ukraine was in the throes of a social revolution as the peasantry was seizing the land. The Ukrainian Confederation of Anarchist Organizations (Nabat) saw in this situation an opportunity to build under anarchist leadership a military force that might carry forward the revolution and expell the foreign imperialists. And that is precisely what they did before they were crushed by the Bolshevik Red Army.
The Ukrainian peasantry embraced anarchism in so far as the anarchist army could protect what they had won in the revolution. The Insurgent Army was a guerilla army. It operated within a region about 150 miles in diameter, populated by 7,000,000 people. In organization it stood midway between the sort of indigenous “bandit” formations that consistently arise from peasants in remote or unstable regions and what I will later define as a mature revolutionary army. It did not have the same worked out anti-authoritarian structure as the anarchist militias in Spain started out with.
Once the Makhnovists had defeated the White forces of Generals Deniken and Wrangel they were in turn defeated by the Red Army. The territory controlled by the Makhnovists was highly unstable. It was subject to periodic occupation by White and foreign forces. The tenacity of the Makhnovists resistance lead to the disintegration of the White forces and the withdrawal of the foreign ones. The Red Army was beating down and absorbing irregular peasant forces all over the former Russian empire. Makhno’s proved the most difficult to defeat, but ultimately they too fell.
The military reasons are straightforward. Irregular forces like Makhno’s can sustain themselves perhaps indefinitely in geographically remote hinterlands. But Ukraine was not such a region. The Brest-Litovsk agreement and the general social collapse of Russia created a momentary opening into which Makhno’s forces stepped. But the consolidation of Bolshevik rule in the rest of Russia and the decision of the imperialists to abandon Ukraine meant the closing of that window. It is important to note that in spite of allthe anarchist slogans the program of the Maknovists in practice was not much different from that of later peasant revolutions (like the Chinese), namely: redistribution of the land, more or less voluntary collectivization, and expulsion of the imperialists (national independance).
If there is any doubt that the Ukrainian Revolution was limited in what it could hope to achieve within its own borders the words of the Nabat in calling for the creation of the Insurgent Army should settle the matter:
“4. With regard to the external attack on the social revolution by Western and other imperialist powers, the anarchists have always relied and will continue to rely not on the regular Red Army, not even on an insurgent war, but on the inevitable collapse of imperialism and its armed forces through the unfolding world-wide revolution”
It shouldn’t be neccessary to note that there wasn’t anything inevitable about the collapse of imperialism on which the Ukrainian anarchists were relying.
The Spanish Revolution had a somewhat different character. Almost 70 years of anarchist education and agitation had prepared significant sections of the Spanish working class and peasantry for a libertarian revolution. When the moment came in July 1936 millions of Spaniards had in their minds what the anarchist reorganization of their society would entail. And they applied the same libertarian principles to the military formations they created: the militias.
The militias were drawn from various factories or neighborhoods or villages and each one had a distinct identity in accordance with its origins. The militias were organized into columns which in turn elected delegates that were to carry out some of the functions of officers, but without the automatic authority that officers commanded. The anarchists were not the only ones to organize militias. The socialist workers of the UGT, and the various parties like the POUM, also organized militias.
The militias, at least initially, were the picture of decentralism and non-authoritarianism. And the military consequences were disastrous. Anarchist accounts of the operations of the militias heavily overemphasize their occasional heroic victories and minimize their frequent defeats or simply blame them on the refusal of other forces to provide them with the arms they needed. But while the militias certainly fought courageously, their decentralism and lack of discipline was as much their downfall as the “treachery” of organizations that never should have been trusted in the first place.
Anarchists studying Spain should be careful about taking their own propaganda too seriously. The lack of internal discipline made for acts of tremendous stupidity from a military point of view. Militia members would regularly abandon their positions when boredom set in. The absence of any sort of unified command structure meant that every proposed coordinated military action involving different militias, let alone ones from different political tendencies, had to be discussed and modified and approved before it could be carried out. In this process crucial time was often wasted and military opportunities lost. When coordinated actions were carried out the modified plans were often greatly reduced in scale, often to the point of making them irrelevant. Militias jealously refused to share materiel with each other. Observers of all perspectives noted how militias of each organization took a certain delight in the defeats suffered by the militias of other organizations.
The simple fact of the matter is that wars can not be won in this way. Militias can play an important role in defending the gains of a revolution, in organizing irregular warfare within a circumscribed region, and in suppressing counter-revolutionary activity within the zone of a revolution. But without a regular army of its own the revolution can not hold back the advances of an invading army.
The reasons are simple and it is borne out by the whole history of military conflict. An army with a unified command going up against a “decentralized” force will set about to identify its weakest units and concentrate its first attacks accordingly. The decentralized forces lacking a unified command will be unable to quickly redeploy troops to the weak area in the way that a regular army can. Similarly when a coordinated offensive needs to be carried out certain troops will be put in considerably greater danger than others. In a decentralized structure such decisions are subject to rejection by the units most likely (or even certain) to take the heaviest losses. This means that the decentralized military structure can only deploy its most courageous or selfless units in such situations. Its not difficult to see how such a practice would result in the rapid weakening of the decentralized structure as it sacrifices its best forces or backs off from battles that can be won. Conversely the boldest units in a decentralized force are more likely to expend themselves in heroic but ultimately pointless acts of self-sacrifice.
There is a reason that the world is dominated by regular armies with unified command structures. It is not because the staes of the world simply find their authoritarian form more agreeable in spite of its comparative military inefficiencies. If that were so states would be constantly striving to obtain the benefits of decentralism in military matters (as they sometimes do in other matters in which decentralism is in fact more efficient). But the military remains the most centralized institution in any society, it authoritarianism the model by which less authoritarian institutions are judged.
One can of course conceive of a perfectly functioning decentralized military structure in which the grasp of military science is so evenly spread out that it makes no errors and goes on to win. But in the real world all such plans run into friction from the flesh and blood people who are supposed to carry them out. Wars are won not by those who concoct perfect plans, but rather by those whose plans are best able to absorb the consequences of their own imperfection. In military matters a reliable command structure enables the most rapid response to setbacks.
If we are ready to concede (as the Spanish anarchists ultimately did) that making war involves compromising anti-authoritarain principles we need to look at precisely what measures need to be taken to prevent those compromises from undoing the whole revolutionary project. It seems that there are a number of basic things here: the election of officers, the elimination of unnecesary social distinctions between officers and their troops, a commitment to developing the leadership skills of the rank and file in opposition to relying on officers from the old regime and the like. But these things can’t hide the fundamentally authoritarian nature of an army: absolute subordination to the command structure, drills that psychologically prepare soldiers to take orders, the suspension of basic democratic rights in the course of military engagements and so on.
Recognizing the neccesity of an army doesn’t mean accepting any old army. One of the central issues in te Spanish Revolution was the attempt to incorporate the militias into a new regular Republican army. Much of the impetus for this militarization came from the Communist Party, which by virtue of its connections with the Soviet Union, was prepared to dominate the command of such an army. The anarchist and POUM militias resisted this process in varying degrees. Ultimately most of the anarchist militias were either incorporated into the new army or broken up by it. One group that resisted militarization were the militias at the Gelsa front. Instead of joining the army they returned to Barcelona and constituted themselves as the Friends of Durruti. The Friends of Durruti played a pivotal role in the May 1937 events in Barcelona, calling on the anarchist forces to maintain their barricades when the CNT leadership was preaching conciliation with the Communists. After these events the Friends of Durruti issued a pamphlet “Towards a Fresh revolution” that analyzed the defeat of the Spanish Revolution and put forward proposals for its regeneration. Unlike anarchists today who see the Spanish militias as the model of anarchist military organization the Friends of Durrut had seen them in action and proposed in opposition to either the Republican army or an exclusive reliance on the militias the revolutionary army:
“With regard to the problem of the war, we back the idea of the army being under the absolute control of the working class. Officers with their origins in the capitalist regime do not deserve the slightest trust from us. Desertions have been numerous and most of the the disasters we have encountered can be laid down to obvious betrayals by officers. As to the army, we want a revolutionary one led exclusively by workers; and should any officer be retained, it must be under the strictest supervision.”
In this quote there is the usual anarchist equivocations. The defeats of the militias are the result of betrayals, but the solution is a revolutionary army. We want the workers in control but we know we will need the expertise of professional officers. This is nonetheless a considerable improvement on the naive celebration of the militias that passes for anarchist military thinking today.
The question of the character of an authentically revolutionary army is important. The Friends of Durruti correctly identify the class character of the army and its command as crucial in determining its role in the revolution. So far we have spoken of the army entirely in its role as defender of gains already made by the revolution. The obvious next question is what role can a revolutionary army play in enlarging the revolutionary zone, in effect bringing the revolution to new areas. This would certainly have been a question if a revolutionary army in Spain had been able to defeat Franco’s forces and take territory that had up to that point not been touched by the Revolution.
Historically many armies have started out with revolutionary objectives. John Ellis’s Armies in Revolution, is a valuable treatment of much of that experience from the point of view of a military historian. Ellis argues that every revolutionary army from Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army to and including the Soviet Red Army was an army in the service of a minority class. He upholds the achievements of Makhno’s Insurgent Army in the face of criticisms by the Bolsheviks. He doesn’t treat the Spanish Revolution (perhaps because it offers no example of an authentically revolutionary army). Finally he points to the Peoples Liberation Army in China as the single example of an army that carried out the revolutionary class program of the oppressed majority, namely the comprehensive redistribution of land to the poor peasantry. I have argued earlier that the Chinese Revolution was ultimately a capitalist revolution, and I would argue that the PLA carried out, at least up until 1949, a program that was consistent with the common interests of the peasantry and the aspiring new capitalist class represented by the leaders of the Communist Party. In spite of these qualifications I would argue that the Chinese experience is still an important one from the point of view of trying to develop a revolutionary libertarian military strategy.
The Revolutionary Class
The problems posed by the Chinese experience are fundamentally the product of China’s underdevelopment and the fact that the only class that can hope to overthrow capitalism, the proletariat, was almost absent from the Chinese political landscape. I have referred earlier to the problems posed by a class which developed historically under pre-capitalist conditions taking over a national economy that is already integrated into world capitalism. There is in anarchism a certain tendency in upholding peasant revolts to avoid their inherent limitations. Whatever the situation once was it should be clear now as the globalization of capitalism accelerates out of the control of any single national capital that the only class that has a hope to take on this system is the international working class. The overwhelmingly middle-class composition of the anarchist movement in the U.S., and the dogmatic invocation of the working class by the various marxist sects, make many anarchists reluctant to take an explicit stand in favor of a working class orientation. Instead the working class is seen as one of many points of reference or “identities” that taken together are going to carry out the revolutionary process. The pluralism of this position is its singular virtue. But by treating economic classes in the same ways that we treat ethnic or sexual identities we lose sight of the fact that it is capitalism that couples oppression with a profit-generating exploitation that fuels its constant and dynamic expansion into new territories and new areas of our lives (including ethnic and sexual identity).
Immigration and the transnational movements of capital are increasingly making the abstract notion of an international proletariat a lived reality for hundreds of millions of people. The rapid urbanization of the Third World increasingly means that it is the proletariat and not the peasantry in those countries that is best positioned to challenge neo-colonialism. The proletariat should not be viewed as a monolithic entity represented by a single party (a la the various currents of Marxism) but rather as a contested body whose unity is contingent on the freedom of its different parts to fight for their interests within it. The fight for womens liberation or the recognition of the rights of various ethnic groups then are not battles to be put off until after the proletariat seizes power globally, but are neccesary precursors to that seizure of power that clarify the revolutionary orientation of the proletariat.
Conclusion
I have sought in this paper to draw out some of the failures of the anarchist movement. I am not arguing here for the abandonment of a generally anti-authoritarian orientation, nor a modification of the ultimate goals of anarchism. I am arguing however that the viability of those goals is contingent on a number of factors and that anarchists have resisted facing these political realities with the result that anarchism has withered as a credible revolutionary alternative to the failed ideologies of marxism and the various nationalisms.
It is not clear to me that anarchism, as defined by its historical practice over the past century, offers an adequate framework for rebuilding the revolutionary project on libertarian foundations. It is clear to me that while the historical experience of marxism is invaluable, and while marxism offers important analytical tools for understanding the world we live in, that marxism as an overarching philosophical framework has proven to be irretrievably authoritarian.
There is a crying need for the development of a new body of revolutionary theory that breaks decisively with the dogmatism and political shallowness of anarchism as well as with the authoritarian essence of marxism.
Any new theoretical approach to the revolutionary project must confront not just the important historical experiences addressed in this paper but also the new conditions we face, in particular the new possibilities for building authentically international revolutionary organizations rooted in an increasingly mobile and international working class.
TellNoLies said
In the interests of full disclosure and accountability, I am Christopher Day.
redflags said
Are you now or have you ever been…
josetheredfox said
Ok, not trying to start shit here Chris, but now it makes sense.
cheers, J.P.
Chuck Morse said
I think this is an interesting article that raises some important questions, although ultimately it is ill-conceived and less than persuasive.
Obviously, Chris is correct to state that the anarchist movement has failed to build to an anarchist society (except for briefly). Yes, that’s true, but lots of traditions and doctrines have failed. Communists and socialists have failed to abolish capitalism; Christians have failed to rebuild the world around god’s will; the enlightenment tradition has failed to reconstruct the world around reason, etc etc. By not placing anarchism in the larger context of the failure of all the optimistic, utopian traditions, Chris obscures the need for a broad, sweeping reconception of the revolutionary tradition as such (not just, or even particularly, anarchism).
And Chris’s perspective is extremely narrow. This essay is organized around a pragmatic standard of truth (“we judge ideologies by their practical results,” Chris says), which is deeply conservative and anti-revolutionary. Of course, if we don’t need to reconcieve of the revolutionary tradition, and our problems are fundamentally practical, then it makes to advance an organizational/technical solution to our problems, which is what Chris does when he calls for an army. That would make sense, but our challenges are really much deeper than that.
These are the bigger issues. I also want to note that his account of the activity of anarchists during Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is logically and factually indefensible.
With respect to the logical issues, Chris argues that anarchists are responsible for Spanish fascism (Franco). The anarchist’s did not build a lasting revolution and thus, Chris declares, “the Spanish people were condemned to forty years of fascist rule”.
Burdening the anarchists with responsibility for Franco’s victory is truly nutty: it’s like blaming the German Communist Party for the holocaust because they failed to seize power when Hitler rose or like blaming Benjamin Franklin for bombing Hiroshima because he invented electricity. Indeed, whatever the failures of the Spanish anarchists may be, and there are many, they did not cause Franco to take power.
Chris is also confused about the facts of the Spanish anarchist experience (and there is a reason why nothing is footnoted). I’ll just mention two of his falsehoods for now: First, Chris says that the anarchist militias produced “disastrous military consequences” because they were decentralized and non-authoritarian. However, it was precisely the anarchists and their decentralized and non-authoritarian militias that stopped Franco from seizing power immediately: without them, he would have been in control within twenty-four hours. (The Socialists refused to arm the people and the Communists had no influence). I’m not sure how that qualifies as a “disaster.”
Second, Chris says that anarchists made no “effort to analyze how the anarchist movement contributed to its own defeat,” which is simply untrue. I can think of at least a dozen books on the topic. Evidently Chris hasn’t read these books, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
Finally, I agree with Chris when he states that “the achievement of a stateless classless society within the territorial limits of a single country (or otherwise defined territory) in a world of nation-states is impossible.” However, it is also impossible to create communist society in a single country, given the economic and political dynamics of a globally interconnected world (unless, of course, you want to become North Korea). Chris’s critique is relevant (though hardly novel), but he’s wrong to suggest that it applies to anarchists uniquely.
Certainly many of the issues that Chris raises in this article are important and I know of more than a few people in the anarchist movement who are and have been actively wrestling with them. I suspect that he is unaware of and uninterested in these individuals and groups, given his personal antipathy toward anarchists, but they are out there.
redflags said
Chris has a personal antipathy towards anarchists?
That is absurd, Chuck. And not the kind of discussion we’re hosting here (e.g.: assumptions or accusations regarding personal motives beyond aspects of our common, shared reality that we can discuss, share, compare, contest and actually learn from.)
Chuck Morse said
I don’t believe that it is absurd, but if the moderator’s feel that my comment about Chris’s personal antipathy distracted from more substantive issues, then please remove that particlar clause (i.e., “given his personal antipathy toward anarchists,” and also this post (and perhaps Redflag’s post #5 too).
josetheredfox said
Redflags: Why don’t you actually engage with Chuck’s critique of Chris Days’ so-called “historical failure of anarchism”? Seriously. This is whats important in Chuck’s posting, a posting which I think is politically right on. Address that, que no?
cheers, j.p.
orinda said
Hey Chuck,
Not sure why you think Chris is antagonistic to anarchists. The more I read of his article the clearer it became he considers himself an anarchist. I don’t think he is putting all the blame on anarchists for the defeat in Spain. Rather he is saying that anarchists have never summed up this experience in a self-critical way, only criticizing the socialists and communists for what happened. From my readings of the Spanish Civil War I’d say no group on the Left there can claim it had no responsibility for the victory of Franco. The RCP wrote a very good article criticizing the communists for many things. One of the most appalling to me was the chance they had to side with the Morrocans against colonialism. They didn’t and many Morrocans joined mercenary forces that helped crush the republic.
I am not saying the RCP or any other communist group has done a complete and accurate analysis of how communists have dealt with anarchists since way back when. I’ve found many anarchists overly obsessed with Kronstadt, but I’ve also been annoyed that the RCP doesn’t think it’s an important enough issue to re-examine in a critical way.
I never heard of the Ukrainian anarchist army before. From Chris’s account, I can’t see how communists today would uphold the Red Army considering them the enemy.
Back to Spain, in 1994 I saw a movie at a film festival called “Libertarias” (it’s in Spanish with subtitles). It never got a theatrical release here but is available on Netflix. It’s about an anarchist militia focusing on the women within it. My take on it was it showed both the good and bad of the anarchists. They righteously refused an authoritarian demand by an anarchist leader to kick out the women because they were alledgedly spreading STD’s through the militia. I could never get any communists to see it other than one. I don’t want to get into describing the plot here but would be interested in hearing if any anarchists (or others) saw it and what they thought of it.
n3wday said
Let’s get a little background here for people unfamiliar. Please everyone, correct any factual inaccuracies of mine as well.
Chris used to be an Anarchist, he was one of the founders of the Love and Rage Collective. Chris no longer is so, however, this article was written and published by Love and Rage when Chris still considered himself an anarchist.
“By not placing anarchism in the larger context of the failure of all the optimistic, utopian traditions, Chris obscures the need for a broad, sweeping reconception of the revolutionary tradition as such (not just, or even particularly, anarchism).”
Ok, my understanding was this article was written by Chris primarily for Anarchists to examine their own tradition (wasn’t it published in the Love and Rage journal; an anarchist journal?). If this is true the criticism is not relevant. Within the context of THIS discussion that’s fine to point out, and even should be (after all this is a Communist blog), but it’s completely illogical to use that as a criticism of the essay itself.
“And Chris’s perspective is extremely narrow. This essay is organized around a pragmatic standard of truth (“we judge ideologies by their practical results,” Chris says), which is deeply conservative and anti-revolutionary.”
I think you need to tease this out a little further, because we do in fact judge ideologies on the basis of how they play out in reality. Without that important connection an ideology is nothing but idealism. So although we can’t be completely pragmatic, as in ONLY judging an ideology by it’s immediate practical results, devoid of any summation of objective conditions and circumstances, practical results none-the-less are important. I think you’re responding to an idea you want Chris to have rather than one he does.
“Of course, if we don’t need to reconcieve of the revolutionary tradition, and our problems are fundamentally practical, then it makes to advance an organizational/technical solution to our problems, which is what Chris does when he calls for an army. That would make sense, but our challenges are really much deeper than that.”
Can you explain this a little further? How do you define reconception? Is reconception devoid of practical elements? What are the deeper problems you speak of?
I’m not that familiar with the history of the Spanish Civil War. I’ve read some stuff here and there but certainly no serious research.
Can you explain how decentralized and anti-authoritarian stopped Franco from seizing power while other forms of military wouldn’t have?
As for Anarchist summations of this experience… This assertion does seem questionable. The essay was written 10 years which could make a difference, but then again the war happened 80 years ago, so maybe not.
Chuck, what are some of your criticisms of the Spanish Civil War? You’ve obviously read up on the subject, and I’m assuming by your response you disagree with the overall thrust of Chris’ article. So where do your conclusions take you?
LS said
Correction of the historical footnotes: There was nothing called the “Love and Rage Collective.” It was the Love & Rage Network then in 1993 it became the Love & Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, as a result of a large internal struggle to become better organized (some collectives that had been part of the network but didn’t want to be part of a tighter organization split at that point). The Love & Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation then split up in 1998, over various internal contradictions.
There was no such thing as “Love & Rage Journal.” Love & Rage was a newspaper. At first it came out monthly, then later settled into being basically bimonthly. The Historical Failure of Anarchism paper was not written for or published in Love & Rage Newspaper. It was presented by Chris at an anarchist conference (not a Love & Rage conference, but a conference organized by other anarchists who weren’t part of Love & Rage). But an article with similar line and conclusions was published in Love & Rage Newspaper. It is on the Love & Rage archive site here: http://loveandrage.org/?q=tradition under the title “The Revolutionary Anarchist Tradition.” It tries to trace a historical tradition within anarchism for Love & Rage’s politics, from Malatesta to the Ukranian Makhnovists to Platformism through Spain and the FAI and the Friends of Durutti. If you click on the link you’ll see a note saying that this article (and the ‘Historical Failure’ article) were very controversial within Love & Rage, and were one of the sparks that ignited the internal struggle that led to Love & Rage’s demise.
n3wday said
Thanks for the corrections LS. The appearance of the article on the Love and Rage website was where my confusions came from. I thought the website served as the Federations theoretical journal.
Chuck Morse said
I also think that it is helpful to put this article in context. N3wday’s comments, with LS’s qualifications, are correct.
Chris wrote this piece just before he dropped out of the anarchist movement and became a vocal anti-anarchist and also just before anarchism, through the anti-globalization movement, achieved greater public influence than it had had for six or seven decades.
For the sake of full disclosure, I have know Chris since 1990. We’ve been in study groups together, he’s slept on my floor, we’ve had beers together, etc. Although I was never a member of Love and Rage, which I always regarded as low on substance but high on rhetoric, we traveled in very similar (perhaps even the same) political and social circles.
Orinda, I’m familiar with that movie, although I probably shouldn’t offer an opinion (I watched the first half in Mexico years ago, but slept through the second half).
N3wsday, I think that you raise some valuable questions, but it seems to me that the “failure” of anarchism must be placed in the context of the failure of the broader revolutionary tradition and the Enlightenment whether you’re addressing anarchists or a more politically varied group.
And I agree that it is helpful to look at the historical of consequences of an ideology when trying to understand it, but that’s different from advancing a purely pragmatic criteria, which Chris does implicitly and explicitly in this article. “We judge ideologies by their practical results,” he says categorically.
I don’t really have a “critique” of the Spanish Civil War any more than I have a “critique” of the Industrial Revolution or the Bronze Age or the Holy Roman Empire. The Spanish Civil War occurred and we should try to understand it as an important moment in world history and, more specifically, the contradictory and contested development of capitalism. Unfortunately, Chris’s article does not facilitate this, given its many factual and logical errors.
In any case, as I said, I think that Chris points to some important questions in this piece, which I appreciate. And I know many anarchists who are actively engaged in confronting them. Chris’s anti-anarchism will probably prevent him from learning from, supporting, or perhaps even noting this work, but it has been going on and will go on regardless of what he thinks.
n3wday said
Chuck,
for the sake of continuing the discussion (and learning for myself), would you mind laying out some of your own views of the period? Strengths, weaknesses etc.
What aspects of the revolution do you feel were most valuable? What should be discarded?
A systematic critique isn’t necessary. But perhaps some general impressions?
n3wday said
Maybe some good book recommendations too?
Iris said
Chuck, who is doing the work of confronting the issues raised by Chris Day? I’m interested in reading it.
Chuck Morse said
N3wday, I’m not trying to be coy, but I don’t think it’s really possible or desirable to split the Spanish Civil War into things that I would embrace and things that I would discard. The good and the bad were deeply and inescapably intertwined. The task, in my view, is to try to understand exactly how and why they were connected (I think that is true of social analysis generally).
Scholars often note that there is more literature on the Spanish Civil War than any, other single event in the history of the 20th century. Indeed, there is a phenomenal amount on the topic, more than a single person could read in a lifetime!
The literature is also quite specialized: you can read about art in the Spanish Civil War, gender in the Spanish Civil War, military technology in the Spanish Civil War, fiction about the Spanish Civil War, poetry about the Spanish Civil War, and so on and so on.
However, if you are just beginning, I would highly recommend George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. This is a mainstay of the literature on the topic and a classic of 20th century literature generally. I would be happy to provide other more specific recommendations depending on your particular interests.
To answer your question, Iris, it’s important to keep in mind that theoretical growth within the anarchist movement occurs differently than in communist movements. With Communist groups, which are typically built around a party, you can learn a lot from looking at things like party resolutions, organizational dictates, and things of that nature. However, the anarchist movement is structured as a network and thus the growth tends to occur around nodes. This can make it difficult (but not impossible) to perspective qualitative changes.
But I can point to several things: for one, there is the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS), which I founded and directed for many years. Its goal is quite explicitly to develop anarchist theory. Although it is primarily a grant giving organization, it also produces publications and sponsors an annual scholarly conference known as the Rethinking the Anarchist Tradition Conference(RAT). I left the IAS in 2005, and the intensity of its activity has decreased since then. You may wish to check out its periodical, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, here and here. (Actually, we gave Chris a $2000 grant a decade ago for a book on the Zapatistas that he has never produced).
And I encourage you to attend the RAT conference, where there are always very vibrant discussions (Chris actually delivered his paper at the very first RAT).
Here is a periodical that I published for a number of years (which merged with Perspectives on Anarchist Theory at one point).
I also work very closely with AK press, which publishes about two dozen books annually that are relevant in various ways to building a revolutionary movement. (In fact, I’m presently in discussions with a historian about producing an anthology of critical writings about Spanish anarchism).
These are some of the thing that come to mind immediately, but there is a lot more. All you need to do a search around. Obviously some things may appeal to you, others may not, but there’s a lot out there. (And feel free to ask me if you want more specific recommendations). I’m happy to help.
TellNoLies said
I guess I started it, but this thread seems to be more about me than about the article. Unfortunately this is pretty typical of how the article was greeted by the anarchist movement generally. Long story short the publication of this article made me an apostate in the eyes of most anarchists. Rather than engage its substantive points most of the responses degenerated into ad hominem atttacks of one sort or another. I humbly submit that this response reflects the fundamental inability of anarchism to answer the challenges posed in this article.
As a once prominent anarchist I felt (and continue to feel) a certain responsibility to publicize my criticisms of ideas that I once held and that I had very actively promoted. I don´t deny that, like a freshly recovering alcoholic, I may have taken up the task of articulating a critique of my past sins with a gusto that no longer seems so neccesary. But this does not mean that I feel any sort of general personal antipathy towards anarchists or the anarchist movement. On the contrary, I regard anarchists as fellow rebels against the rotten system we live under and retain enormous respect for the sincerity and determination of many groups and individuals. One such individual is Chuck. While I find many of his contributions to the discussions here frustrating, as I think my responses to them sometimes suggest, I have considerable respect for him as an individual as well as the projects that he has been part of. I still miss the friends I lost who could not accept my break with anarchism and very much cherish the anarchist friends and comrades I still have.
The basic facts around the publication of the article have been clarified already. I wrote the piece still thinking of myself as an anarchist, although in retrospect its pretty clear that the questions I was posing went to the heart of anarchism and could not really be answered satisfactorily within an anarchist framework.
I don´t doubt that what Chuck says is true, that there are anarchists who are seriously engaged in grappling with these questions. I haven´t kept up with the theoretical debates within anarchism (such as they are) but would eagerly read any such work Chuck might point me to.
Chuck makes a lot of hay out my statement that “We judge ideologies by their practical results,” which he reads as highly categorical. The article represents a transitional moment in my thinking on many questions and it should be read as such. While I still think practical results are important I would probably not put things in such an unqualified manner today. It should be remembered, however, that I was responding to what I percieved (I believe correctly) as a near-total refusal on the part of my then fellow anarchists to think at all systematically about the concrete results of anarchist practice. If my statement bends the stick to far in the other direction I ask only that this not be taken as a n excuse for avoiding engagement with the substantive issues of an article which, despite the many changes in my own thinking since I wrote it, I think still has much in its favor.
saoirse said
Chuck,
If not a critique I am curious what your summation or evaluation of the anarchist forces is. I too read Day’s document and as a former member of Love and Rage studied the available anarchist lit on the spanish civil war. But I am aware that recent scholarship might offer new insights. I do believe there is Day had a bibliography floating around somewhere. Maybe he can dig it up.
Additionally what role does practical results have in political struggle. Is it that Day’s formulation posits practical results as central? I’m not clear here.
More broadly, and here I can’t claim any deep knowledge but isnt the question of how you structure a military a tactical question determined by need. Certainly the US military has experimented with the structure of its counter-insurgent forces such as delta, special forces, marine recon, seals, etc. In many instances offering these specialized units great flexibility and autonomy. Conversely couldn’t an anarchist organization see the need for a short term army?
many thanks,
Saoirse
Mike E said
In the debates of the RCP, the very idea of practical results is raised as “economist” or “pragmatic” or revisionist.
The fact that we start the second Letter discussing whether the RCP had reached its goals or created political base areas was put forward (by some, in cluding on this site) as the epitome of an economist place to start.
But in fact, we seek to know the world in order to change the world (through production, revolution, or other human practice).
…. truth exists relative to reality (not relative to our goals). We do not judge truth by simply “what works for us (or for me) in any given time frame.”
But our strategies are evaluated relative to our objectives. If not, what would they possibly be evaluated in relationship to?
Chuck Morse said
Hi there,
I hope that it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle but, N3wday and Iris, I responded to your posts above (my reply is #16). My post was “held for moderation” for a bit (probably because it contained so many links). (I wrote that post before Saoirse and Tellnolies/Chris commented).
Chuck Morse said
Chris,
Of course I admire your determination and sincerity as well, even if we go at it occasionally. That has never been a question for me, as I’ve always assumed you know.
You write: “I guess I started it, but this thread seems to be more about me than about the article. Unfortunately this is pretty typical of how the article was greeted by the anarchist movement generally. Long story short the publication of this article made me an apostate in the eyes of most anarchists. Rather than engage its substantive points most of the responses degenerated into ad hominem atttacks of one sort or another. I humbly submit that this response reflects the fundamental inability of anarchism to answer the challenges posed in this article.”
You seem to be suggesting that anarchists, because they are anarchists, are incapable of responding to your essay in a substantive way, but I believe that my reply (post #4) was quite substantive. I challenged both the details and the premises of your piece (and even you seem to concede that my comments about pragmatism were accurate).
As I said before, I think that it is correct to say that the classical anarchist movement failed, but wrong to say it has failed exclusively or even particularly. The whole revolutionary and even enlightenment tradition has failed and is in crisis. It is important to appreciate the breadth of the challenges that we face in order to avoid facile and hasty solutions.
And the anarchist movement, which has by no means answered all the big questions, has grown over the last decade, both organizationally and theoretically. I am happy to point people to relevant works whenever I can, although for the purposes of this tread, I mainly wish to assert that the movement is dynamic and developing and that all of you and all of us would be ill-advised to consign it to the dustbin of history.
In terms of the question of power–one of Chris’s main concerns–the impact of post-modernism has prompted anarchists to rethink what power means and how it operates. I don’t believe that any one has come up with the answers, but people are asking serious questions and the debates are evolving.
It gives me some pleasure to note Chris’s contributions to the anarchist movement have had a far more lasting impact than his critiques. As an anarchist, he was a strong advocate for organization and for making white supremacy a central priority of our work. These things were in doubt two decades ago, whereas now they are virtually uncontested. He bears some responsibility this. [As an anecdote: as part of my work with AK Press, I’ve been helping--quite modestly--prepare for the Critical Resistance 10 conference that begins today in Oakland (we co-published a book with CR, we’re promoting the conference through our blog, I’ve been finding translators, etc). I’ve been thinking about Chris, and some of his contributions, while I’ve been doing this.]
* * *
Saoirse, I would be happy to discuss this more, but I think my post above (#16) addresses some of your comments. Please let me know if it doesn’t.
With respect to military strategies, I think that changes in military technologies (particularly the advent of nuclear weapons) have totally transformed the meaning of revolutionary warfare.
gangbox said
Comrade Christopher
In your essay, you cite the standard Maoist view of the Chinese Revolution, and why it had to be a peasant revolution
“The Chinese Revolution must be understood in this context. It was overwhelmingly a peasant revolution that destroyed a very rotten old system, redistributed the land, and established China’s relative economic independence from imperialist domination. Only once these fundamental tasks had been carried out did it even become possible for the Chinese Communist Party to talk about what to do with China’s puny capitalist sector. The cities had been controlled by the Kuomintang and the only significantly industrialized region, Manchuria, had been under Japanese control. The industrial proletariat, such as it was, did not have either the experience or the organization to take matters into their own hands. Any move to do so would need the active support if not of the peasantry, then of the Communist Party.”,
One little problem, as usual, you edit out the Chinese industrial proletariat’s short but powerful history of urban revolutionary activism (in particular, the massive workers revolts of 1925-27… which were led into the blind alley of popular frontism on orders of Stalin and the Comintern, which led to the horrible massacres of 1927).
Here’s some data on that history (from a variety of perspectives):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_12_Incident
http://www.socialistalternative.org/literature/china2/ch1.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/chinesehistory/contents/04ear/c10.html
http://original.britannica.com/eb/topic-112450/Chinese-Communist-Party
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr232/reese.htm
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/alex/works/in_trot/china1.htm
http://www.zhongguo.org/trotsky/revbetrayed/images/China/35.htm
http://www.marxist.com/Asia/chen.html
So much for your claim that Chinese industrrial workers “…did not have either the experience or the organization to take matters into their own hands…” But for the betraals of the Comintern in 1927, the industrial workers of China would have, like their Russian counterparts, actually led the revolution.
GREG BUTLER
TellNoLies said
I have limited internet access presently, making my responses neccesarily abbreviated. Chuck made several points in his earlier post that deserved a response.
Chuck writes:
“By not placing anarchism in the larger context of the failure of all the optimistic, utopian traditions, Chris obscures the need for a broad, sweeping reconception of the revolutionary tradition as such (not just, or even particularly, anarchism).”
This is weak. I wrote the article as an anarchist concerned about the implications of this failure for anarchism. As the implications of it all became clearer for me I argued in many other places precisely for the need for “a broad, sweeping reconception of the revolutionary tradition as such” and this is precisely what attacted me (and presumably Chuck as well) to Kasama.
It is always easy to point out what an argument (or a novel or a movie) DOESN’T do. In somes cases there is value in that, but more often it is a dodge, a way of avoiding the substantive content of what WAS said. No, this article didn’t criticize the failures of Leninism, Christianity or the Enlightenment (though it did acknowledge the validity of such criticisms precisely in the passage that Chuck attacks for its pragmatism).
Chuck goes on: “if we don’t need to reconcieve of the revolutionary tradition, and our problems are fundamentally practical, then it makes to advance an organizational/technical solution to our problems, which is what Chris does when he calls for an army. That would make sense, but our challenges are really much deeper than that.”
Chuck misses the point completely if he reads this article as a “call for an army.” The question of the need for an army is given the attention it gets here, not because of a fixation on an organizational/technical solution, but because it goes to a question at the heart of anarchism which has dogmatically rejected an elementary lesson of its experience in Spain precisely because it reveals deeper theoretical weaknesses. I have not spent the years since I wrote this article building a revolutionary army (though I have dedicated considerable effort to studying one, the EZLN).
Chuck writes: “With respect to the logical issues, Chris argues that anarchists are responsible for Spanish fascism (Franco). The anarchist’s did not build a lasting revolution and thus, Chris declares, “the Spanish people were condemned to forty years of fascist rule”.
“Burdening the anarchists with responsibility for Franco’s victory is truly nutty: it’s like blaming the German Communist Party for the holocaust because they failed to seize power when Hitler rose or like blaming Benjamin Franklin for bombing Hiroshima because he invented electricity. Indeed, whatever the failures of the Spanish anarchists may be, and there are many, they did not cause Franco to take power.”
This is not a question of logic, but of responsibility. The failure of the KPD to defeat Hitler most certainly contributed to the Holocaust. The point that I was making was not that that the Spanish anarchists are therefore morally equivalent to Franco (or the KPD to Hitler) but rather the more obvious point that our strategic failures have big consequences and that it is therefore unconscionable to fail to sum them up as the anarchist movement so clearly did around Spain. To suggest otherwise is IMHO to throw dust in peoples eyes in order to confuse them about this simple but important point.
Chuck goes on “Chris is also confused about the facts of the Spanish anarchist experience (and there is a reason why nothing is footnoted). I’ll just mention two of his falsehoods for now: First, Chris says that the anarchist militias produced “disastrous military consequences” because they were decentralized and non-authoritarian. However, it was precisely the anarchists and their decentralized and non-authoritarian militias that stopped Franco from seizing power immediately: without them, he would have been in control within twenty-four hours. (The Socialists refused to arm the people and the Communists had no influence). I’m not sure how that qualifies as a “disaster.””
This is pretty simple. My comment characterized not just the important first days of Spanish Revolution, but its entirety. Did the militias save the day in the face of Franco’s initial attempt to seize power? Absolutely. Were they adequate to the military tasks of the ensuing civil war? Absolutely not. My view is NOT that militias are worthless, but rather that there are limits on what they can accomplish that were exceeded in Spain and that we should expect to be exceeded in other revolutionary situations.
Chuck writes:
“Second, Chris says that anarchists made no “effort to analyze how the anarchist movement contributed to its own defeat,” which is simply untrue. I can think of at least a dozen books on the topic. Evidently Chris hasn’t read these books, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
Here we have a simple case of selective quotation. The full quote of what I said is:
“And yet while the anarchist movement of the past half century has produced an extensive literature extolling the momentary successes of the Spanish Revolution in the creation of peasant and workers collectives, there has been almost no serious effort to analyze how the anarchist movement contributed to its own defeat. Blaming ones political enemies (fascists, Communists, or social-democrats) for behaving exactly as one would expect them to behave only further confuses matters. Betrayal, after all, is only possible on the part of someone trusted.”
Absent from Chuck{s selective quote are the important words “almost no serious.” What is at issue here is not the existence of anarchist analyses of the Spanish Revolution, but of their quality. Here again I would invite Chuck to direct us to the readings he thinks contradict this characterization.
Mike E said
Moderator note: This thread has been personalized. It was intended as a chance to dig into some issues around anarchism — not to dig into issues about Chris (pro and con, then and now). I realize some of you have been discussing these matters for years — and think of this as an old discussion with each other. But let’s break with that. Can we even pretend that the author of this essay is not among us — and just discuss the issues?
Radical-Eyes said
To Chris/Tell No Lies:
Thanks very much for your thoughtful article. I find myself very much in agreement with it, and plan to pass it on to a number of anarchist, and also trotskyist,-oriented friends of mine.
I would be interested to see what people have to say about the applicability of many of Chris’s criticisms of anarchism to trotskyism as well…I think in particular of your vital point that –to paraphrase– revolutions are generally going to occur in national situations of great “objective constraint”: imperialist enirclement and intervention, civil war, broad social disintegration, etc–which will force these revolutions, and would-be revolutionary states, whether they want to or not, to deal with difficult questions on which “survival” itself depends.
It seems to me that much simplistic “anti-Stalinist” “critiques” of Soviet policies such as the 1939 Non-Aggression Treaty with Nazi Germany seem to fall prey to this same blindness to objective conditions, and indeed this same lack of dialectical thinking. –Freedom and Necessity interpenetrate, and, alas, the unwillingness to grasp this basic concept renders even much “left” history of key historical junctures really manichean and more or less an exercise in moral purificaton.
But I digress…
Actually Chris, I wanted to ask you: Do you still hold that marxism at it essence is “statist” and “authoritarian” (sorry if I am sloppily paraphrasing here!) or is this language–mainly found in the rather quick conclusion of your article– itself a residual trace of earlier beliefs in what you yourself have characterized as a “transitional” document.
Solidarity,
Joe
Chuck Morse said
I certainly welcome the opportunity to discuss the questions that Chris raises in this essay. As I said before, I think many of them are important, even though I believe that he frames them inadequately.
Chris (quite fairly) says that he wrote his article “as an anarchist concerned about the implications of this failure for anarchism,” although his piece should be seen as an attack on anarchism and its cardinal principle: its anti-authoritarianism. For Chris, this anti-authoritarianism caused anarchists to fail in the Ukraine and to fail in Spain and, as a result, “the Spanish people were condemned to forty years of fascist rule”. To use Maoist parlance, the anarchists “betrayed the people” by refusing to build a top down, revolutionary army.
It is no accident that Chris celebrates the Chinese Communist Party in the piece or that he became a vocal anti-anarchist after writing it.
But is Chris right to assert that the anarchist movement possessed deep ideological and organizational problems? Yes, of course he is.
And is Maoism the answer to these problems? Absolutely not.
The anarchist movement failed to make its revolution not because of its anti-authoritarianism, but rather because of other assumptions that it shared with the rest of the socialist left. I refer to its assumptions about the relationship between the economic and political structures, its progressive vision of human history, its ideas about class formation, to name some of the most important. These issues (among others) prevented anarchists from situating themselves in the historical landscape in such a way that would have enabled them to realize their transformative aims.
Were these problems unique to anarchism? No, they were not. Can you confront these problems without also challenging the precepts of other revolutionary traditions? No, you can’t.
And this is what’s wrong with Chris’s article: he doesn’t put his critique of anarchism in a broader context.
With respect to Spain, I’m glad that Chris is backpedaling from his assertion that the “military consequences [of the anarchist militias] were disastrous.” He now seems to acknowledge a fact that is uncontested elsewhere: that the anarchist militias stopped Franco in his tracts during the early days of the conflict and, without them, there were would have no civil war or social revolution.
But he still has his facts mixed up. The anarchists militias were “militarized” in the fall of 1936, three or four months after the Civil War began. This militarization meant the transformation of the militias into a regular army.
Chris’s article suggests that the anarchists would have rejected the constitution of a regularly army, but they didn’t. They accepted it. And, likewise, his article suggests that the constitution of a revolutionary army would have allowed Spanish revolutionaries to defeat Franco, which it didn’t. Franco won.
So, while these are interesting issues to discuss, Chris’s analysis makes little sense because he is confused about the facts.
As for anarchist summations of the Spanish Civil War, Chris says there are no “serious” anarchist analyses of the events, but he doesn’t specify what he means by “serious.” If, by “serious,” he means analyses that echo his condemnation of anarchism and celebration of the Chinese Communist Party then, it’s true, there are no “serious” works on the topic. However, if by “serious” he means books that critically examine the relationship between anarchist practice and ideals and their respective impacts on the Spanish Civil War, then there are at least a dozen books on the topic. Chris seems to think that such works do not and, in fact, cannot exist. Fortunately, he’s mistaken on both counts. (Chris, please contact me offline if you’re interested in some titles.)
zerohour said
“Chris, please contact me offline if you’re interested in some titles.”
I think we’d all be interested in those titles. Why don’t you post them here?
irisbright said
Is it fair to say anti-anarchist? I consider myself a communist, but not anti anarchist. I don’t agree with Chavez, and I think he needs to be heavily criticized, but I’m not anti-Chavez. I think of anti- as embodying a particularly strong opposition. Anarchists are our brothers and sisters in struggle. You don’t agree with Maoist methods, are you anti-Maoist? Maybe you are; I guess I am curious if tellnolies considers himself anti-anarchist, or if there is some hatred of anti-authoritarians that I may not know about!
And I would also be interested in those titles. Thanks Chuck!
Chuck Morse said
I would be happy to recommend books by anarchist authors on the Spanish Civil War. I hadn’t done so thus far because I believed that Chris’s comments about the available literature were fundamentally polemical in nature. That is, I suspect that he is/was less interested in learning about anarchist commentary on the Spanish Civil War than in arguing that anarchists–because they are anarchists–are inherently unable to produce insightful literature on the events.
In any case, Chris’s position is ill-informed, as the following list of anarchist authored books should demonstrate.
I tried to limit myself to English-language works that contain substantive discussions of the CNT-FAI’s confrontations with power (although I included two Spanish titles which are especially germane). I came up with the list in a few minutes, which doubtlessly would be much longer if I put more time into it.
These books all have various merits and demerits and I am not endorsing them by listing them here. I am simply pointing to some of the key texts in the critical anarchist literature on the Spanish Civil War.
1. Abel Paz, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution
2. Murray Bookchin, The Third Revolution (Vol 4).
3.Murray Bookchin, To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936.
4. Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution
5. Jose Peirats, Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution
6. Agustín Guillamón, The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937-1939
7. Chris Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937
8. Lorenzo César, M. (1972). Los anarquistas expañoles y el poder, 1868-1969
9.Rudolf Rocker, The Tragedy of Spain
10. Stuart Christie, We The Anarchists!: A Study Of The Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927–1937
11. Diego Abad de Santillán, Por Que Perdimos la Guerra
12. Antoni Castells i Durán, Desarrollo y significado del proceso estatizador en la experiencia colectivista catalana (1936-1939)
This list should help people see how wrong Chris is to declare that anarchists are incapable of a “serious” engagement with the topic. But I also want to say that I have never limited my reading to writers whose ideological commitments I share. I’ve read works on Spain by Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, liberals, and even fascists. All of them, in addition to those above, have enriched my understanding of the events.
zerohour said
“The anarchist movement failed to make its revolution not because of its anti-authoritarianism, but rather because of other assumptions that it shared with the rest of the socialist left. I refer to its assumptions about the relationship between the economic and political structures, its progressive vision of human history, its ideas about class formation, to name some of the most important. These issues (among others) prevented anarchists from situating themselves in the historical landscape in such a way that would have enabled them to realize their transformative aims.”
There are problems with the assumptions of post-Enlightenment thinking that are shared across the left. One of the strengths of the radical Enlightenment is that it provided the tools for a critique so that a notions such as “inevitability” and “progress” have been challenged from within the left itself. But each strain of left politics has specific features that substantially mark them off from the others so I find Chuck’s argument above a bit of a dodge. It ignores the obvious fact that at least one strain of the socialist left, communism, has actually overthrown states, and anarchism has not. This is not sufficient to establish communism as a superior liberatory praxis or anarchism as an inferior one, but when there is a consistent pattern over time, it is necessary to at least consider why anarchism has never managed to attain one of its primary goals, and whether causation can always be relegated to the outside.
The Spanish Revolution plays a key role in debates about anarchism for good reason. It was the one instance where anarchism could demonstrate its viability as a revolutionary strategy and, if successful, also as a means of organizing society on a nation-wide scale. Anarchists proudly, and correctly, point out that anarchism was the dominant radical politics among the Spanish working class from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. One would think this was because of anarchism’s specific features, not just features it shared with other leftist ideologies. So if anarchist ideological hegemony can be explained on its inherent merits, why should its failure as a political strategy be shared among others?
Chuck’s argument is a case denying for others what he demands for himself. Communist failures are ascribed to their supposedly inherent authoritarianism. Period. Anarchist failures, on the other hand, must be placed in context, and the failures are really found in secondary aspects not even specific to anarchism – therefore, anarchism didn’t really fail at all! Tellnolies was wrong when he said anarchists didn’t do “serious” work addressing criticisms. Evasiveness takes effort too!
I tend to agree that anarchism’s problem is not its emphasis on anti-authoritarianism, autonomy or decentralization. These are its strong points and communists would do well to learn more from anarchist thinking and practice on these matters. Anarchism is hampered by its absolutist insistence on adhering to the above principles at all costs. This assumes that desire must always trump material necessity, but reality imposes certain options and dogma makes it impossible to evaluate the needs of the moment, much less formulate the proper means to address those needs. There are concrete tasks that may require top-down organization for an extended amount of time, like overthrowing a state. Refusing to even consider such an option means that 1] opportunities will be wasted, or 2] those rare moments when it implemented, anarchists become disoriented. Communists have had the exact opposite problem in not knowing when decentralization is necessary and preferred, but I would argue Maoism has gone the furthest in addressing this in practice.
A point of controversy among communists is the CNT-FAI joining the government of Catalonia. There are reams and reams of writing on this so I won’t even try to get deeply into it but I think it gets to the heart of the nature of anarchism. When the CNT-FAI joined the Catalan government, it wasn’t just a practical matter of whether it was necessary to preserve the gains of the revolution up to that point, but it raised questions about whether such actions were consistent with anarchism, and if not, how it reflected on the viability of anarchism?
Chuck Morse said
Zerohour, as much as I welcome your interest in my ideas, you should understand that I do not hold many of the ideas that you attribute to me (or anarchists generally) in your last post.
You say: “Anarchists proudly, and correctly, point out that anarchism was the dominant radical politics among the Spanish working class from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. One would think this was because of anarchism’s specific features, not just features it shared with other leftist ideologies. So if anarchist ideological hegemony can be explained on its inherent merits, why should its failure as a political strategy be shared among others?”
Anarchism was indeed the dominant tendency on the Spanish left in the period that you mention, but there are complicated reasons for this. Whatever “one would think,” to cite your comment, I have never explained this by pointing to anarchism’s “inherent merits“ (whatever that means). Events are far more complicated.
You write: “Chuck’s argument is a case denying for others what he demands for himself. Communist failures are ascribed to their supposedly inherent authoritarianism. Period.”
I have never ascribed Communist failures to their inherent authoritarianism, supposed or otherwise. Again, the world is more complicated.
You write: “A point of controversy among communists is the CNT-FAI joining the government of Catalonia. There are reams and reams of writing on this so I won’t even try to get deeply into it but I think it gets to the heart of the nature of anarchism.”
I am pretty sure that you’re referring to the anarchist’s entry into the Madrid not the Catalan government. Anarchists joined the Catalan government in September 1936, but there is next to nothing written about that (I can’t think of a single article on the topic in any language). They joined the Madrid government two months later and, yes, there are reams written about that.
You accuse me of dodging difficult issues and being evasive and yet you attribute views to me that I have not articulated and do not hold and you are also, it appears, confused about some of the basic facts.
I agree that there is a lot to debate here, but I would suggest that you reflect a little upon your approach to this discussion before casting aspersions upon mine.
ryan d said
I’ve been following this discussion and others on Kasama for a while now. It’s been heartening to hear the level of discussion that happens on this website.
I personally have been thinking lately about the classifications that leftists use and how this can act as a detrimental divide. Specific to this discussion are the classifications of communist and anarchist. I run in political circles of which self-described anarchists and communists take part. Often one grouping attacks or in some way negatively interacts with the other because of preconceived ideas about the other. Communist as authoritarian, anarchist as not serious nor effective, for example. To me this seems like a continuation of the contentions between Marx and Bakunin in the First International. They drew the line in the sand and people today still choose one side or the other, even people who are not aware of what happened a century and a half ago. Of course on either side of the divide many more lines have been drawn.
What I want others to chime in on is the possibility of transcending this divide. Is there a possibility to create new revolutionary political forms that do away with divisive classifications?
I find myself often in the middle being pulled one way or the other, yet I do not wish to be either/or. I chose to write in mainly because Zerohour seems to share some of my own concerns in his/her second to last paragraph. Groups like sds (of which I am involved in) have tried this organizationally, but what I am curious about is whether this can be done ideologically.
nando said
I want to transcend old labels and classifications — but in order to engage (debate, unite and divide) over the burning issues and contradictions of this moment.
And many of the “old issues” will reappear. Many arguments that made their appearance in old controversies will reappear — perhaps with new twists and garb.
I think we need to really think about the response that Prachanda gave to the comrade in NYC last week. He started with “concrete analysis of concrete conditions is the living soul of marxism.”
I think we should start with our problems, our contradictions, in the world as it exists now. And let it rip. And i think the results will surprise us. Already, i have felt the hands of old comrades slip slip away…. because they are wedded to rigid thinking and simplistic “truths,” i.e. to rampant self-deception.
So, i am not naive… I think that many of things Marx and Bakunin fought over are not THAT distant or removed from our world. The contradictions of social and individual still pose themselves. The questions of how one forms a revolutionary driving core capable of leading revolution will pose itself again. Issues of democracy (both radical democracy-of-the-base and bourgeois electoral democracy) are sharply posed.
But I don’t think we can make a revolutionary attempt by “adhering” or “persevering” to a set of ideas that are “there for the takinig” — but only by creatively applying experience to “concrete analysis of concrete conditions.”
Revolution in the real world is always a shocker. Each revolution is a shocker. Because life is unpredictable, because complexity gives rise to great particularity, because the new is truly new (and the old can be deceptive in its similarities to the new).
I think we should plan to have a broad ideological discussion — substantive, comradely, fresh, with open/critical minds — but lets not fool ourselves: the goal is fresh lines of demarcation, fresh verdicts (that will be disputed).
I don’t assume I will agree with Chuck (or you, Ryan), but I expect to learn from both of you. I actually am a communist (not an anarchist). I actually am a Maoist (not just by “tradition” or decent or habit — but by conviction).
But I hope to be challenged, jostled, shaken, probed, filled in, surprised, schooled… at the very least. In ways that help generate our larger collective process.
There is urgency to break with the deadhand of the past, and really look at this moment, this world and these times around us without foggy goggles, blinders, and refracting prisms.
Several people have spoken about how old the revolutionary left has felt to them — hidebound, fractured along old breaks, running in old ruts, repeating old assumptions.
Lets rip each other out of that. And beyond that…. well, we’ll just see. The future is unwritten.
Chuck Morse said
Myself and another comrade co-manage AK Press’s blog and we just published a post recommending various books on Spain. For those interested, it’s here: http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/recommended-reading-the-spanish-civil-war/
Jacob Richter said
The current anarchist (even of the more respectable class-strugglist type) obsession with decentralized organization, social movements, NGOs, etc. (and their failure, as evidenced by the manipulations of the Brazilian “Workers” Party) reminds me too much of Lenin’s warning on tred iunionizm:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/fetishizing-social-movements-t89791/index.html
http://www.isreview.org/issues/61/rev-revnotfunded.shtml
“People talk about stikhiinost. But the stikhiinyi development of the worker movement goes precisely to its subordination to bourgeois ideology [...] because the stikhiinyi worker movement is tred-iunionizm, is Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei – and tred-iunionizm is precisely the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie.” (Vladimir Lenin, What Is To Be Done?)
Napsterner said
When one talks of anarchist failures its good to qualify what one means by failure.
In terms of the anarchist movement I would say that the collapse started before Spain before during and after world war 1 when anarchists were pondering whether they should drop the vitalistic part of their philosophy and become more political(marxisism). Parsons and Serge are good microcosms of what was happening, they both suffered losses in their life and they both pondered whether they should do more separation of means and ends. Unfortunately both did just that, Parsons became a vanguard, and Serge became Lenin’s domesticated anarchist attraction. These sadly were not isolated events, other anarchists were engaging in this encroaching radical realpolitik. Emma and Benito held up the basic principles well after eastern Europe and Spain but others like Nestor got drunk and ended up slurring anarchism as well as his speech in Paris. Anarchism has never been a political philosophy, the decline of anarchism is explicitly tied to this. When anarchists went down this road they might have stuck a fork in the basic principles of anarchy. As loathsome as Lenin was he did not exist on his own, he was part of a discursive current that was changing for the worse. Mass politics was making the larges evolution that we have ever seen and probably the last significant evolution it will ever make. Anarchists unfortunately were not a bulwark against this, they aided and abetted this movement.
In terms of Spain the failures there can be pretty much traced to the point that anarchists abandoned being social and assumed the political roles(on their knees). The moment that CNT decontextualised what it was and became an organization in itself, that’s when the it was all thrown into the toilet. Anarchism is not political, its not and never will be for those who are serious about the ideals. The engaged in a intellectual terrain that was built for Marxists starting from Marx’s impersonal ‘change the world’ slogan. When it comes to the fundamental issues we face, they are issues of how we relate to each other nothing more nothing less. As Gustav said, change your behavior as an individual and species and you put an end to this. The solution IS NOT political never has been. What people like Chris want for anarchism is more politics, this is what sent anarchism into a decline in the first place. The fundamental separation of you and your relatives, workmates, children et all. The grouping of ideological experts and those who need preaching to. The maintenance of a particular choir in France with special attention to the seating arrangements on the left. It’s time to get beyond this people. Revolutions are not about territory(certainly not now)
The solution is and always has been social, get the politics out of it. This is the great tragedy of the 20th century. Why so much energy was extinguished in the early part of c20 and wasted. There nothing more to really be conquered or centralized any more. There’s nothing to but decentralize at this point. If there is another big shake up coming then lets not repeat the politicized nonsense of the last century. As don’t be Marx the farce. Don’t let insurrections die like last time and above all else, if you are serious about creating a new world, be joyful and spare us the ideological sacrificial imperatives.
TellNoLies said
Chuck,
A few points:
1. Thanks for the book list. I’ve read the first six of the titles on your list. While several of them are worthwhile reads, I don’t regard any of them as “serious” critical examinations of the reasons for the anarchist defeat. The Vernon Richards book, despite its promising title, is a particularly egregious example of the sort of uncritical analysis that I was criticizing. I have not read any of the Spanish-language titles on your list, though I have read others. I should note that at the time I wrote “The Historical Failure” my only exposure to the Spanish-language literature was the little that was available in translation, (e.g. Juan Gomez Casas’ history of the FAI). Of the remaining titles, is there any one or two that you think stand out in addressing the questions I raised?
2. While I think the Maoist experience in China offers a better model of how to wage a popular revolutionary war than the anarchist experience in Spain and my break with anarchism was coupled with a generally more sympathetic view towards Maoism (witness my participation here), I do not consider myself a Maoist. I agree with you on the need for a sweeping critical reappraisal of the whole experience of the revolutionary left. That said I don’t think all trends are equally rich in experiences.
3. While the “The Historical Failure” is ostensibly about the historical experience of the anarchist movement, its real importance is as a polemic against more general theoretical weaknesses within contemporary anarchism. Its NOT mainly about whether anarchists have written about Spain or whether the militias accomplished any good. There is a sort of refusal to see the forest for the trees in your responses both to my article and to Zerohour’s argument above which I think goes to heart of the matter.
TellNoLies said
Joe,
I consider myself a Marxist. I no longer think Marxism is inherently “authoritarian” or “statist” but I also don’t think those terms, as they are commonly used by anarchists, are particulalrly useful measures of anything. If by “statism” you mean any position that admits of the possible neccessity of the state under particular circumstances, or by “authoritarianism” any position that sees any value ever in the exercise of centralized authority I think those terms are basically empty. I agree with Nando that anarchism’s problem is with the absolutism with which it applies the essentially correct insight that the over-reliance on centralized authority and state power in the revolutionary process is dangerous. I also think that the chief task of revolutionary theory in the 21st century is to develop a praxis that avoids the authoritarian and statist errors of revolutionary movements and regimes in the 20th century without losing sight of their real accomplishments (not the least of which is the actual successful overthrow of actual states).
zerohour said
Chuck -
“I am pretty sure that you’re referring to the anarchist’s entry into the Madrid not the Catalan government. Anarchists joined the Catalan government in September 1936, but there is next to nothing written about that (I can’t think of a single article on the topic in any language).”
I found a few internet references to the Catalan, not Madrid, controversy here, here and here. Peirats has a whole chapter on this in Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution.
Regardless of whether it was Catalan or Madrid, the larger question is how the CNT entry into the state affected and challenged anarchist notions about the revolutionary process, popular power, and post-revolutionary society.
With the lessons of Spain, and more recent history, in mind, what are some current anarchist ideas on these questions:
Can revolution be brought about by decentralized means?
Is it feasible to go from capitalist society directly to a classless, stateless one? What are the preconditions that must be met?
Without a state, how will a revolutionary society address problems that previous revolutions had to address, like external attacks from imperialists, diplomacy, trade relations, coordination of resources on a nation-wide scale, etc.,?
I apologize for ascribing views to you that are not your own. I was mistakenly projecting views that are actually shared by many other anarchists. At the same time, if anarchists and communist problems can be traced back to shared assumptions, what else can account for communist failure but the one [?] difference they have: anarchists reject the need for a state under any circumstances and communists argue that it’s necessary to transition out of class society? In other words the “authoritarian” issue.
I’m aware that the success or failure of revolutionary movements are complex and can’t be reduced to their ideological pronouncements. There are historical, demographic and international factors at work. Countries have different experiences with popular revolts, economic development, migration patterns, not to mention state apparatuses. However, this doesn’t change the fact that anarchism has not overthrown a single state and you ascribe its failures to do so to everything but its key element, anti-authoritarianism. A pattern has developed here. Even when historical contingency is taken into account, why has anarchism not overcome the challenges in its varied contexts?
Chuck Morse said
Zerohour, I believe that the entire revolutionary tradition (in which I include communists and anarchists) has failed to create the revolution that it sought to create. I do not believe that this failure is primarily a consequence communist authoritarianism or anarchist anti-authoritarianism, but rather the result of far more complicated phenomena.
You ask: “Can revolution be brought about by decentralized means? Is it feasible to go from capitalist society directly to a classless, stateless one? What are the preconditions that must be met? Without a state, how will a revolutionary society address problems that previous revolutions had to address, like external attacks from imperialists, diplomacy, trade relations, coordination of resources on a nation-wide scale, etc.,?”
These questions, which are good ones in my opinion, are impossible to answer without a very articulated definition of what you mean when you say “revolution.”
Would this revolution occur in a highly industrialized, wealthy country in the center like the United States? Or would it occur in a undeveloped, impoverished country in the periphery like Nepal? Would it even occur in one country? Would it occur in a region (e.g., Chiapas) or multiple countries? Would the working class lead the revolution? Would the peasantry lead the revolution? Would it be multi-class? And what exactly is a revolution? Is it primarily a class-based phenomenon or is it about democracy?
I suspect that most of the people on this site would acknowledge that these question have yet to be answered in a compelling way. The relative consensus that existed among revolutionaries on these matters in 1936 or 1917 (etc) has completely evaporated. And of course the issues that I’ve pointed to are just the tip of the iceberg.
So, while I think that the issues that you raise are important, I see no way around the need to face the larger questions about the meaning of revolution. This is why I said that we need to reconceptualize the entire revolutionary perspective. And I do not believe that calling for that is a dodge or evasive (as you suggested): I genuinely believe that our challenges are that deep.
But, with respect to Chris’s article, I think that it is a mistake to assert, as he does, that anarchism has failed while other elements of the revolutionary tradition have succeeded. (The failure has been universal, I’m sorry to say, despite the brief successes). And it is also a mistake to suggest, as Chris does, that revolutionaries can somehow solve their problems by “studying” Chinese communism: a reverential attitude toward the past, communist or anarchist, is a road to nowhere.
Mike E said
There are many things to engage here. There are a number of views expressed above by Chuck that I would like to understand better — largely because i don’t agree with them at first sight.
First, I would like you to elaborate why you think that the very meaning of revolution is in play. I have heard others say this, but don’t simply identify.
I hear the words, but I just don’t know what that means — what issues of meaning are “in play” and what it would mean to reconceptualize revolution itself.
On one level, we are breaking with an early (and perhaps inevitable) simplicity. Early revolutionaries of the 19th century thought revolution would be relatively soon, relatively quick, relatively global, relatively final. And the twentieth century proved the process of overthrowing capitalism is anything but soon, quick, final or immediately global. In that sense, I think there is a great deal to understand (about stages, uneven development, and a critique of “inevitability.”)
The global capitalist revolution took centuries (from the primitive hanseatic leagues to the emergence of the first national capitalist revolution in france, and then to the first stable capitalism on a world scale). there were many reversals, many changes of form and ideology — between the reformation of Luther and the union armies of Lincoln.
Second, I don’t think it is true that the experience of communism in the last century has been a failure.
I think it is true that anarchists have failed to make any lasting revolutions — and one reason i did not become an anarchist is that I concluded that failure flowed from a congenital problem with the anarchist concept. As a secondary point, the anarchists (unlike the communists) were unable to adopt their revolutionary approaches to engage the rising wave of anti-colonial revolution (and so lost out on much of the twentieth century’s stormcenter).
As Mao said (loosely quoting): “The commune form is too weak at dealing with counterrevolutionaries. You need a center, a party, somewhere in the structure.”
But, by contrast, my assessment has always been (and still is) that the experience of communist revolution has been a mix of success and failure. And that is quite an important advance for humanity. The existence of those successes (in the Soviet Union and China, and in places on their periphery) mark something radically new for human history — even though these victories brought (after decades) new complex experiences with capitalist restoration.
Chuck writes: “The failure has been universal, I’m sorry to say, despite the brief successes.”
I also want to make a Maoist distinction between defeat and failure. Forces can be defeated (simply because they were outnumbered and outgunned at a particular juncture) — but that doesn’t inherently mean that the cause of defeat was error or misconception. Defeated armies need to sum things up, and they probably need to adjust their game plans. But I still don’t equate defeat with failure — i.e. it doesn’t inherently mean a discarding of the whole framework or a crisis of basic conception.
I tend to think (as Prachanda said in answer to the floor) that communism has been much too closely associated with the very particular state formation that Stalin led in the Soviet Union. I think that it was particularly Russian, and arose from very particular conditions (including the minority support that the Bolsheviks had, the encirclement, and the constant restlessness of various nationalities within any federation).
There has been a sharp problem among communists of taking specific innovations or concessions and universalizing them. Avakian is doing it to an extreme degree now (where he insists his own preliminary and untested theories are crucial for all of humanity everywhere). The comintern did this promiscuously — insisting that one organizaitonal form was universal, that one program applied to all countries, that soviets were universal forms of socialist rule, that the national question of the world could be understood through the prism of Eastern Europe and so on.
But the Nepalis also do this when they declare parts of their Prachanda Path are universal (including multi-party competition under socialism and the fusion of insurrection and peopleswar). This is a general problem — and it almost always leads to errors in the particular.
On your last point:
Clearly a reverential attitude is worthless. We need a critical and materialist attitude. And we need a certain fearlessness and ruthlessness toward old cherished verdicts (those that are sacred cows, self-invented myths, half-truths, romanticized etc.) And that means there is a lot to rediscover about our own past.
I suspect that when this fearless and ruthless process is over that the Soviet and Chinese revolution will still stand quite tall and impressive. But we will be seeing them without the gauze, and able to extract the lessons of method (not mainly drawing up brittle models of universality).
But we don’t need to go into that ongoing process of summation and resummation with a verdict already in place. As mao said “just go through it and come out the other side.”
I don’t thin
TellNoLies said
Chuck,
There are failures and there are failures. The failure so far of communists to realize a classless society is of a different order than the anarchist failure to decisively overthrow a single state. Its the difference between the failure of the predecessors of the Wright Brothers to get their machines aloft and the failure of the Wright Brothers to make a transatlantic flight.
The Russian Revolution, to take one example, despite all of its many limitations, radically transformed the world. It gave working people across the West and colonized people everywhere else profound hope that they could throw off their chains. It forced the capitalist class everywhere to trim its sails and to make concessions in order to prevent “another Russia.” It legalized homosexuality and thereby opened the way for the emergence of the first gay rights movement in Germany. It legislated equality of the sexes and thereby transformed the terrain on which the fight for womens liberation occurred in the 20th century. It unleashed innovations in the arts. While all of these things would be reversed in varying degrees, the Pandoras box of human liberation had been opened. What you and I mean by the word “freedom” is indelibly marked by the accomplishments of the Russian Revolution.
The Spanish Revolution did not accomplish anything like this. It was rather a heroic defeat that resulted in the virtual evaporation of anarchism as a mass movement among the workers and peasants of the world, confining it primarily to the fringes of student and youth activism.
These are elementary facts that must inform the very neccesary work of critically analyzing the experiences of the entirety of the revolutionary left. I draw this contrast not to assert that the communist movement has figured out the path forward, or to argue that anarchism is worthless, but only to insist on a proper sense of proportion. This is what I mean when I say that not all trends are equal in the richness of their experiences.
You ask a series of very important questions that I agree that revolutionaries have to answer in the 21st century. The way I see it though is that if at the outset of the 20th century both anarchists and communists had an overly schematic understanding of the revolutionary process, that over the course of that century when they were put to the test, the communists proved much more successful in adapting to a world that didn’t conform to their preconceptions. Anarchists are very fond of the image of Marxists as doctrinaire dogmatists and themselves free spirited rebels, but I would submit that it was anarchist dogmatism on the inadmissibility of certain organizational forms that confined it to the margins of revolutionary activity for most of the 20th century.
Chuck Morse said
Tellnolies, there’s no doubt that the Communist movement had a greater impact on the course of the twentieth century than the anarchist movement. Definitely.
However, what makes something “rich in experience” is another question: if your criteria is simply the scope of something’s impact then you should probably spend your time studying, let’s say, the telephone, which surely had a greater impact on our daily lives than the Russian revolution.
Obviously that’s an absurd example. I use it simply to illustrate the presence of problematic assumptions in your claims about what is and what is not “rich in experience”.
Most of what you said about the Russian revolution is true: it was indeed responsible for many of the accomplishments that you identify.
And yet it also launched one of the most barbaric, totalitarian regimes in human history; one that probably did more to poison the revolutionary cause than any other single actor.
And that too has left an indelible mark on the usage of the word “freedom” today.
Does this prove that communism is bad and that anarchism is good?
No, of course not. It proves that history is complicated and that attempts to condemn one tradition (anarchism) and uphold another (communism) are untenable. History is complicated and full of counter-tendencies.
(Mike, I’ve been thinking over your comments. I’d like to do so a little more before responding).
TellNoLies said
Lets stipulate just for the sake of argument that the Soviet Union was “one of the most barbaric, totalitarian regimes in human history.” I think that is debatable, but it doesn’t really go to the point, which is that the we have no fracking idea what sort of society the Spanish anarchists would have established after ten or twenty years because they never got that far. We can’t learn from the mistakes they might have made because they didn’t get past Baltic Ave. So we are stuck with learning from the experiences of those movements that DID get that far. And yes, the results are decidely mixed, though I am with Mike that these revolutions nonetheless constituted big leaps in the protracted struggle for human freedom. The point here is an elementary one. If you want to climb a treacherous mountain you are best advised to concentrate your studies on those whose previous efforts got the furthest even if for precisely this reason they came to a worse end than those who never got past the first ascent.
Yes history is complicated and full of counter-tendencies. But that doesn’t mean we can’t formulate the elementary judgement that Roman Catholicism has proven more successful than the Shakers in passing the first hurdles of self-reproduction as a religious community. Talking about the relative goodness and badness of the two projects doesn’t really even make sense since the huge chasm between their impacts makes them really uncomparable.
As for the telephone, I think it actually makes considerable sense to study its impact, and more generally the ways that changes in communications technology transform the terrain of struggle. Such changes impose real limits on how much we can generalize from previous revolutionary experiences. The Leninist party is a sort of organizational technology that arose within the context of a particular technological configuration that has been superseded several times over in the intervening century. In many respects I think these transformations are greater cause for questioning its validity as a contemporary model for revolutionary organization than the anarchist critiques of its authoritarianism.
mmm. . . smurfs said
I’ve been an anarchist lurker here for a while now and have been following this thread with interest. I really do appreciate the level of discussion that goes on here and, honestly, I secretly wish that anarchist websites could produce the same kind of vigorous and considered debate. I remember reading Mr. Day’s article back in the day and I still think that many of its points are worth grappling with in a comradely way. I’ve been contemplating a more thought out and schematic response to the discussion here but the last post is so absurdly riddled with logical errors that I can’t help but respond directly.
First, let’s “stipulate” that the state that brought us the gulags, forced collectivization, the punitive use of psychiatry, the Stalinist show trials and purges, and the NKVD (not to mention the immoral invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan) is one of the most barbaric, totalitarian regimes in human history. If TellNoLies wants to take that off the table, fine, it’s off the table. Right now we’re talking about the historical failures of anarchism.
What really got my goat was his use of the facile analogy of the “treacherous mountain.” TellNoLies urges that we “concentrate our studies” on those who got the furthest over the mountains and ignore those who never got past the first ascent. This seems like an odd critique of anarchism. Anarchists have written volumes critiquing the failures of the Marxist-Leninists. If anything, we’ve been accused of obsessively “concentrating our studies” on these failures. People have argued that we represent nothing more than a critique of Leninism.
But we’re not really talking about “concentrating our studies.” What TellNoLies is urging is that we actually follow the path of those who got the furthest over the mountain. This ignores the fact that it’s possible that the reason that they only got so far and no further was because they were following the wrong path, which goes directly to the heart of the anarchist critique of marxist leninism. By establishing a cadre of professional revolutionaries that is to become the core of a revolutionary “workers’ state”, you sow the seeds of the new ruling class. To extend this painful metaphor, it’s like the anarchists were standing at the foot of the mountain saying, “Don’t go that way! You’ll be sure to encounter avalanches! Just last week, Bolsheviks went that way and we haven’t heard from them since!” And when the Marxist Leninists did in fact get bogged down in the snow, they criticize anarchists for not getting as far as they did.
I was going to get into the telephone analogy but this is really starting too feel too much like the tired anarchist-marxist polemics that have dominated relations between the two revolutionary traditions for going on a century and a half. MLs ask us what we have ever done that hasn’t ended in failure and we ask what they’ve ever done that hasn’t ended in gulags and the secret police.
If we have to answer for the failure of the Spanish anarchists to stop Franco and for the fact that Makhno drank too much whiskey, you have to answer for Pol Pot and the gulag archipelago. Is that really an argument you want to get into?
That being said, (and I think this is what Chuck is getting at) it seems silly to argue about who was more “successful” in the past century when it is obvious to any objective observer that both traditions have failed spectacularly in overthrowing this rotten patriarchal, racist, homophobic capitalist system. The entire project of the radical enlightenment has collapsed and to the extent that both anarchism and marxist-leninism draw from that tradition, sooner or latter we’re both going to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Napsterner said
Chuck is right about defining what revolution means.
For one thing is grounded on being social or political, being centripetal or contextual.
TnLs’ illustrations of the success of the Bolshevik revolution are very spurious at best. For one thing he obviously defines his standards by political, military, and centripetal impact, this is all fine and good when judging on a particular standard, certainly par for the course among authoritarians, but this hardly covers what is meant by the term revolution.
For me when one talks of revolution and success there must be a sense of context, there must also be a question of whether the potency of a revolution is reversible or not, this of course makes the reciprocity of means and ends very important(for some at least)
Also social mores and artistic tastes do not have a central or primary structuring element. In terms of sexuality, you had an explosion of relationships that we’re being transformed for the better as Vera Schmidt documented. Again this is before the political legislation in all its raw social forms, this is all that ultimately matters, while “political rights” might have a certain sense of practicality, I don’t think that rights, legislation and so forth really define what liberation is. Its the recuperation of raw human intercourse(as is all politics and their agents).
I’ll end with this quote from Gilles Dauvé’s ‘When Insurrections Die’
“Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its “military” dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”. The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any non-violent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.
To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems, in short for everything that plays down the common man. In Spain, from the fall of 1936 onward, the revolution dissolved into the war effort and into a kind of combat typical of states: a war of fronts. Soon the working-class “militia man” evolved into a “soldier”. “
leftspot said
mmm…smurfs says, in response to TellNoLies:
But instead of standing at the bottom of the mountain telling everyone not to follow the path the Marxist-Leninists took to get ‘up the mountain’, why haven’t any anarchists anywhere on the planet been able to forge their own better path up the mountain? That’s what it comes down to for me. The point isn’t to critique the actions of other revolutionaries — the point is to make revolution. If you have a better idea of how to do it and you’re so sure the Marxist-Leninists have got it all wrong, then by all means lead the way. I think the fact that no anarchists have been able to do that during the entire 20th and early 21st century — a period full of revolutions across the globe — has to mean something, no?
Napsterner said
“The entire project of the radical enlightenment has collapsed and to the extent that both anarchism and marxist-leninism draw from that tradition, sooner or latter we’re both going to be consigned to the dustbin of history.”
Well my dear lurker perhaps radicalizing the enlightenment was a mistake to begin with(admitedly in hindsight). The entire enlightenment project is really just a eurocentric, plato-christian infested caricature of better ideas from more ancient and pre-civilized times.
Also I like when bad ideas to begin with collapse. In 1968 the left for all intensive purposes was on its way to the dustbin. Then boom we all know what happened. Unfortunately that which was always stale got very good French seasoning, and the one thing you can say about the French,they can make ANYTHING look pretty(even modernity). I think we’re on the cusp of something big again. I suspect there will once again be workers councils and political demands with the accompanying experts unfortunately, the question is can some of us stop the decadence from setting in yet again.
greyday said
To Chuck, and other anarchists reading and posting:
I’ve been wondering for some time what anarchists have to say about Lenin’s State and Revolution.
On the one hand I’ve heard the cynical take, the one where Lenin just says whatever needs to be said knowing all along that he intended to disperse the Soviets. But lets assume for the sake of argument that what he put forward in State and Revolution was correct, that the State had to be destroyed, and that it had to be built again, but in a qualitatively different way with the arming of the whole populace forming the military, and the Soviets forming the “State”.
Do anarchists oppose such a program, and if so why?
On the other hand, given the distinctly anarchist flavor of some of the propositions put forward by Lenin in State and Revolution, does it seem a little disingenuous for communists to claim that they’re the only ones to have toppled the State when arguably the toppling of the czar was done on the basis of some more or less classic anarchist anti-statism?
One thing I have always found interesting is the positive relationship between anarchism and communism, the way they helped generate each other. Remember, Lenin’s brother was an anarchist. The Russian Revolution did not drop from the sky, but was deeply entangled in the history of Russian Anarchism. I like to think that anarchists were the first to give a try, and if not for them (and I think Lenin would agree with this) it would not have been possible to sum up mistakes in order to get to a point of success.
Aside from all of this, at what point did anarchism become this specific critique of centralism vs. decentralism? Is this a fixation throughout anarchism in the world, or is this a United States thing? One thing that strikes me about it is that it is NOT anti-statist. Practically it eliminates the ability to topple the State. But there is something more disturbing about it for me, it mimics the logic of the very State that we live under in the US. It was the founders who were obsessed with centralization vs. decentralization and political formalities designed to “check authority”. And they did all this in furtherance of what in fact is “the most barbaric, totalitarian regime in human history.”
I guess I’m wondering why anarchism has given up on putting an end to the State? Why have so many drifted into decentralized localisms and programs designed to create space WITHIN the current State? And is the constant talk of “authority” and “centralization” ironically a way of ditching the central confrontation in anarchist politics, the confrontation with the State?
Chuck Morse said
Although I’ve benefited from the intervening posts, I am going to focus my comments here on Tellnolies’s post #43.
TNL, I think that our dispute is not about where you or I or anyone else should ‘concentrate our studies,’ to paraphrase your statement, or what you or I or anyone else subjectively finds “rich in experience.” Frankly, I don’t really care what’s on your reading list and I doubt that you care what’s on mine.
I think that we differ about what political legacy contemporary radicals should embrace and also how to judge the merits of the different legacies out there.
You argue that communists have the most to teach contemporary radials because they, unlike anarchists, have actually seized power and reconstructed their societies over the course of decades.
While I agree that there are things to learn from the mainstream, dominant tendencies in communist history, I think that we are likely to learn more from the more marginal, anti-authoritarian tradition precisely because we want to do things differently (that is, we don’t want–or at least shouldn’t want–to build another totalitarian police state like the Soviet Union). We want to pursue a different path and thus it makes sense to study those who have tried to define and institutionalize a different path.
(And, actually, isn’t this why you’ve spent more than a decade “concentrating your studies” on the Zapatistas and not, for instance, Cuban Communists or the Sandanistas? The Zapatistas never overthrew a state and yet you seem to think that they’re pretty “rich in experience.”)
Having said that, I think that it’s less important where you “concentrate your studies” than how you concentrate them. A book that applies a conservative perspective to a revolutionary group will end up reinforcing conservative biases in a substantive way whereas a radical book on a conservative tendency is likely to offer real insights. It’s a question of method.
And, TNL, I see a pattern of pragmatism in your views. In the above article, you that write that “We judge ideologies by their practical results” and, here, a dozen years latter, you tell us that we should “concentrate our studies” on communists because they “got that far” (i.e., produced “practical results”).
I appreciate your focus on “results” in a way: I think that it probably helped you raise some of the important points in your article and it’s a good corrective to the fantasy worlds of groups like the RCP. (I keep thinking of a comment that Lukacs made when someone explained to him that various facts contradicted some basic Marxist propositions: “Some much the worse for the facts!” he replied…. That is an approach that we should avoid and one that the “results oriented” perspective helps us avoid.
However, a pragmatic, cost-benefit, instrumental, “results oriented” orientation is deeply unsatisfactory because it is devoid of ethical criteria and internally incoherent because it is unable to defend its own presuppositions.
In my view, examining and judging the merits of the various radical legacies requires a very different approach than the one that you seem to embrace.
TellNoLies said
Chuck,
I think you are correct that this argument is really “about what political legacy contemporary radicals should embrace and also how to judge the merits of the different legacies out there” and not about reading lists. I also acknowledge that there is a thread of pragmatism in my writings, but that this is a contradictory thing.
That said, I don’t think the relative “richness of experience” of different political trends is as subjective as you suggest. And while my arguments here have a pragmatic cast, I don’t agree that this reflects a “cost-benefit, instrumental, ‘results oriented’ orientation” that is “devoid of ethical criteria.” The question as I see it is what the relationship is between ones ethical criteria and the process of the ongoing investigation of the social world through study and participation in struggles. For me that process is neccesarily dialectical. I distrust arguments that start from ethical first principles not because I have no ethics but because I recognize ethics as products of continuous social and historical processes of construction. A critical part of the process of my political development has been precisely the constant interrogation of my ethical criteria in the light of new experiences and new knowledge of historical experiences. This is, as I see it, at the heart of Mao’s dictum to “seek truth from facts.” This is not a crude empiricism that imagines that the facts “speak for themselves” but rather a view that “the facts matter” and that serious attention to them is productive of richer theoretical (and ethical) reflection.
When I was first radicalized my “ethical criteria” and therefore my understanding of what freedom was, came from an attitude of really holding this society to the claims of its dominant ideology, liberalism. I think of much of my personal political development as a process of progressively grappling with the tenacious hold of liberalism on my thinking. What really distinguishes anarchism from communism is, I believe, its ABSOLUTIST stance on authority and the state, an absolutism that is, I believe, an inheritance of liberalism. I came to this view and to a rethinking of the ethical criteria that underpinned my anarchism, in part, through a process of historical study of the Spanish and Chinese Revolutions that led me to the conclusion that this absolutism was responsible for the historical defeats and failures of anarchism and that the ethical price of such a persistent record of defeat and failure was unacceptable.
With all that said there is at the end of the day a pragmatic element in my ethics that I am not ashamed of. I think winning matters. Not winning at all costs without regard to what precisely is won. But winning in the sense of winning real advances in human freedom. I think that ideas that repeatedly lead oppressed people into defeat, that never get people past smashing the existing state to the next set of problems of actually trying to reorganize society, are ETHICALLY indefensible. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t things of considerable value to be learned from the experiences that led to those defeats. I think there are. I think communists need to take the experiences of the anarchists in the Spanish Revolution far more seriously than most of them do. (And I concur with the recommendation of the movie “Libertarias” which I saw last week.) I think that failure and success interpenetrate, that the same absolutism that produced defeat produced some uniquely heroic and ambitious attempts to reorganize society, however briefly lived they were. We need to learn from them, but our ability to do so productively requires, I believe, that we face up to the fatal weaknesses that produced or at least contributed to their defeat.
Have you read Fanshen? Reading this book was a turning point for me precisely because it dealt with the very same phenomena that some of the most exciting studies of the Spanish Revolution deal with, the radical reorganization of life in a peasant village under conditions of civil war. All of the same sorts of contradictions and difficulties come up. But of course the results were radically different. The experiments of the Spanish peasants were strangled in the crib, while the peasants of Long Bow got to embark on several decades of struggles before the Deng “reforms” effectively brought an end to their revolutionary experimentation. The relative richness of these two experiences is not simply a matter of subjective taste. More importantly it is difficult to read Fanshen (and its sequels) without being compelled to view the Spanish experiences in a somewhat different light.
Chuck Morse said
TNL, I disagree, in principle, that we will necessary learn more by studying the victors of leftwing, sectarian battles. And I also disagree that the duration of particular initiative is the key indicator of its richness. To analogize, James Joyce’s Ulysses chronicles one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, its main character, whereas J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows follows a journey that was years in the making. Which do you think has more to teach?
These discussions about legacies of resistance point to questions that Mike raised about the meaning of revolution in post number 40. (I had meant to respond to this earlier, apologies.)
The legacies that we study and celebrate (and reject) reflect our convictions about the central contradictions in the present. For example, If we believe that present dilemmas should be explained fundamentally as class contradictions (or expressions thereof) then we are likely to construct history as a history of class struggle and build a political legacy around key moments of class conflict, class consciousness, etc. Or, alternately, if we adopt a democratic perspective and frame the present as fundamentally a contradiction between elites and the people, then we are likely to build a legacy around important moments in the development of democracy (the expansion of suffrage, new articulations in democratic discourse, etc).
And, in my view, the nature of historical development is presently open to debate in ways that it was not in 1917 or 1936, which is why I said that we need to rethink the meaning of revolution.
On the hand, the term “revolution” has been subject to constant interrogation by scholars for at least a half century now. Clearly a revolution marks a major transformation between one period and another, but what is it exactly? There was the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution: obviously, it seems easy enough to define these as revolutions. But what about the women’s liberation movement, for instance, which challenged forms of domination that were millennia in the making? The women’s liberation movement never seized power, but perhaps it made a revolution in gender relations and society as such. Or the gay liberation movement? Or the Renaissance? Or The Beatles? Or Bob Avakian? (Was there a cultural “revolution” within the RCP?).
To provide a coherent definition of “revolution,” we need to place it in a historical context (to show how it is a transition in a continuous series of events). Communists and anarchists both embraced a progressive view of history that emerged in the late eighteenth century (with people like Kant, Hegel, Herder, among others). This view provided a historical template in which to frame the political actions of revolutionaries (the symmetries are striking: for example, Lenin’s vanguard party played the exact same role as Hegel’s “world historical individuals”).
Although critics of this historical perspective have existed ever since it first appeared on the scene, they have been relentless and grown far more numerous since World War II (the impact of fascism prompted the first major breach). Although I agree with some of the criticisms and not with others, I no longer think that it is possible to simply assert a classical socialist (Marxist and anarchist) progressive view of history without a much more serious engagement with critics than has occurred thus far.
So, Mike, this is why I believe that the meaning of the word revolution is no longer as clear as it once was.
I am of the opinion that what some people (like Manuel Castells) call the “information society” is in fact a fundamentally different social form than the one that gave birth to and encompassed the classical revolutionary tradition.
redflags said
James Joyce’s Ulysses chronicles one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, its main character, whereas J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows follows a journey that was years in the making. Which do you think has more to teach?
Harry Potter. By a mile.
Nil said
” But lets assume for the sake of argument that what he put forward in State and Revolution was correct, that the State had to be destroyed, and that it had to be built again, but in a qualitatively different way with the arming of the whole populace forming the military, and the Soviets forming the “State”. ”
I haven’t read State and Revolution, it’s on my list. But in broad strokes, that sounds like a pretty good plan to me. Didn’t quite work though, did it?
I completely agree with Leftspot “The point isn’t to critique the actions of other revolutionaries — the point is to make revolution,” which is one reason these “anarchist vs. communist” debates are so tiresome (I suspect everyone in this discussion agrees, but we haven’t managed to avoid them, although this one isn’t as bad as it could be). In these debates, both ‘sides’ seem to me to be more interested in critiquing the actions of other revolutionaries than making a succesful revolution. From my point of view, a lasting successful revolution hasn’t happened yet. Capitalism rules the world, and nowhere on the planet is a liberated society that has even pushed it aside. Yet.
“Aside from all of this, at what point did anarchism become this specific critique of centralism vs. decentralism? Is this a fixation throughout anarchism in the world, or is this a United States thing?”
I’m not sure what you mean by that really. I think maybe what you’re seeing is specific to the US, I see what you’re saying about similarities to the kind of political discourse we’re taught as the legacy of our ‘founding fathers’. But I think most anarchists have a radical democracy of one sort or another as a priority, which seems to me to be incompatible with a centralization of _power_. I got the feeling decentralization of power was a priority for many types of Maoists as well?
If you read the comments section on one of the most popular English language anarchist news/discussion websites, you’ll find very tiresome debates among mostly US anarchists about whether strong organization is good or bad. I get the feeling that that “pro vs anti organization” debate is a very US thing, with most international anarchists thinking good organization is obviously important. But even the “pro organization” side would perhaps seem to be fetishizing decentralized organization to Greyday
Napsterner said
Well debates on organization to a certain extent reflect views on what human social organization as a whole should be, whether the global caters to the local or vice versa. Anarchists who are for mass organization will want tactics that reflect that, anarchists that want some thing that simply rolls with a context and a particular situation will want something a little smaller. Also quit with this silly American exceptionalism, if you look at anarchist tendencies in places like Greece, Italy or France to name some major countries the informal model has prevailed for some time(particularly in Greece) and they have the same debates and discussions as they do in the US. In fact organization did not used to be such an issue, what made it so was two fold, one the(in my view) reactionary anarchist counter tendencies and tactics that tried to grapple with the statist revolutionary tendencies which had this then illusion of victory(makhno and his post revolutionary binge in paris come to mind), the other is the simple fact that anarchism is to a certain extent evolving into something that believes in more local, more lucid and contextual forms of existence. The anarchist agencies that believe more in the classical model tend to be for things slightly more centralized and globally coordinated(though there is a basic agreement on decentralization). These two things combined give you this annoying racket of a discussion. For me I don’t think organization should be a reified term, organization happens, chaos or order, there’s no pro or anti that needs to be put in parenthesis, just be honest about how your views on organization are prefigured in your worldly views, the “pro” organizationalists tend to be disingenuous when it comes to that very point.
Just to take on greyday a bit, centralization and topping the state are not one and the same thing, if you look at examples like France in 1968 or Argentina in 2001 you’ll find that the dynamic that created those events had a multiplicity of sources and factors with little to know political organization backing it up. This is what tends to create a lot of revolutions. The only thing missing was the final necessary agency needed to end oppressive things such as capital, state, work, industry ect. This last thing is the most difficult hurdle because its ultimately a psychological everyday comfort zone that you’re dealing with and that is what ultimately nourishes this whole totality on a continuing basis. People who make a fetish out of things political or military are not even in the ball park of what needs to be done. It simply comes down to among other things workers and the oppressed as whole saying I’m not doing this anymore.
The issue is and always has been social.
ryan d said
Napsterner,
Could you elaborate on what you mean when you talk of ‘a fetish out of things political or military’?
Napsterner said
What I mean is that basic social relations IE how we relate to one and other should be the primary problem that radicals tackle. Things like states big and small and all the capital that goes with it are symbols of the fucked up relations we have slid into. There’s been a debate for some time now whether the solution is political or social. For me politics is an abstraction of basic social relationships and it needs a good case of subversion and ultimately destruction. How many workers have you come across for example that basically don’t give a fuck about politics, there’s a good reason for that and you don’t have to be a radical to understand. Politics be it in their ancient civilized craft or the more mass based form we see today represent alienated social relationships. In events like Paris in 68 where workers were actually on the verge of abolishing themselves and potentially all work it was the unions and the commie parties who we’re against them just as much as the so-called capitalist powers that be.
The ideologies that came out of 1789 are in no way immune from this. It puts politics over social individual and contextual human relationships. Basically the socialist vanguards of the world want to continue those alienating imperatives. What makes anarchists different is that they have historically wanted to bring problems down to a more species based level.
I think Gustav Landauer summed it up best with this quote
“The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.”
There’s nothing more that needs to be said.
Mike E said
I suspect there is quite a bit more “that needs to be said.”
can you elaborate: Do you really think that we destroy the state merely by “contracting other relationships”? By ignoring and bypassing the state? Leaving it isolated and stranded?
The state is not merely “a condition” or “a certain relationship between human beings.” It is also a set of armed forces and institutions.
Won’t revolutoinary people need to defeat and dismantle oppressive armies?
We don’t need to overthrow anything? We merely “contract other relationships” between human beings?
It seems to me, this ignores the basis nature of the bourgeois state — i.e. that it intrudes with great force into the “relationships between human beings.” It enforces oppressive relations, it hunts down and disrupts radical new experiments, it adjudicates the relations and functioning of an oppressive system.
You can’t create new relations on a society-wide scale without seizing power.
greyday said
Mike,
What is the State?
I think it is one thing to approach it as a reified structure of power, and another thing to approach it as the aggregate of social relations, and still another to approach it as “coercive institutions”.
I think anyone of these is incorrect on their own, but understood altogether you start to get to a close approximation of the State. Yet, even in saying this we would have missed the crucial point. WHO’s rule does the State represent?
The state has a complex and interwoven relationship with civil society, or custom. It insures the continuity of a stable set of social relations. It also steps in to retard the development of social relations towards liberation. At other points it can be the weight behind the enforcement of progressive development of new social customs and mores.
But generally the State, and especially the bourgeois state in today’s world, works to suppress anything that comes into conflict with the stability of the capitalist mode of production (such as it is). Why? Because it disrupts the smooth running of society to have these kinds of new customs and ideas developing in society, and because these disturbances may develop to a point of extreme danger to the State itself. And from the perspective of those in power, a significant threat to the State, by definition, unleashes civil war and chaos. The most important prerogative of the State is self preservation, and that self preservation is justified as a protector of “the people”. But what people?
At the same time, the State does not really exist. It is a legal concept, a reified formality that structures the dictatorship of one section of society over another. The fiction of the State is required to conceptualize that dictatorship, to give it life. It works to abstract the social dynamics of power, reify them, and then impose them on the masses as if it was coming from an outside force. It creates a distance from the class of people who actually rule, and it appears to rule in the name of everyone.
Ultimately the fiction works very much like God, who is an abstraction of humanity created to rule over humanity, but who is actually nothing more than a name for the rule of priests and kings.
I gotta ask, what exactly are you seizing when you “seize power”? And why not work to get rid of this fiction of the State, and develop a different form of power, exercised by a different class of people (I would definitely loosen the concept of class here), to enforce a different set of social relations?
I note, that where you contest Carl Davidson’s withering of negative social relations, you implicitly uphold the “withering away” of the State. If the State really is structured like God, then is it so surprising that the Soviets would eventually approach it in such a way, having refused to work to abolish it, and setting out to strengthen it under the belief that in some FAR distant future it would simply “wither away”?
Again, I wonder, why not aim for what was put forward in State and Revolution? I note that the Bolshevik’s did overthrow the state under this line. Having achieved the “practical aim” that anarchists had never achieved, perhaps the pragmatic view of revolution starts to go a little too far once the ideals, the reasons, for that overthrow of the State begin to be abandoned for the sake of the State.
There is a sense that what was so exhilerating about the GPCR was this confrontation between the masses and the State, and the alternation between that and the real attempt by millions to transform backwards social relations. Then the leash was put back on the “unleashed”.
Maybe Mao should have gone into the mountains and started again! Maybe they should have had a civil war.
So I guess I want a more thorough defense of this politics of “seizing the state”, as opposed to simply destroying it. What are you really talking about? How are you aiming to use such a State? And how is seizing the State (assuming that this is what you mean by “seizing power”) really going to help abolish it? How long will it take? Why not work for something more radical? Why not at least see if the changes in social relations and technology might create an opening for going further than what the Bolsheviks and Mao apparently thought was possible given their conditions?
We do not live in a country that is just waking up out of slavery and feudalism. We do not live in a country that is seriously threatened by foreign invasion. If we might say that the particularities of Nepal, with its deep impoverishment and isolation, warrant a prolonged struggle against feudalism using capitalist finance and economic organization to do it, then might we say that the opposite is true of the United States, with its vast resources? How can we argue for using a tool that was designed for conditions and societies split between a feudal form of organization and a capitalist form of organization, how can we argue for using such tools in the United States?
And if we are going to talk of a State of a different kind, how different is it really going to be, and for how long? Lenin’s argument for the rule of the Soviets WAS a different kind of power, a different kind of State. Why not?
You speak of the movement of the advanced INTO the State apparatus during the Russian Revolution. You speak of it as a necessity, but isn’t it just as much a necessity to maintain the close connection of the advanced to the masses by leading them in their democratic organizations? If faced with similar situation where you cannot have both, where you must have ALL the advanced run off to the front, where many die, then perhaps you must choose one necessity over the other. But how do WE know that we will be faced with THAT choice?
Napsterner said
Mike
The Police and the Military are not automatons. They are a they are a daily product of social conditioning. Obviously there will to a certain extent have to be violence, but it is not something that has to be put on even a primary scale. A lot of taking on these oppressive institutions essentially comes down to subversion. And there have been many cases of fragging by soldiers. If you do have to get violent then I think cases like The Ukraine or Hungary in 1956 are inspiring examples. You chose tactics that do promote and prefigure another round of experts for another generation win or lose.
And at the end of the day if there is an army of people who simply don’t want to be workers anymore then nothing short of classical slavery will be able to reconfigure this or any other system of domination. A
As the poster above said, the state is a new kind of religion, the liberals church. A great deal of destroying the state simply comes from showing it for the abstraction it is.