The Myth of Makhno and Its Price

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Category: History
Created on Sunday, 30 May 2010 06:59
Written by Jason Yanowitz

 

from International Socialist Review

The history of the Makhnovists in the Russian Revolution is an important point of reference among anarchists, especially among the current known as Platformists, but it has received very little critical attention from either academic scholars or other revolutionary trends. The following article from the journal of the International Socialist Organization presents a detailed critique of both the myth-making around Makhno and the strategic conclusions anarchists have drawn from the semi-mythologized history they have created.

Makhno calls for the forms of Bolshevism—revolutionary discipline, vanguard party—without the content, the self-emancipation of the working class. He saw the degeneration in Russia primarily as a problem of ideas—“statism” and authoritarianism—instead of material conditions—poverty and isolation. Thus, he concludes that, “had anarchists been closely connected in organizational terms and had they in their actions abided strictly by a well-defined discipline, they would never have suffered such a rout.” But the strength required to fundamentally transform society and set it on new foundations cannot exist only among the enlightened few who “get it.” Instead, it is found in the collective energy and self-activity of the working class.

The Makhno Myth

By JASON YANOWITZ

 

STARTING IN the 1970s, a new consensus emerged among serious scholars of the Russian Revolution. Instead of seeing the rise of Stalinism as the predetermined outcome of Leninism or workers’ power, “revisionist” historians looked instead to the devastating effects of civil war and international isolation. They discovered that the early years of the workers’ state were far more complicated and rich than the standard right-wing inevitable-march-to-totalitarianism version. In its broad outlines, their work confirmed that material conditions, rather than Bolshevik original sin, transformed a mass, popular revolution into its opposite, Stalinism.1

However, anarchists continue to maintain that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution was the inevitable result of the Bolsheviks’ authoritarianism. According to their narrative, once in power via a devious coup, the Bolsheviks wasted no time in destroying their opponents, in particular, the anarchists, whom they saw as a threat to their “statist” desires. Anarchists point chiefly to the example of anarchist Nestor Makhno and the Makhnovists in the Ukraine as a positive example of a libertarian alternative to Leninism.2 Makhnovist participant and chronicler Peter Arshinov writes:

The history of the Makhnovist movement, during which the popular masses tried for years to realize an independence which is better than any known to us, making enormous sacrifices for its sake, definitely unmasks Bolshevism and completely demolished the legend about its pretended revolutionary and proletarian character.3

In its summary of the movement, Infoshop.org’s “An anarchist FAQ” writes:

Here we have a mass movement operating in the same “exceptional circumstances” as the Bolsheviks, which did not implement the same policies. Indeed, rather than suppress soviet, workplace and military democracy in favor of centralized, top-down party power and modify their political line to justify their implementation of party dictatorship, the Makhnovists did all they could to implement and encourage working-class self-government.4

Most anarchist histories of the movement take a similar line. This article argues that these characterizations range from fraud to fantasy. In reality, the experience of the Makhnovists stands as a case study in the failure of anarchist politics. In the face of the civil war, the Makhnovist movement quickly abandoned their principles, recreating all the features of Bolshevism they reviled. But without the theoretical underpinnings of Marxism, their actions were often devoid of revolutionary content.

A legend is born

There is little controversy over the main points of Makhno’s biography. Born in 1889 to a poor peasant family in the Ukraine, Nestor Makhno (Nestor Ivanovich Mikhailenko) worked in the fields from childhood.5 After leaving school, he worked briefly as an apprentice painter and later in an iron foundry.6 After the 1905 Revolution, he became interested in politics and joined an anarchist circle in Guliai-Pole that engaged in assassinations and financial “expropriations,” until he was imprisoned in 1909 and eventually sentenced to life with hard labor.7 There he languished until workers overthrew the tsar in the February Revolution of 1917 and declared a general amnesty for political prisoners. He moved back to his home outside of Guliai-Pole and began organizing for social revolution.

His efforts were soon interrupted by the Austro-German invasion of 1918, which rolled back the redistribution of land guaranteed by the October Revolution to the peasantry. The army began pillaging the countryside. Makhno organized an armed response and harassed the occupying forces. After one particularly harrowing battle, Makhno was given the title of Batko (Father) by his troops.8 When the German war efforts collapsed in November, the Ukraine became a battleground in the civil war as the White Army sought to create a dictatorship and base of operations. The Makhnovists continued to organize and fight. Despite scattered reports to the contrary, their leadership was principally against anti-Semitism or alliances with the Whites.9 Early on, they displayed brilliant guerrilla tactics. Later, they found themselves in larger set piece battles. Makhno’s army varied in size from a few hundred to tens of thousands and marched under the banners “Liberty or Death” and “The land to the peasants, the factories to the workers.” They entered into alliances with the Bolsheviks against the forces of reaction, but these alliances repeatedly fell apart amid mutual recriminations. Eventually, the Red Army drove Makhno into exile. He died of tuberculosis in 1934.

In the ensuing decades, anarchists waged a largely one-sided battle to tell the “true” story of Nestor Makhno.

A lie piously repeated10

When writing history, it is critical to get multiple sources for key events. None of the major anarchist works on Makhno do so. Nonetheless, these books are useful because they provide the general sweep of the movement and inadvertently reveal the flaws and contradictions in Makhno’s activity.

The principal texts for the Makhno mythology are, in order of publication, Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, Voline, The Unknown Revolution, and Alexander Skirda, Nestor Makhno–Anarchy’s Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine 1917–1921.11 These authors rarely offer corroboration for their main arguments, substituting assertions and invective for evidence and reasoning.12

Arshinov first met Makhno in prison and later joined him in the Ukraine. Voline was another Russian anarchist who came to the Ukraine to organize in the area controlled by the Makhnovists. In his doctoral dissertation on the movement, Marxist scholar Colin Darch did an extensive review of the work of Arshinov and Voline and concluded:

The existing texts are unreliable on empirical grounds. The most detailed accounts, those by Makhno’s anarchist comrades, are empirically unreliable in suggestive ways. Events are conflated, chronologies confused, whole periods glossed over, logical jumps made, and excuses offered. Although Arshinov’s and Voline’s texts are fundamental to an understanding of the trajectory of the Makhnovist Movement, every factual assertion, every reference to a date, must be checked against other sources. In addition, Voline’s version relies heavily on Arshinov for the main outline of the story, which he merely embellishes with eyewitness anecdotes from time to time.13

Skirda’s text is probably the most widely read today. AK Press reprinted it recently, and writings like “An anarchist FAQ” refer to it as “by far the best account of the movement available.”14 Under Skirda’s pen, Makhno emerges as the Second Coming. With “exceptional strength of spirit,” he was an “intractable character”: “literally death-defying,” “ingenious and daring,” “methodical to the point of mania,” “ready for any eventuality,” with “white-hot determination,” “humble among the humble,” “extremely meticulous, almost obsessive.” He “[again and] again displayed the measure of his extraordinary gifts as a leader of men,” as a “strategical genius” while others “made a mistake which Makhno himself would assuredly have avoided” because of the “unbelievable resourcefulness of his tactical genius,” “daring act of terrorism,” and “genius for partisan warfare.” Continues Skirda:

To these gifts, Makhno added the qualities of rare sangfroid and presence of mind; he scarcely ever was ruffled, would sum up the situation in a flash and devised the best possible solution, which would allow him to extricate himself yet again from the hornet’s nest.15

Unsurprisingly, Skirda accepts all of Makhno’s statements as true on their face. For example, Makhno claims to have met with Lenin in 1918.16 The only evidence that this meeting occurred is Makhno himself—it doesn’t appear in the notes or diaries of any of those who were supposed to be present, including Sverdlov and Lenin. Even Arshinov, who notes Makhno’s trip to Moscow, has no mention of a meeting with Lenin during the visit.17

Accepting Makhno’s words as holy writ, Skirda portrays all critics of him as opportunists, hypocrites, or authoritarians. So deep is his antipathy for the Bolsheviks, Skirda goes so far as to idealize their enemy, the brutal White Army General Kornilov:

Contrary to what has often been claimed, Kornilov was a patriotic officer who had risen through the ranks, the son of a mere Cossack, with a Sart (Mongolian) for a mother, and while no inflammatory revolutionary, it had nonetheless been he who had ordered the arrest of the Tsar and his family; so he was no reactionary but was solidly anti-monarchy and wont to say to any who would listen that he would emigrate to the United States should the monarchy be restored in Russia.18

Kind words for a man who said that he and his fellow officers “would not hesitate to hang all the Soviet members if need be” during their coup attempt.19 At the beginning of the civil war, Kornilov said, “The greater the terror, the greater our victories” and “We must save Russia! Even if we have to set fire to half of it and shed the blood of three-fourths of all the Russians!”20 Anarchists have been aided in their myth making by the relative absence of scholarly attention to Makhno’s movement during the civil war. Despite the paucity of archival material and decent scholarship, we can still draw some valuable lessons. Let’s start where few anarchist histories do—examining the real conditions in which Russia found herself in revolution and civil war.

Not in conditions of their choosing21

The successful building of socialism ultimately requires well-developed productive forces to end scarcity and liberate humanity. The Bolsheviks knew that socialist revolution could begin in Russia but not be finished there. Because of Russia’s economic backwardness and small working class, the Bolsheviks knew they would be doomed unless the revolution spread internationally. Their main task was to fight to hang on, doing what they could to spread international revolution and wait for relief from the working class of an advanced capitalist state like Germany. Without more productive tools like tractors, Russia risked a disastrous split between the peasants (the vast majority of the population) and the workers (disproportionately powerful, but still a small minority of the population).22

But the Soviet state was to be given no breathing space. Horrified by the Russian example, the world’s bourgeoisie began plotting the overthrow of the workers’ state.23 They funded a viciously reactionary White Army that plunged the country into civil war. The fledgling revolution stood at the precipice. Over the course of the conflict, the Soviets would face troops from fourteen countries.24 “By the summer of 1918, thirty different governments functioned in the lands that once had been the Russian Empire, and twenty-nine of them stood against the Bolsheviks.”25 “Again and again Soviet power was restricted to the principality of Moscow—the cities of Moscow and Petrograd and a small area around them.”26 Petrograd, a major industrial hub, was nearly taken by the Whites and the battle to hold onto it left most of the city’s population destitute and gray from malnutrition.27

The Soviets had to rebuild an army, virtually from scratch, in a country already exhausted by the World War. Initially formed as a voluntary force with elected officers, the Red Army was forced to institute conscription and appoint officers.28 But they had to win. One historian of the Russian Revolution wrote that “the alternative to Bolshevism, had it failed to survive the ordeal of civil war…would not have been Chernov, opening a Constituent Assembly…but a military dictator, a Kolchak or a Denikin, riding into Moscow on a white horse.”29

The White record was horrific:

[White General Denikin] imposed a regime marked by….a vicious hatred of all Jews. As the pogroms of 1919 burst upon the Jews of the Ukraine with an incredible ferocity, the enemies of Bolshevism committed some of the most brutal acts of persecution in the modern history of the Western world…. Estimates of the numbers killed ran as high as one Jew out of every thirteen. Hundreds of thousands were left homeless, and tens of thousands more became the victims of serious injuries or disease…. No longer spontaneous outpourings of racial and religious hatred, pogroms now became coldly calculated incidents of wholesale rape, extreme brutality and unprecedented destruction. In a single day at the end of August in the Jewish settlement of Kremenchug, the Whites raped 350 women, including pregnant women, women who had just given birth and even women who were dying.30

The Red Army ultimately prevailed in the civil war, but at a terrible cost. Although 350,000 died in combat, more than 7 million perished from disease and famine caused by war conditions.31 And the failure of the revolutionary upheavals in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere to translate into workers’ power left the workers’ state in Russia isolated.

The difficulties of the civil war led to a collapse in industrial output. In 1918, iron ore production dropped to 12.3 percent of 1913 levels. By 1920, it dropped to 1.7 percent. The production of every commodity fell during this time. Huge sections of the rail system and 50 percent of locomotives were inoperative. By 1919, productivity had slipped to 22 percent of its (already low) 1913 level.32 The total employed workforce declined by half through the civil war period.33 By the autumn of 1920, Petrograd, the main industrial center, had lost almost 60 percent of its population. Writes historian E.H. Carr, “The paradox arose that the establishment of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was followed by a marked diminution both of the numbers and of the specific weight in the economy of the class in whose name the dictatorship was exercised.”34

Thirty percent absenteeism in factories was standard (in many cases it was much higher) and the most common cause was hunger.35 By the spring of 1918, food rations were down to 10 percent of what was needed to sustain the average worker.36 And then the blockade—sanctions—by the imperialist powers began. By 1919, “not one letter, not one food parcel, not one package of goods, not one foreign newspaper could enter Red Russia.”37 In 1913, Russia exported 26.5 million tons of commodities; by 1917 that had shrunk to 1.1 million; by 1918, 32,000; and by 1919, zero.38 Despite the desperate need for industrial output, Lenin was reduced to urging the workers of Petrograd, the cradle of the revolution, to head into the countryside to forage for food in July 1918. Twenty-five percent of Russia’s population suffered from acute hunger. People dug up dead horses to eat their flesh; others practiced cannibalism.39 And yet there was grain. The Northern Caucasus alone had 2.5 million tons of grain. Only 270,000 tons a month were needed to keep the big towns supplied. The rich peasants or kulaks primarily hoarded it.40

As part of a policy known as war communism, the Bolsheviks began requisitioning grain from the peasantry.41 Every day that kulaks held onto grain more people died. Less repressive measures to get the food had failed, leaving force as the only means in these dire circumstances. The people’s commissar of food supplies explained, “There are only two possibilities, either we perish from hunger, or we weaken the (peasant economy) to some extent, but (manage to) get out of our temporary difficulties.”42 The anarchist historian Paul Avrich summarized the tragic catch-22:

There is little doubt that compulsory requisitioning saved the Bolshevik regime from defeat, for without it neither the army nor the urban population, from which the government drew its main support, could have survived. Yet the inevitable price was the estrangement of the peasantry. Forced at gunpoint to hand over their surpluses and denied the compensation of badly needed consumer goods, the villagers responded in predictable fashion: the food detachments, when not met by open resistance, were stymied by evasive tactics to which every ounce of peasant ingenuity was applied. In 1920, a leading authority estimated, more than a third of the total harvest was successfully hidden from the government’s collection teams.43

The Makhnovists existed at a special moment in history. As the peasants seized the land, each family getting its own parcel, the desire to be free of any external interference blossomed. The peasantry was caught between an understandable resentment of the Bolshevik requisitioning and their greater fear of White rule. Makhno built his army on this foundation.

A leaky raincoat44

Clearly, conditions were not ripe for egalitarian socialism, let alone the statelessness of communism. But anarchists ignore the objective difficulties facing the revolution and proffer Makhno as the valid alternative. To make their case, anarchists have constructed an idealized version of Makhno’s “free communes.”45

The Makhnovists made two attempts at organizing production along anarchist lines. Both were centered on their base of operations, Guliai-Pole. The first, in February 1918, lasted three weeks before the Austro-German invasion destroyed it.46 We know little of this experiment. Makhno’s own memoirs barely touch on the political and economic organization of the communes. Instead, he spends most of the time discussing eating arrangements. Makhno ignores all the key issues for describing a society’s workings. Darch writes:

There is nothing on social relations of production, on the division of labor, on crop selection, on the labor process, on marketing, on the distribution of surplus; simply three hundred undifferentiated anarchists and peasants in a communal canteen, taking a day off whenever they felt like it. And these few weeks in spring were to serve as a basis for a social revolution.47

Makhno’s second attempt at establishing communes came with the end of the First World War in late 1918 and the withdrawal of the Central Powers. By early 1919, Makhno and his followers had more communes up and running. These lasted until June, when they fell apart during battles between the Red Army and the Makhnovists. Arshinov describes them as:

[R]eal working communes of peasants who…found there whatever moral and material support he needed. The principles of brotherhood and equality permeated the communes. Everyone—men, women and children—worked according to his or her abilities. Organization work was assigned to one or two comrades who, after finishing it, took up the remaining tasks together with the other members of the commune.48

This sounds quite nice. But Arshinov acknowledges that there were few communes (he describes four), “and included only a minority of the population—especially those who did not have well-established farmlands.”

With the massive land reform of the revolution, most peasants now had access to their own land. There was almost no interest in joining anarchist-led communes. The peasantry had little in their lived experience that drove them to seek such radical change.49 In fact, at most, a few thousand in a population of several million were involved in the communes—or less than 0.1 percent of those in the area over which the Makhnovists claimed influence. These experiments made no attempt to address issues of modern production and therefore cannot reasonably serve as a model for society. This becomes clearer when examining the Makhnovists’ attitude towards workers.

Despite once sending a hundred train cars of wheat to Moscow that he captured from the Whites, Makhno generally had a distrustful attitude toward the cities, calling them “a poison.”50 His vision for worker and peasant relations was based on barter between the two. But humanity cannot build a viable system of production on the chance that peasants will have a surplus they are willing to trade.51

When they occupied towns, the Makhnovists would declare null and void all laws and state structures. In the midst of a civil war, they emptied all the prisons and jails. Then they would hand out all the money and food until it was gone.52 They destroyed the existing economic and political structures and then denied responsibility for the consequences. There was no thought of rationing the resources because there was no consideration of problems of production beyond small-scale family agriculture.

When local railway and telegraph workers who had not been paid for months asked for help, Makhno told them, “We are not like the Bolsheviks to feed you, we don’t need the railways; if you need money, take the bread from those who need your railways and telegraphs.”53 In reality, the Makhnovists did need the railways. But Makhno declared his army exempt from rail charges. In the context of civil war and mass famine, his was less a call for workers’ power and more a prescription for starvation.54

Makhno issued a currency that carried the text: “feel free to forge this.” He also declared valid all currencies, including those of defunct governments. While this may just seem like Abbie Hoffman-style antics, the ensuing mass inflation was devastating for workers. Unlike the peasants who grew their own food, the workers were dependent on a wage to eat and desperately needed price controls.55 But they could not look to Makhno for help, who later told the workers of Briansk, “Because the workers do not want to support Makhno’s movement and demand pay for the repairs of the armored car, I will take this armored car for free and pay nothing.”56

Leon Trotsky, head of the Red Army, wrote of a similar incident:

[S]ince the Makhnovists are sitting on the railway branch-line from Mariupol, they are refusing to allow the coal and grain to leave except in exchange for other supplies. It has come about that, while rejecting the “state power” created by the workers and peasants of the whole country, the Makhnovists leadership has organized its own little semi-piratical power, which dares to bar the way for the Soviet power of the Ukraine and all of Russia. Instead of the country’s economy being properly organized according to a general plan and conception, and instead of a co-operative, socialist and uniform distribution of all the necessary products, the Makhnovists are trying to establish domination by gangs and bands: whoever has grabbed something is its rightful owner, and can then exchange it for whatever he hasn’t got. This is not products-exchange but commodity-stealing.57

In this 1919 document, the Makhnovists seem almost willfully ignorant of the devastation facing Russia after the revolution:

[The supply] issue was particularly easy to resolve at the beginning of the revolution, when life was not yet in complete disarray and when food was available everywhere in more or less adequate supply.58

The reality was quite different. In October 1917, Petrograd was down to less than four days of food.59 Although peasants had access to food, the cities were starving and the war-ravaged economy was in shambles. The Makhnovist solution was unworkable: decentralized anarchy to leap over the real problems of production. In reality, local autonomy would mean no coordinated, centralized plan for war production and defense. If implemented on a wide scale, the Makhnovist approach would have led to a swift White victory with an immediate reversal of all of the peasantry’s gains.

If it walks like a duck…

Anarchists identify authority as the root cause of human oppression. There is a wide range of opinion over what kind of authority is the “bad” kind—some reject all authority, others just hierarchical authority, and others just state authority. Most believe the authority of the majority over the minority (i.e., democracy) is antithetical to freedom. The inherent contradictions in this approach have been addressed in this magazine and elsewhere.60 When occupying cities or towns, Makhno’s troops would post notices on walls that read:

This Army does not serve any political party, any power, any dictatorship. On the contrary, it seeks to free the region of all political power, of all dictatorship. It strives to protect the freedom of action, the free life of the workers against all exploitation and domination. The Makhno Army does not therefore represent any authority. It will not subject anyone to any obligation whatsoever. Its role is confined to defending the freedom of the workers. The freedom of the peasants and the workers belongs to themselves, and should not suffer any restriction.61

But left in control of territory that they wanted to secure, the Makhnovists ended up forming what most would call a state. The Makhnovists set monetary policy.62 They regulated the press.63 They redistributed land according to specific laws they passed. They organized regional legislative conferences. 64 They controlled armed detachments to enforce their policies.65 To combat epidemics, they promulgated mandatory standards of cleanliness for the public health.66 Except for the Makhnovists, parties were banned from organizing for election to regional bodies. They banned authority with which they disagreed to “prevent those hostile to our political ideas from establishing themselves.”67 They delegated broad authority to a “Regional Military-Revolutionary Council of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents.” The Makhnovists used their military authority to suppress rival political ideas and organizations.68 The anarchist historian Paul Avrich notes, “the Military-Revolutionary Council, acting in conjunction with the Regional Congresses and the local soviets, in effect formed a loose-knit government in the territory surrounding Guliai-Pole.”69

Why did self-proclaimed anarchists create a state? They were not confused or impure. They built a state because they had no choice. Ultimately, states are coercive instruments whereby one class rules society. A workers’ state is unique in history because the class wielding power does so in the interests of the vast majority. During the civil war, the Ukraine was far from a classless society, as the actions of the Makhnovists show. Of course, they never called their instrument a “state.” When reality overwhelms theory, anarchists have traditionally just created new labels. In 1873, Marx, Engels, and Lafargue wrote this analysis of the anarchist program:

Thus in this anarchistic organization…we have first the Council of the Commune, then the executive committees, which, to be able to do anything at all, must be vested with some power and supported by a public force; this is to be followed by nothing short of a federal parliament, whose principal object will be to organize this public force. Like the Commune Council, this parliament will have to assign executive power to one or more committees which by this act alone will be given an authoritarian character that the demands of the struggle will increasingly accentuate. We are thus confronted with a perfect reconstruction of all the elements of the “authoritarian State”; and the fact that we call this machine “a revolutionary commune organized from bottom to top” makes little difference. The name changes nothing of the substance.70

Anarchist attacks on the Bolsheviks’ civil war policies often focus on the severe military discipline, conscription, grain requisitioning, and creation of a secret police. Yet, under the same conditions of civil war, Makhno’s army adopted all these measures, albeit with different names.

In his army, Makhno claimed that units had the right to elect their commanders. However, he retained veto power over any decisions.71 He increasingly relied on a close group of friends for his senior command.72 As Darch notes, “Although some of Makhno’s aides attempted to introduce more conventional structures into the army, [Makhno]’s control remained absolute, arbitrary and impulsive.”73 One regiment found it necessary to pass a resolution that “all orders must be obeyed provided that the commanding officer was sober at the time of giving it.”74 As the war went on, his forces moved from voting on their orders to carrying out executions ordered by Makhno to enforce discipline.75

The pressures of war forced Makhno to move to compulsory military service, a far cry from the free association of individuals extolled in anarchist theory. Tellingly, all the anarchist histories call it a “voluntary” mobilization (complete with quotation marks).76 Historian David Footman describes the linguistic back-flips:

Accordingly, at Makhno’s insistence, the second Congress passed a resolution in favor of “general, voluntary and egalitarian mobilization.” The orthodox Anarchist line, expressed at an Anarchist gathering of this period, was that “no compulsory army…can be regarded as a true defender of the social revolution,” and debate ranged round the issue as to whether enlistment could be described as “voluntary” (whatever the feelings of individuals) if it took place as the result of a resolution voluntarily passed by representatives of the community as a whole.77

Just in case people did not understand the meaning of “voluntary,” the Makhnovists issued a clarifying bulletin:

Some groups have understood voluntary mobilization as mobilization only for those who wish to enter the Insurrectionary Army, and that anyone who for any reason wishes to stay at home is not liable…. This is not correct…. The voluntary mobilization has been called because the peasants, workers and insurgents themselves decided to mobilize themselves without awaiting the arrival of instructions from the central authorities.78

The Makhnovists needed conscription for the same reason the Bolsheviks did: the bulk of the peasantry was sick of fighting. The difference between the two is that the Bolsheviks had a political outlook that saw conscription as part of a transitional period with the future depending on world revolution, when the productive power of humanity first unleashed by capitalism could be brought to bear on all spheres of life, in the interest of the vast majority. The peasants of Russia and the Ukraine were still using wooden ploughs and harvesting by hand. They stood to gain immensely from an increase in both productivity and leisure time. In contrast, Makhno had no similar perspective and had no generalized plan or vision for the future.

An army needs to eat. As they moved through the Ukraine, locals would point out the kulaks who would “agree” to provide food.79 Despite orders to the contrary, Makhnovists would loot town after town, adding to the workers’ misery. One witness recalled:

Food supply was primitive, on the traditional insurgent pattern: the bratishki—the Makhnovists’ name for each other—would scatter to the peasant huts on entering a village, and eat what God sent; there was thus no shortage, although plundering and thoughtless damage to peasant stock did occur; I saw them shoot peasant cattle for fun more than once, amid the howls of women and children.80

From their earliest days, they took the equipment they needed from those who had it.81 As they passed through towns and villages, they required the populace to quarter them.82 While condemning the Soviet Cheka as an authoritarian betrayal, Makhno created two secret police forces that carried out numerous acts of terror.82 After a battle in one village, they shot a villager suspected of treachery with no trial. They summarily executed many of their prisoners of war.84 Their secret police were tasked with getting rid of “opponents within or outwith [sic] the movement.”85 Their activities led to one anarchist Congress asking Makhno to explain his activities:

It has been reported to us that there exists in the army a counter-espionage service which engages in arbitrary and uncontrolled actions, of which some are very serious, rather like the Bolshevik Cheka. Searches, arrests, even torture and executions are reported.86

Makhno was not the saint his supporters suppose. He accepted a number of political posts despite, in Skirda’s words, it “amount[ing] to a relative infringement of the anarchist teaching that forbade acceptance of any formal authority.” But fear not—he took them only to “reduce the authority of those committees.” This is a standard weakness with anarchism. In the real world, it is impossible to dispense with all authority. Instead, anarchists rely on morally upstanding and special individuals. After all, the reasoning goes, authority is bad because ordinary people would quickly abuse it.87

Makhno declared public drunkenness of his soldiers a capital offense, but placed himself above his own law.88 As his close collaborator, Voline, notes in a chronicle of the movement:

His greatest fault was certainly the abuse of alcohol…. Under [its influence], Makhno became irresponsible in his actions; he lost control of himself. Then it was personal caprice, often supported by violence, that suddenly replaced his sense of revolutionary duty; it was the despotism, the absurd pranks, the dictatorial antics of a warrior chief.89

Others also note Makhno’s alcoholism.90

More disturbing was Makhno’s treatment of women. According to Voline, Makhno and his commanders would hold drunken parties that turned into “orgies in which certain women were forced to participate.”91 Again, Skirda defends Makhno. First, he quotes Makhno’s boasting to a comrade that “he could have any woman he wanted in his glory days.” Presumably Makhno was not raping women—they all wanted it. Then, Skirda asserts that Makhno’s wife, who traveled with him, would not have allowed it.92 However, theirs was clearly a complicated relationship. She tried to kill him when they were in exile. In later photos, his face bears a huge scar from her knife attack.93 What we know about the treatment of women in Makhno’s army reflects the politics of the peasantry whose struggles do not necessarily challenge the ruling ideas of society.

Foul weather friends

Reciting the ins and outs of every military campaign in the Ukraine is well beyond the scope of this article. Makhno was clearly a gifted tactician. He pioneered the use of tachanaka, machine guns mounted on horse-drawn carriages. He would dress in the enemy’s uniforms, penetrate their lines, and attack from the rear. When facing overwhelming odds, his forces would simply bury their weapons and melt into the surrounding villages. At various points in the civil war, his forces played a critical role in conjunction with the Red Army. However, anarchists overstate the case when they claim his forces single-handedly won the war by overwhelming the Whites’ rear. At its height, the Soviets had five million troops in sixteen armies, fought along a 5,000-mile front, and produced all their own weaponry.94 Makhno’s army peaked at 30,000 troops, never fought outside the Ukraine, and relied on others for their weapons.95 Additionally, the bulk of Makhno’s tactics—harassing the rear of the White Army—would have been impossible if the Red Army was not engaging the White’s front.

Anarchist histories spend most of their time recounting Makhno’s military genius and Bolshevik betrayals. But their explanation for the Makhno-Bolshevik alliances collapsing—Bolshevik fear of a successful example of anarchism—falls flat. The real causes for the battles between the two came from the way the original alliance fractured and the impossibility of having an unreliable “anarchist” region in the southern Ukraine amid a sea of hostile capitalist forces.

The first alliance between Makhno and the Red Army broke apart in May 1919. It was never particularly strong. Despite their agreement, Makhno prevented grain collection in areas he controlled and raided any supply trains passing through.96

This was a time of immense danger to the Soviet state. The White Army was advancing, using the planes, tanks, machine guns, field guns, rifles, and millions of shells and bullets it received from the Western powers.97 In mid-May, Denikin broke through Makhno’s lines and advanced about thirty miles into the Red Army’s rear. Over the next three days, the White Army opened a massive gap in Makhno’s sector. Soon the whole Red Army was in retreat.98

With his portion of the line in shambles, Makhno resigned his command on May 29 and abandoned the front. The Makhnovists cabled the Red Army that they were going “to create an independent insurgent army, entrusting Comrade Makhno with the army’s leadership.” That day, the Bolsheviks ordered his arrest.99 Darch writes:

In the meantime, the insurgents decided to call an extraordinary congress for 15 June to discuss the White breakthrough and the crisis in relations with the Reds. The call which was issued was addressed to all the districts of two provinces, to all insurgents, and provocatively to all Red Army troops in the area. The Bolshevik reaction was harsh. The Whites had captured Bakhmut, north-east of Guliai-Pole, on 1 June. The Bolsheviks accused Makhno of seeking the protection of the Soviet flag, and of then attacking the political organization of the Red Army and the Soviet government, while trying to consolidate his power. On 4 June Trotsky issued Order No.1824, a document Arshinov prints as proof of Bolshevik perfidy. Skirda also quotes the provisions, if not the preamble. In the circumstances, the order was reasonable; it banned the Congress as an incitement to another anti-Soviet revolt and the further opening up of the front.100

The Makhnovist announcement for the congress stated that the Soviet state must be overthrown and urged members of the Red Army to desert their posts to attend.101 With the collapse of the alliance, both sides set on each other, with the Cheka hunting down Makhnovists and Makhno’s forces summarily executing Bolsheviks. For decades, anarchists have written polemics about how they were betrayed. However, their timeline and version of events is well refuted by Darch, who concludes:

[Arshinov and Voline] seriously misrepresent the sequence of events which led to Makhno’s calamitous abandonment of the Red Army front against Denikin in May and June 1919, in order to organize and attend a local anarchist congress in Guliai-Pole. [They] have been followed in this misrepresentation by many secondary sources. Once a more probable chronology is established, the received interpretation…becomes notably less convincing. A likely alternative is that Makhno did in fact desert his post with his forces, as the Bolsheviks claimed at the time. This is much more than a mere detail. Anarchist claims for Makhno-as-victim of Soviet treachery have been ideologically important at various junctures, such as the French student revolt of 1968, and have relied heavily on this kind of ambiguity.102

Over the next eighteen months, the civil war raged on in the Ukraine. By late 1920, Makhno was in a bind. Wrangel (Denikin’s successor) had successfully penned him in and denied him his base of operations at Guliai-Pole. Wrangel tried to ally with the Makhnovists, but they shot his emissaries.103 However, there was one regiment of Makhno’s that believed he had struck an alliance and so joined Wrangel’s forces for several weeks.104

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were close to defeating Wrangel, but they needed to drive him from the Ukraine before he could loot that year’s grain harvest. The Red Army and the Makhnovists struck a new deal and quickly crippled Wrangel.105 Although there is disagreement about the role played by Makhno’s army in this period, Wrangel was forced to evacuate all his forces before the end of the year.106 Soon after, the Red Army attacked the Makhnovists, eventually driving Makhno into exile.

To understand why the Red Army attacked Makhno, we must step back. By 1920, so much mutual distrust had built up that even though they agreed to another alliance, it was bound to disintegrate once the pressures of fighting a common enemy were lifted. Both sides recognized this.107 For the Bolsheviks, they faced a situation where the Makhnovists had previously betrayed them, had repeatedly declared overwhelming hostility to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and had nothing but vague platitudes to offer as a substitute. The Makhnovists were organized with an approach of anarchism from above as the peasant army would roll into a town and obliterate existing state structures before moving on. The Soviet state was still barely holding on, and it could ill afford to leave such a hostile force organized in the Ukraine.

Regardless, with the threat of the White Army ended, the bulk of Makhno’s support came from peasants angered at grain requisitioning. When the policy of war communism was replaced with a limited market system for the peasants known as the New Economic Policy (NEP), much of Makhno’s base dissipated.108

Conclusion

This article could not cover all the controversies that swirled around Makhno, nor could it examine all the activities of the Makhnovists. Instead, I focused on those activities most relevant to understanding the political nature and limits of Makhno’s movement. Ironically, while condemning Bolshevism and ignoring the incredibly unfavorable situation it faced, Arshinov excuses all the problems of the Makhnovists by citing the same “exceptional” circumstances:

The basic shortcoming of the movement resides in the fact that during its last two years it concentrated mainly on military activities. This was not an organic flaw of the movement itself but rather its misfortune—it was imposed on the movement by the situation in the Ukraine. Three years of uninterrupted civil wars made the southern Ukraine a permanent battlefield…. These conditions tore the Makhnovists away from its healthy foundation, away from socially creative work among the masses, and forced it to concentrate on war…. When speaking about the military character of the movement we should not begin with the fact that Makhnovists devoted a great deal of time to artillery and cavalry combats; we should rather ask how the Makhnovists began, what goals they pursued and what means they had to realize them…. The movement obviously had to undergo great changes in its strategy in its ways and means of action and was forced to devote a large part of its forces to the military side of the struggle for freedom. But as we said, this was not its fault, but its misfortune.109

Change the names and this roughly describes the trajectory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. The difference is that the Bolsheviks had an understanding of human liberation that was connected to the real world. The Makhnovists never had a realistic plan for transforming and organizing society. The only reason they were able to operate at all was because the Russian working class overthrew the tsar and bourgeoisie. But almost ninety years later, Makhno is still revered by anarchists. Explaining the ongoing interest in Makhno, Darch writes:

The Makhnovist movement, because it attracted literate supporters from the anarchist intelligentsia, is the best documented of the [peasant rebellions]. Historically, anarchism has often been the political expression of resistance adopted by social classes whose position is undermined by the historical trend of their times. Typically, anarchist revolutionaries are rural aristocrats—Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy—or wealthy peasants; rarely are they involved in centralization or industrialization. Anarchists are not so much anti-nationalist as pre-nationalist. They look back to the community that preceded the centralized nation-state. Their future is firmly rooted in an idealized past…. When Makhno began to struggle against the modernizing revolution of the Bolsheviks, a party of great theoretical and practical sophistication with the ability to adapt its strategy to changing circumstances, he failed. It is a measure of his gifts that his resistance to Bolshevism lasted so long. It is hardly an indication of the viability of the anarchist vision.110

In the 1920s, some of the surviving membership of the Makhnovists engaged in a debate over next steps for the anarchist movement.111 They sought to understand the experience in Russia and use it as a guide for future action. In that discussion, Makhno wrote:

Without discipline inside the organization, there is no way of undertaking any consequential revolutionary activity at all. In the absence of discipline, the revolutionary vanguard cannot exist, for in that case it would find itself in utter disarray in its practice and would be incapable of identifying the tasks of the moment or of living up to the initiator role that the masses expect of it.112

Makhno calls for the forms of Bolshevism—revolutionary discipline, vanguard party—without the content, the self-emancipation of the working class. He saw the degeneration in Russia primarily as a problem of ideas—“statism” and authoritarianism—instead of material conditions—poverty and isolation. Thus, he concludes that, “had anarchists been closely connected in organizational terms and had they in their actions abided strictly by a well-defined discipline, they would never have suffered such a rout.”113 But the strength required to fundamentally transform society and set it on new foundations cannot exist only among the enlightened few who “get it.” Instead, it is found in the collective energy and self-activity of the working class. With their hand on the lever of production, only the working class can revolutionize society. The Russian experience demonstrates they will need a state when they do so—to defend their new gains. But it also shows that when workers’ power next establishes itself, its wielders will have to put tremendous energy into helping workers in other countries in their project of self-emancipation. A socialist revolution left isolated is ultimately doomed.

To overthrow the bourgeoisie requires organization and authority. In their actions, the Makhnovists recognized this. But their utopian views prevented them from uniting with the workers’ state. Other anarchists, such as Victor Serge and Bill Shatov, recognized that the moment required unshakeable unity of revolutionaries and knew that immediate aims had to fall short of long-term goals. Although the Bolsheviks were ultimately unsuccessful (and certainly made many mistakes along the way), any other course would have prematurely thrown in the towel on the possibility of spreading workers’ power. In an address on anarchism during the civil war, Trotsky neatly summarized the Marxist position on the state:

The bourgeoisie says: don’t touch the state power; it is the sacred hereditary privilege of the educated classes. But the Anarchists say: don’t touch it, it is an infernal invention, a diabolical device, don’t have anything to do with it. The bourgeoisie says, don’t touch it, it’s sacred. The Anarchists say: don’t touch it, because it’s sinful. Both say: don’t touch it. But we say: don’t just touch it, take it in your hands, and set it to work in your own interests, for the abolition of private ownership and the emancipation of the working class.114

Jason Yanowitz is an activist in western Massachusetts.

 

1 Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin (London: Merlin Press, 1975); Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976; reprint Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2004); S.A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–18 (Cambridge University Press, 1983); Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); Stephen Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience (Oxford University Press, 1985); Diane Koenker, William Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). More recently, Kevin Murphy traces the shop floor battles against Stalinism (Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory [Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005]). For a good short introduction on the state of Soviet historiography, see Murphy, 1–7. I am grateful to Annie Zirin for feedback and suggestions on multiple drafts of this article.

 

2 A quick note on transliteration is needed here. Obviously, proper names in the Ukraine and Russia are not natively expressed in the Roman alphabet. There are many competing systems of transliteration. For example, Makhno’s base of operations is rendered in at least the following ways: Gulyai-Poyle, Guliai-Pole, Guliai-Polya, Huliai-Pole, or Hulyai-Poyle. To reduce confusion and improve legibility, I have tried to normalize the spelling of words throughout, including in quotations, without notice. Also, since independence Ukraine has dropped the article “the” before its name, but references here that are historical retain the article.

3 Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921 (1922; reprint London: Freedom Press, 1987), 259. Smith traces the inability of anarchists in the cities to connect with the working class (142–56). Because they pushed for decentralization in the face of economic collapse, their proposals were voted down and their influence was miniscule. One proposal put forth by Voline (before he joined Makhno in the Ukraine) got only 8 votes while the Bolsheviks got 290 for a counter-proposal (Smith, 144). Smith’s whole book describes the process by which the Bolsheviks won the allegiance of the vast majority of the working class during 1917.

4 “Appendix 4.6: Why does the Makhnovist movement show there is an alternative to Bolshevism?”, “An anarchist FAQ” (currently located at http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secA1.html). For more libertarian information on Makhno, see http://www.nestormakhno.info/.

5 Arshinov, 51. Most sources agree on 1889, but Alexander Skirda puts it in 1888 (Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine, 1918–1921 [1982; reprint with new afterword, Oakland: AK Press, 2004], 17).

6 Michael Malet, Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil War (London: Macmillan Press, 1982), xxi.

7 Skirda, 28.

8 It was a title peasants gave to leaders. There is some disagreement in the literature about whether Batko should be translated as “Father” or “Little Father.”

9 Many of the charges of anti-Semitism appeared after Makhno was in exile, and it seems all are without merit. Throughout his army’s existence, Makhno was militant in opposing the scapegoating of Jews.

10 This section aims to show that Skirda writes with unintentional irony: “That a lie piously repeated can sometimes achieve the standing of a half-truth in some minds, we know.” (4)

11 Voline, The Unknown Revolution (1947; reprint with new translation and more material, Detroit: Black and Red, 1974). Other works with an acknowledged libertarian perspective include Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton University Press, 1967[Reprinted, Oakland: AK Press, 2005]); Michael Malet, Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil War (London: Macmillan Press, 1982), which is out of print. Michael Palij’s book suffers from trying to overlay Ukrainian nationalist politics onto the Makhnovist movement (The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno, 1918–1921 [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976]). Although there is useful analysis and history that peeps through, the nationalist contortions reduce the utility of most of the text. For a full review of Skirda and Malet, see Colin Darch, “The myth of Nestor Makhno,” Economy and Society 14, no. 4 (1985), 524–36. I am grateful to James Fiorentino for helping me locate some of the rarer works.

12 For an extended review of Makhnovist historiography, see Colin Darch, “The Makhnovschina, 1917–1921: Ideology, Nationalism and Peasant Insurgency in Early 20th Century Ukraine” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bradford, 1994), 22–60. Portions of the dissertation are available at http://members.tripod.com/~Colin_Darch/Makhno_contents.html. I am grateful to Dr. Darch for making both his full dissertation and journal article available

to me.

13 Darch, “Makhnovschina,” 526.

14 “Why does the Makhnovist movement show there is an alternative to Bolshevism?” found at http://www.infoshop.org/faq/append46.html.

15 Page numbers for Skirda listed in order of appearance in paragraph: 251; 32; 2; 78; 64; 298; 32; 301; 134; 134; 249; 247; 251; 64; 260; 64. Many of his descriptions read like Stalinist accounts of Lenin. In some ways, Skirda merely echoes the Makhnovists: “Why do we call ourselves Makhnovists? Because in the darkest days of the reaction in the Ukraine we have seen among us through thick and thin, our friend and guide Makhno whose voice has spoken out against all oppression of toilers throughout the Ukraine, inciting struggle against all oppressors and all the marauders and political tricksters who misled us.” Quoted in Skirda, 383. This overstates the necessity of Makhno’s involvement. As Darch notes, “Makhno was the most articulate and the most successful of the peasant insurgent leaders—Grigorev, Angel, Zeleny, Struk, Antonov and crucially he survived to tell his tale. If a gendarme had killed him in 1906, or if he had stayed in Moscow in 1917, the peasants of the Ukraine would still have resisted the Whites and the Bolsheviks without him (‘Makhnovschina,’ 68).”

16 Skirda, 50–52.

17 Arshinov, 54–55. Darch discusses this absence and Makhno’s description (“Makhnovschina,” 187–217).

18 Skirda, 69.

19 John Rees, “In defense of October,” International Socialism 2, no. 51 (1991), 15.

20 W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War: 1918–1921 (1989; reprint Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1999), 85–86. At least Makhno would have had no illusions in Kornilov. Given the opportunity, he probably would have put a bullet in the general’s head. Skirda also celebrates the Czech Legion uprising that opened the doors to years of civil war, 72. Taking an odd position for an anarchist, Skirda thinks the disbanding of the Constituent Assembly was unjustified, 156. He also argues that the Reds were worse than the Whites, 169.

21 A common paraphrasing of the Marx’s famous line, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already given and transmitted from the past.” Karl Marx, “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 1852, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm.

22 For further discussion on this point, see Tony Cliff, Lenin: The Revolution Besieged (London: Bookmarks, 1987), 207–83.

23 See David Foglesong, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

24 Tony Cliff, Trotsky: The Sword of the Revolution (London: Bookmarks, 1990), 58.

25 Lincoln, 73.

26 Cliff, Trotsky, 58.

27 Leon Trotsky, My Life, “The defense of Petrograd,” Chapter 35, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1930-lif/ch35.htm.

28 Ibid., 64–68.

29 Quoted in Rees, 31.

30 Lincoln, 317–23. Incidentally, despite this record, Skirda persists in viewing the Whites as the lesser evil, sympathetically describing Denikin as “also of very modest origins” (70), and claiming that “the Whites’ sinister record had been beaten out of sight [by the Reds]!”169.

31 Cliff, “Lenin,” 90.

32 Ibid., 84–86.

33 Smith, 243. In the metal factories of the Petrograd province that employed more than 100 workers, the total workforce slumped from 197,686 to 57,995 between January and April 1918.

34 E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 2, 1917–1923 (London: Penguin books, 1972), 198.

35 Cliff, “Lenin,” 84–86.

36 Smith, 243.

37 Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, trans. Peter Sedgwick (1930, reprint London: Pluto Press, Bookmarks, 1992), 351.

38 Cliff, “Lenin,” 84.

39 Rees, 56.

40 Ibid., 45.

41 For more on war communism, see Cliff, “Lenin,” 83–97.

42 Quoted in Rees, 44.

43 Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1970), 9–10.

44 In discussing the Spanish Civil War, Trotsky wrote that anarchist practice and theory are like “raincoats that leak only when it rains, i.e., in ‘exceptional’ circumstances, but during dry weather they remain waterproof with complete success.” Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution, 1931–39 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 327.

45 For example, “An anarchist FAQ” writes, “The ‘free commune’ was a voluntary association of rural workers who took over an expropriated estate and managed the land in common. The commune was managed by a general meeting of all its members and based on the liberty, equality and solidarity of its members…. Like their political ideas, their economic ideas were designed to ensure the freedom of working people and the end of hierarchy in all aspects of society. In summary, the Makhnovist had a [sic] constructive social ideas which aimed to ensure the total economic and political emancipation of the working people.” Currently located at http://www.infoshop.org/faq/append46.html#app6.

46 Darch, “Myth,” 527.

47 Ibid., 528.

48 Arshinov, 87.

49 There was a tradition of community-level decision making and responsibility. These communes (Mir) were formed out of several families living in the same area. They made decisions to which the whole group was accountable and they jointly paid taxes to the tsar. However, there was little socialized production. They all worked their own separate plots of land, even if they jointly planned the division of that land. The Makhnovists were careful to distinguish between those and their “free working communes.” Darch describes these dynamics (“Makhnovschina,” 114–51).

50 The wheat is described by Skirda, 88, and the poison by Avrich, 219.

51 In fact, the peasants most likely to have a surplus were the kulaks, wealthier peasants who employed others to till the land. In practice, his approach would benefit the wealthy (Darch, “Myth,” 530). Even later when Bolshevik policy produced a great leveling of the peasantry (although some kulaks remained), under Makhno’s approach, the kulaks would have easily risen again. In practice, Makhno tended toward conciliation with the kulaks, downplaying the class tensions within the peasantry, much to the frustration of the Bolsheviks. In describing their class approach, David Footman quotes the Guliai-Pole Congress: “ways and means of our new agricultural order must be devised by the free and natural decision and initiative of the peasantry as a whole (Civil War in Russia [London: Faber and Faber, 1961], 277).” Trotsky and Lenin both also comment on this in various articles on Makhno. Darch notes: “There is no conclusive proof that the movement’s membership consisted mainly of poor peasants. There are grounds for supposing that a principle motive behind the Makhnovists was the highly developed sense of property among the Ukrainian rural population. If this is the case, then the Soviet charge that the movement was a kulak one might be partly justified.” (“Makhnovschina,” 46)

52 Darch, “Myth,” 531.

53 Quote in A. Kramer, internet article, http://www.marxist.com/History/russia_peasants.htm.

54 Malet reproduces Makhno’s order, 123. Skirda reproduces a related article from the Makhnovinist paper, 156.

55 Footman, 279.

56 Kramer and Skirda (156–57) describe the same incident.

57 Leon Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, Vol. 2, 1919 (1924, reprint and translation London: New Park, 1979), 277. Also available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1919-mil/ch49.htm.

58 “Draft declaration of the (Makhnovist) revolutionary insurgent army of the Ukraine adopted on October 20, 1919 at a session of the Military Revolutionary Soviet,” reproduced in Skirda, 373.

59 Smith, 86.

60 For example, in a disagreement, someone has to prevail. If the minority can overrule the majority, we are left with an even more “authoritarian” state of affairs. For more on the general flaws of anarchism, see Paul D’Amato, “Anarchism: How not to make a revolution,” International Socialist Review, 3 (1997); Geoff Bailey, “Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War,” International Socialist Review, 24 (2002); Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Volume 4, Critique of Other Socialisms (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990) 107–75, 270–304.

61 Quoted in Palij, 59.

62 From a Makhnovist bulletin: “Soviet and Ukranian currencies are to have the same value as other currencies. Those who violate this disposition are to be liable to revolutionary sanction [i.e., execution].” Quoted in Skirda, 165.

63 Skirda recounts one case of a Bolshevik paper being repressed because it was critical of the Makhnovists, 92. Malet reprints the full order, including the army’s right of censorship on military reports, 176.

64 These bodies supposedly had no decision-making authority. They were only allowed to carry out the congress’s decisions. In the fast moving situation of the civil war, it seems certain that these bodies had to make decisions in the light of changing circumstance. Regardless, one “congress of the front” in early 1919 passed a set of regulations on military organization. According to Skirda, “All detachments refusing to acknowledge its authority were to be disarmed and their commanders brought before a general tribunal of the insurgents (79).”

65 Malet writes, “Despite assurances that the town commandants did not interfere in the civil life of their cities, they did have a lot of power. Klein at Olexandrivske complained that all he did was sit at a desk and sign bits of paper, while Lashkevich at Katerynoslav threatened to shoot the local Bolsheviks if they tried to take over civilian power in the city. Skaladytsky in Nykopil ordered that anyone who did not allow free exchange of the various currencies would be dealt with as a counter-revolutionary,” 93.

66 Malet, 96. Responding to a typhus epidemic, they had to “threaten punishment to all who did not keep their places clean.”

67 Palij, 151. Quote of Makhno in Darch, “Makhnovschina,” 92.

68 Skirda, 359. From a Makhnovist bulletin: “…the cultivation, organization and erection by constraints on their part of any political authority hostile to the laboring people—which has nothing to do with the free expression of ideas—will in no ways be tolerated by the revolutionary insurgents.” Makhno’s supporters point to his allowing the freedom of the press. At various points, Bolsheviks and others were allowed to publish newspapers, but if they advocated specific policies with which the anarchists disagreed, they would be shut down. Whether one thinks this is valid is less important then recognizing that this behavior is “authoritarian” and “statist.”

69 Avrich, Russian Anarchists, 214.

70 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “From the alliance of socialist democracy and the International Working Men’s Association,” in Marx, Engels, Lenin, Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 110–11. Bakunin in this tract Engels’ cites, then goes on to argue that one hundred anarchists organizing secretly as the “revolutionary general staff” would be sufficient for the success of the revolution in Europe. The Bakuninist program, “Program and purpose of the revolutionary organization of the international brothers,” can be found in Michael Bakunin, Selected Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 172.

71 Footman, 286.

72 Malet, 93 and Avrich, Russian Anarchists, 215.

73 Darch, “Makhnovschina,” 328. Darch summarizes a report from an officer in the Ukrainian National Army assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the Makhnovists.

74 Footman, 286.

75 Malet, 102.

76 Skirda, 157.

77 Footman, 268. Ellipses are his.

78 Quoted in Malet, 105. Ellipses are his.

79 Footman, 260. Palij notes that the “primary source of the food would be free gifts from the peasants, the spoils of victory, and requisitions from privileged groups (197).”

80 Quoted in Malet, 98.

81 Ibid., 18.

82 Footman, 265–66.

83 Ibid., 288. They were the Razvedka and the Kommissiya Protivmakhnovskikh Del. Palij also describes them, 192.

84 Ibid., 261. Although they developed a reputation for freeing the rank and file (which they did sometimes), there was no semblance of a trial for the officers, who were almost always summarily executed.

85 Malet, 102.

86 Quoted in Ibid., 103.

87 Skirda, 35.

88 On ban, see Palij, 197. Malet notes that he also banned card playing, 101.

89 Voline, 705–06.

90 Malet, 100-101; Footman, 289; Victor Peters, Nestor Makhno: The Life of an Anarchist (Winnipeg: Echo Books, 1970), 57. Darch discusses his early anarchist years and notes “According to one account the other members did not trust him because he was an habitual drunkard. In such a condition, he was aggressive and talkative, and liked to pick fights (‘Makhnovschina,’ 19).” Malet notes that once in exile, he cut back because he no longer had to “keep up the drinking standards of his fellow Ukrainian peasants,” only resuming heavy drinking in the last few years of his life, when “he knew that tuberculosis was killing him anyway,” 189. Skirda dismisses this portion of Voline’s book, claiming it was lies driven by factional infighting and hurt feelings. This defense is weak. Voline spends the bulk of his time singing Makhno’s praises and defending him from unjust criticism such as anti-Semitism. He devotes less than 6 of 170 pages on the Makhnovists to criticisms of the movement.

91 Voline, 705. Peters mentions others rapes, 58.

92 Skirda, 306.

93 Darch, “Makhnovschina,” 50–51.

94 Cliff, Lenin, 155.

95 For size estimate, see Darch, “Makhnovschina,” 408. Makhno’s army either expended energy on raids to acquire weapons, or, when in alliance with the Red Army, got them from the workers’ state, Ibid., 329.

96 Ibid., 271.

97 Lincoln, 198.

98 Darch, “Makhnovschina,” 288. To explain their failure, the Makhnovists claim it was not their fault—they were deliberately deprived of weapons by the treacherous Bolsheviks. This does not explain their abandonment of the front. Additionally, a more credible explanation for supply problems is a combination of the fog of war and the generally poor material conditions the Red Army faced. It’s not as if the rest of the Red Army was superbly equipped by a well-oiled machine. Indeed, there are cables from Bolsheviks traveling with Makhno requesting arms and reinforcements from Bolsheviks in the rear. Ibid., 289–90.

99 Ibid., 291.

100 Ibid., 42. The full text of Order 1824 can be found online at http://nestormakhno.info/english/trotsky/ord1824.htm.

101 Ibid., 291. From the announcement addressed to all units of Makhno’s division and Red Army troops in the region: “The Executive Committee of the RVS [...] has reached the conclusion that only the working masses themselves can find a solution, and not individuals or parties.”

102 Ibid., 530.

103 Ibid., 418.

104 Skirda, 194. This may reveal a lack of political awareness by many in Makhno’s army. It also may have fueled incorrect rumors of a Wrangel-Makhno alliance.

105 The details of this agreement are covered by Darch, “Makhnovschina,” 419–25.

106 Skirda argues that “Thus, in two weeks the Makhnovists had done what the Red Army had failed to achieve over six months! (226)” Malet notes that “it is not easy to evaluate the contribution of the Makhnovists to Wrangel’s defeat” and goes on to quote a Bolshevik writer on the Makhnovists’ heroism, 69. However, Darch points out that during the campaign against Wrangel, the Red Army leaders were sending a constant stream of cables to the rear about the failures and slowness of the Makhnovists (“Makhnovschina,” 115). Lincoln concludes that the key factor was sending fresh reserves of committed Bolsheviks that meant their proportion in the Red Army on the front rose to one in eight, 440–43.

107 Darch, “Makhnovschina,”.

108 Ibid., 543–45. While acknowledging the NEP’s critical role, Darch argues there are additional factors, including the peasants’ exhaustion with war, Makhno’s lack of resources, and Makhno’s military defeat at the hands of the Red Army.

109 Arshinov, 252–53. Emphasis in original.

110 Darch, “Makhnovschina,” 56–57.

111 This is known as the debate over the Platform.

112 Nestor Makhno, ed. Alexander Skirda, The Struggle Against the State and other Essays (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 67. The original essay “On revolutionary discipline” was written in 1925.

113 Ibid.

114 Leon Trotsky, How The Revolution Armed, Vol. 1, 1918 (London: New Park, 1979), 400–401. Also available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch34.htm.

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Comments (42)

  • Guest (Andrei Kuznetsov)

    Although I (obviously) disagree with the Trotskyist tone of the article, I am impressed by how well this article refutes the story of Makhno being an exemplary Anarchist, as well as shows the conditions that the Bolsheviks faced in the midst of the Civil War that led them to do what they did (for better or for worse).

    Both Communists and Anarchists seem to miss one important thing when discussing history: <b>Context, context, context</b>. If one loses sight of context, you can only end up with a mythology in which you can deify or demonize anyone you wish for your particular agenda.

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  • Guest (21st century anarchist)

    While some of the smarter anarchists don't really really on makhno and what could be said to be semi leinist practices at various points I do have to point out couple of fails in this argument(which just repeats the leinist talking points)

    1) It should not be compulsory for the country to feed the city, feeding your self is your afair, if this means that urban eastern europe would have had to take the steps to innovate urban agriculture before bill mollison came along so be it.

    2) The failure to see things beyond the ideology and practice of productionism which is an essential component in the ideology of capital, if eastern europe were to have been truly successful they would have had to come up with new paradigms of producing things. In this regard you need major breaks from the old way of doing things something dialecticians don't understand, it means going beyond the dichotomy of city and country, in the grand scheme of things people starved to death anyway just as always happens with yet another model of the city of leviathan.


    "Landed property can only belong to the species. It would be a matter of revitalizing the communities so as to include technical progress and avoid the development of capital. That would have meant, in short, the application of the fundamental point of the then communist programme : the abolition of the town/country separation-opposition. Now capital accomplished that in its own way and to its own profit. The man-nature relationship is posed differently .

    In the absence of this perspective, Lenin could only give the following guarantee against restoration in Russia :

    "We are not in a position to call forth at our own will a socialist revolution in the West, which is the only absolute guarantee against restoration in Russia." [63]

    He was right, but he displaced the problem. He could not see the danger of restoration, not as the return to another mode of production (the restoration in France did not re-establish feudalism, the monarchy was a bourgeois monarchy which had to stand at the head of society itself becoming more bourgeois, it could only hold back the movement), but as the reaffirmation of a previous form of political domination which would have had to have been suppressed. One would have needed to have understood the development of capital into the material community as had achieved in the West on the basis of the socialization of production and men. This could not happen in Russia because capital was not developed enough to domesticate men, to impose capital's life on them, forcing then into quantitative time, capital's time. Thus here there would be a real despotic authority ruling all aspects of life, hence the restoration of despotism. Therefore there is a great deal of truth in naming Stalin the Red Tsar. This despotism could not be an obscurantist one, but an enlightening one, and here again we find the importance of marxism. State intervention implies a certain will, a certain consciousness. Historical materialism suits the granting of this, thus explaining the fundamental mechanisms of the mode of production with the different representations for the various classes or elements intervening in the process. Since the state had to develop the CMP, with the perspective of reducing the length of capital's existence, that meant that the social body as a whole was unable to engender or supersede it. Thus it was not society that would engender its own adequate representation and consciousness during its movement. It had to be given the consciousness of something that it had to do. This duty was even more constraining as there was an abyss between the mentality of the mujik and what capital needed to develop. It was not without reason that Lenin said that one had to learn to work ! "

    Jacques Camatte Community and Communism in Russia

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  • Guest (Otto)

    As someone who used to be an anarchist, I like seeing serious intellectual writings. I decided we can’t have a stateless society until we’ve crushed all those who want to bring back the bourgeoisie. I still agree with the aims of anarchy. I just disagree with the attempts being used to create it.

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  • Guest (TransconaSlim)

    I like this article, but I think that it is very limited in its analysis, which has allot to do with it’s Leninist outlook.

    I think that looking at the material conditions is important, but that only really explains half of the quick degeneration of the Russian revolution under the Bolsheviks. What I think is just as important is the structures created by the Bolsheviks, including the role of the state.

    The soviets, as expressions of workers self-management, these were groups of workers elected at most factories before, during and after the October revolution. The delegates to these committees were mandated and recallable. As each workplace relied on many others to supply raw materials, power and to take their products on to the next stage of production the Factory Committees tried to federate in November 1917.

    The planned "All Russian Congress of Factory Committees" never took place. Instead the Bolshevik party decided to set up the “All Russian council of workers control” only 25% of the delegates coming from the factory committees, one that was controlled by the Bolsheviks, as an organization the party could control. This body only met once, and was soon absorbed by the Supreme Economic Council set up in November 1917 which was attached to the Council of Peoples Commissars, itself entirely made up of Bolshevik party members. The Bolsheviks had taken control of the economy out of the hands of the Working class and into the hands of the Bolshevik party.

    This was all before the civil war.

    In essence, platformists want to use the structure of the Bolsheviks, revolutionary discipline, vanguard party, hierarchy, etc. but argue that just because they aren’t capturing the state, that there communism is “anarchist” communism that things will turn out differently. I honestly doubt it. There’s one particularly vocal platformist on the Anarchist Black Cat forum named Dundee_United who argues for an “anarchist government” (!) with “Superior nuclear weapons and ballistics, a massive standing army, a powerful airforce, and a blue ocean navy”! This is a far cry from self-organized workers militias, virtually indistinguishable from the same-old Leninist line.

    I’ve always believed that wobbly slogan, that we build the “new world in the shell of the old”. The nature of how we organize will reflect the nature of post-capitalist society. Our means and our ends are the same; our organizations need to reflect the rank-and-file democratic, liberatory self-managed society we want to live in.


    Still, a decent enough article. As an anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist and wobbly, that is exactly why I will never be a platformist.

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  • Guest (David_D)

    What I have to say is that someone should be proud to be called a Stalinist. Stalin was a great proletarian revolutionary and brilliant communist theoretician. He was the great leader of the Soviet Union and the international communist movement for decades. He was, perhaps more than any other individual, responsible for the first great wave of the world proletarian revolution, and communist should uphold and not discard him. Mao Zedong stood on the shoulders of J.V. Stalin and appropriately defended and evaluated his contributions.

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  • Guest (21st century anarchist)

    Stalin roolze

    Otto if I may ask and I have never gotten a proper response from any leninist who makes these assumptions, how do you separate "the people who want to restore capitalism" from social relationships as a whole? If the social relationships are in full transformation mode then they will be as successful as your contemporary radical subverter who is a contradiction easily absorbed and ultimately all newly ordered systems absorb their contradictions effortlessly, emergence always outdoes intention, to a certain degree the anarchist will need some accidents on her side to push things over the top, the key is not falling into old social practices that ultimately restore the old order, there was a tragic 2nd hand story I heard out of argentina where workers at a balloon factory had a faction that wanted to turn the work space into a community space, the majority on the other hand wanted to restore it under cooperatism, guess who won and guess who is apparently making less money now, this is not a question of some tiny minority, this gets down to social behavior, when there is a tipping point what is needed are those individualistic subversionists who propogate new ways of living.

    Slim

    While I harbor no illusions about the fact that anarchists might well restored capitalism, it may have taken the form of some eastern european mondragon-esc kind of bloc or the Chiapas on a larger level, or maybe a slightly more decentralized form of yugoslavia or libya without the charismatic leader, while it is not my ideal outcome by anymeans it would have been preferable to what DID happen.

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  • Guest (TOR)

    The main problem I have with most anarchists is the stuff about prefigurative politics. I don't believe the revolutionary party should become the post-revolutionary society or that democratic centralism as it is practiced in Leninist parties is the way to run a country. Neither did Lenin. In regards to platformism and Makhnovism, I think the main problem is one of tactics and the fact that these people end up simply stealing from the proletarian state power because they feel that this national democratic authority is somehow limiting their ability to be completely autonomous on a regionalist or even nationalist basis. It also seems that despite all the talk about internationalism and lack of belief in the state among anarchists, that many of them actually believe in incredibly nationalist or even regionalist ideologies, which is probably linked to the problems with their theories about federalism. Their tactics also often fail to go beyond capitalism, as many of their tactics seemed to be aimed towards developing a utopian free-market based society in which there is somehow no bourgeoisie, no money and no state and people can choose to work in whatever arrangements they want and enter into whatever trading relationships they want. While that would be a great society, it unfortunately isn't possible for such a society to be sustainable for any length of time, as a bourgeoisie would arise very quickly under such conditions.

    In terms of strategy, the IWW and the impossibilists seem to uphold the most purist, dogmatic and unrealistic visions of societal transformation of anyone on earth outside of people who believe that it is only through contact with aliens or some kind of messiah that socialism or 'utopia' can be brought about on earth.

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  • Guest (nando)

    David wrote:

    <blockquote>"What I have to say is that someone should be proud to be called a Stalinist. Stalin was a great proletarian revolutionary and brilliant communist theoretician. He was the great leader of the Soviet Union and the international communist movement for decades. He was, perhaps more than any other individual, responsible for the first great wave of the world proletarian revolution, and communist should uphold and not discard him. Mao Zedong stood on the shoulders of J.V. Stalin and appropriately defended and evaluated his contributions."</blockquote>

    I have, as you know, written quite a bit about the need to be critical of Stalin. And I believe that there is a bit of a blindspot coming out of the more Comintern-descended sections of communists -- that lags far behind what most of the world knows (factually) about some of the more troubling experiences of the Soviet Union. ("We choose not to know, we pretend it couldn't be true etc.")

    But having said that, and written about that, I do want to (for the moment) talk about the reasons to uphold Stalin as a revolutionary and a communist (some of which is spoken to by David above).

    I do not think that Stalin was a "brilliant communist theoretician" -- his early works were not terrible (especially works like Foundations of Leninism and On the Opposition). But he soon became the patron of a very mechanical and reductionist form of Marxism that basically served more as a unifying state ideology than a critical theory (and that was more about the authoritity of the state than about pressing forward the revolution). And so, I believe the method and approach of Stalin (especially after he had more and more unchallenged leadership, by say, 1930) is not something we should emulate or adopt.

    But having said that let me list some of the accomplishments we CAN associate with Stalin, that are (to borrow a word from his cult of selfpraise) "immortal":

    1) He led the first attempt at creating a socialist society -- at a time where there was no experience to learn from.

    2) He led the first creation of a socialist industry and a planned economy.

    3) He led the first attempt to socialize a country's agriculture.

    4) Under the leadership of the Soviet Union, the communist movement became (for the first time really) a truly global movement -- and the network of communist organizations (for the first time) extended around the world (including into colonial countries).

    5) He led the communist movement to embrace (following Lenin's lead) the national democratic revolutionary currents arising in the colonial world -- envisioning the world revolutionary process as having multiple currents (including the socialist proletarian one in the developed countries, and the anti-colonial anti-feudal struggle in the colonial world).

    6) He (personally and directly) insisted that American socialists take the oppression and struggle of African American people seriously -- he pressed them to view Black people as an oppressed nation, with oppression and rights <em>as a nation</em>, and to view the struggle of black people as more than just "a part of the working class", but an important and justified movement in its own right. (For that reason alone, he should be honored within the U.S. and any future revolutionary movement -- because under the influence of the Comintern the deep indifference and overt racism of most American socialists toward black people was harshly condemned and replaced.)

    7)He led the great antifascist war against Nazi Germany -- mobilizing the people of the Soviet Union under incredibly difficult conditions, to repulse, pursue, and crush the Nazi forces. It was an unbelievable feat that few believed possible (and that most thought would lead to the crumbling of the new Soviet society under hammer blows). The defeat of Hitler will be entrwined with the name Joseph Stalin forever, and not just because millions of Soviet fighters rose from trenches to fight with Stalin's name on their lips.

    8) His preservation of the Soviet Union under difficult conditions created a great base area for the next great wave of revolution -- represented first and foremost by the Chinese Revolution (the second great communist revolution of the twentieth century). It is impossible to imagine the advance of socialist revolution in East Asia without understanding how it "stood on the shoulders" of the Soviet Union -- and it is painful to imagine the cost of Chinese victory if there had not been a Soviet Union objectively restraining the viciousness of a nuclear armed U.S.

    9) Stalin in a number of key places fought for the advance of the revolulion in the Soviet Union against forces that (very dogmatically) thought it was impossible to "build socialisim in one country," and against forces who thought the Soviet Union should take a capitalist road (and maintain capitalism in agriculture for the foreseeable future).

    All of these important contributions come entwined with Stalin's errors -- which I am not mentioning here, but which I am highly familiar with. Each accomplishment is marked by the fact that Stalin had few experiences to use as guidposts (in other words we can be more critical of STalin precisely because we have his experience, positive and negative, to sum up.)

    But it is part of the sharp contradiction of history that we have such an experience: where we have much to criticize in the <em>ways</em> the Soviet party conducted collectivization, or dealt with national contradictions, or deployed its police campaigns, or treated internal dissidents, or used raw nationalism to mobilize antifascist resistance, or adopted forms of social conservatism to bring stability to a wildly chaotic post-revolutionary society. WE can (and should) both understand his accomplishments and also his painful and grievous misdeeds...

    And the point of it all is to do better -- certainly better than capitalism, and better than our first experiements with socialism.

    I have always respected Mao's advice to remember the difference between "Sian and Yenan." Our movement has made mistakes -- which we must understand. But that doesn't mean we don't see a difference between "us and them" -- between the counterrevolutionary headquarters in Sian and the revolutionary headquarters in Yenan. These are our mistakes and our accomplishments. And if we don't look at it that way, we won't even look at the roots of the problems (we will just demonize the actors). And then we won't be able to truly learn -- for the next time.

    Thanks David.

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  • Guest (nando)

    21st century anarchist writes:

    <blockquote>"It should not be compulsory for the country to feed the city, feeding your self is your affair..."</blockquote>

    I find this a remarkable and revealing statement. It underscores the connection between social programs of some anarchism and an underlying individualism (that is rather hostile to genuinely solving the problems of our time.)

    None of these problems are just "your affair" -- we live in an entwined humanity. And fragmenting it into "i take care of me, fuck you" is (no matter how you wrap it) ultimately non-revolutionary, and at its heart, rather capitalist. (Since in many ways the essense of capitalism is fragmenting the locus of concern and decisionmaking to smaller parts of society, and to the self -- and that is precisely what makes our major problems of food and ecology and poverty so impossible to solve by capitalist means.

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  • Guest (William Dhalgren)

    Though I don't speak or read Ukrainian, so can't really back this up, it always struck me that a lot of the legend around Makhno seems similar to older Ukrainian folklore about bandits, and especially the 18th/19th century haidamakas. Some of my older relatives describe Ustym Karmaliuk in similar terms.

    The haidamaka chief is, first and foremost, supposed to be more clever, just and pious than his opponents; he's usually only beaten by some sort of trickery. He stands up for the needs of common peasants against the local elites, distant central state and parasitic city-dwellers. Even Makhno's summary executions and occasional rages could easily fit this model; the bandit chief is also sometimes portrayed as a dark or troubled figure.

    I'm not trying to suggest that Makhno's movement is strictly a descendant of rural banditry, but I think that this history of armed peasant resistance shaped how Makhno's followers saw him (and also how he saw himself). This doesn't excuse 21st century anarchists who uncritically repeat these semi-mythical aspects of the Makhno story, but it helps to historically situate them.

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  • Guest (William Dhalgren)

    I didn't mean for the term "21st century anarchist" to seem as though it was directed at the poster above. Sorry.

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  • Guest (MJ)

    "Despite once sending a hundred train cars of wheat to Moscow that he captured from the Whites, Makhno generally had a distrustful attitude toward the cities, calling them “a poison.”50 His vision for worker and peasant relations was based on barter between the two. But humanity cannot build a viable system of production on the chance that peasants will have a surplus they are willing to trade.51"

    Speaking as an anarchist-communist inspired by the Platform (living in a rural area, and employed in a food-producing industry), I agree with this kernel of your otherwise tenuous economic argument. Rural agrarian development has always been dependent on urbanization; cities are not a poison or perversion.

    But I think that many here on Kasama, being versed in the politics of certain more recent revolutionary movements, would disagree with the implications of your conclusion: that rural and urban masses would best be unified by the repression of peasants and their food-producing labor, both militarily and through the maintenance of price-controlled capitalist markets for food!

    Maybe Makhnov was a drunk, but after he and his comrades were stabbed in the back and defeated, the economic policies he fought to prevent took the lives of between three and ten million Ukrainians by starvation. That's some viable system of production you are defending.

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  • Guest (21st century anarchist)

    Nando perhaps my your affair comment sounded more individualizing then I actually meant but I can assure you I am not repeating bourgeois ideological talking points, your are right that things are entwined, unfortunately the city/country dynamic does not play to any qualitative reciprocation and has not since this whole thing started in the fertile crescent. Any communism that does not stress skills and self determination as a value is doomed to fail at some point.

    if one of the points against Mak and the peasants was the problem of feeding the cities then its a terrible point to make due to the fact that lenin represented a tendency that was never interested in a process of communization that would have led to a qualitative reciprocation, lenin was first and for most a taylorist and a technocrat who sucked the dialectical dick, his interest was in recreating the process of modernization that was made so tragically famous in britain during the tillage to pastaway period, it was the same thing fucking thing and you know it, it you are in the process of a civil war or any form of so-called war communism then you are doing something wrong, this is what gilles dauve drove home well in when insurrections die. The ideology of production that lenin was wed to was always going to fuck people over.

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  • Guest (21st century anarchist)

    Also this....

    "The bourgeoisie says: don’t touch the state power; it is the sacred hereditary privilege of the educated classes. But the Anarchists say: don’t touch it, it is an infernal invention, a diabolical device, don’t have anything to do with it. The bourgeoisie says, don’t touch it, it’s sacred. The Anarchists say: don’t touch it, because it’s sinful. Both say: don’t touch it. But we say: don’t just touch it, take it in your hands, and set it to work in your own interests, for the abolition of private ownership and the emancipation of the working class."

    is just fail as an analysis, even the point about liberalism and and the state is incorrect, liberals believe in a limited use of the state just like you guys supposedly do, the perception of the anarchist position does not deserve comment, anarchists do not talk about good and evil but consequences when dealing with an emergent process like that of the state, all emergent processes are beyond the power of human intentionality(which can only be contextual anyway)and you have to know whether that emergent process which will always operate on its own internal logic as the state does is something you want give life to or not.

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  • Guest (sks)

    @21st century anarchist

    Sorry. Load of crap.

    It is really this simple:

    1) The state is a way to guarantee the dominance of one class over the other.

    2) The majority of people do not belong to the ruling class, that is, the class that control the state.

    3) In order to achieve true democratic control, this must be remedied by the economic majority controlling the state.

    4) Once the economic majority is in control of the state, it will by sheer existence make the other classes irrelevant. Once classes cease to exist, the state pops out. You are left with self-rule... anarchy!

    Anarchists ultimately are dreaming a pipe dream even more hardcore that the "statist" communist one: they think you can abolish the state and classes by sheer will. I cannot be done. Not even the massed armies of Spartacus could topple the decadent legions of the Roman Empire. The State abhors a vacuum, and even in "failed" states like Somalia, there ar ein fact states in operation - they do not conform to what the "international community" of states calls a state, but they conform to the simplified definition I give above.

    The problem anarchists face is that in every attempt at revolutionary anarchism they have had to adopt statist solutions, as they did in Barcelona or the Paris commune, that is re-establish the state, or never really fully destroying it. The problem statist face is that every attempt of a socialist state has reverted into state capitalism and even capitalism. These are real problems.

    Unfortunately, anarchists ignore their problems, while statists, for the most part, readily acknowledge theirs, and try to develop practice and theory to resolve it. Anarchists stick tho the triumph of will BS - some go as far to fail to recognize that the conditions that semi-statified the anarchist bid for power had an objective nature no amount of will could overcome and claim that it was all the "leader's fault".

    I call shenanigans. You cannot possibly expect that there will ever be a pure leader...

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  • Guest (David_D)

    "...And I believe that there is a bit of a blindspot coming out of the more Comintern-descended sections of communists — that lags far behind what most of the world knows (factually) about some of the more troubling experiences of the Soviet Union."

    Really? It seems to me that communists have spent FAR more energy analyzing, criticizing, and repudiating the various real and imagined faults of the Soviet Union, particularly under Stalin, than the bourgeoisie had done with the historical experience of capitalism at a similar stage in its world-historic development. That's a good thing in an important sense, and we shouldn't use the exploiting classes as our standard. But I think it's critical that these errors are in the shade compared with the ongoing crimes of imperialism.

    "I do not think that Stalin was a 'brilliant communist theoretician' — his early works were not terrible (especially works like Foundations of Leninism and On the Opposition). But he soon became the patron of a very mechanical and reductionist form of Marxism that basically served more as a unifying state ideology than a critical theory (and that was more about the authoritity of the state than about pressing forward the revolution). And so, I believe the method and approach of Stalin (especially after he had more and more unchallenged leadership, by say, 1930) is not something we should emulate or adopt."

    I would disagree. I think that his synthesis of Marxism-Leninism was brilliant. "Economic Problems of Socialism" was brilliant. I cannot conceive of Maoism without Stalin's contributions, especially in terms of national self-determination.

    "...we have much to criticize in the ways the Soviet party conducted collectivization, or dealt with national contradictions, or deployed its police campaigns, or treated internal dissidents, or used raw nationalism to mobilize antifascist resistance, or adopted forms of social conservatism to bring stability to a wildly chaotic post-revolutionary society. WE can (and should) both understand his accomplishments and also his painful and grievous misdeeds…"

    Each of these points divides into two. Revolution and class dictatorship involve and utilize coercion, and not just with the class enemy. Stalin and his associates, in my opinion, DID smash a real fifth column for German imperialism. It wasn't necessarily in all cases a conscious fifth column, but it was an objective one. And nationalism is a powerful tool in political mobilization, and I think it's not always wrong to utilize it, even in intermediate countries like central Europe back then.

    "I have always respected Mao’s advice to remember the difference between 'Sian and Yenan.' Our movement has made mistakes — which we must understand. But that doesn’t mean we don’t see a difference between “us and them” — between the counterrevolutionary headquarters in Sian and the revolutionary headquarters in Yenan. These are our mistakes and our accomplishments."

    I wholeheartedly agree. I go beyond though, and say that this is an ideological and political heritage that we cannot discard with complete disarticulation and liquidation. In short, it would mean not being communists any more.

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  • Guest (nando)

    David writes:

    <blockquote>"I would disagree. I think that his synthesis of Marxism-Leninism was brilliant. “Economic Problems of Socialism” was brilliant. I cannot conceive of Maoism without Stalin’s contributions, especially in terms of national self-determination."</blockquote>

    A few things quickly:

    I suggest we not rate contributions as "brilliant" or not brilliant -- despite the fact that this was precisely the way Stalin's views were promoted. (Mao discouraged that kind of talk about himself as was documented in <a href="/http://kasamaproject.org/pamphlets/9-letters/letter-8/" rel="nofollow">one of the essays of the 9 letters</a>.) Instead we should examine the theses in the context of the world -- divide them into two, identify where they capture something about reality and where they don't.

    And overall, I think Stalin fell short in a number of ways -- even if we cut him slack for pioneering an uncharted course in the worlds first successful socialist revolution.

    One of the substantive issues here is precisely the synthesis of Marxism-Leninism. There was value in identifying how Lenin had broken with previous Marxist verdicts and brought something new to communist theory. And there was value in upholding more correct, newer insights over less correct older ones.

    But the specific codification of communist theory into Marxism-Leninism injected a number of problems as well -- since many particular features of the Russian revolution were codified as universal. And this was used to impose and defend a new orthodoxy that often did not serve well. And a number of theories were taught as the lesson of Bolshevism which misrepresented the experience in a reductionist way (including, I believe, in the universalizing of a very very particular form of party, down to its name, structure, cellular structure, program, symbols, etc.)

    In fact the Maoist approach to the question of nationalities differed <em>significantly</em> from the Bolshevik approach. And in the 1960s, the CPUSA often raised Stalin's writings on the Soviet Union to critique the Maoists on precisely this point. (CPUSA Chairman <a href="/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Winston" rel="nofollow">Henry Winston</a> wrote a particular work hammering exactly this point home in his attacks on Maoism.)

    For example you will not find a discussion of self-determination of minority nationalities within the Chinese revolution, or a discussion of whether they are nations or not, nor will you find an importation of Stalin's criteria for nationhood into the discussion of (say) Tibet.

    The Comintern (and Stalin) upheld the national liberation movements of the colonial world (and their integration into the world socialist revolution). But a different theory emerged from the Chinese revolution than the one Stalin articulated in regard to Eastern Europe (as one would expect for a complex series of nationality issues in a very different part of the world).

    While you are correct that Mao emerged from Stalin's movement, and Mao's theory emerged out of the politics and theory of the Comintern, it is worth noting the places and ways Mao's work involved negation as well as affirmation.

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  • Guest (21st century anarchist)

    "Sorry. Load of crap.

    It is really this simple:

    1) The state is a way to guarantee the dominance of one class over the other.

    2) The majority of people do not belong to the ruling class, that is, the class that control the state.

    3) In order to achieve true democratic control, this must be remedied by the economic majority controlling the state.

    4) Once the economic majority is in control of the state, it will by sheer existence make the other classes irrelevant. Once classes cease to exist, the state pops out. You are left with self-rule… anarchy!"

    Sorry but your whole antecedent does not reflect reality no matter how much you keep repeating it.

    The state is the exercise of power period, there is not a privileged controlling few at the level of substance, it is an emergent phenomena that operates on its own imperatives as all emergent processes do, everything comes down to whether you believe that these processes are desirable or not, if you like it then you affirm the forms of behavior that reflects it, if you want it gone then you contract different behaviors and relationships, in any event I would think its an obvious iron rule that any emergent process(that is to say complexities and multiplicities beyond an individual or contextual intention) are not privy to being controlled, only adapted to.

    Also there is no such thing as a majority in any substantial sense, there's a multitude(to use that old but somewhat useful phrase) but you will not find a single unifying principle in all that base of heterogeneous matter.

    And the problems that you list have not been ignored by anarchists or the libertarian strands of communism for that matter, I mentioned Dauve's 'when insurrections die', I could also add 'reinventing hierarchy' by Robert Graham, we know about the capitulations, but we are not giving up by any means, what we are doing is re-inventing what anarchy needs to be at even more intense levels, there have been strands of thought that have questioned such things as the single revolution and even such things as consciousness raising all together, to a certain degree any revolutionary who is honest will have to accept that some things will have swing her way through accidents and other objective events, to a certain degree we are living in those days right now, there may very well be a world shake up and down size, what anarchists need to do is be in those key positions to rock the boat in the right direction, for instance if someone proposes reopening the factory under different arrangements that threaten to restore things suggest creating a space of play instead.

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  • Guest (Nick R)

    I don't like to comment on websites, but this is so extreme:

    <i>It should not be compulsory for the country to feed the city, feeding your self is your afair</i>

    21st Century Anarchist do you really realize what this means? Since you don't qualify it by saying anything about the context (like it only applied in Ukraine during the civil war) I assume you think this principle should be followed in the modern world in future revolutions. This is essentially a recipe for catastrophic disaster. You may not intend it this way but peasants withholding food from the cities is basically genocidal. In a world where over half the population lives in urban areas this would amount to a human death toll on an unprecedented scale.

    Beyond that the city and country are dependent on each other in complex ways. Though it might take longer, without supplies from cities rural economies will collapse. There can be no immediate transition to 'urban agriculture', nor can industry be moved quickly into the country. This contradiction will be resolved slowly, or not at all. But in the immediate period after the revolution people will continue to need to eat. It is amazingly inhumane to support the starvation of whole urban populations. And honestly I don't care if there are peasants who want to withhold it. Their rights to what ever form of self determination you are imagining cannot predominate over millions' right to eat(survive)! This conception of personal autonomy as more important than rights to food, shelter, medicine, or other necessities is incredibly bourgeois. These are basically the conditions our society currently operates under. How well is that working out?

    Lenin was not a technocrat or a taylorist. I have no idea where you come up with this. And your comment about him sucking dialectic dick is homophobic and offensive. I am pretty sure Lenin never did suck any dick, but so what if he did? What the hell is wrong with that and why do you feel like it is insulting? Many woman and men perform fellatio using it as an insult is degrading to them.

    Any animal that could possibly be called human has used production on some scale, for tools, clothing, food. It is impossible to go without it. Our ability to produce is probably what makes us most distinctly human. Didn't Engels prove that it was tool use which caused larger brains to develop in evolution? We should attempt to make production sustainable and good for the environment, but we are limited in this by the economic structure of society.

    MJ

    I have never read a source written by a real historian who has put the number dead in the 30s soviet famine at more then about 5 million. And it is often less then that. The famine occurred in other areas in the Soviet Union and not just the Ukraine. Only Ukrainian nationalists seem to think figures on the scale of 10 million and they have useful political reasons for this. This is in contrast to a system in the capitalist world where the people who die from hunger is staggeringly higher. But for some reason these are considered 'acts of god' and simply the way nature works, instead of the way capitalism works. And this isn't even counting treatable diseases too.

    Generally I think it is interesting that the two time anarchists actually participated in a revolution (Ukraine and Spain) those who led the anarchist forces came out of it and developed 'authoritarian' positions, which most anarchists abhor. Makhno developed the platform, referred to hear as Leninist (in the bad way anarchists mean when they say that). And the veterans of the 'Friends of Durruti' issued statement criticizing the militias and arguing for the need of greater military discipline. It's almost like using pure anarchist ideas doesn't work in the real world. But I suppose there could be other explanations for these events too.

    -Nick R

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  • Guest (Nick R)

    Why the hell shouldn't we exercise power and how could we possibly have a revolution of any sort without exercising power? If we deprive the upper class of their property which they use to oppress others, then that is an exercise of force. I want to be able to exercise power and force against the enemies of the working class, this is the whole point of socialism. If we plan defeat the largest military on Earth we will need to exercise some force, or support others doing so. Force and power are not bad in themselves it is how they are put to use which determines their character.

    Also I wanted to mention a few things I left out before about Stalin. He obviously did some bad things, but this has to be weighed against what he did accomplish. Some of his policies did have horrible human costs. But over all he industrialized an impoverished nation cut off from the world. He drastically raised life expectancy, education levels and eventually standards of living. He protected the Slavic peoples and ultimately most of Asia from what would have likely been extermination at the hands of the Nazis. There were lives taken by his policies, but don't the millions he saved through winning the war and improving medicine and food supply and health need to be counted too? Anyway the Ukrainian famine had nothing to do with Makhno's army it took place two decades later and had different causes.

    -Nick R

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  • Guest (TOR)

    "for instance if someone proposes reopening the factory under different arrangements that threaten to restore things suggest creating a space of play instead."

    How will a space of play feed people or provide for their basic needs in the way a factory could.

    Also, in regards to the state, if the state simply represents the exercise of power and never has a class basis regardless of the politics of the regime in power, the dominant mode of production and the particular relations of production, then why do you think the state exists anyway? What causes it to exist and be reproduced and why did it come into being historically? For me, your analysis isn't even anarchist, as Franz Oppenheimer provides a very good anarchist theory of how the state arose and why it exists that is much more materialist than your analysis and actually has an explanation for how the state came into existence, though one I wouldn't agree with as a universal rule, as I am partial to Engels' work on this question and see the conquest theory of the state as very limited.

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  • Guest (scott nappalos)

    I lack the space for a comprehensive reply to the historical sources, so instead will focus on what I find to be the core issues though it is worth stating that obviously this piece is skewed towards a reading of history which privileges a revisionist approach to the Bolsheviks in the revolution. The problem with this article is that is obscures the real issues, and through it's sectarian attempt to silence anarchist opposition, limits our ability to learn from the errors of the Russian Revolution and grow collectively. We should laud attempts to get deeper understandings of the material reality of revolutions, but we can do so without resorting to distorting others perspectives, using hand waving over the serious issues, and addressing comrades honestly and openly. The articles deepest critiques come down to three theses all of which rest on fundamental and dangerous errors which if repeated spell certain failure for any movement for liberation from exploitation.

    First the article argues that the imposition of capitalism, put forth by Lenin ultimately as bringing a build up of capitalist production under Taylorism and one-man factory rule imported from Western capitalist practice and theory, by the Bolsheviks was both necessary and progressive in advancing the revolution. While it is positive to try and ground an analysis in the material conditions of the time, they present a distorted understanding of these conditions which make capitalism a foregone conclusion and in which socialism was never possible (likewise with the discussion of the state all materiality is abstracted away alongside history to make the course of the failed revolution seem inevitable and just).

    "The successful building of socialism ultimately requires well-developed productive forces to end scarcity and liberate humanity."

    This slips in the theory of productive forces, which given the failure of this theory in the history of State Capitalist nations to produce anything close to socialism should give us more than pause. Marx in fact explicitly rejected this idea in his later ideas on Russia, which the Bolsheviks knowingly ignored. The Spanish revolution in 1936 in fact shows this fallacy for what it is. A revolutionary working class and peasantry is more than capable of transforming an economy to increase production even under war and was able to create for a time and in certain places the wealth necessary for the communization of society. It at least should be an open question whether this was possible, not merely an assumption.

    Even should this thesis be true, there is a question whether the imposition of capitalism upon the Russian working class and peasantry was the most effective means to obtain it. The problem with this logic, despite appeals to a vision of down-the-road liberating the workers, is it has no end. This is why Stalin's solution of forced-labor and the imposition of capitalist work relations at the cost of millions of lives was debated in earnest. If we step back, we can see that the real issue was not the immediate status of productive forces, but rather the method by which we transform the existing economy into a socialized economy. For this perspective you don't even have to look to anarchists. Monsoor Hekmat, an iranian leninist, makes similar points here
    http://www.marxists.org/archive/hekmat-mansoor/1986/12/experience.htm

    The same can be said of the Worker's Opposition tendency within the Bolshevik Party (before they were disbanded, and eventually murdered), the council communists, and the left communists such as Bordiga. Bordiga went further in his critique of the Bolsheviks, he asserted the Soviet Union was not state capitalist, but merely capitalist.

    Secondly, the article assumes that a state is merely an organization of governance.

    "the Makhnovists ended up forming what most would call a state. The Makhnovists set monetary policy.62 They regulated the press.63 They redistributed land according to specific laws they passed. They organized regional legislative conferences. 64 They controlled armed detachments to enforce their policies.65 To combat epidemics, they promulgated mandatory standards of cleanliness for the public health.66 Except for the Makhnovists, parties were banned from organizing for election to regional bodies. They banned authority with which they disagreed to “prevent those hostile to our political ideas from establishing themselves.”67 They delegated broad authority to a “Regional Military-Revolutionary Council of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents.” The Makhnovists used their military authority to suppress rival political ideas and organizations.68 The anarchist historian Paul Avrich notes, “the Military-Revolutionary Council, acting in conjunction with the Regional Congresses and the local soviets, in effect formed a loose-knit government in the territory surrounding Guliai-Pole.”69"

    This is an ahistorical analysis that abstracts away all the material and historical characteristics of a state and tries to apply it to a revolutionary situation. The modern state primarily co-developed with capitalism and is intimately bound up with ruling class domination. The state is an institution of bourgeios class rule, and the point of struggle for class fractions. The state is at once a social relationship of power between dominated and the ruling, and a series of institutions which are organized based on hierarchical power centralized into bodies capable of using their power on broader lower bodies. This is a rough characterization of the state, but even that shows the baselessness of their claims that the makhnovschina in Ukraine had Bolshevik ideas and had to build a state. They fail to recognize the difference between organs of popular power where decisions emerge from the base upwards, and centralized institutions of power which explicitly give power to ignore this. Understanding that power is not a matter of structures and that bureaucratism can emerge even from direct democracy, if we don't even had the vocabulary to distinguish between workers councils and the executive committees of the soviet bureaucracy, then we lack any means to understand that reality and give a materialist analysis.

    Whatever you can say about organization in the maknovschina, nothing approached the exclusive executive power we know from states in our time, nor was there anything resembling the following

    "The Sixth Party Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) held at Petrograd between July 26 and August 3 1917 defined democratic centralism as follows:

    1. That all directing bodies of the Party, from top to bottom, shall be elected;
    2. That Party bodies shall give periodical accounts of their activities to their respective Party organizations;
    3. That there shall be strict Party discipline and the subordination of the minority to the majority;
    4. That all decisions of higher bodies shall be absolutely binding on lower bodies and on all Party members." (1)

    By ignoring these issues with revolutionary power, the article obscures what is dangerous to obscure. The revolution is in part the destruction of capitalist power which alienates workers from a world of their own creating. The transformation of ruling class power into proletarian power means an end to alienated labor and rule by the workers themselves. If we're unable to even talk about the differences between institutions of popular power deciding their own fate versus small groupings (who ended up to be a ruling class in training that successfully brought capitalism back to Russia) acting supposedly in the working classes interest, then we lack any arsenal to deal with these issues. By obscuring the actual debate, this article robs us of a means to rectify the mistakes of the Russian Revolution.

    Lastly the article orients towards a crass economism that tries to derive the consciousness and organization of forces from their position in the economy. That is just to say that they see peasants as incapable of leading socialist transformations, and try to derive the Makhnovschinas positions from their supposed peasant privledges. This is to obscure the role of workers movements in the ukraine, the existence of agricultural proletariat in the movement, and the real distinctions in the peasant movements. Moreover we have no reason at this stage in the game to believe we get any guarentees based solely on class. Merely charging a movement with having certain class membership is the subversion of real debate in the form of ad hominem objections that is made by manipulating the data. This has been the history in the recent left of calling opponents "petit-bourgeois" which served the interests only of sectarians in silencing real debate and opposition, and which increasingly makes the left sound crazy and isolated.

    Sources

    (1) History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course. New York: International Publishers, 1939, p. 198

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  • Guest (anarchist communist)

    The vast majority of this article (and the many of the comments for that matter) are based on slander, misrepresentations and ignorance. Are there competing points of views? Of course. But let's base our debates on we both actually believe instead of ignorant caricatures and strawmen. Is there debate over the actual facts? Of course. But let's not act like historians with your political sympathies are more objective than historians with our political sympathies. The problem is there's a lot of misinformation. Two sources that I would recommend that would make this debate worth having (and might actually lead to an advancement towards common struggle or at least clarification of where we actually disagree) would be:

    1) A Makhno FAQ: http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/makfaq.html from the Nestor Makhno Archives

    *I feel folks reading this would even out the debate and help address where conflicting facts and political views lie.

    and

    2) Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism
    An excerpt is here: http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/black-flame-the-revolutionary-class-politics-of-anarchism-and-syndicalism-%E2%80%94-book-excerpt/

    *There's a lot of misinformation about what anarchism is. This book is probably the most highly-researched and accurate book I have ever seen on what anarchism actually IS as defined through ACTUAL struggle over the past century.

    Anarchism is not about a vacuum of power, but about popular self-managed power. It's not about chaos and disorganization, it's about collectively developed and agreed upon forms of horizontal or bottom-up organization. It's not about free markets, it's about communism (or at least socialism). Our difference of opinion is how to get there. Statist communists feel we need a state to transition from our current society to the next. Anarchist communists feel we can transition immediately (not through ideas like the article falsely suggests); but through the expropriation of the means of production by the popular classes and reconstruction of society among communist lines with administration through direct democracy and popular institutions directly accountable and receiving direction directly from the popular classes, rather than having a state apparatus and a vanguard party making decisions on behalf of the popular classes. There are different strains of anarchism just like Marxism: so the insurrectionist anarchist think that insurrectionary actions will inspire the masses to revolution while mass anarchists (like platformists, especifists, etc) think that militants need to be organizing among those of our class to build class power, class consciousness and class struggle because the self-activity of the working class will be the force that creates the revolution, smashes the institutions of bourgeois power, expropriates the means of production and wealth, defends and fights against bourgeois and other reactionary forces and reconstructs society along directly democratic and communist lines immediately (and progressively developing) from the beginning of the revolution.

    Anyway, I'm rambling; but I think our debates would be a lot more productive if we were on the same page as far as what our politics ACTUALLY were and what our disagreements were ACTUALLY about instead of slandering and misrepresenting each other. Not saying either side is innocent; just saying both of sides could do a better job. Again, I'd highly recommend the two sources above to understand the anarchist position on the Makhnovists and to understand what anarchism actually is and how it actually engaged class struggle from the 1860s on.. (yes I'm deliberately starting with Bakunin in the International and skipping Proudhon; read Black Flame to understand why)

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  • Guest (N. Simone)

    Thanks Scott for bringing the discussion back on track. I would be interested in hearing more from tellnolies about what was specifically relevant or valuable about this article, beyond the gesture of engaging with other communist tendencies. And would like to hear more perspectives from Kasama readers on the tradition of left workers opposition.

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  • Guest (N. Simone)

    To be clear, I am interested in hearing from Kasama readers as to whether there are valuable historical lessons that can be acknowledged and gleaned from workers opposition movements in light of their 'premature' resistance against policies that are now recognized as errors with tragic human cost?

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  • Guest (21st century anarchist)

    "21st Century Anarchist do you really realize what this means?"

    Yes I do, it means that people living in cities will have to adapted and no longer rely on alienated relationships, the fact of the matter is the city is based on an inherently violent relationship with those who use land more immediately and this will have to be solved sooner or later. And no one is even talking about withholding food, there's plenty food, the problem is modern production and its particular structure.

    And ultimately the point is to no longer be dependent for any form of survival and encourage the return of skill and self determination, I believe that when there is a will and a necessity to do so, plus the open sourcing of land the the emergence of this will actually be effortless as all things are when there is revolutionary momentum, hell look at the works of Masanobu Fukuoka and Bill Mollison, and what has developed from them, you don't think these things could have been engendered much earlier had their been a proper settling of accounts visa vi town/country, these ideas have taken of without revolutionary conditions being in place, urban agriculture is also more evolved then you realize mostly due to permaculture which I would guess will take of as THE form of post civilized food production, once there is no more property, and forced enclosure you can only imagine what can be possible. Also terms like humane and rights mean nothing to me, I'm an egoist dear and I do believe that people should not be forced to take care of others on an alienated level, there's no such thing as a right to life or any rights for that matter at the end of the day, you simply live, interdependence by all means but to hell with alienated dependence, terms of economies and collapse, isn't that what we want to get away from btw.

    As for lenin I will disregard your political correctness and your asinine(and interesting) inference of homophobia on my part and simply say that you should learn more about lenin, there is no debate that he was a taylorist as scott's post below alludes to, as for being a technocrat, his practice speaks for itself.

    As for your point on production I'm talking about the specific ideology it has taken on for the past 200 years, and don't conflate tool use with modern technology, there is an obvious difference of individuation and self mastery and immediate control, this isn't to say that complexity is a bad thing, just that this thing today sucks, what ultimately defines all civilized production however is forced compulsory labor(I'll return to this later)

    As for the state as I already said, you can't control what is uncontrollable, any complex social arrangement that is beyond the power of ordering and intentionality is beyond control, you either work with it or get rid of it, but there is no controlling it.
    As for terms like 'life expectancy' , 'education levels' and 'standard of living' these are bourgeois spooks that objectify and overly quantify human life, I hope by the end of the 21st century these spooks have been exorcised, it's also funny that you mention the nazies, their technics of propaganda and control already had a precedent in the horrors that transpired in russia, before Goebbels became a master of tv propaganda there was lenin and his overzealous interest in using tv(and pavlov his first post-rev visit) to control people.

    TOR

    To give you a simple question of why the state exists I will return to my point about production and what ties it together in the history of civilization, what is the source the state and its power? what particular activity was going on in the fertile crescent to make this horrendous thing possible that was actually pre-class(from what we know of the early villages they distrusted men that went for power at least for a little while) well I'll give you a clue TOR, its an emergent process that Bob Black argues should be abolished, it starts with a W, that my dear is your source of the state.

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  • Guest (David_D)

    N. Simone: I think the "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)", published in 1938 I believe, is fundamentally and principally correct with regard to how to assess the various opposition movements within the party.

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  • Guest (Green Red)

    on this i am absolutely illiterate. but then, what happened to the Kronstadt incident? was it all white Russians' conspiracy?

    Is there an angstrom of value in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_Rebellion?

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  • Guest (TOR)

    The workers' opposition in the Soviet Union and the left communist trends emerging internationally at the time are something that we need to re-examine and research alongside a re-reading of Lenin's Left-Wing Communism, as this debate is incredibly important and we should not simply assume that Lenin was right on everything just because he was Lenin.

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  • Guest (Otto)

    21st Century Anarchist:
    "f I may ask and I have never gotten a proper response from any leninist who makes these assumptions, how do you separate “the people who want to restore capitalism” from social relationships as a whole?"

    "If this were easy to do, it would have already been done instead of China and the USSR taking steps backward rather than forward.
    In some ways Marxist-Leninism has the same problems with anarchy in that we have a position which actually takes a certain amount of idealism ( in the sense that workers want liberation and that they are rational enough to see that). People are not rational so rational ideas often aren’t taken seriously.
    If we were completely rational, we would have had an anarchist revolution by now and the bourgeoisie would be crushed and gone forever. Also the state, which is always oppressive, would also be gone.
    But as Maoists and Leninists, we have to deal with people who can’t see their class interests and they make incredibly ignorant choices. Under Maoism, the continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat was one way to keep the bourgeoisie classes on the run. It takes vigilance to struggle against such tendencies even after a revolutionary state is completed. This is to say that neither a Marxist-Leninist revolution or an anarchist revolution (which has never happened yet) can change the relationship between those who want capitalist restoration and those who want to move forward, overnight.
    They only real way to get rid of those who want to restore capitalism is to kill them off. But since most of us are not into genocide we have to look for ways to keep them out of power until their bankrupt ideology finally loses its appeal permanently. That takes a prolonged socialist revolution as was promoted in China under Mao. When he died, his opponents took over and restored capitalism. This teaches us that revolutionary vigilance is the only way to stop capitalist restoration. Socialism is in its infancy. Capitalism has had more than 200 years of experience in promoting and defending itself. Socialism will take some time to be able to overcome their experience at crushing revolutions. In the mean time, we can only move forward with out theories and rely on our own experiences in revolution.
    Maoism had 35 years of practice, while anarchy has not really had any. So I will stick with Maoism.

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  • Guest (21st century anarchist)

    I'm afraid I'm going to have to differ on that other bourgeois spook rational self interest, it is basically a buzzword for self preservation and human tendencies are far more ambiguous then that, besides the best thing humans can do in terms of their preservation is simply live their every day lives on terms that the objective condition of the day dictates. Revolutionaries tend to be iconoclasts of some sort and at their worst they tend to radiate towards things that cause a lot of self harm, in the extreme sense they are either ascetics of some sort or quixotic individuals, there is certainly a place for them but ultimately I tend to think revolutions simply come with a changing flow of things that is beyond our control, the key is to ride the momentum in the right direction when a historical accident happens, if for example there is a world wide breakdown in 2012 that leads to unprecedented levels of decentering, I don't want to hear anything about building it back up, there are undoubtedly going to be calls for some world wide council with some distribution scheme in place, this is where the historical anarchist comes in and propagates that dispersal, decentering and individuation continue, in that regards the propaganda of intentionality that anarchists are know for will always be useful in the hear and now.

    Also you admit that worker attachments to the existing order are what keep things afloat, in that regards some instrumental program of getting rid of those who want to restore capitalism is useless, ultimately we are the ones who want to restore things or not, there is no them in any serious sense. Besides all that what exactly makes socialism different from capitalism, they both ultimately share the founding french ideals of modernity anyway and they both are proponents of production for productions sake, if anything socialism is just a particular tendency within the greater ideological wing of 1789.

    "How will a space of play feed people or provide for their basic needs in the way a factory could."

    See the example I wrote of Argentina earlier involving the balloon factory(cause we really need balloons) Factories were never about need anyway, as Mumford pointed out they are paleotechnological relics that were always a reflection of the surplus overproduction logic of capitalism, Kevin Carson the neo-mutualist has written some good critiques of that model as well as proposing a scaled down alternative to them in a new society. Play and need go together anyway.

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  • Guest (Otto)

    Even in my early days as an anarchist I saw capitalism as a form of oppression. I was anti-authority at the time, which is why I considered myself an anarchist. I still don't like authority, but I've gotten used to the idea that it is a necessary evil in the short-run.
    If you see no real difference between socialism and capitalism then we don't have much common ground on which to debate.

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  • Guest (David_D)

    Otto why is authority a bad thing? Even under communism, there will still be antagonistic contradiction among the people. Those who don't think so are wrong, in my opinion. There will still be crime and anti-social behavior, and there will still be the need for exercise of authority. That may be contradictory to the traditional understanding of communism.

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  • Guest (anarchist communist)

    David_D, I think that you're missing the point. It's not about: you can do whatever you want, when you want. You can deal with people engaging in anti-social behavior without top-down bodies with power over the populace. I think that you just don't understand the anarchist position on authority and accountability. Here's one piece that addresses it within the context of anarchist organizations: http://anarkismo.net/article/16133

    There's also a pretty extensive outline of some of the fundamentals of an anarchist vision of society here that addresses the majority of the criticisms/ misunderstandings of anarchism:
    I. What would an anarchist society look like?
    http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secIcon.html

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  • Guest (Otto)

    As Anarchist Communist pointed out, it is a vision. All government uses coercion and some of that is against criminal elements. But in an ideal society we don't need to jail people for anti-social behavior. All people can be redeemed with out punishment. Classical Marxism even talks about a stage of development where the state withers away.
    I gave up the ideals that we can let people who have committed crime go without punishment. Punishment is repressive, but people in a society, don't feel safe if criminals aren’t push shed. So on a practical level, I agree we need a state and laws and we have had them in Communist countries. Capitalist society as we live in, is very repressive and one reason I was an anarchists was that conservatives were so favorable to punishing people, passing new laws to allow for more punishment for more activities that used to be legal and more severe punishments and less rehabilitation and no second chances.
    I rebelled against that. The big question is are people redeemable or as Pol Pot concluded should we get rid of them once they make a mistake?
    As I said before, I’ve chosen to oppose capitalism as the main source of repression in today’s world, so I no longer consider myself an anarchist.

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  • Guest (anarchist communist)

    Anarchism doesn't mean letting people who engage in anti-social acts go without "punishment". And I also have chosen to oppose capitalism as the main source of repression in today's world, so I consider myself an anarchist.

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  • "There’s also a pretty extensive outline of some of the fundamentals of an anarchist vision of society"

    This is where the disconnect takes place for me. My disagreement with anarchism isn't centered on an abstract vision of classless society, but with anarchist ideas about how we will get there.

    Part of this is related to a penchance for generalization when specifics are called for. For instance, the notion of "The State" as an instrument of class rule. Marxists have no objection to this overall characterization, but what purpose does it serve to rail against a transcendental state? Are the states of the Incan empire, Japan during the Meiji period, Sweden in the 1920s, China in 1963 and the US in 1996 really the same state? Does that mean whatever differences there are are simply secondary and perhaps just cosmetic? Does each state not have substantial differences in terms of class formation, ideological practices, political limitations and openings? Wouldn't this have a significant bearing on the shapes of political alliances, radical organization and the constellation of contradictions that come into play? Or is all this washed away in the face of <b>The State</b>?

    I'd like to suggest that anarchists discuss how a post-capitalist society run on anarchist principles would function in the aftermath of a revolution. I am presuming it will be national in scope since I doubt anyone has a viable strategy to make revolutions in two or more countries at the same time.

    Let's stipulate some given factors based on what we know of past revolutions:

    - not everyone, perhaps not even a majority of people will necessarily subscribe to anarchism; even those who consider themselves anarchists will have differences on significant questions
    - the infrastructure will be devastated and rebuilding on a national scale will require massive coordination efforts, but...
    - the world will most likely still be imperialist, and as such, the anarchist revolution will face the strong possibility of military assaults, economic pressure [if not embargo], internal sabotage, and just straightforward confusion and dissent from sections of the population
    - contradictions of the old society: class, misogyny, race, homophobia, etc., will probably still exist [unless anarchism will somehow eliminate centuries-old conditioned practices in a short period of time]

    In order not to make it too unmoored, let's use Spain in the 1930's as the proposed scenario. The anarchists have won and Stalin does not try to influence their politics [I'm just trying to present an "ideal" scenario here]. How could anarchists have dealt with the above challenges while retaining anarchist ideals? Do anarchists truly believe that they will be able to completely dictate the terms of their existence in such an environment? How can they coordinate the movements of people, resources and information across large stretches of territory without a large centralized body?

    We could also posit that the Bolsheviks lost complete legitimacy after the July Days of 1917 and anarchists led by Makhno made the revolution instead. The above questions still would apply.

    Real world revolutions acquire their character from choices people make in conditions that pure ideologies cannot possibly account for. When faced with realities that contradict their visions, I've found that anarchists often prefer their visions, and condemn reality for not having caught up.

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  • Guest (anarchist communist)

    First of all, the same point you make about the State can be made about Capitalism. Could we say that capitalism in England in the 1830s is the same as in the United States in the 1930s, is the same as Japan after World War II, is the same as Norway during that same period, is the same as Singapore in the 1990s, is the same as Nicaragua in the 1990s, is the same as the US now, is the same as Haiti now? Of course, not. It's taken on different forms with different forces interacting with it from different regional and power positions within imperialism in different periods of the development of capitalism. But we can all agree that capitalism in whatever form can't be reformed, it must be abolished and replaced with socialism (or for most of us on this board I'd assume: communism).

    Regarding you're conditions, they all sound like a pretty reasonable scenario. Regarding how we get there, anarchism is based on the belief that a successful revolution that brings us to communism must be made by the self-activity of the popular classes. This means that before revolution mass anarchists believe that a long period of engagement, organizing and popularizing of anarchist ideas and methods and the building of popular class consciousness, solidarity and power must occur in preparation for a revolutionary juncture (so there are subjective activities and there are objective conditions that must occur... perhaps the subjective can hasten the objective; and certainly the objective can contribute to the subjective). The Russian Revolution had strong elements of this with the revolutionary self-activity of the workers and peasants, decision-making of the soviets, etc. The anarchist alternative to authority through centralized party control is worker power and control directly-democratically federated and coordinated through assemblies, delegate councils and delegate congresses (note: the anarchist mandated delegate plays a much different role than representative). In Russia, this would have involved coordination and self-activity between the directly-democratic soviets, between the self-managed factories and between the agricultural communes (including the necessary expansion of these institutions), establishing agreements in the context of equal decision-making capacity and equalizing material conditions. During the Spanish Revolution, this also occurred; but the anarchists made the fatal mistake of trying to deal with other forces through the state (and getting out-manuvered) rather than abolishing state power completely- like the Friends of Durruti argued- in anarchist dominant zones such as Catalonia and running society through worker councils and community assemblies like occurred in some areas. It may not have succeeded even under these conditions due to the likely embargo by imperialist countries, the civil war against much better equipped Italian, German and Spanish facist forces, etc. The other problem in Spain was the lack of international movement. After 1917, the global anarchist movement steadily declined due to the myth and hope of Russia. By 1936, there was no real hope of extensive international solidarity besides the limited solidarity the comparably smaller movements in many countries could provide through the international Brigades and limited solidarity actions internationally.

    So I do think that any successful communist revolution must be thinking larger than a country. I don't think it's important whether people call themselves anarchists or not; it's likely a libertarian communist revolution will see a variety of forces contributing to it (like in the Kronstadt rebellion). I do agree that there will be major obstacles, which stresses the importance of pushing for the importance of material and power equalization- acknowledging the likely uneveness there will be still and acknowledging the likely informal power of influence that will have to occur still- as much as possible amongst the revolutionary populace to invest people in the outcome and to trust in the revolutionary creativity of the working class. I do think that there will likely be a carry over of many of the same prejudices and contradictions of the old society; but that stresses the importance of any left revolutionaries to focus on challenging these in the movements we're trying to build now; so at revolutionary junctures, solidarity is as wide-spread as possible and contradictions from the old society are minimal as possible; but even after the revolution- after the key institutions which uphold these contradictions are destroyed- there will likely be a continual progression towards combating these over time. I do feel that there will likely be a global attack on any successful revolution, which is why it's important for any left movement as it grows to increasingly connect with our comrades globally so that we're building movements in larger regions than just a country and ideally have connections globally.

    I also agree with you that: "Real world revolutions acquire their character from choices people make in conditions that pure ideologies cannot possibly account for." But the difference is that anarchists ideal role is organizer, facilitator and participant within the broader working class popular movement as an equal (if with informal influence of ideas); not as decision-maker above the movement on behalf of the movement. That's a much different role and the logic of that role brings much different conclusions. We're not only arguing that certain people within the bolshevik party should have made different decisions; but that the whole role of the bolshevik party as decision-makers imposing their view from above was the problem. Just like the capitalist class/ working class relation of dominance and exploitation needs to be abolished and in doing abolishing capitalists as a class and replacing it with direct worker power and control; so the government-populace relation of dominance and imposition needs to be abolished to abolish the state and replace it with working-class community power and control. The anarchist critique is against all forms of top-down, hierarchical relation of power in favor of bottom-up and horizontal relations of popular power. There's both a structural as well as an ideological/ cultural component to that (This is touched on in the article above on anarchist accountability)

    Also, we still haven't truly seen what any of us would call communism, so regardless of our ideologies, we have to ask ourselves: why? We'll likely come to different conclusions; but the anarchist argument remains that we feel that we disagree with constituting a state after the revolution with the goal of it whithering away because we don't see the logic of a dominating relationship (despite how much we call it this domination a "people's" domination) ever withering away: that hierarchical power is corrupting, conservative and ultimately damaging to the revolutionary self-activity of the popular classes. Do we need to be organized? Absolutely, highly organized. Do we need to coordinate? Absolutely, as much as possible. Do we need to defend ourselves against reactionary, capitalist, imperialist forces? Of Course. But anarchists argue that just as the revolution should occur from the self-activity of the working class- of which we're a part- society should be administered after the revolution through popular institutions from the bottom-up without any grouping or individuals over and above it making decisions "on behalf of" or "in the interests of" or "for" the popular classes.

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  • Guest (zerohour)

    "we feel that we disagree with constituting a state after the revolution with the goal of it whithering away because we don’t see the logic of a dominating relationship (despite how much we call it this domination a “people’s” domination) ever withering away:"

    Communists have not argued for the "withering away of the state" for about a century now. This was proposed before actual socialist revolutions occurred. Since then, communists have learned a few harsh lessons. Among them, that whether one establishes a state is not just a matter of what one believes, but a matter of what options are presented in given circumstances. Another example of this is the CNT joining the government in Catalan. Do you think they planned on this at the start of the Spanish Revolution?

    Revolutionary possibilities do not emerge in the time and place most convenient for revolutionaries. And even when they do, they don't necessarily take the forms we expect or hope for. The challenge for us is whether purist doctrine is to be favored over a non-compliant reality. This is not limited to anarchists, we see this with communists who criticize the Nepalese Revolution because it doesn't resemble closely enough their favorite moments from past revolutions.

    You say: "I do feel that there will likely be a global attack on any successful revolution, which is why it’s important for any left movement as it grows to increasingly connect with our comrades globally so that we’re building movements in larger regions than just a country and ideally have connections globally." But the USSR didn't really have this option. As for this method of drawing on international support, I believe the EZLN tried this and I'd like to learn more about this experience. At the same time, I don't think see how external support will mitigate the need for a central institution that can operate on a national scale. I didn't see an argument as to how "democratically federated and coordinated through assemblies, delegate councils and delegate congresses", which I think would be important components of a revolutionary society, can fend off external and internal attacks, much less engage in international diplomacy, and set military and economic policy that can be enforced. Yes, enforced. If national development requires coordination and local units decide not to cooperate, what doe people do? Change plans every time there is a dissenting voice? There are no easy answers and authoritarianism should be avoided if possible. You're suggesting it may always be. In an ideal world, perhaps, but in a world looking to decimate you at any opportunity, it's a different story.

    One thing Engels did get right is that it's not possible to abolish something just by changing its name. Anarchists may recognize the need for a centralized structure, and may not wish to call it a state, and maybe one day, we'll see how that works out.

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  • Guest (21st century anarchist)

    "- not everyone, perhaps not even a majority of people will necessarily subscribe to anarchism; even those who consider themselves anarchists will have differences on significant questions
    - the infrastructure will be devastated and rebuilding on a national scale will require massive coordination efforts, but…
    - the world will most likely still be imperialist, and as such, the anarchist revolution will face the strong possibility of military assaults, economic pressure [if not embargo], internal sabotage, and just straightforward confusion and dissent from sections of the population
    - contradictions of the old society: class, misogyny, race, homophobia, etc., will probably still exist [unless anarchism will somehow eliminate centuries-old conditioned practices in a short period of time]"

    -So what, not everyone today is a capitalist in the die in the wool ideological sense, the logic still runs because to a great degree it is autonomous from human intention(which btw is also the case for those state definitions you listed)
    -This would be a time to think critically about technology and what we want to rebuild properly to scale and what we want to leave behind, things like mines and factories for the most part suck.
    -take them on in as networked and anarchistic a way as possible the zapatistas are still around after all
    -Contradictions are not necessarily bad, class is the only really concrete thing in that list, beyond that the others just require the institutions that prop them up no longer being subsided in any way, such things will always probably exist on some species level however.

    As for spain, the cnt were originally unionists not anarchists, the ideological prefiguration came back to haunt that revolution, also read when insurrections die by gilles dauve.

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  • Guest (anarchist communist)

    I do agree that the anarchists hadn't planned on participating in the government in Spain. This, I would argue- along with the Friends of Durruti and the Libertarian Youth at that time argued- was a mistake. This move- in hopes of first defending against the facists, then preceeding with the revolution- wasn't just an ideological error; it was a practical error. The strength of the anarchists were in the revolutionary base that was active carrying out the revolution. This move undermined that base and destroyed both the morale and the power of that base. I'm not saying that they necessarily would won out if they'd abolished state power immediately in Catalonia and other anarchist dominant zones- because as I've said they were isolated, hence the need for revolutionary internationalism and revolution across larger regions, not just countries; I'm arguing that there were sectors within the Spanish anarchism movement arguing for this and I believe they were correct an that is one of the lessons of the Spanish Revolution.

    "Revolutionary possibilities do not emerge in the time and place most convenient for revolutionaries. And even when they do, they don’t necessarily take the forms we expect or hope for." I agree, this is why anarchists argue that a successful revolution is largely dependent on the work done before a revolutionary situation to build widespread class consciousness, power, capacity and solidarity regionally and internationally. If "Communists" give up on a classless, stateless society, then you've given up on communism in its true sense. I still believe in the possibility of communism because I have faith in popular class creativity, solidarity and power. But I agree any future anarchist-influenced revolution will likely be messy, uneven and not what we expected. That doesn't mean that because we can't know what those challenges are now, that we should assume that we'll have to give up our principles once that started. My conclusions from looking at failed revolutions throughout history only strengthens my belief in the necessity of anarchist ideas, practices and methods (or at least of the libertarian left) becoming the leading ideas, practices and methods of a regional/ as global as possible revolutionary movement for it to have success. Others might come to different conclusions, but you're right only the material conditions we face in future revolutionary situations will confirm or deny the validity of our contrasting theories.

    Regarding, defense. There are different views on this. Realistically I think this question needs to be settled within the movement- as of course all questions should be settled there- but the two dominant theories on this come from the classic position on anarchist militias with an armed populace; or the Friends of Durruti position on a mandated and recallable delegate command that directs logistical matters:

    "This body will be organised as follows: members of the revolutionary Junta will be elected by democratic vote in the union organisations. Account is to be taken of the number of comrades away at the front; these comrades must have the right to representation. The Junta will steer clear of economic affairs, which are the exclusive preserve of the unions.

    The functions of the revolutionary Junta are as follows:

    a) The management of the war

    b) The supervision of revolutionary order

    c) International affairs

    d) Revolutionary propaganda.

    Posts to come up regularly for re-allocation so as to prevent anyone growing attached to them. And the trade union assemblies will exercise control over the Junta's activities."
    *From Towards a Fresh Revolution, The Friends of Durruti
    http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=912 />
    Regarding policy, anarchists have historically argued for majority vote with mandated delegate coordination of proposals, hashing out differences and trying to come to mutually agreeable solutions. There are four options that delegate congresses can propose and assemblies can decide upon with dissenting individuals, workplaces, communities or regions:
    1) Decide nothing
    2) Accept a few positions as acceptable possitions
    3) Minority accepts the Majority position through majority vote
    4) Split based on fundamental disagrements that the minority can't accept

    This however is only within the popular class movements, between forces of reaction and capitalist class, the principles of a liberatory class war only apply. But amongst those forces where exploitation and domination does is not occurring, anarchists argue that people should be convinced of a possible compromise or left to their own autonomy. But that also means expelling individuals an groupings is an option. If they don't want to abide by the responsibilities and agreements come to by a freely associated confederation or commune, then that freely associated confederation or commune could decide to freely disassociate from them and exclude them from all of the benefits that come with being part of that confederation or commune. But practically imposing a judgement or policy is only going to undermine revolutionary solidarity and the harm will out weigh the benefits of imposition- if not in the short-run, then in the medium and long run. Again this only applies to relations within the popular classes and to questions not related to domination or exploitation. For in a revolutionary situation, there is no dialogue between capitalist and worker, the only resolution to that relation is the expropriation of the means of production and wealth of the capitalist by the workers and the abolition of capitalists as a class.

    Regarding, Engels view of the State, I disagree. I think that the state loses all meaning if it's transposed onto the vision of anarchists. The state is a structure over and above the populace that makes decisions on its behalf that the populace must follow; it's a hierarchical division of power that imposes decisions from the top-down. The anarchist vision proposes the abolition of this hierarchical power structure over and above the populace in favor of a free society that decides directly for itself how to administer society without hierarchical power relations of dominance; but through horizontal relations of power of direct democracy; and with bottom-up directives for coordination and hashing out compromises between mandated, instantly recallable delegates that have no power over those they're mandated by. Here's a more extensive reply to that same charge:     http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI5.html#seci55

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  • Guest (Anarcho)

    A reply to this article can be found here: <a href="/http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/on-the-bolshevik-myth" rel="nofollow">On the Bolshevik Myth</a>

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