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Title: About the Platform Author: Barikád KollektĂva Date: February 2005 Language: en Topics: platform Source: Retrieved on 14th October 2021 from https://anarchistplatform.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/about-the-platform/ Notes: English text revised by the Nestor Makhno Archive.
The text itself, as we have seen before, was written in a period when
the counter-revolution (after the abolition of the 1917–23 revolutionary
wave) was in the full flush of health. So the most emphasized point of
the text was to point out the disorganisation and confusion of the
movement, the complete lack of centralization and united practice. It is
doubtless that against the powers of the extremely centralized and at
least against the proletarians unified capital one has to use similar
methods in order to win. But pseudo-anarchism was attacking the
anti-democratic and dictatorial essence of the proletarian struggle with
full force. So the desired unity only without them and against them
could be achieved.
The Platform correctly states that anarchism is “not a beautiful utopia,
nor an abstract philosophical idea, it is a social movement of the
labouring masses”. Instead of the bourgeois duality of practice and
theory, this is an organic unity, the process of the abolition of
capital in its every manifestation. The Platform always proceeds from
the active reality and tries to react in accordance with this; it does
not concern itself with the theoretical “problems” constantly debated by
the “anarchologists” (Did Kropotkin wear flowered underpants? Will there
be weather forecast in the anarchist society? etc.).
Above all, the text urges the creation of a powerful, all-in anarchist
organization. Maybe today this seems to be obvious, but in that
situation it was not. Many pseudo-anarchists denied even the necessity
of organization itself. Others said if an organization exists, it must
be something nominal, just for the purposes of coordination, within
which the individual persons and subgroups have inner autonomy. This
democratic pseudo-organization has in each case proven to be completely
unable to produce any revolutionary activity.
Hence the creators of the Platform were for the unitary (revolutionary)
tendency and for organized collective activity. This was a very
important step for anarchists, because they challenged those taboos
which were a real barrier for anarchism to really effective struggle.
The Platform stresses the absurdity of the pseudo-organization
established on the basis of such a synthesis.
The goal of the text is no other than to provide the programme for an
international anarchist-revolutionary organisation in formation, namely
the programme of the worldwide communist proletarian party – the
programme of the proletariat organized into a class. This task was
beyond the means of the text. In general, this is the revolutionary
programme of the proletariat – though it is an existing and effective
historical reality, it is no other than the revolutionary process:
nobody, no group will ever be able to put them down exactly. But this is
not necessary, because in the course of the concretizations of the class
struggle (which contains the written documents, too) this programme will
always be realized to some extent.
From these events, and the lessons from them, one can abstract and
deduce some of its characteristics. These are principally the break with
democracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the struggle against
parliamentarianism and the trade unions, the struggle against political
parties and the tasks of the anarcho-communist revolutionary core (with
an inappropriate word, the “vanguard”). These points have no clear
appearance in the Platform either.
The poorest parts of the text are those dealing with the concrete task
which should be completed in the course of the revolution, which try to
give a picture about the organization of the production, consumption,
army etc. It must be laid down that the Platform (which went quite far
in the break with pseudo-anarchism and in other crucial questions of the
proletarian revolution) here falls into the trap of making up utopias.
The main problem with these utopias is that they can be realised as
well: they do not solve the antagonism between human activity and work,
means and ware, use-value and exchange-value. The exchange between
cities and villages (though with great simplification) nowadays goes the
same way as well…
The platformists did not see the complete subversiveness of the
proletarian revolution – its characteristics that must profoundly change
the relations. The antagonisms mentioned before should be destroyed in
the first minutes of the revolution, and there cannot be any
transitional, half-capitalist/half-communist State.
Although the text itself lays this down in a whole chapter, exposing how
counter-revolutionary the conceptions about transition are, however, the
second part the text itself drafts such a state… The form of the
dictatorship of the proletariat (which is not “the organ of the
transition” but the nature of the revolutionary struggle, the
proletarian class) is the counter-state, which is the complete and
active negation of the existing order – just as the proletariat is the
negation of the bourgeoisie in itself. The creators of the text fall
into the error that they talk about the “freedom” and the “independence”
of the proletarians (in their terminology, the workers – which means the
same here).
Here are two anarchist fetishes which the text could not surpass. These
two terms only have sense in capitalism. From what is a worker free and
independent? From capitalism? It is obvious that this is not the case,
because that determines his existence (as a worker and as a social
creature, too). Thus it is his class that he is free and independent
from, from the force whose goal is no other than the complete
abolishment of this system – including the freedom and independence of
the “worker”.
The interesting thing is that the text has many times settled its
account with these illusions because it argues the necessity of
centralization and a unified organization. It was attacked many times by
the champions of freedom…
As we have mentioned before, its position on the trade unions is quite
confused as well. While elsewhere it is clearly shown that the
revolutionary struggle is no other than anarchist communism, in this
question the authors draw several levels, and they indicate syndicalism
as a means of struggle. On the one hand they see the
counter-revolutionary role of the trade unions (which the majority of
syndicalists saw too during the revolution), while on the other hand
they believe in the possibility that they can be improved.
The anticipation explained here is in fact about a trade union under
anarchist influence. This is a contradiction, though: an organization
which tries to ameliorate (because it is a trade union) society which it
wants to completely destroy (because it is anarchist).
The historical programme of the proletariat does not contain wage
struggles (?), declared strikes (?), trade union maydays. Conversely, it
does contain the abolition of wage labour, violent wildcat strikes, the
ecstatic joy of struggle and the dictatorial oppression of hostile
interests.
We do not want to deal with the part on production and distribution, the
army etc. These are desipient, sometimes dangerous daydreaming about
self-management and voluntariness etc. – a kind of a democratic heaven
which is in complete discordance with the expectations of the general
part. But we should add that anyone who tries to describe the communist
society within the circumstances of the current society, cannot go
further than daydreaming.
At the end of the text, the authors have to fight another
pseudo-anarchist phantom, which seems to be quite dangerous: federalism.
Although the text is, in fact, about organizing ourselves into a class
and about centralizing the struggle (and this is obvious to the
pseudo-anarchist whimperers), the authors are too shy to admit the
necessity of centralization verbally. They try to avoid this by making
difference between “bad” and “good” federalism. The “bad” one emphasizes
the importance of the ego and it is the means of the individualist,
while the “good” one is, as it is revealed, not federalism but
centralism… Exactly the vagueness of the question, the lack of
breaking-up in this question leads the authors to put down that entirely
bourgeois rubbish about the Federal Executive Committee. Well, this is
not the “organized vanguard”…
Shortly, we will mention another critical point: the text keeps
separating the peasantry and the proletariat – though this latter does
not only refer to the “oily-handed workers”. The peasantry is not a
social class, it is a layer created by the division of labour. There are
bourgeoisies as well in their ranks, not only proletarians (and this
also refers to the workers, though there are obviously more peasant
bourgeoises…). But still, it is an important lesson that the peasantry
in the modern revolutionary movement in Europe and in the areas where a
real owner of its lands (unlike in Russia!) played a more
counter-revolutionary role. The overestimating of the revolutionary
potential of the peasantry is due to the group’s (a bit too
over-emphasized) Russian point of view. The importance of labour is also
over-emphasized. They fall into the old ouvrierist trap, which is the
oldest weapon social democracy has against us: let’s be proud of our
work, let’s be proud to be workers, unlike the bourgeois “drones”, let’s
struggle for the “society of labour”…! But communism is no more than the
complete negation of labour, every kind of work, the realisation of
human activity against alienated activity. It is not just we are not
proud to be workers, but that’s why we are revolting, we are revolting
against labour!
“What is the difference between the social democrat and the communist?”
– was the question posed by the Situationist International at the
beginning of the seventies: “The social democrats want full employment,
the communists want full unemployment.”
We want to stress once more that the Platform is not a holy text and it
is not without errors. It wasn’t like that in 1926, either. But its goal
was (as the authors claim) not to create a bible, but a way to start a
debate which would result in common revolutionary activity among the
really revolutionary elements. We cannot say anything more either but
let it nowadays do a similar task as well.