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Title: The Rehabilitation of Anarchism
Author: Daniel Guérin
Date: 1965
Language: en
Topics: anarchist history
Source: Chapter from *For a Libertarian Communism*

Daniel Guérin

The Rehabilitation of Anarchism

Anarchism has long been a victim of an undeserved discredit, of an

injustice that has manifested itself in three ways.

First, its defamers insist that anarchism is dead, that it has not

resisted the great revolutionary tests of our time: the Russian

Revolution and the Spanish Revolution. That it no longer has a place in

the modern world, characterized as this is by centralization,

large-scale political and economic units, and the totalitarian concept.

All that is left to the anarchists, as Victor Serge said, is, “by the

force of events to go over to revolutionary Marxism.”[1]

Second, its detractors, in order to better discredit it, propose an

absolutely tendentious vision of its doctrine. Anarchism is said to be

essentially individualist, particularist, and resistant to any form of

organization. It aims at fracturing and atomizing, at the retreat into

themselves of local units of administration and production. It is said

to be incapable of unity, centralization, and planning. It’s nostalgic

for “the Golden Age.” It aims for the reviving of outmoded forms of

society. It sins by a childish optimism; its “idealism” fails to take

into account the solid reality of the material infrastructure.

Finally, certain commentators are interested solely in wresting from

oblivion and publicizing only its most controversial deviations, like

individual assassinations and propaganda by the deed.

In revisiting the question I’m not simply trying to retrospectively

repair a triple injustice or trying to write a work of erudition. It

seems to me, in fact, that anarchism’s constructive ideas are still

alive; that they can, on condition they be reexamined and closely

scrutinized, assist contemporary socialist thought in making a new

start.

Nineteenth-century anarchism is clearly distinguishable from

twentieth-century anarchism. Nineteenth-century anarchism was

essentially doctrinal. Though Proudhon had played a more or less central

role in the revolution of 1848, and the disciples of Bakunin were not

totally foreign to the Paris Commune, these two nineteenth-century

revolutions in their essence were not libertarian revolutions, but to a

certain extent rather “Jacobin” revolutions. On the contrary, the

twentieth century is, for the anarchists, one of revolutionary practice.

They played an active role in the two Russian Revolutions and, even

more, in the Spanish Revolution.

The study of the authentic anarchist doctrine, as it was formed in the

nineteenth century, shows that anarchy is neither disorganization,

disorder, nor atomization, but the search for true organization, true

unity, true order, and true centralization, which can only reside, not

in authority, coercion, or compulsion exercised from the top down, but

in free, spontaneous, federalist association from the bottom up. As for

the study of the Russian and Spanish revolutions and the role played in

them by the anarchists, it shows that contrary to the false legend

believed by some, these great and tragic experiences show that

libertarian socialism was largely in the right against the socialism

I’ll call “authoritarian.” Throughout the world, socialist thought over

the course of the fifty years that followed the Russian Revolution, of

the thirty years that followed the Spanish Revolution, has remained

obsessed with a caricature of Marxism, bursting with its dogmas. In

particular, the internecine quarrel between Trotsky and Stalin, which is

the one best known to the advanced reader, if it contributed to wresting

Marxism-Leninism from a sterilizing conformism, did not truly cast

complete light on the Russian Revolution, because it did not

address—could not address—the heart of the problem.

For Voline, anarchist historian of the Russian Revolution, to speak of a

“betrayal” of the revolution, as Trotsky does, is insufficient as an

explanation: “How was that betrayal possible in the aftermath of so

beautiful and total a revolutionary victory? This is the real question

.... What Trotsky calls betrayal was, in fact, the ineluctable effect of

a slow degeneration due to incorrect methods .... It was the

degeneration of the revolution ... that led to Stalin, and not Stalin

who caused the revolution to degener.” Voline asks: “Could Trotsky

really ‘explain’ the drama since, along with Lenin, he himself

contributed to the disarming of the masses.”[2]

The assertion of the late, lamented Isaac Deutscher, according to which

the Trotsky-Stalin controversy would “continue and reverberate for the

rest of the century” is debatable.[3] The debate that should be reopened

and continued is perhaps less that between Lenin’s successors, which is

already outdated, but rather that between authoritarian socialism and

libertarian socialism. In recent time anarchism has come out of the

shadow to which it was relegated by its enemies.

Materials for a fresh examination of anarchism are today available to

those who are impassioned about social emancipation and in search of its

most effective forms. And also, perhaps, the materials for a synthesis,

one both possible and necessary, between the two equally fertile schools

of thought: that of Marx and Engels and that of Proudhon and Bakunin.

Ideas, it should be said, contemporary in their flowering and less

distant from each other than might be thought. Errico Malatesta, the

great Italian anarchist, observed that all the anarchist literature of

the nineteenth century “was impregnated with Marxism.”[4] And in the

other direction, the ideas of Proudhon and Bakunin contributed in no

small degree to enriching Marxism.

[1] Serge’s preface to Joaquin Maurin, Révolution et Contre-Revolution

en Espagne (Rieder, 1937).

[2] See Voline’s The Unknown Revolution, 1917–1921 (Book 2, Part V, Ch.

7), first published in French in 1947. Voline was the pseudonym of

Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum (1882–1945), a prominent Russian

anarchist who took part in both the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions

before being forced into exile by the Bolsheviks. [DB]

[3] See Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet

Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast (first published 1954–63).

[4] Malatesta, polemic of 1897 quoted by Luigi Fabbri, Dittoturae

Rivoluzione (1921).