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Title: On Anarchism
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: 2013
Language: en
Topics: anarchist history, history, introductory, introduction

Noam Chomsky

On Anarchism

Introduction

Anarcho-Curious? or, Anarchist Amnesia

Nathan Schneider

The first evening of a solidarity bus tour in the West Bank, I listened

as a contingent of college students from around the United States made

an excellent discovery: they were all, at least kind of, anarchists. As

they sat on stuffed chairs in the lobby of a lonely hotel near the

refugee camp in war-ravaged Jenin, they probed one another’s political

tendencies, which were reflected in their ways of dressing and their

most recent tattoos. All of this, along with stories of past trauma,

made their way out into the light over the course of our ten-day trip.

“I think I would call myself an anarchist,” one admitted.

Then another jumped into the space this created: “Yeah, totally.”

Basic agreement about various ideologies and idioms ensued—ableism,

gender queerness, Zapatistas, black blocs, borders. The students took

their near unison as an almost incalculable coincidence, though it was

no such thing.

This was the fall of 2012, just after the one-year anniversary of Occupy

Wall Street. A new generation of radicals had experienced a moment in

the limelight and a sense of possibility—and had little clear idea about

what to do next. They had participated in an uprising that aspired to

organize horizontally, that refused to address its demands to the proper

authority, and that, like other concurrent movements around the world,

prided itself on the absence of particular leaders. One couldn’t call

the Occupy movement an anarchist phenomenon per se; though some of its

originators were self-conscious and articulate anarchists, most who took

part wouldn’t describe their objectives that way. Still, the mode of

being that Occupy swept so many people into with its temporary

autonomous zones in public squares nevertheless left them feeling, as it

was sometimes said, anarcho-curious.

The generation most activated by Occupy is one for which the Cold War

means everything and nothing. We came to consciousness in a world where

communism was a doomed proposition from the get-go, vanquished by our

Reagan-esque grandfathers and manifestly genocidal to boot. Capitalism

won fair and square: market forces work. A vaguer kind of socialism,

such as what furnished the functional train systems that carried us on

backpacking trips across Europe, still held some appeal. Yet the word

“socialism” has been so thoroughly tarnished in the hegemonic sound

bites of Fox News as to be obviously unusable politically. It’s also the

word Fox associates with Barack Obama, whom this generation’s

door-knocking helped elect but whose administration strengthened the

corporate oligarchy, waged unaccountable robot wars, and imprisoned

migrant workers and heroic whistleblowers at record rates. So much for

“socialism.”

Anarchism, then, is a corner backed into rather than a conscious

choice—an apophatic last resort, and a fruitful one. It permits being

political outside the red-and-blue confines of what is normally referred

to as “politics” in the United States, without being doomed to a major

party’s inevitable betrayal. We can affirm the values we’ve learned on

the Internet—transparency, crowd-sourcing, freedom to, freedom from. We

can be ourselves.

Anarchy is the political blank slate of the early twenty-first century.

It is shorthand for an eternal now, for a chance to restart the clock.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the anarchic online collective

Anonymous, whose only qualification for membership is having effaced

one’s identity, history, origins, and responsibility.

This anarchist amnesia that has overtaken radical politics in the United

States is a reflection of the amnesia in U.S. politics generally. With

the exception of a few shared mythologies about our founding

slaveholders and our most murderous wars, we like to imagine that

everything we do is being done for the very first time. Such amnesia can

be useful, because it lends a sensation of pioneering vitality to our

undertakings that the rest of the history-heavy world seems to envy. But

it also condemns us to forever reinvent the wheel. And this means

missing out on what makes anarchism worth taking seriously in the end:

the prospect of learning, over the course of generations, how to build a

well-organized and free society from the ground up.

Our capacity to forget is astonishing. In 1999, a horizontal “spokes

council” organized the protests that helped shut down the World Trade

Organization meeting in Seattle. Just over a decade later, a critical

mass of Occupy Wall Street participants considered such a

decision-making structure an illegitimate and intolerably reformist

innovation.

Despite whatever extent to which we have ourselves to blame for our

amnesia, however, it also has been imposed on us through repression

against the threat anarchism was once perceived to pose. Remember that

an American president was killed by an anarchist, and another anarchist

assassination set off World War I. There are still unmarked gashes on

buildings along Wall Street left over from anarchist bombs. More

usefully, and more dangerously, anarchists used to travel across the

country teaching industrial workers how to organize themselves and

demand a fair share from their robber-baron bosses. Thus, the official

questionnaire at Ellis Island sought to single out anarchists coming

from Europe. Thus, Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were martyred

in 1927, and roving grand juries imprison anarchists without charge

today. Thus, we see liberal sleights of hand such as the one described

in chapter 3, by which the anarchist popular revolution under way during

the Spanish Civil War was deftly erased from history.

Anarchism’s slate is really anything but blank. In this book Noam

Chomsky plays the role of an ambassador for the kind of anarchism that

we’re supposed to have forgotten—that has a history and knows it, that

has already shown another kind of world to be possible. He first

encountered anarchism as a child in New York, before World War II

succeeded in making capitalist-against-communist Manichaeism the

unquestioned civil religion of the United States. He could find not just

Marx but also Bakunin in the book stalls. He witnessed a capitalist

class save itself from Depression-era ruin only by creating a social

safety net and tolerating unions. The Zionism he was exposed to was a

call to agrarian collectivism, not to military occupation.

The principle with which Chomsky describes his own anarchist leanings

draws a common thread from early modern libertarian theorists like

Godwin and Proudhon to the assassins of the early 1900s and the

instincts of Anonymous today: power that isn’t really justified by the

will of the governed should be dismantled. More to the point, it should

be refashioned from below. Without greedy elites maintaining their

privilege with propaganda and force, workers might own and govern their

workplaces, and communities might provide for the basic needs of

everyone. Not all anarchist tactics are equally ethical or effective,

but they do more or less arise from this common hope.

Into old age, Chomsky carries his anarchism with uncommon humaneness,

without the need to put it on display as a black-masked caricature of

itself. A lifetime of radical ideas and busy activism is enough of a

credential. He sees no contradiction between holding anarchist ideals

and pursuing certain reforms through the state when there’s a chance for

a more free, more just society in the short term; such humility is a

necessary antidote to the self-defeating purism of many anarchists

today. He represents a time when anarchists were truly fearsome—less

because they were willing to put a brick through a Starbucks window than

because they had figured out how to organize themselves in a functional,

egalitarian, and sufficiently productive society.

This side of anarchism was the cause of George Orwell’s revelry upon

arriving in Barcelona to join the war against Franco. It’s a moment he

records in Homage to Catalonia, a book you’ll find quoted several times

in the pages that follow; already farms, factories, utilities, and

militias were being run by workers along anarcho-socialist lines. Orwell

recalls:

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size

in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in

capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one

was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of

working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms

of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it

was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say

that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that

the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the

normal motives of civilized life—snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of

the boss, etc.—had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division

of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in

the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the

peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of

course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary

and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole

surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon

anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one

realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange

and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal

than apathy or cynicism, where the word “comrade” stood for comradeship

and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of

equality.

With a few proper nouns adjusted, much the same statement could have

come from a witness to the Occupy movement, though the awe would be less

well deserved. Orwell saw anarchy overtake a whole city along with large

swaths of countryside, rather than the square block or less of a typical

Occupy encampment. That these far smaller utopias managed to convey the

same sense of knock-you-down newness, of soul-conquering significance,

is probably because of historical amnesia again: most people had never

learned about the bigger ones in school. They were astonished by the

systematic violence used to eliminate the Occupy encampments because

they hadn’t heard about how the Spanish anarchists and the Paris Commune

were crushed with military force as well. Amnesia constrains ambition

and inoculates against patience.

Still, developments are under way that contribute to anarchism’s legacy.

Anarchists in this country now insist on grappling with challenges of

sexual identity and ingrained oppression that mainstream society

gingerly prefers not to recognize. They are at the forefront of

movements to protect animal rights and the environment that future

generations will be grateful for. As industrial agriculture becomes more

and more poisoned by profit motives, anarchists are growing their own

food. Anarchist hackers understand better than most of us the power of

information and the lengths that those in power will go to control it;

proof is in the years- and decades-long prison sentences now being doled

out for online civil disobedience.

These mighty insights, along with so much else, risk being lost to

amnesia if they’re not passed on in memory and habit, if they’re not

treated as part of a legacy rather than as just passing reactions

against the latest brand of crisis. At least in their various

collectives and affinity groups, committed anarchists today tend to be a

literate bunch who do know their history, even if others have forgotten.

A bit of historical consciousness suggests something else: there may be

more anarcho-curiosity among us than we tend to realize. Among the

supporting characters one finds in Peter Marshall’s Chomsky-endorsed

study Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism are forefathers

to those we call “libertarians” in the United States—which is to say,

capitalists in favor of minimal government—including John Stuart Mill,

Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Herbert Spencer.

Chomsky refers to right-wing libertarianism as “an aberration” nearly

unique to this country, a theory of “a world built on hatred” that

“would self-destruct in three seconds.” Yet the vitality of this once-

or twice-removed cousin of anarchism becomes evident with every election

cycle, when libertarian candidate Ron Paul squeezes his way into the

Republican debates thanks to the impressively determined and youthful

“army” fighting for his “rEVOLution.” (The capitalized words spell

“LOVE” backward.) This is anarchism with corporate funding and misplaced

nostalgia, its solidarity cleaved off by the willful protagonists in Ayn

Rand’s novels. Yet I’m more optimistic than I’m often told I should be

about the prospects for and longings of this bloc and of the chances for

reuniting it with a libertarianism more worth having.

In the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street, libertarian foot

soldiers were out in force. They too had a bone to pick with a

government-slash-empire that acts like a subsidiary of the big banks,

and they kept trying to draw Occupiers into their sieges of the Federal

Reserve building a block from occupied Zuccotti Park. But over time they

withdrew from the encampments, probably after having had enough of the

disorderliness and the leftist identity politics. They retreated to

tabling stations a block or two away and then disappeared from the

movement just about entirely.

The scenario could have played out differently. If it had, what might

these right and left libertarianisms—equally amnesiac about their common

origins—learn from one another?

The anarcho-curious left might rediscover that there is more to a

functional resistance movement than youthful rebellion. Its members

might, for instance, study working examples of the mutual aid they long

for—education, material support, free day care—in churches and

megachurches across the country, which form both the social life and the

power base of the right. Independent of the state, these citadels put

into practice something anarchists have been saying all along: no form

of politics is worth our time until it helps struggling people get what

they need, sustainably and reliably. All the better if you can do so

without patriarchy and fundamentalism.

Meanwhile, the libertarian right might find the wherewithal to detach

from its overly rosy view of the Constitution, from its more or less

subtle racism against nonwhites and immigrants, and from its 1-percenter

sponsors. It might raise tougher questions about whether “competition”

is really the most liberating response to long-standing injustices along

lines of gender, race, and circumstance. What would these young,

energetic libertarians think if they encountered an egalitarian,

democratic anarchism in the form of a robust political philosophy and

practice? For too many people, Ayn Rand is as close to it as they are

ever exposed to, and she’s not very close at all.

Anarchism deserves better than to be a mere curiosity, or a blank slate,

or an overlapping consensus among newly minted radicals who have trouble

agreeing on anything else. It is better than that. Both the

anarcho-curiosity awakened by Occupy and the flourishing of right-wing

libertarianism are signs that anarchism is overdue for recognition as a

serious intellectual tradition and a real possibility. Noam Chomsky has

been treating it that way throughout his career, and more of us should

follow suit.

On Anarchism

1. Notes on Anarchism

A French writer, sympathetic to anarchism, wrote in the 1890s that

“anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything”—including,

he noted, those whose acts are such that “a mortal enemy of anarchism

could not have done better.”[1] There have been many styles of thought

and action that have been referred to as “anarchist.” It would be

hopeless to try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some

general theory or ideology. And even if we proceed to extract from the

history of libertarian thought a living, evolving tradition, as Daniel

Guérin does in Anarchism, it remains difficult to formulate its

doctrines as a specific and determinate theory of society and social

change. The anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker, who presents a systematic

conception of the development of anarchist thought towards

anarchosyndicalism, along lines that bear comparison to Guérin’s work,

puts the matter well when he writes that anarchism is not

a fixed, self-enclosed social system but rather a definite trend in the

historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the

intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions,

strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and

social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute

concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and to affect wider

circles in more manifold ways. For the anarchist, freedom is not an

abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for

every human being to bring to full development all the powers,

capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them

to social account. The less this natural development of man is

influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more

efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it

become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which

it has grown.[2]

One might ask what value there is in studying a “definite trend in the

historic development of mankind” that does not articulate a specific and

detailed social theory. Indeed, many commentators dismiss anarchism as

utopian, formless, primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the

realities of a complex society. One might, however, argue rather

differently: that at every stage of history our concern must be to

dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an

era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for

security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute

to—rather than alleviate—material and cultural deficit. If so, there

will be no doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future,

nor even, necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals

towards which social change should tend. Surely our understanding of the

nature of man or of the range of viable social forms is so rudimentary

that any far-reaching doctrine must be treated with great skepticism,

just as skepticism is in order when we hear that “human nature” or “the

demands of efficiency” or “the complexity of modern life” requires this

or that form of oppression and autocratic rule.

Nevertheless, at a particular time there is every reason to develop,

insofar as our understanding permits, a specific realization of this

definite trend in the historic development of mankind, appropriate to

the tasks of the moment. For Rocker, “the problem that is set for our

time is that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and

political and social enslavement”; and the method is not the conquest

and exercise of state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but

rather “to reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground

up and build it up in the spirit of Socialism.”

But only the producers themselves are fitted for this task, since they

are the only value-creating element in society out of which a new future

can arise. Theirs must be the task of freeing labor from all the fetters

which economic exploitation has fastened on it, of freeing society from

all the institutions and procedure of political power, and of opening

the way to an alliance of free groups of men and women based on

co-operative labor and a planned administration of things in the

interest of the community. To prepare the toiling masses in city and

country for this great goal and to bind them together as a militant

force is the objective of modern Anarcho-syndicalism, and in this its

whole purpose is exhausted. [p. 108]

As a socialist, Rocker would take for granted “that the serious, final,

complete liberation of the workers is possible only upon one condition:

that of the appropriation of capital, that is, of raw material and all

the tools of labor, including land, by the whole body of the

workers.”[3] As an anarchosyndicalist, he insists, further, that the

workers’ organizations create “not only the ideas, but also the facts of

the future itself” in the prerevolutionary period, that they embody in

themselves the structure of the future society—and he looks forward to a

social revolution that will dismantle the state apparatus as well as

expropriate the expropriators. “What we put in place of the government

is industrial organization.”

Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic order

cannot be created by the decrees and statutes of a government, but only

by the solidaric collaboration of the workers with hand and brain in

each special branch of production; that is, through the taking over of

the management of all plants by the producers themselves under such form

that the separate groups, plants, and branches of industry are

independent members of the general economic organism and systematically

carry on production and the distribution of the products in the interest

of the community on the basis of free mutual agreements. [p. 94]

Rocker was writing at a moment when such ideas had been put into

practice in a dramatic way in the Spanish Revolution. Just prior to the

outbreak of the revolution, the anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad

de Santillan had written:

... in facing the problem of social transformation, the Revolution

cannot consider the state as a medium, but must depend on the

organization of producers.

We have followed this norm and we find no need for the hypothesis of a

superior power to organized labor, in order to establish a new order of

things. We would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any,

the State can have in an economic organization, where private property

has been abolished and in which parasitism and special privilege have no

place. The suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must

be the task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the

Revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the

producers organize themselves for due collective distribution and the

State has nothing to do; or the Revolution does not give social wealth

to the producers, in which case the Revolution has been a lie and the

State would continue.

Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an economic

and administrative regulating power. It receives its orientation from

below and operates in accordance with the resolutions of the regional

and national assemblies. It is a liaison corps and nothing else.[4]

Engels, in a letter of 1883, expressed his disagreement with this

conception as follows:

The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the

proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political

organization of the state.... But to destroy it at such a moment would

be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious

proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its

capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of

society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in

a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris

commune.[5]

In contrast, the anarchists—most eloquently Bakunin—warned of the

dangers of the “red bureaucracy,” which would prove to be “the most vile

and terrible lie that our century has created.”[6] The

anarchosyndicalist Fernand Pelloutier asked: “Must even the transitory

state to which we have to submit necessarily and fatally be the

collectivist jail? Can’t it consist in a free organization limited

exclusively by the needs of production and consumption, all political

institutions having disappeared?”[7]

I do not pretend to know the answer to this question. But it seems clear

that unless there is, in some form, a positive answer, the chances for a

truly democratic revolution that will achieve the humanistic ideals of

the left are not great. Martin Buber put the problem succinctly when he

wrote: “One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has

been turned into a club to put forth leaves.”[8] The question of

conquest or destruction of state power is what Bakunin regarded as the

primary issue dividing him from Marx.[9] In one form or another, the

problem has arisen repeatedly in the century since, dividing

“libertarian” from “authoritarian” socialists.

Despite Bakunin’s warnings about the red bureaucracy, and their

fulfillment under Stalin’s dictatorship, it would obviously be a gross

error in interpreting the debates of a century ago to rely on the claims

of contemporary social movements as to their historical origins. In

particular, it is perverse to regard Bolshevism as “Marxism in

practice.” Rather, the left-wing critique of Bolshevism, taking account

of the historical circumstances of the Russian Revolution, is far more

to the point.[10]

The anti-Bolshevik, left-wing labor movement opposed the Leninists

because they did not go far enough in exploiting the Russian upheavals

for strictly proletarian ends. They became prisoners of their

environment and used the international radical movement to satisfy

specifically Russian needs, which soon became synonymous with the needs

of the Bolshevik Party-State. The “bourgeois” aspects of the Russian

Revolution were now discovered in Bolshevism itself: Leninism was

adjudged a part of international social-democracy, differing from the

latter only on tactical issues.[11]

If one were to seek a single leading idea within the anarchist

tradition, it should, I believe, be that expressed by Bakunin when, in

writing on the Paris Commune, he identified himself as follows:

I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition

under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and

grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated

by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more

than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the

individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by

the School of J.-J. Rousseau and the other schools of bourgeois

liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented

by the State which limits the rights of each—an idea that leads

inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean

the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that

consists in the full development of all of the material, intellectual

and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes

no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own

individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions

since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or

above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our

material, intellectual and moral being—they do not limit us but are the

real and immediate conditions of our freedom.[12]

These ideas grow out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau’s

Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt’s Limits of State Action, Kant’s

insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the

precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be

granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of

industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it

is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical

humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals

that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social

order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical

liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life,

capitalist social relations are also intolerable. This is clear, for

example, from the classic work of Humboldt, The Limits of State Action,

which anticipated and perhaps inspired Mill and to which we return

below. This classic of liberal thought, completed in 1792, is in its

essence profoundly, though prematurely, anticapitalist. Its ideas must

be attenuated beyond recognition to be transmuted into an ideology of

industrial capitalism.

Humboldt’s vision of a society in which social fetters are replaced by

social bonds and labor is freely undertaken suggests the early Marx,

with his discussion of the “alienation of labor when work is external to

the worker ... not part of his nature ... [so that] he does not fulfill

himself in his work but denies himself ... [and is] physically exhausted

and mentally debased,” alienated labor that “casts some of the workers

back into a barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines,” thus

depriving man of his “species character” of “free conscious activity”

and “productive life.” Similarly, Marx conceives of “a new type of human

being who needs his fellow-men.... [The workers’ association becomes]

the real constructive effort to create the social texture of future

human relations.”[13] It is true that classical libertarian thought is

opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper

assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free

association. On the same assumptions, capitalist relations of

production, wage labor, competitiveness, the ideology of “possessive

individualism”—all must be regarded as fundamentally antihuman.

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the

liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

Rudolf Rocker describes modern anarchism as “the confluence of the two

great currents which during and since the French revolution have found

such characteristic expression in the intellectual life of Europe:

Socialism and Liberalism.” The classical liberal ideals, he argues, were

wrecked on the realities of capitalist economic forms. Anarchism is

necessarily anti-capitalist in that it “opposes the exploitation of man

by man.” But anarchism also opposes “the dominion of man over man.” It

insists that “socialism will be free or it will not be at all. In its

recognition of this lies the genuine and profound justification for the

existence of anarchism.”[14] From this point of view, anarchism may be

regarded as the libertarian wing of socialism. It is in this spirit that

Daniel Guérin has approached the study of anarchism in Anarchism and

other works.[15]

Guérin quotes Adolph Fischer, who said that “every anarchist is a

socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist.”

Similarly Bakunin, in his “anarchist manifesto” of 1865, the program of

his projected international revolutionary fraternity, laid down the

principle that each member must be, to begin with, a socialist.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of

production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as

incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and

under the control of the producer. As Marx put it, socialists look

forward to a society in which labor will “become not only a means of

life, but also the highest want in life,”[16] an impossibility when the

worker is driven by external authority or need rather than inner

impulse: “no form of wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious

than another, can do away with the misery of wage-labor itself.”[17] A

consistent anarchist must oppose not only alienated labor but also the

stupefying specialization of labor that takes place when the means for

developing production

mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him to

become a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such a torment

that its essential meaning is destroyed; estrange from him the

intellectual potentialities of the labor process in very proportion to

the extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent

power.... [18]

Marx saw this not as an inevitable concomitant of industrialization, but

rather as a feature of capitalist relations of production. The society

of the future must be concerned to “replace the detail-worker of today

... reduced to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed

individual, fit for a variety of labours ... to whom the different

social functions ... are but so many modes of giving free scope to his

own natural powers.”[19] The prerequisite is the abolition of capital

and wage labor as social categories (not to speak of the industrial

armies of the “labor state” or the various modern forms of

totalitarianism or state capitalism). The reduction of man to an

appurtenance of the machine, a specialized tool of production, might in

principle be overcome, rather than enhanced, with the proper development

and use of technology, but not under the conditions of autocratic

control of production by those who make man an instrument to serve their

ends, overlooking his individual purposes, in Humboldt’s phrase.

Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under capitalism, to create “free

associations of free producers” that would engage in militant struggle

and prepare to take over the organization of production on a democratic

basis. These associations would serve as “a practical school of

anarchism.”[20] If private ownership of the means of production is, in

Proudhon’s often quoted phrase, merely a form of “theft”—“the

exploitation of the weak by the strong”[21]—control of production by a

state bureaucracy, no matter how benevolent its intentions, also does

not create the conditions under which labor, manual and intellectual,

can become the highest want in life. Both, then, must be overcome.

In his attack on the right of private or bureaucratic control over the

means of production, the anarchist takes his stand with those who

struggle to bring about “the third and last emancipatory phase of

history,” the first having made serfs out of slaves, the second having

made wage earners out of serfs, and the third which abolishes the

proletariat in a final act of liberation that places control over the

economy in the hands of free and voluntary associations of producers

(Fourier, 1848).[22] The imminent danger to “civilization” was noted by

de Tocqueville, also in 1848:

As long as the right of property was the origin and groundwork of many

other rights, it was easily defended—or rather it was not attacked; it

was then the citadel of society while all the other rights were its

outworks; it did not bear the brunt of attack and, indeed, there was no

serious attempt to assail it. But today, when the right of property is

regarded as the last undestroyed remnant of the aristocratic world, when

it alone is left standing, the sole privilege in an equalized society,

it is a different matter. Consider what is happening in the hearts of

the working-classes, although I admit they are quiet as yet. It is true

that they are less inflamed than formerly by political passions properly

speaking; but do you not see that their passions, far from being

political, have become social? Do you not see that, little by little,

ideas and opinions are spreading amongst them which aim not merely at

removing such and such laws, such a ministry or such a government, but

at breaking up the very foundations of society itself?[23]

The workers of Paris, in 1871, broke the silence, and proceeded

to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the

Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of

the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the

expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by

transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the

means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free

and associated labor.[24]

The Commune, of course, was drowned in blood. The nature of the

“civilization” that the workers of Paris sought to overcome in their

attack on “the very foundations of society itself” was revealed, once

again, when the troops of the Versailles government reconquered Paris

from its population. As Marx wrote, bitterly but accurately:

The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid

light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their

masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised

savagery and lawless revenge ... the infernal deeds of the soldiery

reflect the innate spirit of that civilization of which they are the

mercenary vindicators.... The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which

looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is

convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar. [Ibid., pp.

74, 77]

Despite the violent destruction of the Commune, Bakunin wrote that Paris

opens a new era, “that of the definitive and complete emancipation of

the popular masses and their future true solidarity, across and despite

state boundaries ... the next revolution of man, international and in

solidarity, will be the resurrection of Paris”—a revolution that the

world still awaits.

The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist

of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized

labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body

of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct,

not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat.

He will, in short, oppose

the organization of production by the Government. It means

State-socialism, the command of the State officials over production and

the command of managers, scientists, shop-officials in the shop.... The

goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is

not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class

substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the

workers themselves being master over production.

These remarks are taken from “Five Theses on the Class Struggle” by the

left-wing Marxist Anton Pannekoek, one of the outstanding theorists of

the council communist movement. And in fact, radical Marxism merges with

anarchist currents.

As a further illustration, consider the following characterization of

“revolutionary Socialism”:

The revolutionary Socialist denies that State ownership can end in

anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen why the State

cannot democratically control industry. Industry can only be

democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly

from their own ranks industrial administrative committees. Socialism

will be fundamentally an industrial system; its constituencies will be

of an industrial character. Thus those carrying on the social activities

and industries of society will be directly represented in the local and

central councils of social administration. In this way the powers of

such delegates will flow upwards from those carrying on the work and

conversant with the needs of the community. When the central

administrative industrial committee meets it will represent every phase

of social activity. Hence the capitalist political or geographical state

will be replaced by the industrial administrative committee of

Socialism. The transition from the one social system to the other will

be the social revolution. The political State throughout history has

meant the government of men by ruling classes; the Republic of Socialism

will be the government of industry administered on behalf of the whole

community. The former meant the economic and political subjection of the

many; the latter will mean the economic freedom of all—it will be,

therefore, a true democracy.

This programmatic statement appears in William Paul’s The State, Its

Origins and Function, written in early 1917—shortly before Lenin’s State

and Revolution, perhaps his most libertarian work (see note 9). Paul was

a member of the Marxist–De Leonist Socialist Labor Party and later one

of the founders of the British Communist Party.[25] His critique of

state socialism resembles the libertarian doctrine of the anarchists in

its principle that since state ownership and management will lead to

bureaucratic despotism, the social revolution must replace it by the

industrial organization of society with direct workers’ control. Many

similar statements can be cited.

What is far more important is that these ideas have been realized in

spontaneous revolutionary action, for example in Germany and Italy after

World War I and in Spain (not only in the agricultural countryside, but

also in industrial Barcelona) in 1936. One might argue that some form of

council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an

industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that

democracy is severely limited when the industrial system is controlled

by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers and

technocrats, a “vanguard” party, or a state bureaucracy. Under these

conditions of authoritarian domination the classical libertarian ideals

developed further by Marx and Bakunin and all true revolutionaries

cannot be realized; man will not be free to develop his own

potentialities to their fullest, and the producer will remain “a

fragment of a human being,” degraded, a tool in the productive process

directed from above.

The phrase “spontaneous revolutionary action” can be misleading. The

anarchosyndicalists, at least, took very seriously Bakunin’s remark that

the workers’ organizations must create “not only the ideas but also the

facts of the future itself” in the prerevolutionary period. The

accomplishments of the popular revolution in Spain, in particular, were

based on the patient work of many years of organization and education,

one component of a long tradition of commitment and militancy. The

resolutions of the Madrid Congress of June 1931 and the Saragossa

Congress in May 1936 foreshadowed in many ways the acts of the

revolution, as did the somewhat different ideas sketched by Santillan

(see note 4) in his fairly specific account of the social and economic

organization to be instituted by the revolution. Guérin writes: “The

Spanish revolution was relatively mature in the minds of the libertarian

thinkers, as in the popular consciousness.” And workers’ organizations

existed with the structure, the experience, and the understanding to

undertake the task of social reconstruction when, with the Franco coup,

the turmoil of early 1936 exploded into social revolution. In his

introduction to a collection of documents on collectivization in Spain,

the anarchist Augustin Souchy writes:

For many years, the anarchists and syndicalists of Spain considered

their supreme task to be the social transformation of the society. In

their assemblies of Syndicates and groups, in their journals, their

brochures and books, the problem of the social revolution was discussed

incessantly and in a systematic fashion.[26]

All of this lies behind the spontaneous achievements, the constructive

work of the Spanish Revolution.

The ideas of libertarian socialism, in the sense described, have been

submerged in the industrial societies of the past half-century. The

dominant ideologies have been those of state socialism or state

capitalism (of an increasingly militarized character in the United

States, for reasons that are not obscure).[27] But there has been a

rekindling of interest in the past few years. The theses I quoted by

Anton Pannekoek were taken from a recent pamphlet of a radical French

workers’ group (Informations Correspondance Ouvrière). The remarks by

William Paul on revolutionary socialism are cited in a paper by Walter

Kendall given at the National Conference on Workers’ Control in

Sheffield, England, in March 1969. The workers’ control movement has

become a significant force in England in the past few years. It has

organized several conferences and has produced a substantial pamphlet

literature, and counts among its active adherents representatives of

some of the most important trade unions. The Amalgamated Engineering and

Foundryworkers’ Union, for example, has adopted, as official policy, the

program of nationalization of basic industries under “workers’ control

at all levels.”[28] On the Continent, there are similar developments.

May 1968 of course accelerated the growing interest in council communism

and related ideas in France and Germany, as it did in England.

Given the general conservative cast of our highly ideological society,

it is not too surprising that the United States has been relatively

untouched by these developments. But that too may change. The erosion of

the cold-war mythology at least makes it possible to raise these

questions in fairly broad circles. If the present wave of repression can

be beaten back, if the left can overcome its more suicidal tendencies

and build upon what has been accomplished in the past decade, then the

problem of how to organize industrial society on truly democratic lines,

with democratic control in the workplace and in the community, should

become a dominant intellectual issue for those who are alive to the

problems of contemporary society, and, as a mass movement for

libertarian socialism develops, speculation should proceed to action.

In his manifesto of 1865, Bakunin predicted that one element in the

social revolution will be “that intelligent and truly noble part of the

youth which, though belonging by birth to the privileged classes, in its

generous convictions and ardent aspirations, adopts the cause of the

people.” Perhaps in the rise of the student movement of the 1960s one

sees steps towards a fulfillment of this prophecy.

Daniel Guérin has undertaken what he has described as a “process of

rehabilitation” of anarchism. He argues, convincingly I believe, that

“the constructive ideas of anarchism retain their vitality, that they

may, when re-examined and sifted, assist contemporary socialist thought

to undertake a new departure ... [and] contribute to enriching

Marxism.”[29] From the “broad back” of anarchism he has selected for

more intensive scrutiny those ideas and actions that can be described as

libertarian socialist. This is natural and proper. This framework

accommodates the major anarchist spokesmen as well as the mass actions

that have been animated by anarchist sentiments and ideals. Guérin is

concerned not only with anarchist thought but also with the spontaneous

actions of popular forces that actually create new social forms in the

course of revolutionary struggle. He is concerned with social as well as

intellectual creativity. Furthermore, he attempts to draw from the

constructive achievements of the past lessons that will enrich the

theory of social liberation. For those who wish not only to understand

the world, but also to change it, this is the proper way to study the

history of anarchism.

Guérin describes the anarchism of the nineteenth century as essentially

doctrinal, while the twentieth century, for the anarchists, has been a

time of “revolutionary practice.”[30] Anarchism reflects that judgment.

His interpretation of anarchism consciously points towards the future.

Arthur Rosenberg once pointed out that popular revolutions

characteristically seek to replace “a feudal or centralized authority

ruling by force” with some form of communal system which “implies the

destruction and disappearance of the old form of State.” Such a system

will be either socialist or an “extreme form of democracy ... [which is]

the preliminary condition for Socialism inasmuch as Socialism can only

be realized in a world enjoying the highest possible measure of

individual freedom.” This idea, he notes, was common to Marx and the

anarchists.[31] This natural struggle for liberation runs counter to the

prevailing tendency towards centralization in economic and political

life.

A century ago Marx wrote that the bourgeosie of Paris “felt there was

but one alternative—the Commune, or the empire—under whatever name it

might reappear.”

The empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public

wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered, by the props

it lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and

the concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them

politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted

their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to

the frères Ignorantins, it had revolted their national feeling as

Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one

equivalent for the ruins it made—the disappearance of the empire.[32]

The miserable Second Empire “was the only form of government possible at

a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had

not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation.”

It is not very difficult to rephrase these remarks so that they become

appropriate to the imperial systems of 1970. The problem of “freeing man

from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social

enslavement” remains the problem of our time. As long as this is so, the

doctrines and the revolutionary practice of libertarian socialism will

serve as an inspiration and a guide.

2. Excerpts from Understanding Power

Transcending Capitalism

MAN: Referring back to your comments about escaping from or doing away

with capitalism, I’m wondering what workable scheme you would put in its

place?

Me?

MAN: Or what would you suggest to others who might be in a position to

set it up and get it going?

Well, I think that what used to be called, centuries ago, “wage slavery”

is intolerable. I mean, I do not think that people ought to be forced to

rent themselves in order to survive. I think that the economic

institutions ought to be run democratically—by their participants, and

by the communities in which they live. And I think that through various

forms of free association and federalism, it’s possible to imagine a

society working like that. I mean, I don’t think you can lay it out in

detail—nobody’s smart enough to design a society; you’ve got to

experiment. But reasonable principles on which to build such a society

are quite clear.

MAN: Most efforts at planned economies kind of go against the grain of

democratic ideals, and founder on those rocks.

Well, it depends which planned economies you mean. There are lots of

planned economies—the United States is a planned economy, for example. I

mean, we talk about ourselves as a “free market,” but that’s baloney.

The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive

are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts—like capital-intensive

agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case

there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on

the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized

by publicly funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy

that are functioning well.

And if you go to the East Asian countries that are supposed to be the

big economic successes—you know, what everybody talks about as a triumph

of free-market democracy—they don’t even have the most remote relation

to free-market democracy: formally speaking they’re fascist, they’re

state-organized economies run in cooperation with big conglomerates.

That’s precisely fascism, it’s not the free market.

Now, that kind of planned economy “works,” in a way—it produces at

least. Other kinds of command economies don’t work, or work differently:

for example, the Eastern European planned economies in the Soviet era

were highly centralized, over-bureaucratized, and they worked very

inefficiently, although they did provide a kind of minimal safety net

for people. But all of these systems have been very antidemocratic—like,

in the Soviet Union, there were virtually no peasants or workers

involved in any decision-making process.

MAN: It would be hard to find a working model of an ideal.

Yes, but in the eighteenth century it would have been hard to find a

working model of a political democracy—that didn’t prove it couldn’t

exist. By the nineteenth century, it did exist. Unless you think that

human history is over, it’s not an argument to say “it’s not around.”

You go back two hundred years, it was hard to imagine slavery being

abolished.

The Kibbutz Experiment

ANOTHER MAN: How could you make decisions democratically without a

bureaucracy? I don’t see how a large mass of people could actively

participate in all of the decisions that need to be made in a complex

modern society.

No, I don’t think they can—I think you’ve got to delegate some of those

responsibilities. But the question is, where does authority ultimately

lie? I mean, since the very beginnings of the modern democratic

revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it’s always

been recognized that people have to be represented—the question is, are

we represented by, as they put it, “countrymen like ourselves,” or are

we represented by “our betters?”

For example, suppose this was our community, and we wanted to enter into

some kind of arrangement with the community down the road—if we were

fairly big in scale, we couldn’t all do it and get them all to do it,

we’d have to delegate the right to negotiate things to representatives.

But then the question is, who has the power to ultimately authorize

those decisions? Well, if it’s a democracy, that power ought to lie not

just formally in the population, but actually in the population—meaning

the representatives can be recalled, they’re answerable back to their

community, they can be replaced. In fact, there should be as much as

possible in the way of constant replacement, so that political

participation just becomes a part of everybody’s life.

But I agree, I don’t think it’s possible to have large masses of people

get together to decide every topic—it would be unfeasible and pointless.

You’re going to want to pick committees to look into things and report

back, and so on and so forth. But the real question is, where does

authority lie?

MAN: It sounds like the model you’re looking to is similar to that of

the kibbutzim [collective farming communities in Israel].

Yeah, the kibbutz is actually as close to a full democracy as there is,

I think. In fact, I lived on one for a while, and had planned to stay

there, for precisely these reasons. On the other hand, life is full of

all kinds of ironies, and the fact is—as I have come to understand over

the years even more than I did at one time—although the kibbutzim are

very authentic democracies internally, there are a lot of very ugly

features about them.

For one thing, they’re extremely racist: I don’t think there’s a single

Arab on any kibbutz in Israel, and it turns out that a fair number of

them have been turned down. Like, if a couple forms between a Jewish

member of a kibbutz and an Arab, they generally end up living in an Arab

village. The other thing about them is, they have an extremely

unpleasant relationship with the state—which I didn’t really know about

until fairly recently, even though it’s been that way for a long time.

See, part of the reason why the kibbutzim are economically successful is

that they get a substantial state subsidy, and in return for that state

subsidy they essentially provide the officers’ corps for the elite

military units in Israel. So if you look at who goes into the pilot

training schools and the rangers and all that kind of stuff, it’s

kibbutz kids—that’s the trade-off: the government subsidizes them as

long as they provide the Praetorian Guard. Furthermore, I think they end

up providing the Praetorian Guard in part as a result of kibbutz

education. And here there are things that people who believe in

libertarian ideas, as I do, really have to worry about.

You see, there’s something very authoritarian about the libertarian

structure of the kibbutz—I could see it when I lived in it, in fact.

There’s tremendous group pressure to conform. I mean, there’s no force

that makes you conform, but the group pressures are very powerful. The

dynamics of how this worked were never very clear to me, but you could

just see it in operation: the fear of exclusion is very great—not

exclusion in the sense of not being allowed into the dining room or

something, but just that you won’t be a part of things somehow. It’s

like being excluded from a family: if you’re a kid and your family

excludes you—like maybe they let you sit at the table, but they don’t

talk to you—that’s devastating, you just can’t survive it. And something

like that carries over into these communities.

I’ve never heard of anybody studying it, but if you watch the kids

growing up, you can understand why they’re going to go into the rangers

and the pilot programs and the commandos. There’s a tremendous macho

pressure, right from the very beginning—you’re just no good unless you

can go through Marine Corps training and become a really tough bastard.

And that starts pretty early, and I think the kids go through real

traumas if they can’t do it: it’s psychologically very difficult.

And the results are striking. For example, there’s a movement of

resisters in Israel [Yesh G’vul], people who won’t serve in the Occupied

Territories—but it doesn’t have any kibbutz kids in it: the movement

just doesn’t exist there. Kibbutz kids also have a reputation for being

what are called “good soldiers”—which means, you know, not nice people:

do what you gotta do. All of these things are other aspects of it, and

the whole phenomenon comes pretty much without force or authority, but

because of a dynamics of conformism that’s extremely powerful.

Like, the kibbutz I lived in was made up of pretty educated people—they

were German refugees, and a lot of them had university degrees and so

on—but every single person in the whole kibbutz read the same newspaper.

And the idea that you might read a different newspaper—well, it’s not

that there was a law against it, it was just that it couldn’t be done:

you’re a member of this branch of the kibbutz movement, that’s the

newspaper you read.

MAN: Then how can we build a social contract which is cooperative in

nature, but at the same time recognizes individual humanity? It seems to

me that there’s always going to be a very tense polar pull there.

Where’s the polar pull—between what and what?

MAN: Between a collective value and an individual value.

I guess I don’t see why there has to be any contradiction there at all.

It seems to me that a crucial aspect of humanity is being a part of

functioning communities—so if we can create social bonds in which people

find satisfaction, we’ve done it: there’s no contradiction.

Look, you can’t really figure out what problems are going to arise in

group situations unless you experiment with them—it’s like physics: you

can’t just sit around and think what the world would be like under such

and such conditions, you’ve got to experiment and learn how things

actually work out. And one of the things I think you learn from the

kibbutz experiment is that you can in fact construct quite viable and

successful democratic structures—but there are still going to be

problems that come along. And one of the problems that people just have

to face is the effect of group pressures to conform.

I think everybody knows about this from families. Living in a family is

a crucial part of human life, you don’t want to give it up. On the other

hand, there plainly are problems that go along with it—nobody has to be

told that. And a serious problem, which becomes almost pathological when

it arises in a close-knit group, is exclusion—and to avoid exclusion

often means doing things you wouldn’t want to do if you had your own

way. But that’s just a part of living, to be faced with human problems

like that.

Actually, I’m not a great enthusiast of Marx, but one comment he made

seems appropriate here. I’m quoting, so pardon the sexist language, but

somewhere or other he said: socialism is an effort to try to solve man’s

animal problems, and after having solved the animal problems, then we

can face the human problems—but it’s not a part of socialism to solve

the human problems; socialism is an effort to get you to the point where

you can face the human problems. And I think the kind of thing you’re

concerned about is a human problem—and those are going to be there.

Humans are very complicated creatures, and have lots of ways of

torturing themselves in their inter-personal relations. Everybody knows

that, without soap operas.

“Anarchism” and “Libertarianism”

WOMAN: Professor Chomsky, on a slightly different topic, there’s a

separate meaning of the word “anarchy” different from the one you often

talk about—namely, “chaos.”

Yeah, it’s a bum rap, basically—it’s like referring to Soviet-style

bureaucracy as “socialism,” or any other term of discourse that’s been

given a second meaning for the purpose of ideological warfare. I mean,

“chaos” is a meaning of the word, but it’s not a meaning that has any

relevance to social thought. Anarchy as a social philosophy has never

meant “chaos”—in fact, anarchists have typically believed in a highly

organized society, just one that’s organized democratically from below.

WOMAN: It seems to me that as a social system, anarchism makes such

bottom-line sense that it was necessary to discredit the word, and take

it out of people’s whole vocabulary and thinking—so you just have a

reflex of fear when you hear it.

Yeah, anarchism has always been regarded as the ultimate evil by people

with power. So in Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare [a 1919 campaign against

“subversives” in the U.S.], they were harsh on socialists, but they

murdered anarchists—they were really bad news.

See, the idea that people could be free is extremely frightening to

anybody with power. That’s why the 1960s have such a bad reputation. I

mean, there’s a big literature about the Sixties, and it’s mostly

written by intellectuals, because they’re the people who write books, so

naturally it has a very bad name—because they hated it. You could see it

in the faculty clubs at the time: people were just traumatized by the

idea that students were suddenly asking questions and not just copying

things down. In fact, when people like Allan Bloom [author of The

Closing of the American Mind] write as if the foundations of

civilization were collapsing in the Sixties, from their point of view

that’s exactly right: they were. Because the foundations of civilization

are, “I’m a big professor, and I tell you what to say, and what to

think, and you write it down in your notebooks, and you repeat it.” If

you get up and say, “I don’t understand why I should read Plato, I think

it’s nonsense,” that’s destroying the foundations of civilization. But

maybe it’s a perfectly sensible question—plenty of philosophers have

said it, so why isn’t it a sensible question?

As with any mass popular movement, there was a lot of crazy stuff going

on in the Sixties—but that’s the only thing that makes it into history:

the crazy stuff around the periphery. The main things that were going on

are out of history—and that’s because they had a kind of libertarian

character, and there is nothing more frightening to people with power.

MAN: What’s the difference between “libertarian” and “anarchist,”

exactly?

There’s no difference, really. I think they’re the same thing. But you

see, “libertarian” has a special meaning in the United States. The

United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect:

what’s called “libertarianism” here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that’s

always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every

anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have

unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme

authority.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to

rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, “they rent

themselves freely, it’s a free contract”—but that’s a joke. If your

choice is, “do what I tell you or starve,” that’s not a choice—it’s in

fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized

times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

The American version of “libertarianism” is an aberration, though—nobody

really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that

worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three

seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because

you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a

tax, you can say: “No, I’m a libertarian, I’m against that tax”—but of

course, I’m still in favor of the government building roads, and having

schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard

[American academic]—and if you just read the world that they describe,

it’s a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in

it. This is a world where you don’t have roads because you don’t see any

reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you’re not going

to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other

people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge

people to ride on it. If you don’t like the pollution from somebody’s

automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want

to live in a world like that? It’s a world built on hatred.

The whole thing’s not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it

couldn’t function for a second—and if it could, all you’d want to do is

get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American

aberration, it’s not really serious.

Articulating Visions

MAN: You often seem reluctant to get very specific in spelling out your

vision of an anarchist society and how we could get there. Don’t you

think it’s important for activists to do that, though—to try to

communicate to people a workable plan for the future, which then can

help give them the hope and energy to continue struggling? I’m curious

why you don’t do that more often.

Well, I suppose I don’t feel that in order to work hard for social

change you need to be able to spell out a plan for a future society in

any kind of detail. What I feel should drive a person to work for change

are certain principles you’d like to see achieved. Now, you may not know

in detail—and I don’t think that any of us do know in detail—how those

principles can best be realized at this point in complex systems like

human societies. But I don’t really see why that should make any

difference: what you try to do is advance the principles. Now, that may

be what some people call “reformism”—but that’s kind of like a put-down:

reforms can be quite revolutionary if they lead in a certain direction.

And to push in that direction, I don’t think you have to know precisely

how a future society would work: I think what you have to be able to do

is spell out the principles you want to see such a society realize—and I

think we can imagine many different ways in which a future society could

realize them. Well, work to help people start trying them.

So for example, in the case of workers taking control of the workplace,

there are a lot of different ways in which you can think of workplaces

being controlled—and since nobody knows enough about what all the

effects are going to be of large-scale social changes, I think what we

should do is try them piecemeal. In fact, I have a rather conservative

attitude towards social change: since we’re dealing with complex systems

which nobody understands very much, the sensible move I think is to make

changes and then see what happens—and if they work, make further

changes. That’s true across the board, actually.

So, I don’t feel in a position—and even if I felt I was, I wouldn’t say

it—to know what the long-term results are going to look like in any kind

of detail: those are things that will have to be discovered, in my view.

Instead, the basic principle I would like to see communicated to people

is the idea that every form of authority and domination and hierarchy,

every authoritarian structure, has to prove that it’s justified—it has

no prior justification. For instance, when you stop your five-year-old

kid from trying to cross the street, that’s an authoritarian situation:

it’s got to be justified. Well, in that case, I think you can give a

justification. But the burden of proof for any exercise of authority is

always on the person exercising it—invariably. And when you look, most

of the time these authority structures have no justification: they have

no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of

the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people,

or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything

else—they’re just there in order to preserve certain structures of power

and domination, and the people at the top.

So I think that whenever you find situations of power, these questions

should be asked—and the person who claims the legitimacy of the

authority always bears the burden of justifying it. And if they can’t

justify it, it’s illegitimate and should be dismantled. To tell you the

truth, I don’t really understand anarchism as being much more than that.

As far as I can see, it’s just the point of view that says that people

have the right to be free, and if there are constraints on that freedom

then you’ve got to justify them. Sometimes you can—but of course,

anarchism or anything else doesn’t give you the answers about when that

is. You just have to look at the specific cases.

MAN: But if we ever had a society with no wage incentive and no

authority, where would the drive come from to advance and grow?

Well, the drive to “advance”—I think you have to ask exactly what that

means. If you mean a drive to produce more, well, who wants it? Is that

necessarily the right thing to do? It’s not obvious. In fact, in many

areas it’s probably the wrong thing to do—maybe it’s a good thing that

there wouldn’t be the same drive to produce. People have to be driven to

have certain wants in our system—why? Why not leave them alone so they

can just be happy, do other things?

Whatever “drive” there is ought to be internal. So take a look at kids:

they’re creative, they explore, they want to try new things. I mean, why

does a kid start to walk? You take a one-year-old kid, he’s crawling

fine, he can get anywhere across the room he likes really fast, so fast

his parents have to run after him to keep him from knocking everything

down—all of a sudden he gets up and starts walking. He’s terrible at

walking: he walks one step and he falls on his face, and if he wants to

really get somewhere he’s going to crawl. So why do kids start walking?

Well, they just want to do new things, that’s the way people are built.

We’re built to want to do new things, even if they’re not efficient,

even if they’re harmful, even if you get hurt—and I don’t think that

ever stops.

People want to explore, we want to press our capacities to their limits,

we want to appreciate what we can. But the joy of creation is something

very few people get the opportunity to have in our society: artists get

to have it, craftspeople have it, scientists. And if you’ve been lucky

enough to have had that opportunity, you know it’s quite an

experience—and it doesn’t have to be discovering Einstein’s theory of

relativity: anybody can have that pleasure, even by seeing what other

people have done. For instance, if you read even a simple mathematical

proof like the Pythagorean Theorem, what you study in tenth grade, and

you finally figure out what it’s all about, that’s exciting—“My God, I

never understood that before.” Okay, that’s creativity, even though

somebody else proved it two thousand years ago.

You just keep being struck by the marvels of what you’re discovering,

and you’re “discovering” it, even though somebody else did it already.

Then if you can ever add a little bit to what’s already known—alright,

that’s very exciting. And I think the same thing is true of a person who

builds a boat: I don’t see why it’s fundamentally any different—I mean,

I wish I could do that; I can’t, I can’t imagine doing it.

Well, I think people should be able to live in a society where they can

exercise these kinds of internal drives and develop their capacities

freely—instead of being forced into the narrow range of options that are

available to most people in the world now. And by that, I mean not only

options that are objectively available, but also options that are

subjectively available—like, how are people allowed to think, how are

they able to think? Remember, there are all kinds of ways of thinking

that are cut off from us in our society—not because we’re incapable of

them, but because various blockages have been developed and imposed to

prevent people from thinking in those ways. That’s what indoctrination

is about in the first place, in fact—and I don’t mean somebody giving

you lectures: sitcoms on television, sports that you watch, every aspect

of the culture implicitly involves an expression of what a “proper” life

and a “proper” set of values are, and that’s all indoctrination.

So I think what has to happen is, other options have to be opened up to

people—both subjectively, and in fact concretely: meaning you can do

something about them without great suffering. And that’s one of the main

purposes of socialism, I think: to reach a point where people have the

opportunity to decide freely for themselves what their needs are, and

not just have the “choices” forced on them by some arbitrary system of

power. [ ... ]

Adam Smith: Real and Fake

MAN: You said that classical liberalism was “anticapitalist.” What did

you mean by that?

Well, the underlying, fundamental principles of Adam Smith and other

classical liberals were that people should be free: they shouldn’t be

under the control of authoritarian institutions, they shouldn’t be

subjected to things like division of labor, which destroys them. So look

at Smith: why was he in favor of markets? He gave kind of a complicated

argument for them, but at the core of it was the idea that if you had

perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality—that’s why Adam

Smith was in favor of markets. Adam Smith was in favor of markets

because he thought that people ought to be completely equal—completely

equal—and that was because, as a classical liberal, he believed that

people’s fundamental character involves notions like sympathy, and

solidarity, the right to control their own work, and so on and so forth:

all the exact opposite of capitalism.

In fact, there are no two points of view more antithetical than

classical liberalism and capitalism—and that’s why when the University

of Chicago publishes a bicentennial edition of Smith, they have to

distort the text (which they did): because as a true classical liberal,

Smith was strongly opposed to all of the idiocy they now spout in his

name.

So if you read George Stigler’s introduction to the bicentennial edition

of The Wealth of Nations—it’s a big scholarly edition, University of

Chicago Press, so it’s kind of interesting to look at—it is

diametrically opposed to Smith’s text on point after point. Smith is

famous for what he wrote about division of labor: he’s supposed to have

thought that division of labor was a great thing. Well, he didn’t: he

thought division of labor was a terrible thing—in fact, he said that in

any civilized society, the government is going to have to intervene to

prevent division of labor from simply destroying people. Okay, now take

a look at the University of Chicago’s index (you know, a detailed

scholarly index) under “division of labor”: you won’t find an entry for

that passage—it’s simply not there.

Well, that’s real scholarship: suppress the facts totally, present them

as the opposite of what they are, and figure, “probably nobody’s going

to read to page 473 anyhow, because I didn’t.” I mean, ask the guys who

edited it if they ever read to page 473—answer: well, they probably read

the first paragraph, then sort of remembered what they’d been taught in

some college course.

But the point is, for classical liberals in the eighteenth century,

there was a certain conception of just what human beings are

like—namely, that what kind of creatures they are depends on the kind of

work they do, and the kind of control they have over it, and their

ability to act creatively and according to their own decisions and

choices. And there was in fact a lot of very insightful comment about

this at the time.

So for example, one of the founders of classical liberalism, Wilhelm von

Humboldt (who incidentally is very admired by so-called “conservatives”

today, because they don’t read him), pointed out that if a worker

produces a beautiful object on command, you may “admire what the worker

does, but you will despise what he is”—because that’s not really

behaving like a human being, it’s just behaving like a machine. And that

conception runs right through classical liberalism. In fact, even half a

century later, Alexis de Tocqueville [French politician and writer]

pointed out that you can have systems in which “the art advances and the

artisan recedes,” but that’s inhuman—because what you’re really

interested in is the artisan, you’re interested in people, and for

people to have the opportunity to live full and rewarding lives they

have to be in control of what they do, even if that happens to be

economically less efficient.

Well, okay—obviously there’s just been a dramatic change in intellectual

and cultural attitudes over the past couple centuries. But I think those

classical liberal conceptions now have to be recovered, and the ideas at

the heart of them should take root on a mass scale.

Now, the sources of power and authority that people could see in front

of their eyes in the eighteenth century were quite different from the

ones that we have today—back then it was the feudal system, and the

Church, and the absolutist state that they were focused on; they

couldn’t see the industrial corporation, because it didn’t exist yet.

But if you take the basic classical liberal principles and apply them to

the modern period, I think you actually come pretty close to the

principles that animated revolutionary Barcelona in the late 1930s—to

what’s called “anarchosyndicalism.” [Anarchosyndicalism is a form of

libertarian socialism that was practiced briefly in regions of Spain

during its revolution and civil war of 1936, until it was destroyed by

the simultaneous efforts of the Soviet Union, the Western powers, and

the Fascists.] I think that’s about as high a level as humans have yet

achieved in trying to realize these libertarian principles, which in my

view are the right ones. I mean, I’m not saying that everything that was

done in that revolution was right, but in its general spirit and

character, in the idea of developing the kind of society that Orwell saw

and described in I think his greatest work, Homage to Catalonia — with

popular control over all the institutions of society—okay, that’s the

right direction in which to move, I think. [ ... ]

Defending the Welfare State

WOMAN: Noam, since you’re an anarchist and often say that you oppose the

existence of the nation-state itself and think it’s incompatible with

true socialism, does that make you at all reluctant to defend welfare

programs and other social services which are now under attack from the

right wing, and which the right wing wants to dismantle?

Well, it’s true that the anarchist vision in just about all its

varieties has looked forward to dismantling state power—and personally I

share that vision. But right now it runs directly counter to my goals:

my immediate goals have been, and now very much are, to defend and even

strengthen certain elements of state authority that are now under severe

attack. And I don’t think there’s any contradiction there—none at all,

really.

For example, take the so-called welfare state. What’s called the

“welfare state” is essentially a recognition that every child has a

right to have food, and to have health care and so on—and as I’ve been

saying, those programs were set up in the nation-state system after a

century of very hard struggle, by the labor movement, and the socialist

movement, and so on. Well, according to the new spirit of the age, in

the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who got raped and has a child, her

child has to learn “personal responsibility” by not accepting state

welfare handouts, meaning, by not having enough to eat. Alright, I don’t

agree with that at any level. In fact, I think it’s grotesque at any

level. I think those children should be saved. And in today’s world,

that’s going to have to involve working through the state system; it’s

not the only case.

So despite the anarchist “vision,” I think aspects of the state system,

like the one that makes sure children eat, have to be defended—in fact,

defended very vigorously. And given the accelerating effort that’s being

made these days to roll back the victories for justice and human rights

which have been won through long and often extremely bitter struggles in

the West, in my opinion the immediate goal of even committed anarchists

should be to defend some state institutions, while helping to pry them

open to more meaningful public participation, and ultimately to

dismantle them in a much more free society.

There are practical problems of tomorrow on which people’s lives very

much depend, and while defending these kinds of programs is by no means

the ultimate end we should be pursuing, in my view we still have to face

the problems that are right on the horizon, and which seriously affect

human lives. I don’t think those things can simply be forgotten because

they might not fit within some radical slogan that reflects a deeper

vision of a future society. The deeper visions should be maintained,

they’re important—but dismantling the state system is a goal that’s a

lot farther away, and you want to deal first with what’s at hand and

nearby, I think. And in any realistic perspective, the political system,

with all its flaws, does have opportunities for participation by the

general population which other existing institutions, such as

corporations, don’t have. In fact, that’s exactly why the far right

wants to weaken governmental structures—because if you can make sure

that all the key decisions are in the hands of Microsoft and General

Electric and Raytheon, then you don’t have to worry anymore about the

threat of popular involvement in policy-making.

So take something that’s been happening in recent years: devolution—that

is, removing authority from the federal government down to the state

governments. Well, in some circumstances, that would be a democratizing

move which I would be in favor of—it would be a move away from central

authority down to local authority. But that’s in abstract circumstances

that don’t exist. Right now it’ll happen because moving decision-making

power down to the state level in fact means handing it over to private

power. See, huge corporations can influence and dominate the federal

government, but even middle-sized corporations can influence state

governments and play one state’s workforce off against another’s by

threatening to move production elsewhere unless they get better tax

breaks and so on. So under the conditions of existing systems of power,

devolution is very antidemocratic; under other systems of much greater

equality, devolution could be highly democratic—but these are questions

which really can’t be discussed in isolation from the society as it

actually exists.

So I think that it’s completely realistic and rational to work within

structures to which you are opposed, because by doing so you can help to

move to a situation where then you can challenge those structures.

Let me just give you an analogy. I don’t like to have armed police

everywhere, I think it’s a bad idea. On the other hand, a number of

years ago when I had little kids, there was a rabid raccoon running

around our neighborhood biting children. Well, we tried various ways of

getting rid of it—you know, “Have-a-Heart” animal traps, all this kind

of stuff—but nothing worked. So finally we just called the police and

had them do it: it was better than having the kids bitten by a rabid

raccoon, right? Is there a contradiction there? No: in particular

circumstances, you sometimes have to accept and use illegitimate

structures.

Well, we happen to have a huge rabid raccoon running around—it’s called

corporations. And there is nothing in the society right now that can

protect people from that tyranny, except the federal government. Now, it

doesn’t protect them very well, because mostly it’s run by the

corporations, but still it does have some limited effect—it can enforce

regulatory measures under public pressure, let’s say, it can reduce

dangerous toxic waste disposal, it can set minimal standards on health

care, and so on. In fact, it has various things that it can do to

improve the situation when there’s this huge rabid raccoon dominating

the place. So, fine, I think we ought to get it to do the things it can

do—if you can get rid of the raccoon, great, then let’s dismantle the

federal government. But to say, “Okay, let’s just get rid of the federal

government as soon as we possibly can,” and then let the private

tyrannies take over everything—I mean, for an anarchist to advocate that

is just outlandish, in my opinion. So I really don’t see any

contradiction at all here.

Supporting these aspects of the governmental structures just seems to me

to be part of a willingness to face some of the complexities of life for

what they are—and the complexities of life include the fact that there

are a lot of ugly things out there, and if you care about the fact that

some kid in downtown Boston is starving, or that some poor person can’t

get adequate medical care, or that somebody’s going to pour toxic waste

in your backyard, or anything at all like that, well, then you try to

stop it. And there’s only one institution around right now that can stop

it. If you just want to be pure and say, “I’m against power, period,”

well, okay, say, “I’m against the federal government.” But that’s just

to divorce yourself from any human concerns, in my view. And I don’t

think that’s a reasonable stance for anarchists or anyone else to take.

---

The note references in this chapter were left intact to match the

original note numbering. The editors’ explanatory notes can be found

online at understandingpower.com/chap6.htm.

3. Part II of Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship

If it is plausible that ideology will in general serve as a mask for

self-interest, then it is a natural presumption that intellectuals, in

interpreting history or formulating policy, will tend to adopt an

elitist position, condemning popular movements and mass participation in

decision making, and emphasizing rather the necessity for supervision by

those who possess the knowledge and understanding that is required (so

they claim) to manage society and control social change. This is hardly

a novel thought. One major element in the anarchist critique of Marxism

a century ago was the prediction that, as Bakunin formulated it:

According to the theory of Mr. Marx, the people not only must not

destroy [the state] but must strengthen it and place it at the complete

disposal of their benefactors, guardians, and teachers—the leaders of

the Communist party, namely Mr. Marx and his friends, who will proceed

to liberate [mankind] in their own way. They will concentrate the reins

of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require an

exceedingly firm guardianship; they will establish a single state bank,

concentrating in its hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural and

even scientific production, and then divide the masses into two

armies—industrial and agricultural—under the direct command of the state

engineers, who will constitute a new privileged scientific-political

estate.[33]

One cannot fail to be struck by the parallel between this prediction and

that of Daniel Bell—the prediction that in the new postindustrial

society, “not only the best talents, but eventually the entire complex

of social prestige and social status, will be rooted in the intellectual

and scientific communities.”[34] Pursuing the parallel for a moment, it

might be asked whether the left-wing critique of Leninist elitism can be

applied, under very different conditions, to the liberal ideology of the

intellectual elite that aspires to a dominant role in managing the

welfare state.

Rosa Luxemburg, in 1918, argued that Bolshevik elitism would lead to a

state of society in which the bureaucracy alone would remain an active

element in social life—though now it would be the “red bureaucracy” of

that State Socialism that Bakunin had long before described as “the most

vile and terrible lie that our century has created.”[35] A true social

revolution requires a “spiritual transformation in the masses degraded

by centuries of bourgeois class rule”;[36] “it is only by extirpating

the habits of obedience and servility to the last root that the working

class can acquire the understanding of a new form of discipline,

self-discipline arising from free consent.”[37] Writing in 1904, she

predicted that Lenin’s organizational concepts would “enslave a young

labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power ... and turn it

into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee.”[38] In the

Bolshevik elitist doctrine of 1918 she saw a disparagement of the

creative, spontaneous, self-correcting force of mass action, which

alone, she argued, could solve the thousand problems of social

reconstruction and produce the spiritual transformation that is the

essence of a true social revolution. As Bolshevik practice hardened into

dogma, the fear of popular initiative and spontaneous mass action, not

under the direction and control of the properly designated vanguard,

became a dominant element of so-called “Communist” ideology.

Antagonism to mass movements and to social change that escapes the

control of privileged elites is also a prominent feature of contemporary

liberal ideology.[39] Expressed as foreign policy, it takes the form

described earlier. To conclude this discussion of counterrevolutionary

subordination, I would like to investigate how, in one rather crucial

case, this particular bias in American liberal ideology can be detected

even in the interpretation of events of the past in which American

involvement was rather slight, and in historical work of very high

caliber.

In 1966, the American Historical Association gave its biennial award for

the most outstanding work on European history to Gabriel Jackson, for

his study of Spain in the 1930s.[40] There is no question that of the

dozens of books on this period, Jackson’s is among the best, and I do

not doubt that the award was well deserved. The Spanish Civil War is one

of the crucial events of modern history, and one of the most extensively

studied as well. In it, we find the interplay of forces and ideas that

have dominated European history since the industrial revolution. What is

more, the relationship of Spain to the great powers was in many respects

like that of the countries of what is now called the Third World. In

some ways, then, the events of the Spanish Civil War give a foretaste of

what the future may hold, as Third World revolutions uproot traditional

societies, threaten imperial dominance, exacerbate great-power

rivalries, and bring the world perilously close to a war which, if not

averted, will surely be the final catastrophe of modern history. My

reason for wanting to investigate an outstanding liberal analysis of the

Spanish Civil War is therefore twofold: first, because of the intrinsic

interest of these events; and second, because of the insight that this

analysis may provide with respect to the underlying elitist bias which I

believe to be at the root of the phenomenon of counterrevolutionary

subordination.

In his study of the Spanish Republic, Jackson makes no attempt to hide

his own commitment in favor of liberal democracy, as represented by such

figures as Azaña, Casares Quiroga, Martínez Barrio,[41] and the other

“responsible national leaders.” In taking this position, he speaks for

much of liberal scholarship; it is fair to say that figures similar to

those just mentioned would be supported by American liberals, were this

possible, in Latin America, Asia, or Africa. Furthermore, Jackson makes

little attempt to disguise his antipathy towards the forces of popular

revolution in Spain, or their goals.

It is no criticism of Jackson’s study that his point of view and

sympathies are expressed with such clarity. On the contrary, the value

of this work as an interpretation of historical events is enhanced by

the fact that the author’s commitments are made so clear and explicit.

But I think it can be shown that Jackson’s account of the popular

revolution that took place in Spain is misleading and in part quite

unfair, and that the failure of objectivity it reveals is highly

significant in that it is characteristic of the attitude taken by

liberal (and Communist) intellectuals towards revolutionary movements

that are largely spontaneous and only loosely organized, while rooted in

deeply felt needs and ideals of dispossessed masses. It is a convention

of scholarship that the use of such terms as those of the preceding

phrase demonstrates naïveté and muddle-headed sentimentality. The

convention, however, is supported by ideological conviction rather than

history or investigation of the phenomena of social life. This

conviction is, I think, belied by such events as the revolution that

swept over much of Spain in the summer of 1936.

The circumstances of Spain in the 1930s are not duplicated elsewhere in

the underdeveloped world today, to be sure. Nevertheless, the limited

information that we have about popular movements in Asia, specifically,

suggests certain similar features that deserve much more serious and

sympathetic study than they have so far received.[42] Inadequate

information makes it hazardous to try to develop any such parallel, but

I think it is quite possible to note long-standing tendencies in the

response of liberal as well as Communist intellectuals to such mass

movements.

As I have already remarked, the Spanish Civil War is not only one of the

critical events of modern history but one of the most intensively

studied as well. Yet there are surprising gaps. During the months

following the Franco insurrection in July 1936, a social revolution of

unprecedented scope took place throughout much of Spain. It had no

“revolutionary vanguard” and appears to have been largely spontaneous,

involving masses of urban and rural laborers in a radical transformation

of social and economic conditions that persisted, with remarkable

success, until it was crushed by force. This predominantly anarchist

revolution and the massive social transformation to which it gave rise

are treated, in recent historical studies, as a kind of aberration, a

nuisance that stood in the way of successful prosecution of the war to

save the bourgeois regime from the Franco rebellion. Many historians

would probably agree with Eric Hobsbawm[43] that the failure of social

revolution in Spain “was due to the anarchists,” that anarchism was “a

disaster,” a kind of “moral gymnastics” with no “concrete results,” at

best “a profoundly moving spectacle for the student of popular

religion.” The most extensive historical study of the anarchist

revolution[44] is relatively inaccessible, and neither its author, now

living in southern France, nor the many refugees who will never write

memoirs but who might provide invaluable personal testimony have been

consulted, apparently, by writers of the major historical works.[45] The

one published collection of documents dealing with collectivization[46]

has been published only by an anarchist press and hence is barely

accessible to the general reader, and has also rarely been consulted—it

does not, for example, appear in Jackson’s bibliography, though

Jackson’s account is intended to be a social and political, not merely a

military, history. In fact, this astonishing social upheaval seems to

have largely passed from memory. The drama and pathos of the Spanish

Civil War have by no means faded; witness the impact a few years ago of

the film To Die in Madrid. Yet in this film (as Daniel Guérin points

out) one finds no reference to the popular revolution that had

transformed much of Spanish society.

I will be concerned here with the events of 1936–1937,[47] and with one

particular aspect of the complex struggle involving Franco Nationalists,

Republicans (including the Communist party), anarchists, and socialist

workers’ groups. The Franco insurrection in July 1936 came against a

background of several months of strikes, expropriations, and battles

between peasants and Civil Guards. The left-wing Socialist leader Largo

Caballero had demanded in June that the workers be armed, but was

refused by Azaña. When the coup came, the Republican government was

paralyzed. Workers armed themselves in Madrid and Barcelona, robbing

government armories and even ships in the harbor, and put down the

insurrection while the government vacillated, torn between the twin

dangers of submitting to Franco and arming the working classes. In large

areas of Spain effective authority passed into the hands of the

anarchist and socialist workers who had played a substantial, generally

dominant role in putting down the insurrection.

The next few months have frequently been described as a period of “dual

power.” In Barcelona industry and commerce were largely collectivized,

and a wave of collectivization spread through rural areas, as well as

towns and villages, in Aragon, Castile, and the Levant, and to a lesser

but still significant extent in many parts of Catalonia, Asturias,

Estremadura, and Andalusia. Military power was exercised by defense

committees; social and economic organization took many forms, following

in main outlines the program of the Saragossa Congress of the anarchist

CNT in May 1936. The revolution was “apolitical,” in the sense that its

organs of power and administration remained separate from the central

Republican government and, even after several anarchist leaders entered

the government in the autumn of 1936, continued to function fairly

independently until the revolution was finally crushed between the

fascist and Communist-led Republican forces. The success of

collectivization of industry and commerce in Barcelona impressed even

highly unsympathetic observers such as Borkenau. The scale of rural

collectivization is indicated by these data from anarchist sources: in

Aragon, 450 collectives with half a million members; in the Levant, 900

collectives accounting for about half the agricultural production and 70

percent of marketing in this, the richest agricultural region of Spain;

in Castile, 300 collectives with about 100,000 members.[48] In

Catalonia, the bourgeois government headed by Companys retained nominal

authority, but real power was in the hands of the anarchist-dominated

committees.

The period of July through September may be characterized as one of

spontaneous, widespread, but unconsummated social revolution.[49] A

number of anarchist leaders joined the government; the reason, as stated

by Federica Montseny on January 3, 1937, was this: “... the anarchists

have entered the government to prevent the Revolution from deviating and

in order to carry it further beyond the war, and also to oppose any

dictatorial tendency, from wherever it might come.”[50] The central

government fell increasingly under Communist control—in Catalonia, under

the control of the Communist-dominated PSUC—largely as a result of the

valuable Russian military assistance. Communist success was greatest in

the rich farming areas of the Levant (the government moved to Valencia,

capital of one of the provinces), where prosperous farm owners flocked

to the Peasant Federation that the party had organized to protect the

wealthy farmers; this federation “served as a powerful instrument in

checking the rural collectivization promoted by the agricultural workers

of the province.”[51] Elsewhere as well, counterrevolutionary successes

reflected increasing Communist dominance of the Republic.

The first phase of the counterrevolution was the legalization and

regulation of those accomplishments of the revolution that appeared

irreversible. A decree of October 7 by the Communist Minister of

Agriculture, Vicente Uribe, legalized certain expropriations—namely, of

lands belonging to participants in the Franco revolt. Of course, these

expropriations had already taken place, a fact that did not prevent the

Communist press from describing the decree as “the most profoundly

revolutionary measure that has been taken since the military

uprising.”[52] In fact, by exempting the estates of landowners who had

not directly participated in the Franco rebellion, the decree

represented a step backward, from the standpoint of the revolutionaries,

and it was criticized not only by the CNT but also by the Socialist

Federation of Land Workers, affiliated with the UGT. The demand for a

much broader decree was unacceptable to the Communist-led ministry,

since the Communist party was “seeking support among the propertied

classes in the anti-Franco coup” and hence “could not afford to repel

the small and medium proprietors who had been hostile to the working

class movement before the civil war.”[53] These “small proprietors,” in

fact, seem to have included owners of substantial estates. The decree

compelled tenants to continue paying rent unless the landowners had

supported Franco, and by guaranteeing former landholdings, it prevented

distribution of land to the village poor. Ricardo Zabalza, general

secretary of the Federation of Land Workers, described the resulting

situation as one of “galling injustice”; “the sycophants of the former

political bosses still enjoy a privileged position at the expense of

those persons who were unable to rent even the smallest parcel of land,

because they were revolutionaries.”[54]

To complete the stage of legalization and restriction of what had

already been achieved, a decree of October 24, 1936, promulgated by a

CNT member who had become Councilor for Economy in the Catalonian

Generalitat, gave legal sanction to the collectivization of industry in

Catalonia. In this case too, the step was regressive, from the

revolutionary point of view. Collectivization was limited to enterprises

employing more than a hundred workers, and a variety of conditions were

established that removed control from the workers’ committees to the

state bureaucracy.[55]

The second stage of the counterrevolution, from October 1936 through May

1937, involved the destruction of the local committees, the replacement

of the militia by a conventional army, and the re-establishment of the

prerevolutionary social and economic system, wherever this was possible.

Finally, in May 1937, came a direct attack on the working class in

Barcelona (the May Days).[56] Following the success of this attack, the

process of liquidation of the revolution was completed. The

collectivization decree of October 24 was rescinded and industries were

“freed” from workers’ control. Communist-led armies swept through

Aragon, destroying many collectives and dismantling their organizations

and, generally, bringing the area under the control of the central

government. Throughout the Republican-held territories, the government,

now under Communist domination, acted in accordance with the plan

announced in Pravda on December 17, 1936: “So far as Catalonia is

concerned, the cleaning up of Trotzkyist and Anarcho-Syndicalist

elements there has already begun, and it will be carried out there with

the same energy as in the U.S.S.R.”[57]—and, we may add, in much the

same manner.

In brief, the period from the summer of 1936 to 1937 was one of

revolution and counterrevolution: the revolution was largely spontaneous

with mass participation of anarchist and socialist industrial and

agricultural workers; the counterrevolution was under Communist

direction, the Communist party increasingly coming to represent the

right wing of the Republic. During this period and after the success of

the counterrevolution, the Republic was waging a war against the Franco

insurrection; this has been described in great detail in numerous

publications, and I will say little about it here. The Communist-led

counterrevolutionary struggle must, of course, be understood against the

background of the ongoing antifascist war and the more general attempt

of the Soviet Union to construct a broad antifascist alliance with the

Western democracies. One reason for the vigorous counterrevolutionary

policy of the Communists was their belief that England would never

tolerate a revolutionary triumph in Spain, where England had substantial

commercial interests, as did France and to a lesser extent the United

States.[58] I will return to this matter below. However, I think it is

important to bear in mind that there were undoubtedly other factors as

well. Rudolf Rocker’s comments are, I believe, quite to the point:

... the Spanish people have been engaged in a desperate struggle against

a pitiless foe and have been exposed besides to the secret intrigues of

the great imperialist powers of Europe. Despite this the Spanish

revolutionaries have not grasped at the disastrous expedient of

dictatorship, but have respected all honest convictions. Everyone who

visited Barcelona after the July battles, whether friend or foe of the

C.N.T., was surprised at the freedom of public life and the absence of

any arrangements for suppressing the free expression of opinion.

For two decades the supporters of Bolshevism have been hammering it into

the masses that dictatorship is a vital necessity for the defense of the

so-called proletarian interests against the assaults of the

counter-revolution and for paving the way for Socialism. They have not

advanced the cause of Socialism by this propaganda, but have merely

smoothed the way for Fascism in Italy, Germany and Austria by causing

millions of people to forget that dictatorship, the most extreme form of

tyranny, can never lead to social liberation. In Russia, the so-called

dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to Socialism, but to the

domination of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole

people....

What the Russian autocrats and their supporters fear most is that the

success of libertarian Socialism in Spain might prove to their blind

followers that the much vaunted “necessity of a dictatorship” is nothing

but one vast fraud which in Russia has led to the despotism of Stalin

and is to serve today in Spain to help the counter-revolution to a

victory over the revolution of the workers and peasants.[59]

After decades of anti-Communist indoctrination, it is difficult to

achieve a perspective that makes possible a serious evaluation of the

extent to which Bolshevism and Western liberalism have been united in

their opposition to popular revolution. However, I do not think that one

can comprehend the events in Spain without attaining this perspective.

With this brief sketch—partisan, but I think accurate—for background, I

would like to turn to Jackson’s account of this aspect of the Spanish

Civil War (see note 8).

Jackson presumes (p. 259) that Soviet support for the Republican cause

in Spain was guided by two factors: first, concern for Soviet security;

second, the hope that a Republican victory would advance “the cause of

worldwide ‘people’s revolution’ with which Soviet leaders hoped to

identify themselves.” They did not press their revolutionary aims, he

feels, because “for the moment it was essential not to frighten the

middle classes or the Western governments.”

As to the concern for Soviet security, Jackson is no doubt correct. It

is clear that Soviet support of the Republic was one aspect of the

attempt to make common cause with the Western democracies against the

fascist threat. However, Jackson’s conception of the Soviet Union as a

revolutionary power—hopeful that a Republican victory would advance “the

interrupted movement toward world revolution” and seeking to identify

itself with “the cause of the world-wide ‘people’s revolution’ ”—seems

to me entirely mistaken. Jackson presents no evidence to support this

interpretation of Soviet policy, nor do I know of any. It is interesting

to see how differently the events were interpreted at the time of the

Spanish Civil War, not only by anarchists like Rocker but also by such

commentators as Gerald Brenan and Franz Borkenau, who were intimately

acquainted with the situation in Spain. Brenan observes that the

counter-revolutionary policy of the Communists (which he thinks was

“extremely sensible”) was

the policy most suited to the Communists themselves. Russia is a

totalitarian regime ruled by a bureaucracy: the frame of mind of its

leaders, who have come through the most terrible upheaval in history, is

cynical and opportunist: the whole fabric of the state is dogmatic and

authoritarian. To expect such men to lead a social revolution in a

country like Spain, where the wildest idealism is combined with great

independence of character, was out of the question. The Russians could,

it is true, command plenty of idealism among their foreign admirers, but

they could only harness it to the creation of a cast-iron bureaucratic

state, where everyone thinks alike and obeys the orders of the chief

above him.[60]

He sees nothing in Russian conduct in Spain to indicate any interest in

a “people’s revolution.” Rather, the Communist policy was to oppose

“even such rural and industrial collectives as had risen spontaneously

and flood the country with police who, like the Russian Ogpu, acted on

the orders of their party rather than those of the Ministry of the

Interior.” The Communists were concerned to suppress altogether the

impulses towards “spontaneity of speech or action,” since “their whole

nature and history made them distrust the local and spontaneous and put

their faith in order, discipline and bureaucratic uniformity”—hence

placed them in opposition to the revolutionary forces in Spain. As

Brenan also notes, the Russians withdrew their support once it became

clear that the British would not be swayed from the policy of

appeasement, a fact which gives additional confirmation to the thesis

that only considerations of Russian foreign policy led the Soviet Union

to support the Republic.

Borkenau’s analysis is similar. He approves of the Communist policy,

because of its “efficiency,” but he points out that the Communists “put

an end to revolutionary social activity, and enforced their view that

this ought not to be a revolution but simply the defence of a legal

government ... communist policy in Spain was mainly dictated not by the

necessities of the Spanish fight but by the interests of the intervening

foreign power, Russia,” a country “with a revolutionary past, not a

revolutionary present.” The Communists acted “not with the aim of

transforming chaotic enthusiasm into disciplined enthusiasm [which

Borkenau feels to have been necessary], but with the aim of substituting

disciplined military and administrative action for the action of the

masses and getting rid of the latter entirely.” This policy, he points

out, went “directly against the interests and claims of the masses” and

thus weakened popular support. The now apathetic masses would not commit

themselves to the defense of a Communist-run dictatorship, which

restored former authority and even “showed a definite preference for the

police forces of the old regime, so hated by the masses.” It seems to me

that the record strongly supports this interpretation of Communist

policy and its effects, though Borkenau’s assumption that Communist

“efficiency” was necessary to win the anti-Franco struggle is much more

dubious—a question to which I return below.[61]

It is relevant to observe, at this point, that a number of the Spanish

Communist leaders were reluctantly forced to similar conclusions.

Bolloten cites several examples,[62] specifically, the military

commander “El Campesino” and Jesús Hernández, a minister in the

Caballero government. The former, after his escape from the Soviet Union

in 1949, stated that he had taken for granted the “revolutionary

solidarity” of the Soviet Union during the Civil War—a most remarkable

degree of innocence—and realized only later “that the Kremlin does not

serve the interests of the peoples of the world, but makes them serve

its own interests; that, with a treachery and hypocrisy without

parallel, it makes use of the international working class as a mere pawn

in its political intrigues.” Hernández, in a speech given shortly after

the Civil War, admits that the Spanish Communist leaders “acted more

like Soviet subjects than sons of the Spanish people.” “It may seem

absurd, incredible,” he adds, “but our education under Soviet tutelage

had deformed us to such an extent that we were completely

denationalized; our national soul was torn out of us and replaced by a

rabidly chauvinistic internationalism, which began and ended with the

towers of the Kremlin.”

Shortly after the Third World Congress of the Communist International in

1921, the Dutch “ultra-leftist” Hermann Gorter wrote that the congress

“has decided the fate of the world revolution for the present. The trend

of opinion that seriously desired world revolution ... has been expelled

from the Russian International. The Communist Parties in western Europe

and throughout the world that retain their membership of the Russian

International will become nothing more than a means to preserve the

Russian Revolution and the Soviet Republic.”[63] This forecast has

proved quite accurate. Jackson’s conception that the Soviet Union was a

revolutionary power in the late 1930s, or even that the Soviet leaders

truly regarded themselves as identified with world revolution, is

without factual support. It is a misinterpretation that runs parallel to

the American Cold War mythology that has invented an “international

Communist conspiracy” directed from Moscow (now Peking) to justify its

own interventionist policies.

Turning to events in revolutionary Spain, Jackson describes the first

stages of collectivization as follows: the unions in Madrid, “as in

Barcelona and Valencia, abused their sudden authority to place the sign

incautado [placed under workers’ control] on all manner of buildings and

vehicles” (p. 279). Why was this an abuse of authority? This Jackson

does not explain. The choice of words indicates a reluctance on

Jackson’s part to recognize the reality of the revolutionary situation,

despite his account of the breakdown of Republican authority. The

statement that the workers “abused their sudden authority” by carrying

out collectivization rests on a moral judgment that recalls that of

Ithiel Pool, when he characterizes land reform in Vietnam as a matter of

“despoiling one’s neighbors,” or of Franz Borkenau, when he speaks of

expropriation in the Soviet Union as “robbery,” demonstrating “a streak

of moral indifference.”

Within a few months, Jackson informs us, “the revolutionary tide began

to ebb in Catalonia” after “accumulating food and supply problems, and

the experience of administering villages, frontier posts, and public

utilities, had rapidly shown the anarchists the unsuspected complexity

of modern society” (pp. 313–14). In Barcelona, “the naïve optimism of

the revolutionary conquests of the previous August had given way to

feelings of resentment and of somehow having been cheated,” as the cost

of living doubled, bread was in short supply, and police brutality

reached the levels of the monarchy. “The POUM and the anarchist press

simultaneously extolled the collectivizations and explained the failures

of production as due to Valencia policies of boycotting the Catalan

economy and favoring the bourgeoisie. They explained the loss of Málaga

as due in large measure to the low morale and the disorientation of the

Andalusian proletariat, which saw the Valencia government evolving

steadily toward the right” (p. 368). Jackson evidently believes that

this left-wing interpretation of events was nonsensical, and that in

fact it was anarchist incompetence or treachery that was responsible for

the difficulties: “In Catalonia, the CNT factory committees dragged

their heels on war production, claiming that the government deprived

them of raw materials and was favoring the bourgeoisie” (p. 365).

In fact, “the revolutionary tide began to ebb in Catalonia” under a

middle-class attack led by the Communist party, not because of a

recognition of the “complexity of modern society.” And it was, moreover,

quite true that the Communist-dominated central government attempted,

with much success, to hamper collectivized industry and agriculture and

to disrupt the collectivization of commerce. I have already referred to

the early stages of counterrevolution. Further investigation of the

sources to which Jackson refers and others shows that the anarchist

charges were not baseless, as Jackson implies. Bolloten cites a good

deal of evidence in support of his conclusion that

In the countryside the Communists undertook a spirited defence of the

small and medium proprietor and tenant farmer against the collectivizing

drive of the rural wage-workers, against the policy of the labour unions

prohibiting the farmer from holding more land than he could cultivate

with his own hands, and against the practices of revolutionary

committees, which requisitioned harvests, interfered with private trade,

and collected rents from tenant farmers.[64]

The policy of the government was clearly enunciated by the Communist

Minister of Agriculture: “We say that the property of the small farmer

is sacred and that those who attack or attempt to attack this property

must be regarded as enemies of the regime.”[65] Gerald Brenan, no

sympathizer with collectivization, explains the failure of

collectivization as follows (p. 321):

The Central Government, and especially the Communist and Socialist

members of it, desired to bring [the collectives] under the direct

control of the State: they therefore failed to provide them with the

credit required for buying raw materials: as soon as the supply of raw

cotton was exhausted the mills stopped working ... even [the munitions

industry in Catalonia] were harassed by the new bureaucratic organs of

the Ministry of Supply.[66]

He quotes the bourgeois president of Catalonia, Companys, as saying that

“workers in the arms factories in Barcelona had been working 56 hours

and more each week and that no cases of sabotage or indiscipline had

taken place,” until the workers were demoralized by the

bureaucratization—later, militarization—imposed by the central

government and the Communist party.[67] His own conclusion is that “the

Valencia Government was now using the P.S.U.C. against the C.N.T.—but

not ... because the Catalan workers were giving trouble, but because the

Communists wished to weaken them before destroying them.”

The cited correspondence from Companys to Prieto, according to Vernon

Richards (p. 47), presents evidence showing the success of Catalonian

war industry under collectivization and demonstrating how “much more

could have been achieved had the means for expanding the industry not

been denied them by the Central Government.” Richards also cites

testimony by a spokesman for the subsecretariat of munitions and

armament of the Valencia government admitting that “the war industry of

Catalonia had produced ten times more than the rest of Spanish industry

put together and [agreeing] ... that this output could have been

quadrupled as from beginning of September[68] if Catalonia had had

access to the necessary means for purchasing raw materials that were

unobtainable in Spanish territory.” It is important to recall that the

central government had enormous gold reserves (soon to be transmitted to

the Soviet Union), so that raw materials for Catalan industry could

probably have been purchased, despite the hostility of the Western

democracies to the Republic during the revolutionary period (see below).

Furthermore, raw materials had repeatedly been requested. On September

24, 1936, Juan Fabregas, the CNT delegate to the Economic Council of

Catalonia who was in part responsible for the collectivization decree

cited earlier, reported that the financial difficulties of Catalonia

were created by the refusal of the central government to “give any

assistance in economic and financial questions, presumably because it

has little sympathy with the work of a practical order which is being

carried out in Catalonia”[69]—that is, collectivization. He “went on to

recount that a Commission which went to Madrid to ask for credits to

purchase war materials and raw materials, offering 1,000 million pesetas

in securities lodged in the Bank of Spain, met with a blank refusal. It

was sufficient that the new war industry in Catalonia was controlled by

the workers of the C.N.T. for the Madrid Government to refuse any

unconditional aid. Only in exchange for government control would they

give financial assistance.”[70]

Broué and Témime take a rather similar position. Commenting on the

charge of “incompetence” leveled against the collectivized industries,

they point out that “one must not neglect the terrible burden of the

war.” Despite this burden, they observe, “new techniques of management

and elimination of dividends had permitted a lowering of prices” and

“mechanisation and rationalization, introduced in numerous enterprises

... had considerably augmented production. The workers accepted the

enormous sacrifices with enthusiasm because, in most cases, they had the

conviction that the factory belonged to them and that at last they were

working for themselves and their class brothers. A truly new spirit had

come over the economy of Spain with the concentration of scattered

enterprises, the simplification of commercial patterns, a significant

structure of social projects for aged workers, children, disabled, sick

and the personnel in general” (pp. 150–51). The great weakness of the

revolution, they argue, was the fact that it was not carried through to

completion. In part this was because of the war; in part, a consequence

of the policies of the central government. They too emphasize the

refusal of the Madrid government, in the early stages of

collectivization, to grant credits or supply funds to collectivized

industry or agriculture—in the case of Catalonia, even when substantial

guarantees were offered by the Catalonian government. Thus the

collectivized enterprises were forced to exist on what assets had been

seized at the time of the revolution. The control of gold and credit

“permitted the government to restrict and prevent the function of

collective enterprises at will” (p. 144).

According to Broué and Témime, it was the restriction of credit that

finally destroyed collectivized industry. The Companys government in

Catalonia refused to create a bank for industry and credit, as demanded

by the CNT and POUM, and the central government (relying, in this case,

on control of the banks by the socialist UGT) was able to control the

flow of capital and “to reserve credit for private enterprise.” All

attempts to obtain credit for collectivized industry were unsuccessful,

they maintain, and “the movement of collectivization was restricted,

then halted, the government remaining in control of industry through the

medium of the banks ... [and later] through its control of the choice of

managers and directors,” who often turned out to be the former owners

and managers, under new titles. The situation was similar in the case of

collectivized agriculture (pp. 204f).

The situation was duly recognized in the West. The New York Times, in

February 1938, observed: “The principle of State intervention and

control of business and industry, as against workers’ control of them in

the guise of collectivization, is gradually being established in

loyalist Spain by a series of decrees now appearing. Coincidentally

there is to be established the principle of private ownership and the

rights of corporations and companies to what is lawfully theirs under

the Constitution.”[71]

Morrow cites (pp. 64–65) a series of acts by the Catalonian government

restricting collectivization, once power had shifted away from the new

institutions set up by the workers’ revolution of July 1936. On February

3, the collectivization of the dairy trade was declared illegal.[72] In

April, “the Generalidad annulled workers’ control over the customs by

refusing to certify workers’ ownership of material that had been

exported and was being tied up in foreign courts by suits of former

owners; henceforth the factories and agricultural collectives exporting

goods were at the mercy of the government.” In May, as has already been

noted, the collectivization decree of October 24 was rescinded, with the

argument that the decree “was dictated without competency by the

Generalidad,” because “there was not, nor is there yet, legislation of

the [Spanish] state to apply” and “article 44 of the Constitution

declares expropriation and socialization are functions of the State.” A

decree of August 28 “gave the government the right to intervene in or

take over any mining or metallurgical plant.” The anarchist newspaper

Solidaridad Obrera reported in October a decision of the department of

purchases of the Ministry of Defense that it would make contracts for

purchases only with enterprises functioning “on the basis of their old

owners” or “under the corresponding intervention controlled by the

Ministry of Finance and Economy.”[73]

Returning to Jackson’s statement that “In Catalonia, the CNT factory

committees dragged their heels on war production, claiming that the

government deprived them of raw materials and was favoring the

bourgeoisie,” I believe one must conclude that this statement is more an

expression of Jackson’s bias in favor of capitalist democracy than a

description of the historical facts. At the very least, we can say this

much: Jackson presents no evidence to support his conclusion; there is a

factual basis for questioning it. I have cited a number of sources that

the liberal historian would regard, quite correctly, as biased in favor

of the revolution. My point is that the failure of objectivity, the

deepseated bias of liberal historians, is a matter much less normally

taken for granted, and that there are good grounds for supposing that

this failure of objectivity has seriously distorted the judgments that

are rather brashly handed down about the nature of the Spanish

revolution.

Continuing with the analysis of Jackson’s judgments, unsupported by any

cited evidence, consider his remark, quoted above, that in Barcelona

“the naïve optimism of the revolutionary conquests of the previous

August had given way to feelings of resentment and of somehow having

been cheated.” It is a fact that by January 1937 there was great

disaffection in Barcelona. But was this simply a consequence of “the

unsuspected complexity of modern society”? Looking into the matter a bit

more closely, we see a rather different picture. Under Russian pressure,

the PSUC was given substantial control of the Catalonian government,

“putting into the Food Ministry [in December 1936] the man most to the

Right in present Catalan politics, Comorera”[74]—by virtue of his

political views, the most willing collaborator with the general

Communist party position. According to Jackson, Comorera “immediately

took steps to end barter and requisitioning, and became a defender of

the peasants against the revolution” (p. 314); he “ended requisition,

restored money payments, and protected the Catalan peasants against

further collectivization” (p. 361). This is all that Jackson has to say

about Juan Comorera.

We learn more from other sources: for example, Borkenau, who was in

Barcelona for the second time in January 1937—and is universally

recognized as a highly knowledgeable and expert observer, with strong

anti-anarchist sentiments. According to Borkenau, Comorera represented

“a political attitude which can best be compared with that of the

extreme right wing of the German social-democracy. He had always

regarded the fight against anarchism as the chief aim of socialist

policy in Spain.... To his surprise, he found unexpected allies for his

dislike [of anarchist policies] in the communists.”[75] It was

impossible to reverse collectivization of industry at that stage in the

process of counterrevolution; Comorera did succeed, however, in

abolishing the system by which the provisioning of Barcelona had been

organized, namely, the village committees, mostly under CNT influence,

which had cooperated (perhaps, Borkenau suggests, unwillingly) in

delivering flour to the towns. Continuing, Borkenau describes the

situation as follows:

... Comorera, starting from those principles of abstract liberalism

which no administration has followed during the war, but of which

right-wing socialists are the last and most religious admirers, did not

substitute for the chaotic bread committees a centralized

administration. He restored private commerce in bread, simply and

completely. There was, in January, not even a system of rationing in

Barcelona. Workers were simply left to get their bread, with wages which

had hardly changed since May, at increased prices, as well as they

could. In practice it meant that the women had to form queues from four

o’clock in the morning onwards. The resentment in the working-class

districts was naturally acute, the more so as the scarcity of bread

rapidly increased after Comorera had taken office.[76]

In short, the workers of Barcelona were not merely giving way to

“feelings of resentment and of somehow having been cheated” when they

learned of “the unsuspected complexity of modern society.” Rather, they

had good reason to believe that they were being cheated, by the old dog

with the new collar.

George Orwell’s observations are also highly relevant:

Everyone who has made two visits, at intervals of months, to Barcelona

during the war has remarked upon the extraordinary changes that took

place in it. And curiously enough, whether they went there first in

August and again in January, or, like myself, first in December and

again in April, the thing they said was always the same: that the

revolutionary atmosphere had vanished. No doubt to anyone who had been

there in August, when the blood was scarcely dry in the streets and

militia were quartered in the small hotels, Barcelona in December would

have seemed bourgeois; to me, fresh from England, it was liker to a

workers’ city than anything I had conceived possible. Now [in April] the

tide had rolled back. Once again it was an ordinary city, a little

pinched and chipped by war, but with no outward sign of working-class

predominance.... Fat prosperous men, elegant women, and sleek cars were

everywhere.... The officers of the new Popular Army, a type that had

scarcely existed when I left Barcelona, swarmed in surprising numbers

... [wearing] an elegant khaki uniform with a tight waist, like a

British Army officer’s uniform, only a little more so. I do not suppose

that more than one in twenty of them had yet been to the front, but all

of them had automatic pistols strapped to their belts; we, at the front,

could not get pistols for love or money....[77] A deep change had come

over the town. There were two facts that were the keynote of all else.

One was that the people—the civil population—had lost much of their

interest in the war; the other was that the normal division of society

into rich and poor, upper class and lower class, was reasserting

itself.[78]

Whereas Jackson attributes the ebbing of the revolutionary tide to the

discovery of the unsuspected complexity of modern society, Orwell’s

firsthand observations, like those of Borkenau, suggest a far simpler

explanation. What calls for explanation is not the disaffection of the

workers of Barcelona but the curious constructions of the historian.

Let me repeat, at this point, Jackson’s comments regarding Juan

Comorera: Comorera “immediately took steps to end barter and

requisitioning, and became a defender of the peasants against the

revolution”; he “ended requisitions, restored money payments, and

protected the Catalan peasants against further collectivization.” These

comments imply that the peasantry of Catalonia was, as a body, opposed

to the revolution and that Comorera put a stop to the collectivization

that they feared. Jackson nowhere indicates any divisions among the

peasantry on this issue and offers no support for the implied claim that

collectivization was in process at the period of Comorera’s access to

power. In fact, it is questionable that Comorera’s rise to power

affected the course of collectivization in Catalonia. Evidence is

difficult to come by, but it seems that collectivization of agriculture

in Catalonia was not, in any event, extensive, and that it was not

extending in December, when Comorera took office. We know from anarchist

sources that there had been instances of forced collectivization in

Catalonia,[79] but I can find no evidence that Comorera “protected the

peasantry” from forced collectivization. Furthermore, it is misleading,

at best, to imply that the peasantry as a whole was opposed to

collectivization. A more accurate picture is presented by Bolloten (p.

56), who points out that “if the individual farmer viewed with dismay

the swift and widespread development of collectivized agriculture, the

farm workers of the Anarchosyndicalist CNT and the Socialist UGT saw in

it, on the contrary, the commencement of a new era.” In short, there was

a complex class struggle in the countryside, though one learns little

about it from Jackson’s oversimplified and misleading account. It would

seem fair to suppose that this distortion again reflects Jackson’s

antipathy towards the revolution and its goals. I will return to this

question directly, with reference to areas where agricultural

collectivization was much more extensive than in Catalonia.

The complexities of modern society that baffled and confounded the

unsuspecting anarchist workers of Barcelona, as Jackson enumerates them,

were the following: the accumulating food and supply problems and the

administration of frontier posts, villages, and public utilities. As

just noted, the food and supply problems seem to have accumulated most

rapidly under the brilliant leadership of Juan Comorera. So far as the

frontier posts are concerned, the situation, as Jackson elsewhere

describes it (p. 368), was basically as follows: “In Catalonia the

anarchists had, ever since July 18, controlled the customs stations at

the French border. On April 17, 1937, the reorganized carabineros,

acting on orders of the Finance Minister, Juan Negrín, began to reoccupy

the frontier. At least eight anarchists were killed in clashes with the

carabineros.” Apart from this difficulty, admittedly serious, there

seems little reason to suppose that the problem of manning frontier

posts contributed to the ebbing of the revolutionary tide. The available

records do not indicate that the problems of administering villages or

public utilities were either “unsuspected” or too complex for the

Catalonian workers—a remarkable and unsuspected development, but one

which nevertheless appears to be borne out by the evidence available to

us. I want to emphasize again that Jackson presents no evidence to

support his conclusions about the ebbing of the revolutionary tide and

the reasons for the disaffection of the Catalonian workers. Once again,

I think it fair to attribute his conclusions to the elitist bias of the

liberal intellectual rather than to the historical record.

Consider next Jackson’s comment that the anarchists “explained the loss

of Málaga as due in large measure to the low morale and the

disorientation of the Andalusian proletariat, which saw the Valencia

government evolving steadily toward the right.” Again, it seems that

Jackson regards this as just another indication of the naïveté and

unreasonableness of the Spanish anarchists. However, here again there is

more to the story. One of the primary sources that Jackson cites is

Borkenau, quite naturally, since Borkenau spent several days in the area

just prior to the fall of Málaga on February 8, 1937. But Borkenau’s

detailed observations tend to bear out the anarchist “explanation,” at

least in part. He believed that Málaga might have been saved, but only

by a “fight of despair” with mass involvement, of a sort that “the

anarchists might have led.” But two factors prevented such a defense:

first, the officer assigned to lead the defense, Lieutenant Colonel

Villalba, “interpreted this task as a purely military one, whereas in

reality he had no military means at his disposal but only the forces of

a popular movement”; he was a professional officer, “who in the secrecy

of his heart hated the spirit of the militia” and was incapable of

comprehending the “political factor.”[80] A second factor was the

significant decline, by February, of political consciousness and mass

involvement. The anarchist committees were no longer functioning and the

authority of the police and Civil Guards had been restored. “The

nuisance of hundreds of independent village police bodies had

disappeared, but with it the passionate interest of the village in the

civil war.... The short interlude of the Spanish Soviet system was at an

end” (p. 212). After reviewing the local situation in Málaga and the

conflicts in the Valencia government (which failed to provide support or

arms for the militia defending Málaga), Borkenau concludes (p. 228):

“The Spanish republic paid with the fall of Málaga for the decision of

the Right wing of its camp to make an end of social revolution and of

its Left wing not to allow that.” Jackson’s discussion of the fall of

Málaga refers to the terror and political rivalries within the town but

makes no reference to the fact that Borkenau’s description, and the

accompanying interpretation, do support the belief that the defeat was

due in large measure to low morale and to the incapacity, or

unwillingness, of the Valencia government to fight a popular war. On the

contrary, he concludes that Colonel Villalba’s lack of means for

“controlling the bitter political rivalries” was one factor that

prevented him from carrying out the essential military tasks. Thus he

seems to adopt the view that Borkenau condemns, that the task was a

“purely military one.” Borkenau’s eyewitness account appears to me much

more convincing.

In this case too Jackson has described the situation in a somewhat

misleading fashion, perhaps again because of the elitist bias that

dominates the liberal-Communist interpretation of the Civil War. Like

Lieutenant Colonel Villalba, liberal historians often reveal a strong

distaste for “the forces of a popular movement” and “the spirit of the

militia.” And an argument can be given that they correspondingly fail to

comprehend the “political factor.”

In the May Days of 1937, the revolution in Catalonia received the final

blow. On May 3, the councilor for public order, PSUC member Rodríguez

Salas, appeared at the central telephone building with a detachment of

police, without prior warning or consultation with the anarchist

ministers in the government, to take over the telephone exchange. The

exchange, formerly the property of IT&T, had been captured by Barcelona

workers in July and had since functioned under the control of a UGT-CNT

committee, with a governmental delegate, quite in accord with the

collectivization decree of October 24, 1936. According to the London

Daily Worker (May 11, 1937), “Salas sent the armed republican police to

disarm the employees there, most of them members of the CNT unions.” The

motive, according to Juan Comorera, was “to put a stop to an abnormal

situation,” namely, that no one could speak over the telephone “without

the indiscreet ear of the controller knowing it.”[81] Armed resistance

in the telephone building prevented its occupation. Local defense

committees erected barricades throughout Barcelona. Companys and the

anarchist leaders pleaded with the workers to disarm. An uneasy truce

continued until May 6, when the first detachments of Assault Guards

arrived, violating the promises of the government that the truce would

be observed and military forces withdrawn. The troops were under the

command of General Pozas, formerly commander of the hated Civil Guard

and now a member of the Communist party. In the fighting that followed,

there were some five hundred killed and over a thousand wounded. “The

May Days in reality sounded the death-knell of the revolution,

announcing political defeat for all and death for certain of the

revolutionary leaders.”[82]

These events—of enormous significance in the history of the Spanish

revolution—Jackson sketches in bare outline as a marginal incident.

Obviously the historian’s account must be selective; from the

left-liberal point of view that Jackson shares with Hugh Thomas and many

others, the liquidation of the revolution in Catalonia was a minor

event, as the revolution itself was merely a kind of irrelevant

nuisance, a minor irritant diverting energy from the struggle to save

the bourgeois government. The decision to crush the revolution by force

is described as follows:

On May 5, Companys obtained a fragile truce, on the basis of which the

PSUC councilors were to retire from the regional government, and the

question of the Telephone Company was left to future negotiation. That

very night, however, Antonio Sesé, a UGT official who was about to enter

the reorganized cabinet, was murdered. In any event, the Valencia

authorities were in no mood to temporize further with the Catalan Left.

On May 6 several thousand asaltos arrived in the city, and the

Republican Navy demonstrated in the port.[83]

What is interesting about this description is what is left unsaid. For

example, there is no comment on the fact that the dispatch of the

asaltos violated the “fragile truce” that had been accepted by the

Barcelona workers and the anarchist and the POUM troops nearby, and

barely a mention of the bloody consequences or the political meaning of

this unwillingness “to temporize further with the Catalan Left.” There

is no mention of the fact that along with Sesé, Berneri and other

anarchist leaders were murdered, not only during the May Days but in the

weeks preceding.[84] Jackson does not refer to the fact that along with

the Republican navy, British ships also “demonstrated” in the port.[85]

Nor does he refer to Orwell’s telling observations about the Assault

Guards, as compared to the troops at the front, where he had spent the

preceding months. The Assault Guards “were splendid troops, much the

best I had seen in Spain.... I was used to the ragged, scarcely-armed

militia on the Aragon front, and I had not known that the Republic

possessed troops like these.... The Civil Guards and Carabineros, who

were not intended for the front at all, were better armed and far better

clad than ourselves. I suspect it is the same in all wars—always the

same contrast between the sleek police in the rear and the ragged

soldiers in the line.”[86] (See page 80 below.)

The contrast reveals a good deal about the nature of the war, as it was

understood by the Valencia government. Later, Orwell was to make this

conclusion explicit: “A government which sends boys of fifteen to the

front with rifles forty years old and keeps its biggest men and newest

weapons in the rear is manifestly more afraid of the revolution than of

the fascists. Hence the feeble war policy of the past six months, and

hence the compromise with which the war will almost certainly end.”[87]

Jackson’s account of these events, with its omissions and assumptions,

suggests that he perhaps shares the view that the greatest danger in

Spain would have been a victory of the revolution.

Jackson apparently discounts Orwell’s testimony, to some extent,

commenting that “the readers should bear in mind Orwell’s own honest

statement that he knew very little about the political complexities of

the struggle.” This is a strange comment. For one thing, Orwell’s

analysis of the “political complexities of the struggle” bears up rather

well after thirty years; if it is defective, it is probably in his

tendency to give too much prominence to the POUM in comparison with the

anarchists—not surprising, in view of the fact that he was with the POUM

militia. His exposure of the fatuous nonsense that was appearing at the

time in the Stalinist and liberal presses appears quite accurate, and

later discoveries have given little reason to challenge the basic facts

that he reported or the interpretation that he proposed in the heat of

the conflict. Orwell does, in fact, refer to his own “political

ignorance.” Commenting on the final defeat of the revolution in May, he

states: “I realized—though owing to my political ignorance, not so

clearly as I ought to have done—that when the Government felt more sure

of itself there would be reprisals.” But this form of “political

ignorance” has simply been compounded in more recent historical work.

Shortly after the May Days, the Caballero government fell and Juan

Negrín became premier of Republican Spain. Negrín is described as

follows, by Broué and Témime: “... he is an unconditional defender of

capitalist property and resolute adversary of collectivization, whom the

CNT ministers find blocking all of their proposals. He is the one who

solidly reorganized the carabineros and presided over the transfer of

the gold reserves of the Republic to the USSR. He enjoyed the confidence

of the moderates ... [and] was on excellent terms with the Communists.”

The first major act of the Negrín government was the suppression of the

POUM and the consolidation of central control over Catalonia. The

government next turned to Aragon, which had been under largely anarchist

control since the first days of the revolution, and where agricultural

collectivization was quite extensive and Communist elements very weak.

The municipal councils of Aragon were coordinated by the Council of

Aragon, headed by Joaquín Ascaso, a well-known CNT militant, one of

whose brothers had been killed during the May Days. Under the Caballero

government, the anarchists had agreed to give representation to other

antifascist parties, including the Communists, but the majority remained

anarchist. In August the Negrín government announced the dissolution of

the Council of Aragon and dispatched a division of the Spanish army,

commanded by the Communist officer Enrique Lister, to enforce the

dissolution of the local committees, dismantle the collectives, and

establish central government control. Ascaso was arrested on the charge

of having been responsible for the robbery of jewelry—namely, the

jewelry “robbed” by the Council for its own use in the fall of 1936. The

local anarchist press was suppressed in favor of a Communist journal,

and in general local anarchist centers were forcefully occupied and

closed. The last anarchist stronghold was captured, with tanks and

artillery, on September 21. Because of government-imposed censorship,

there is very little of a direct record of these events, and the major

histories pass over them quickly.[88] According to Morrow, “the official

CNT press ... compared the assault on Aragon with the subjection of

Asturias by Lopez Ochoa in October 1934”—the latter, one of the

bloodiest acts of repression in modern Spanish history. Although this is

an exaggeration, it is a fact that the popular organs of administration

were wiped out by Lister’s legions, and the revolution was now over, so

far as Aragon was concerned.

About these events, Jackson has the following comments:

On August 11 the government announced the dissolution of the Consejo de

Aragón, the anarchist-dominated administration which had been recognized

by Largo Caballero in December, 1936. The peasants were known to hate

the Consejo, the anarchists had deserted the front during the Barcelona

fighting, and the very existence of the Consejo was a standing challenge

to the authority of the central government. For all these reasons Negrín

did not hesitate to send in troops, and to arrest the anarchist

officials. Once their authority had been broken, however, they were

released.[89]

These remarks are most interesting. Consider first the charge that the

anarchists had deserted the front during the May Days. It is true that

elements of certain anarchist and POUM divisions were prepared to march

on Barcelona, but after the “fragile truce” was established on May 5,

they did not do so; no anarchist forces even approached Barcelona to

defend the Barcelona proletariat and its institutions from attack.

However, a motorized column of 5,000 Assault Guards was sent from the

front by the government to break the “fragile truce.”[90] Hence the only

forces to “desert the front” during the Barcelona fighting were those

dispatched by the government to complete the job of dismantling the

revolution, by force. Recall Orwell’s observations quoted above, pages

76–77.

What about Jackson’s statement that “the peasants were known to hate the

Consejo”? As in the other cases I have cited, Jackson gives no

indication of any evidence on which such a judgment might be based. The

most detailed investigation of the collectives is from anarchist

sources, and they indicate that Aragon was one of the areas where

collectivization was most widespread and successful.[91] Both the CNT

and the UGT Land Workers’ Federation were vigorous in their support for

collectivization, and there is no doubt that both were mass

organizations. A number of nonanarchists, observing collectivization in

Aragon firsthand, gave very favorable reports and stressed the voluntary

character of collectivization.[92] According to Gaston Leval, an

anarchist observer who carried out detailed investigation of rural

collectivization, “in Aragon 75 percent of small proprietors have

voluntarily adhered to the new order of things,” and others were not

forced to involve themselves in collectives.[93] Other anarchist

observers—Augustin Souchy in particular—gave detailed observations of

the functioning of the Aragon collectives. Unless one is willing to

assume a fantastic degree of falsification, it is impossible to

reconcile their descriptions with the claim that “the peasants were

known to hate the Consejo”—unless, of course, one restricts the term

“peasant” to “individual farm owner,” in which case it might very well

be true, but would justify disbanding the Council only on the assumption

that the rights of the individual farm owner must predominate, not those

of the landless worker. There is little doubt that the collectives were

economically successful,[94] hardly likely if collectivization were

forced and hated by the peasantry.

I have already cited Bolloten’s general conclusion, based on very

extensive documentary evidence, that while the individual farmer may

have viewed the development of collectivized agriculture with dismay,

“the farm workers of the Anarchosyndicalist CNT and the Socialist UGT

saw in it, on the contrary, the commencement of a new era.” This

conclusion seems quite reasonable, on the basis of the materials that

are available. With respect to Aragon, specifically, he remarks that the

“debt-ridden peasants were strongly affected by the ideas of the CNT and

FAI, a factor that gave a powerful spontaneous impulse to collective

farming,” though difficulties are cited by anarchist sources, which in

general appear to be quite honest about failures. Bolloten cites two

Communist sources, among others, to the effect that about 70 percent of

the population in rural areas of Aragon lived in collectives (p. 71); he

adds that “many of the region’s 450 collectives were largely voluntary,”

although “the presence of militiamen from the neighbouring region of

Catalonia, the immense majority of whom were members of the CNT and FAI”

was “in some measure” responsible for the extensive collectivization. He

also points out that in many instances peasant proprietors who were not

compelled to adhere to the collective system did so for other reasons:

“... not only were they prevented from employing hired labour and

disposing freely of their crops ... but they were often denied all

benefits enjoyed by members” (p. 72). Bolloten cites the attempt of the

Communists in April 1937 to cause dissension in “areas where the CNT and

UGT had established collective farms by mutual agreement” (p. 195),

leading in some cases to pitched battles and dozens of assassinations,

according to CNT sources.[95]

Bolloten’s detailed analysis of the events of the summer of 1937 sheds

considerable light on the question of peasant attitudes towards

collectivization in Aragon:

It was inevitable that the attacks on the collectives should have had an

unfavorable effect upon rural economy and upon morale, for while it is

true that in some areas collectivization was anathema to the majority of

peasants, it is no less true that in others collective farms were

organized spontaneously by the bulk of the peasant population. In Toledo

province, for example, where even before the war rural collectives

existed, 83 per cent of the peasants, according to a source friendly to

the Communists, decided in favour of the collective cultivation of the

soil. As the campaign against the collective farms reached its height

just before the summer harvest [1937] ... a pall of dismay and

apprehension descended upon the agricultural labourers. Work in the

fields was abandoned in many places or only carried on apathetically,

and there was danger that a substantial portion of the harvest, vital

for the war effort, would be left to rot. [p. 196]

It was under these circumstances, he points out, that the Communists

were forced to change their policy and—temporarily—to tolerate the

collectives. A decree was passed legalizing collectives “during the

current agricultural year” (his italics) and offering them some aid.

This “produced a sense of relief in the countryside during the vital

period of the harvest.” Immediately after the crops had been gathered,

the policy changed again to one of harsh repression. Bolloten cites

Communist sources to the effect that “a short though fierce campaign at

the beginning of August” prepared the way for the dissolution of the

Council of Aragon. Following the dissolution decree, “the newly

appointed Governor General, José Ignacio Mantecón, a member of the Left

Republican Party, but a secret Communist sympathizer [who joined the

party in exile, after the war], ... ordered the break-up of the

collective farms.” The means: Lister’s division, which restored the old

order by force and terror. Bolloten cites Communist sources conceding

the excessive harshness of Lister’s methods. He quotes the Communist

general secretary of the Institute of Agrarian Reform, who admits that

the measures taken to dissolve the collectives were “a very grave

mistake, and produced tremendous disorganization in the countryside,” as

“those persons who were discontented with the collectives ... took them

by assault, carrying away and dividing up the harvest and farm

implements without respecting the collectives that had been formed

without violence or pressure, that were prosperous, and that were a

model of organization.... As a result, labour in the fields was

suspended almost entirely, and a quarter of the land had not been

prepared at the time for sowing” (p. 200). Once again, it was necessary

to ameliorate the harsh repression of the collectives, to prevent

disaster. Summarizing these events, Bolloten describes the resulting

situation as follows:

But although the situation in Aragon improved in some degree, the

hatreds and resentments generated by the break-up of the collectives and

by the repression that followed were never wholly dispelled. Nor was the

resultant disillusionment that sapped the spirit of the

Anarchosyndicalist forces on the Aragon front ever entirely removed, a

disillusionment that no doubt contributed to the collapse of that front

a few months later ... after the destruction of the collective farms in

Aragon, the Communist Party was compelled to modify its policy, and

support collectives also in other regions against former owners who

sought the return of confiscated land.... [pp. 200–201]

Returning to Jackson’s remarks, I think we must conclude that they

seriously misrepresent the situation.[96] The dissolution of the Council

of Aragon and the large-scale destruction of the collectives by military

force was simply another stage in the eradication of the popular

revolution and the restoration of the old order. Let me emphasize that I

am not criticizing Jackson for his negative attitude towards the social

revolution, but rather for the failure of objectivity when he deals with

the revolution and the ensuing repression.

Among historians of the Spanish Civil War, the dominant view is that the

Communist policy was in essentials the correct one—that in order to

consolidate domestic and international support for the Republic it was

necessary to block and then reverse the social revolution. Jackson, for

example, states that Caballero “realized that it was absolutely

necessary to rebuild the authority of the Republican state and to work

in close cooperation with the middle-class liberals.” The anarchist

leaders who entered the government shared this view, putting their trust

in the good faith of liberals such as Companys and believing—naively, as

events were to show—that the Western democracies would come to their

aid.

A policy diametrically opposed to this was advocated by Camillo Berneri.

In his open letter to the anarchist minister Federica Montseny[97] he

summarizes his views in the following way: “The dilemma, war or

revolution, no longer has meaning. The only dilemma is this: either

victory over Franco through revolutionary war, or defeat” (his italics).

He argued that Morocco should be granted independence and that an

attempt should be made to stir up rebellion throughout North Africa.

Thus a revolutionary struggle should be undertaken against Western

capitalism in North Africa and, simultaneously, against the bourgeois

regime in Spain, which was gradually dismantling the accomplishments of

the July revolution. The primary front should be political. Franco

relied heavily on Moorish contingents, including a substantial number

from French Morocco. The Republic might exploit this fact, demoralizing

the Nationalist forces and perhaps even winning them to the

revolutionary cause by political agitation based on the concrete

alternative of pan-Islamic—specifically, Moroccan—revolution. Writing in

April 1937, Berneri urged that the army of the Republic be reorganized

for the defense of the revolution, so that it might recover the spirit

of popular participation of the early days of the revolution. He quotes

the words of his compatriot Louis Bertoni, writing from the Huesca

front:

The Spanish war, deprived of all new faith, of any idea of a social

transformation, of all revolutionary grandeur, of any universal meaning,

is now merely a national war of independence that must be carried on to

avoid the extermination that the international plutocracy demands. There

remains a terrible question of life or death, but no longer a war to

build a new society and a new humanity.

In such a war, the human element that might bring victory over fascism

is lost.

In retrospect, Berneri’s ideas seem quite reasonable. Delegations of

Moroccan nationalists did in fact approach the Valencia government

asking for arms and matériel, but were refused by Caballero, who

actually proposed territorial concessions in North Africa to France and

England to try to win their support. Commenting on these facts, Broué

and Témime observe that these policies deprived the Republic of “the

instrument of revolutionary defeatism in the enemy army,” and even of a

possible weapon against Italian intervention. Jackson, on the other

hand, dismisses Berneri’s suggestion with the remark that independence

for Morocco (as for that matter, even aid to the Moroccan nationalists)

was “a gesture that would have been highly appreciated in Paris and

London.” Of course it is correct that France and Britain would hardly

have appreciated this development. As Berneri points out, “it goes

without saying that one cannot simultaneously guarantee French and

British interests in Morocco and carry out an insurrection.” But

Jackson’s comment does not touch on the central issue, namely, whether

the Spanish revolution could have been preserved, both from the fascists

at the front and from the bourgeois-Communist coalition within the

Republic, by a revolutionary war of the sort that the left proposed—or,

for that matter, whether the Republic might not have been saved by a

political struggle that involved Franco’s invading Moorish troops, or at

least eroded their morale. It is easy to see why Caballero was not

attracted by this bold scheme, given his reliance on the eventual

backing of the Western democracies. On the basis of what we know today,

however, Jackson’s summary dismissal of revolutionary war is much too

abrupt.

Furthermore, Bertoni’s observations from the Huesca front are borne out

by much other evidence, some of it cited earlier. Even those who

accepted the Communist strategy of discipline and central control as

necessary concede that the repressions that formed an ineliminable part

of this strategy “tended to break the fighting spirit of the

people.”[98] One can only speculate, but it seems to me that many

commentators have seriously underestimated the significance of the

political factor, the potential strength of a popular struggle to defend

the achievements of the revolution. It is perhaps relevant that

Asturias, the one area of Spain where the system of CNT-UGT committees

was not eliminated in favor of central control, is also the one area

where guerrilla warfare continued well after Franco’s victory. Broué and

Témime observe[99] that the resistance of the partisans of Asturias

“demonstrates the depth of the revolutionary élan, which had not been

shattered by the reinstitution of state authority, conducted here with

greater prudence.” There can be no doubt that the revolution was both

widespread and deeply rooted in the Spanish masses. It seems quite

possible that a revolutionary war of the sort advocated by Berneri would

have been successful, despite the greater military force of the fascist

armies. The idea that men can overcome machines no longer seems as

romantic or naive as it may have a few years ago.

Furthermore, the trust placed in the bourgeois government by the

anarchist leaders was not honored, as the history of the

counterrevolution clearly shows. In retrospect, it seems that Berneri

was correct in arguing that they should not have taken part in the

bourgeois government, but should rather have sought to replace this

government with the institutions created by the revolution.[100] The

anarchist minister Garcia Oliver stated that “we had confidence in the

word and in the person of a Catalan democrat and retained and supported

Companys as President of the Generalitat,”[101] at a time when in

Catalonia, at least, the workers’ organizations could easily have

replaced the state apparatus and dispensed with the former political

parties, as they had replaced the old economy with an entirely new

structure. Companys recognized fully that there were limits beyond which

he could not cooperate with the anarchists. In an interview with H. E.

Kaminski, he refused to specify these limits, but merely expressed his

hope that “the anarchist masses will not oppose the good sense of their

leaders,” who have “accepted the responsibilities incumbent upon them”;

he saw his task as “directing these responsibilities in the proper

path,” not further specified in the interview, but shown by the events

leading up to the May Days.[102] Probably, Companys’ attitude towards

this willingness of the anarchist leaders to cooperate was expressed

accurately in his reaction to the suggestion of a correspondent of the

New Statesman and Nation, who predicted that the assassination of the

anarchist mayor of Puigcerdá would lead to a revolt: “[Companys] laughed

scornfully and said the anarchists would capitulate as they always had

before.”[103] As has already been pointed out in some detail, the

liberal-Communist Party coalition had no intention of letting the war

against Franco take precedence over the crushing of the revolution. A

spokesman for Comorera put the matter clearly: “This slogan has been

attributed to the P.S.U.C.: ‘Before taking Saragossa, it is necessary to

take Barcelona.’ This reflects the situation exactly....”[104] Comorera

himself had, from the beginning, pressed Companys to resist the

CNT.[105] The first task of the antifascist coalition, he maintained,

was to dissolve the revolutionary committees.[106] I have already cited

a good deal of evidence indicating that the repression conducted by the

Popular Front seriously weakened popular commitment and involvement in

the antifascist war. What was evident to George Orwell was also clear to

the Barcelona workers and the peasants in the collectivized villages of

Aragon: the liberal-Communist coalition would not tolerate a

revolutionary transformation of Spanish society; it would commit itself

fully to the anti-Franco struggle only after the old order was firmly

re-established, by force, if necessary.[107]

There is little doubt that farm workers in the collectives understood

quite well the social content of the drive towards consolidation and

central control. We learn this not only from anarchist sources but also

from the socialist press in the spring of 1937. On May 1, the Socialist

party newspaper Adelante had the following to say:

At the outbreak of the Fascist revolt the labor organizations and the

democratic elements in the country were in agreement that the so-called

Nationalist Revolution, which threatened to plunge our people into an

abyss of deepest misery, could be halted only by a Social Revolution.

The Communist Party, however, opposed this view with all its might. It

had apparently completely forgotten its old theories of a “workers’ and

peasants’ republic” and a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” From its

constant repetition of its new slogan of the parliamentary democratic

republic it is clear that it has lost all sense of reality. When the

Catholic and conservative sections of the Spanish bourgeoisie saw their

old system smashed and could find no way out, the Communist Party

instilled new hope into them. It assured them that the democratic

bourgeois republic for which it was pleading put no obstacles in the way

of Catholic propaganda and, above all, that it stood ready to defend the

class interests of the bourgeoisie.[108]

That this realization was widespread in the rural areas was underscored

dramatically by a questionnaire sent by Adelante to secretaries of the

UGT Federation of Land Workers, published in June 1937.[109] The results

are summarized as follows:

The replies to these questions revealed an astounding unanimity.

Everywhere the same story. The peasant collectives are today most

vigorously opposed by the Communist Party. The Communists organize the

well-to-do farmers who are on the lookout for cheap labor and are, for

this reason, outspokenly hostile to the cooperative undertakings of the

poor peasants.

It is the element which before the revolution sympathized with the

Fascists and Monarchists which, according to the testimony of the

trade-union representatives, is now flocking into the ranks of the

Communist Party. As to the general effect of Communist activity on the

country, the secretaries of the U.G.T. had only one opinion, which the

representative of the Valencia organization put in these words: “It is a

misfortune in the fullest sense of the word.”[110]

It is not difficult to imagine how the recognition of this “misfortune”

must have affected the willingness of the land workers to take part in

the antifascist war, with all the sacrifices that this entailed.

The attitude of the central government to the revolution was brutally

revealed by its acts and is attested as well in its propaganda. A former

minister describes the situation as follows:

The fact that is concealed by the coalition of the Spanish Communist

Party with the left Republicans and right wing Socialists is that there

has been a successful social revolution in half of Spain. Successful,

that is, in the collectivization of factories and farms which are

operated under trade union control, and operated quite efficiently.

During the three months that I was director of propaganda for the United

States and England under Alvarez del Vayo, then Foreign Minister for the

Valencia Government, I was instructed not to send out one word about

this revolution in the economic system of loyalist Spain. Nor are any

foreign correspondents in Valencia permitted to write freely of the

revolution that has taken place.[111]

In short, there is much reason to believe that the will to fight Franco

was significantly diminished, perhaps destroyed, by the policy of

authoritarian centralization undertaken by the liberal-Communist

coalition, carried through by force, and disguised in the propaganda

that was disseminated among Western intellectuals[112] and that still

dominates the writing of history. To the extent that this is a correct

judgment, the alternative proposed by Berneri and the left “extremists”

gains in plausibility.

As noted earlier, Caballero and the anarchist ministers accepted the

policy of counterrevolution because of their trust in the Western

democracies, which they felt sure would sooner or later come to their

aid. This feeling was perhaps understandable in 1937. It is strange,

however, that a historian writing in the 1960s should dismiss the

proposal to strike at Franco’s rear by extending the revolutionary war

to Morocco, on grounds that this would have displeased Western

capitalism (see page 85 above).

Berneri was quite right in his belief that the Western democracies would

not take part in an antifascist struggle in Spain. In fact, their

complicity in the fascist insurrection was not slight. French bankers,

who were generally pro-Franco, blocked the release of Spanish gold to

the loyalist government, thus hindering the purchase of arms and,

incidentally, increasing the reliance of the Republic on the Soviet

Union.[113] The policy of “nonintervention,” which effectively blocked

Western aid for the loyalist government while Hitler and Mussolini in

effect won the war for Franco, was also technically initiated by the

French government—though apparently under heavy British pressure.[114]

As far as Great Britain is concerned, the hope that it would come to the

aid of the Republic was always unrealistic. A few days after the Franco

coup, the foreign editor of Paris-Soir wrote: “At least four countries

are already taking active interest in the battle—France, which is

supporting the Madrid Government, and Britain, Germany and Italy, each

of which is giving discreet but nevertheless effective assistance to one

group or another among the insurgents.”[115] In fact, British support

for Franco took a fairly concrete form at the very earliest stages of

the insurrection. The Spanish navy remained loyal to the Republic,[116]

and made some attempt to prevent Franco from ferrying troops from

Morocco to Spain. Italian and German involvement in overcoming these

efforts is well documented;[117] the British role has received less

attention, but can be determined from contemporary reports. On August

11, 1936, the New York Times carried a front-page report on British

naval actions in the Straits of Gibraltar, commenting that “this action

helps the Rebels by preventing attacks on Algeciras, where troops from

Morocco land.” (A few days earlier, loyalist warships had bombarded

Algeciras, damaging the British consulate.) An accompanying dispatch

from Gibraltar describes the situation as it appeared from there:

Angered by the Spanish factions’ endangering of shipping and neutral

Gibraltar territory in their fighting, Great Britain virtually blockaded

Gibraltar Harbor last night with the huge battleship Queen Elizabeth in

the center of the entrance, constantly playing searchlights on near-by

waters.

Many British warships patrolled the entire Strait today, determined to

prevent interference with Britain’s control over the entrance to the

Mediterranean, a vital place in the British “lifeline to the East.”

This action followed repeated warnings to the Spanish Government and

yesterday’s decree that no more fighting would be permitted in Gibraltar

Harbor. The British at Gibraltar had become increasingly nervous after

the shelling of Algeciras by the Loyalist battleship Jaime I.

Although British neutrality is still maintained, the patrol of the

Strait and the closing of the harbor will aid the military Rebels

because Loyalist warships cannot attempt to take Algeciras, now in Rebel

hands, and completely isolate the Rebels from Morocco. The Rebels now

can release some troops, who were rushed back to Algeciras, for duty

further north in the drive for Madrid.

It was reported in Gibraltar tonight that the Rebels had sent a

transport across the Strait and had landed more troops from Morocco for

use in the columns that are marching northward from headquarters at

Seville.

This was the second time this year that Britain warned a power when she

believed her measure of Mediterranean control was threatened, and it

remains to be seen whether the Madrid Government will flout the British

as the Italians did. If it attempts to do so, the British gunners of the

Gibraltar fort have authority to fire warning shots. What will happen if

such shots go unheeded is obvious.

All the British here refer to the Madrid Government as the “Communists”

and there is no doubt where British sympathies now lie, encouraged by

the statement of General Francisco Franco, leader of the Rebels, that he

is not especially cooperating with Italy.

The British Government has ordered Spaniards here to cease plotting or

be expelled and has asked Britons “loyally to refrain from either acting

or speaking publicly in such a manner as to display marked partiality or

partisanship.”

The warning, issued in the official Gibraltar Gazette, was signed by the

British Colonial Secretary here.

The warning was issued after reports of possible Communist troubles here

had reached official ears and after strong complaints that Spanish

Rebels were in Gibraltar. It was said Rebels were making headquarters

here and entering La Linea to fight. [Italics mine]

I have quoted this dispatch in full because it conveys rather accurately

the character of British “neutrality” in the early stages of the war and

thenceforth. In May 1938, the British ambassador to Spain, Sir Henry

Chilton, “expressed the conviction that a Franco victory was necessary

for peace in Spain; that there was not the slightest chance that Italy

and/or Germany would dominate Spain; and that even if it were possible

for the Spanish Government to win (which he did not believe) he was

convinced that a victory for Franco would be better for Great

Britain.”[118] Churchill, who was at first violently opposed to the

Republic, modified his position somewhat after the crushing of the

revolution in the summer of 1937. What particularly pleased him was the

forceful repression of the anarchists and the militarization of the

Republic (necessary when “the entire structure of civilization and

social life is destroyed,” as it had been by the revolution, now happily

subdued).[119] However, his good feelings towards the Republic remained

qualified. In an interview of August 14, 1938, he expressed himself as

follows: “Franco has all the right on his side because he loves his

country. Also Franco is defending Europe against the Communist danger—if

you wish to put it in those terms. But I, I am English, and I prefer the

triumph of the wrong cause. I prefer that the other side wins, because

Franco could be an upset or a threat to British interests, and the

others no.”[120]

The Germans were quite aware of British sentiments, naturally, and

therefore were much concerned that the supervisory committee for the

nonintervention agreement be located in London rather than Paris. The

German Foreign Ministry official responsible for this matter expressed

his view on August 29, 1936, as follows: “Naturally, we have to count on

complaints of all kinds being brought up in London regarding failure to

observe the obligation not to intervene, but we cannot avoid such

complaints in any case. It can, in fact, only be agreeable to us if the

center of gravity, which after all has thus far been in Paris because of

the French initiative, is transferred to London.”[121] They were not

disappointed. In November, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden stated in the

House of Commons: “So far as breaches [of the nonintervention agreement]

are concerned, I wish to state categorically that I think there are

other Governments more to blame than those of Germany and Italy.”[122]

There was no factual basis for this statement, but it did reflect

British attitudes. It is interesting that according to German sources,

England was at that time supplying Franco with munitions through

Gibraltar and, at the same time, providing information to Germany about

Russian arms deliveries to the Republic.[123]

The British left was for the most part in support of the

liberal-Communist coalition, regarding Caballero as an “infantile

leftist” and the anarchists as generally unspeakable.

The British policy of mild support for Franco was to be successful in

preserving British interests in Spain, as the Germans soon discovered. A

German Foreign Ministry note of October 1937 to the embassy in

Nationalist Spain included the following observation: “That England

cannot permanently be kept from the Spanish market as in the past is a

fact with which we have to reckon. England’s old relations with the

Spanish mines and the Generalissimo’s desire, based on political and

economic considerations, to come to an understanding with England place

certain limits on our chances of reserving Spanish raw materials to

ourselves permanently.”[124]

One can only speculate as to what might have been the effects of British

support for the Republic. A discussion of this matter would take us far

afield, into a consideration of British diplomacy during the late 1930s.

It is perhaps worth mention, now that the “Munich analogy” is being

bandied about in utter disregard for the historical facts by Secretary

Rusk and a number of his academic supporters, that “containment of

Communism” was not a policy invented by George Kennan in 1947.

Specifically, it was a dominant theme in the diplomacy of the 1930s. In

1934, Lloyd George stated that “in a very short time, perhaps in a year,

perhaps in two, the conservative elements in this country will be

looking to Germany as the bulwark against Communism in Europe.... Do not

let us be in a hurry to condemn Germany. We shall be welcoming Germany

as our friend.”[125] In September 1938, the Munich agreement was

concluded; shortly after, both France and Britain did welcome Germany as

“our friend.” As noted earlier (see note 87), even Churchill’s role at

this time is subject to some question. Of course, the Munich agreement

was the death knell for the Spanish Republic, exactly as the necessity

to rely on the Soviet Union signaled the end of the Spanish revolution

in 1937.

The United States, like France, exhibited less initiative in these

events than Great Britain, which had far more substantial economic

interests in Spain and was more of an independent force in European

affairs. Nevertheless, the American record is hardly one to inspire

pride. Technically, the United States adhered to a position of strict

neutrality. However, a careful look raises some doubts. According to

information obtained by Jackson, “the American colonel who headed the

Telephone Company had placed private lines at the disposal of the Madrid

plotters for their conversations with Generals Mola and Franco,”[126]

just prior to the insurrection on July 17. In August, the American

government urged the Martin Aircraft Company not to honor an agreement

made prior to the insurrection to supply aircraft to the Republic, and

it also pressured the Mexican government not to reship to Spain war

materials purchased in the United States.[127] An American arms

exporter, Robert Cuse, insisted on his legal right to ship airplanes and

aircraft engines to the Republic in December 1936, and the State

Department was forced to grant authorization. Cuse was denounced by

Roosevelt as unpatriotic, though Roosevelt was forced to admit that the

request was quite legal. Roosevelt contrasted the attitude of other

businessmen to Cuse as follows:

Well, these companies went along with the request of the Government.

There is the 90 percent of business that is honest, I mean ethically

honest. There is the 90 percent we are always pointing at with pride.

And then one man does what amounts to a perfectly legal but thoroughly

unpatriotic act. He represents the 10 percent of business that does not

live up to the best standards. Excuse the homily, but I feel quite

deeply about it.[128]

Among the businesses that remained “ethically honest” and therefore did

not incur Roosevelt’s wrath was the Texaco Oil Company, which violated

its contracts with the Spanish Republic and shipped oil instead to

Franco. (Five tankers that were on the high seas in July 1936 were

diverted to Franco, who received six million dollars worth of oil on

credit during the Civil War.) Apparently, neither the press nor the

American government was able to discover this fact, though it was

reported in left-wing journals at the time.[129] There is evidence that

the American government shared the fears of Churchill and others about

the dangerous forces on the Republican side. Secretary of State Cordell

Hull, for example, informed Roosevelt on July 23, 1936, that “one of the

most serious factors in this situation lies in the fact that the

[Spanish] Government has distributed large quantities of arms and

ammunition into the hands of irresponsible members of left-wing

political organizations.”[130]

Like Churchill, many responsible Americans began to rethink their

attitude towards the Republic after the social revolution had been

crushed.[131] However, relations with Franco continued cordial. In 1957,

President Eisenhower congratulated Franco on the “happy anniversary” of

his rebellion,[132] and Secretary Rusk added his tribute in 1961. Upon

criticism, Rusk was defended by the American ambassador to Madrid, who

observed that Spain is “a nation which understands the implacable nature

of the communist threat,”[133] like Thailand, South Korea, Taiwan, and

selected other countries of the Free World.[134]

In the light of such facts as these, it seems to me that Jackson is not

treating the historical record seriously when he dismisses the proposals

of the Spanish left as absurd. Quite possibly Berneri’s strategy would

have failed, as did that of the liberal-Communist coalition that took

over the Republic. It was far from senseless, however. I think that the

failure of historians to consider it more seriously follows, once again,

from the elitist bias that dominates the writing of history—and, in this

case, from a certain sentimentality about the Western democracies.

The study of collectivization published by the CNT in 1937[135]

concludes with a description of the village of Membrilla. “In its

miserable huts live the poor inhabitants of a poor province; eight

thousand people, but the streets are not paved, the town has no

newspaper, no cinema, neither a café nor a library. On the other hand,

it has many churches that have been burned.” Immediately after the

Franco insurrection, the land was expropriated and village life

collectivized. “Food, clothing, and tools were distributed equitably to

the whole population. Money was abolished, work collectivized, all goods

passed to the community, consumption was socialized. It was, however,

not a socialization of wealth but of poverty.” Work continued as before.

An elected council appointed committees to organize the life of the

commune and its relations to the outside world. The necessities of life

were distributed freely, insofar as they were available. A large number

of refugees were accommodated. A small library was established, and a

small school of design.

The document closes with these words:

The whole population lived as in a large family; functionaries,

delegates, the secretary of the syndicates, the members of the municipal

council, all elected, acted as heads of a family. But they were

controlled, because special privilege or corruption would not be

tolerated. Membrilla is perhaps the poorest village of Spain, but it is

the most just.

An account such as this, with its concern for human relations and the

ideal of a just society, must appear very strange to the consciousness

of the sophisticated intellectual, and it is therefore treated with

scorn, or taken to be naive or primitive or otherwise irrational. Only

when such prejudice is abandoned will it be possible for historians to

undertake a serious study of the popular movement that transformed

Republican Spain in one of the most remarkable social revolutions that

history records.

Franz Borkenau, in commenting on the demoralization caused by the

authoritarian practices of the central government, observes (p. 295)

that “newspapers are written by Europeanized editors, and the popular

movement is inarticulate as to its deepest impulses ... [which are shown

only] ... by acts.” The objectivity of scholarship will remain a

delusion as long as these inarticulate impulses remain beyond its grasp.

As far as the Spanish revolution is concerned, its history is yet to be

written.

I have concentrated on one theme—the interpretation of the social

revolution in Spain—in one work of history, a work that is an excellent

example of liberal scholarship. It seems to me that there is more than

enough evidence to show that a deep bias against social revolution and a

commitment to the values and social order of liberal bourgeois democracy

has led the author to misrepresent crucial events and to overlook major

historical currents. My intention has not been to bring into question

the commitment to these values—that is another matter entirely. Rather,

it has been to show how this commitment has led to a striking failure of

objectivity, providing an example of “counterrevolutionary

subordination” of a much more subtle and interesting sort—and

ultimately, I believe, a far more important one—than those discussed in

the first part of this essay.

4. Interview with Harry Kreisler, from Political Awakenings

March 22, 2002

How do you think your parents shaped your perspectives on the world?

Those are always very hard questions, because it’s a combination of

influence and resistance, which is difficult to sort out. My parents

were immigrants, and they happened to end up in Philadelphia, as part of

what amounted to kind of a Hebrew ghetto, Jewish ghetto, in

Philadelphia. Not a physical ghetto—it was scattered around the city—but

a cultural ghetto.

When my father’s family came over, for whatever reason, they went to

Baltimore, and my mother’s family, from another part of the Pale of

Settlement, came to New York. The families were totally different. The

Baltimore family was ultra-orthodox. In fact, my father told me that

they had become more orthodox when they got here than they even were in

the shtetl in the Ukraine where they came from. In general, there was a

tendency among some sectors of immigrants to intensify the cultural

tradition, probably as a way of identifying themselves in a strange

environment, I suppose.

The other part of the family, my mother’s, was mainly Jewish working

class—very radical. The Jewish element had disappeared. This was the

1930s, so they were part of the ferment of radical activism that was

going on in all sorts of ways. Of all of them, the one that actually did

influence me a great deal was an uncle by marriage who came into the

family when I was about seven or eight. He had grown up in a poor area

of New York. In fact, he himself never went past fourth grade—on the

streets, and with a criminal background, and all [the things that were]

going on in the underclass ghettos in New York. He happened to have a

physical deformity, so he was able to get a newsstand under a

compensation program that was run in the 1930s for people with

disabilities. He had a newsstand on 72^(nd) Street in New York and lived

nearby in a little apartment. I spent a lot of time there.

That newsstand became an intellectual center for émigrés from Europe;

lots of Germans and other émigrés were coming. He wasn’t a very educated

person, formally—like I said, he never went past fourth grade—but maybe

the most educated person I’ve ever met. Self-educated. The newsstand

itself was a very lively, intellectual center—professors of this and

that arguing all night. And working at the newsstand was a lot of fun. I

went for years thinking that there’s a newspaper called Newsinmira.

Because people came out of the subway station and raced past the

newsstand; they would say “Newsinmira,” and I gave them two tabloids,

which I later discovered were the News and the Mirror. And I noticed

that as soon as they picked up the “Newsinmira,” the first thing they

opened to was the sports page. So this is an eight-year-old’s picture of

the world. There were newspapers there, but that wasn’t all there

was—that was the background of the discussions that were going on.

Through my uncle and other influences, I got myself involved in the

ongoing ’30s radicalism, and was very much part of the Hebrew-based,

Zionist-oriented—this is Palestine, pre-Israel—Palestine-oriented life.

And that was a good part of my life. I became a Hebrew teacher like my

parents, and a Zionist youth leader, combining it with the radical

activism in various ways. Actually, that’s the way I got into

linguistics.

You actually wrote your first essay as a ten-year-old, on the Spanish

Civil War.

Well, you know, like you said, I was ten years old. I’m sure I would not

want to read it today. I remember what it was about because I remember

what struck me. This was right after the fall of Barcelona; the fascist

forces had conquered Barcelona, and that was essentially the end of the

Spanish Civil War. And the article was about the spread of fascism

around Europe. So it started off by talking about Munich and Barcelona,

and the spread of the Nazi power, fascist power, which was extremely

frightening.

Just to add a little word of personal background, we happened to be, for

most of my childhood, the only Jewish family in a mostly Irish and

German Catholic neighborhood, sort of a lower middle-class neighborhood,

which was very anti-Semitic, and quite pro-Nazi. It’s obvious why the

Irish would be: they hated the British; it’s not surprising the Germans

were [anti-Semitic]. I can remember beer parties when Paris fell. And

the sense of the threat of this black cloud spreading over Europe was

very frightening. I could pick up my mother’s attitudes, particularly;

she was terrified by it.

It was also in my personal life, because I saw the streets.

Interesting—for some reason which I do not understand to this day, my

brother and I never talked to our parents about it. I don’t think they

knew that we were living in an anti-Semitic neighborhood. But on the

streets, you know, you go out and play ball with kids, or try to walk to

the bus or something; it was a constant threat. It was just the kind of

thing you knew for some reason not to talk to your parents about. To the

day of their death they didn’t know. But there was this combination of

knowing that this cloud was spreading over the world and picking up,

particularly, that my mother was very upset about it—my father too, but

more constrained—and living it in the streets in my own daily life, that

made it very real.

Anyhow, by the late ’30s, I did become quite interested in Spanish

anarchism and the Spanish Civil War, where all of this was being fought

out at the time. Right before the World War broke out, a kind of

microcosm was going on in Spain. By the time I was old enough to get on

a train by myself, around ten or eleven, I would go to New York for a

weekend and stay with my aunt and uncle, and hang around at anarchist

bookstores down around Union Square and Fourth Avenue. There were little

bookstores with émigrés, really interesting people. To my mind they

looked about ninety; they were maybe in their forties or something, and

they were very interested in young people. They wanted young people to

come along, so they spent a lot of attention. Talking to these people

was a real education.

These experiences we’ve described, you were saying they led you into

linguistics, but also led you into your view of politics and of the

world. You’re a libertarian anarchist, and when one hears that, because

of the way issues are framed in this country, there are many

misperceptions. Help us understand what that means.

The United States is sort of out of the world on this topic. Here, the

term “libertarian” means the opposite of what it always meant in

history. Libertarian throughout modern European history meant socialist

anarchist. It meant the antistate element of the Workers’ Movement and

the Socialist Movement. Here it means ultra-conservative—Ayn Rand or

Cato Institute or something like that. But that’s a special U.S. usage.

There are a lot of things quite special about the way the United States

developed, and this is part of it. In Europe, it meant, and always meant

to me, an antistate branch of socialism, which meant a highly organized

society, nothing to do with chaos, but based on democracy all the way

through. That means democratic control of communities, of workplaces, of

federal structures, built on systems of voluntary association, spreading

internationally. That’s traditional anarchism. You know, anybody can

have the word if they like, but that’s the mainstream of traditional

anarchism.

And it has roots. Coming back to the United States, it has very strong

roots in the American working-class movements. So if you go back to,

say, the 1850s, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, right

around the area where I live, in Eastern Massachusetts, in the textile

plants and so on, the people working on those plants were, in part,

young women coming off the farm. They were called “factory girls,” the

women from the farms who worked in the textile plants. Some of them were

Irish, immigrants in Boston and that group of people. They had an

extremely rich and interesting culture. They’re kind of like my uncle

who never went past fourth grade—very educated, reading modern

literature. They didn’t bother with European radicalism; that had no

effect on them, but they were very much a part of the general literary

culture. And they developed their own conceptions of how the world ought

to be organized.

They had their own newspapers. In fact, the period of the freest press

in the United States was probably around the 1850s. In the 1850s, the

scale of the popular press—meaning run by factory girls in Lowell and so

on—was on the scale of the commercial press or even greater. These were

independent newspapers that [arose] spontaneously, without any

background. [The writers had] never heard of Marx or Bakunin or anyone

else, yet they developed the same ideas. From their point of view, what

they called “wage slavery,” renting yourself to an owner, was not very

different from the chattel slavery that they were fighting a civil war

about. So the idea of renting yourself, meaning working for wages, was

degrading. It was an attack on your personal integrity. They despised

the industrial system that was developing, that was destroying their

culture, destroying their independence, their individuality,

constraining them to be subordinate to masters.

There was a tradition of what was called Republicanism in the United

States. We’re free people, you know, the first free people in the world.

This was destroying and undermining that freedom. This was the core of

the labor movement all over, and included in it was the assumption, just

taken for granted, that those who work in the mills should own them.

In fact, one of their main slogans was a condemnation of what they

called the “new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but

self.” That new spirit, that you should only be interested in gaining

wealth and forgetting about your relations to other people, they

regarded it as a violation of fundamental human nature and a degrading

idea.

That was a strong, rich American culture, which was crushed by violence.

The United States has a very violent labor history, much more so than

Europe. It was wiped out over a long period, with extreme violence. By

the time it picked up again in the 1930s, that’s when I personally came

into the tail end of it. After the Second World War it was crushed. By

now, it’s forgotten. But it’s very real. I don’t really think it’s

forgotten; I think it’s just below the surface in people’s

consciousness.

You examine in your work the extent to which histories and traditions

are forgotten. To define a new position often means going back and

finding those older traditions.

Things like this, they’re forgotten in the intellectual culture, but my

feeling is they’re alive in the popular culture, in people’s sentiments

and attitudes and understanding and so on. I know when I talk to, say,

working-class audiences today, and I talk about these ideas, they seem

very natural to them. It’s true, nobody talks about them, but when you

bring up the idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow

their orders, and that they own and you work—you built it, but you don’t

own it—that’s a highly unnatural notion. You don’t have to study any

complicated theories to see that this is an attack on human dignity.

So coming out of this tradition, being influenced by and continuing to

believe in it, what is your notion of legitimate power? Under what

circumstances is power legitimate?

The core of the anarchist tradition, as I understand it, is that power

is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the

burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian

hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can’t prove it, then it

should be dismantled.

Can you ever prove it? Well, it’s a heavy burden of proof to bear, but I

think sometimes you can bear it. So to take an example, if I’m walking

down the street with my four-year-old granddaughter, and she starts to

run into the street, and I grab her arm and pull her back, that’s an

exercise of power and authority, but I can give a justification for it,

and it’s obvious what the justification would be. And maybe there are

other cases where you can justify it. But the question that always

should be asked uppermost in our mind is, “Why should I accept it?” It’s

the responsibility of those who exercise power to show that somehow it’s

legitimate. It’s not the responsibility of anyone else to show that it’s

illegitimate. It’s illegitimate by assumption, if it’s a relation of

authority among human beings which places some above others. Unless you

can give a strong argument to show that it’s right, you’ve lost.

It’s kind of like the use of violence, say, in international affairs.

There’s a very heavy burden of proof to be borne by anyone who calls for

violence. Maybe it can be sometimes justified. Personally, I’m not a

committed pacifist, so I think that, yes, it can sometimes be justified.

So I thought, in fact, in that article I wrote in fourth grade, I

thought the West should be using force to try to stop Fascism, and I

still think so. But now I know a lot more about it. I know that the West

was actually supporting Fascism, supporting Franco, supporting

Mussolini, and so on, and even Hitler. I didn’t know that at the time.

But I thought then and I think now that the use of force to stop that

plague would have been legitimate, and finally was legitimate. But an

argument has to be given for it.

You’ve said, “You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution

as long as you like and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in

chemistry and it will be refuted tomorrow.” How does your approach to

the world as a scientist affect and influence the way you approach

politics?

Nature is tough. You can’t fiddle with Mother Nature, she’s a hard

taskmistress. So you’re forced to be honest in the natural sciences. In

the soft fields, you’re not forced to be honest. There are standards, of

course; on the other hand, they’re very weak. If what you propose is

ideologically acceptable, that is, supportive of power systems, you can

get away with a huge amount. In fact, the difference between the

conditions that are imposed on dissident opinion and on mainstream

opinion is radically different.

For example, I’ve written about terrorism, and I think you can show

without much difficulty that terrorism pretty much corresponds to power.

I don’t think that’s very surprising. The more powerful states are

involved in more terrorism, by and large. The United States is the most

powerful, so it’s involved in massive terrorism, by its own definition

of terrorism. Well, if I want to establish that, I’m required to give a

huge amount of evidence. I think that’s a good thing. I don’t object to

that. I think anyone who makes that claim should be held to very high

standards. So, I do extensive documentation, from the internal secret

records and historical record and so on. And if you ever find a comma

misplaced, somebody ought to criticize you for it. So I think those

standards are fine.

All right, now, let’s suppose that you play the mainstream game. You can

say anything you want because you support power, and nobody expects you

to justify anything. For example, in the unimaginable circumstance that

I was on, say, Nightline, and I was asked, “Do you think Kadhafi is a

terrorist?” I could say, “Yeah, Kadhafi is a terrorist.” I don’t need

any evidence. Suppose I said, “George Bush is a terrorist.” Well, then I

would be expected to provide evidence—“Why would you say that?”

In fact, the structure of the news production system is, you can’t

produce evidence. There’s even a name for it—I learned it from the

producer of Nightline, Jeff Greenfield. It’s called “concision.” He was

asked in an interview somewhere why they didn’t have me on Nightline.

First of all, he says, “Well, he talks Turkish, and nobody understands

it.” But the other answer was, “He lacks concision.” Which is correct, I

agree with him. The kinds of things that I would say on Nightline, you

can’t say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If

you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two

commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion,

you’re expected to give evidence, and that you can’t do between two

commercials. So therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can’t

talk.

I think that’s a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision

is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated

over and over again, and that nothing else is heard.

What is your advice for people who have the same concerns, who identify

with the tradition that you come out of, and who want to be engaged in

opposition?

The same as the factory girls in the Lowell textile plant 150 years ago:

they joined with others. To do these things alone is extremely hard,

especially when you’re working fifty hours a week to put the food on the

table. Join with others, and you can do a lot of things. It’s got a big

multiplier effect. That’s why unions have always been in the lead of

development of social and economic progress. They bring together poor

people, working people, enable them to learn from one another, to have

their own sources of information, and to act collectively. That’s how

everything is changed—the civil rights movement, the feminist movement,

the solidarity movements, the workers’ movements. The reason we don’t

live in a dungeon is because people have joined together to change

things. And there’s nothing different now from before. In fact, just in

the last forty years, we’ve seen remarkable changes in this respect.

Go back to ’62, there was no feminist movement, there was a very limited

human rights movement. There was no environmental movement, meaning

rights of our grandchildren. There were no Third World solidarity

movements. There was no antiapartheid movement. There was no

anti-sweatshop movement. I mean, all of the things that we take for

granted just weren’t there. How did they get there? Was it a gift from

an angel? No, they got there by struggle, common struggle by people who

dedicated themselves with others, because you can’t do it alone, and

[their efforts] made it a much more civilized country. It was a long way

to go, and that’s not the first time it happened. And it will continue.

You believe that when we focus on heroes in the movement, that’s a

mistake, because it’s really the unsung heroes, the unsung seamstresses

or whatever in this movement, who actually make a difference.

Take, say, the civil rights movement. When you think of the civil rights

movement, the first thing you think of is Martin Luther King Jr. King

was an important figure. But he would have been the first to tell you,

I’m sure, that he was riding the wave of activism, that people who were

doing the work, who were in the lead in the civil rights movement, were

young SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] workers, freedom

riders, people out there in the streets every day getting beaten and

sometimes killed, working constantly. They created the circumstances in

which a Martin Luther King could come in and be a leader. His role was

extremely important, I’m not denigrating it, it was very important to

have done that. But the people who were really important are the ones

whose names are forgotten. And that’s true of every movement that ever

existed.

Is it the case that by seeing so much you understand that very little

sometimes can be accomplished, but that may be very important?

I don’t think we should give up long-term visions. I agree with the

factory girls in Lowell in 1850. I think wage slavery is an attack on

fundamental human rights. I think those who work in the plants should

own them. I think we should struggle against what was then the “new

spirit of the age”: gain wealth, forgetting everybody but yourself. Yes,

that’s all degrading and destructive, and in the long term—I don’t know

how long—it should be dismantled. But right now there are serious

problems to deal with, like thirty million Americans who don’t have

enough to eat, or people elsewhere in the world who are far worse off,

and who are, in fact, under our boot, we’re grinding them into the dust.

Those are short-term things that can be dealt with. There’s nothing

wrong with making small gains, like the gains that I was talking about

before, from the ’60s until today. They’re extremely important for human

lives. It doesn’t mean that there are not a lot of mountain peaks to

climb, there are. But you do what’s within range.

The same in the sciences. You might like to solve the problems of, say,

what causes human action, but the problems you work on are the ones that

are right at the edge of your understanding. There’s a famous joke about

a drunk under a lamppost looking at the ground, and somebody comes up

and asks him “What are you looking for?” He says, “I’m looking for a

pencil that I dropped.” They say, “Well, where did you drop it?” He

says, “Oh, I dropped it across the street.” “Well, why are looking

here?” “This is where the light is.” That’s the way the sciences work.

Maybe the problem you would like to solve is across the street, but you

have to work where the light is. If you try to move it a little farther,

maybe ultimately you’ll get across the street.

5. Language and Freedom

When I was invited to speak on the topic “language and freedom,” I was

puzzled and intrigued. Most of my professional life has been devoted to

the study of language. There would be no great difficulty in finding a

topic to discuss in that domain. And there is much to say about the

problems of freedom and liberation as they pose themselves to us and to

others in the mid-twentieth century. What is troublesome in the title of

this lecture is the conjunction. In what way are language and freedom to

be interconnected?

As a preliminary, let me say just a word about the contemporary study of

language, as I see it. There are many aspects of language and language

use that raise intriguing questions, but—in my judgment—only a few have

so far led to productive theoretical work. In particular, our deepest

insights are in the area of formal grammatical structure. A person who

knows a language has acquired a system of rules and principles—a

“generative grammar,” in technical terms—that associates sound and

meaning in some specific fashion. There are many reasonably well-founded

and, I think, rather enlightening hypotheses as to the character of such

grammars, for quite a number of languages. Furthermore, there has been a

renewal of interest in “universal grammar,” interpreted now as the

theory that tries to specify the general properties of these languages

that can be learned in the normal way by humans. Here too, significant

progress has been achieved. The subject is of particular importance. It

is appropriate to regard universal grammar as the study of one of the

essential faculties of mind. It is, therefore, extremely interesting to

discover, as I believe we do, that the principles of universal grammar

are rich, abstract, and restrictive, and can be used to construct

principled explanations for a variety of phenomena. At the present stage

of our understanding, if language is to provide a springboard for the

investigation of other problems of man, it is these aspects of language

to which we will have to turn our attention, for the simple reason that

it is only these aspects that are reasonably well understood. In another

sense, the study of formal properties of language reveals something of

the nature of man in a negative way: it underscores, with great clarity,

the limits of our understanding of those qualities of mind that are

apparently unique to man and that must enter into his cultural

achievements in an intimate, if still quite obscure, manner.

In searching for a point of departure, one turns naturally to a period

in the history of Western thought when it was possible to believe that

“the thought of making freedom the sum and substance of philosophy has

emancipated the human spirit in all its relationships, and ... has given

to science in all its parts a more powerful reorientation than any

earlier revolution.”[136] The word “revolution” bears multiple

associations in this passage, for Schelling also proclaims that “man is

born to act and not to speculate”; and when he writes that “the time has

come to proclaim to a nobler humanity the freedom of the spirit, and no

longer to have patience with men’s tearful regrets for their lost

chains,” we hear the echoes of the libertarian thought and revolutionary

acts of the late eighteenth century. Schelling writes that “the

beginning and end of all philosophy is—Freedom.” These words are

invested with meaning and urgency at a time when men are struggling to

cast off their chains, to resist authority that has lost its claim to

legitimacy, to construct more humane and more democratic social

institutions. It is at such a time that the philosopher may be driven to

inquire into the nature of human freedom and its limits, and perhaps to

conclude, with Schelling, that with respect to the human ego, “its

essence is freedom”; and with respect to philosophy, “the highest

dignity of Philosophy consists precisely therein, that it stakes all on

human freedom.”

We are living, once again, at such a time. A revolutionary ferment is

sweeping the so-called Third World, awakening enormous masses from

torpor and acquiescence in traditional authority. There are those who

feel that the industrial societies as well are ripe for revolutionary

change—and I do not refer only to representatives of the New Left. See

for example, the remarks of Paul Ricoeur cited in chapter 6 [of For

Reasons of State], pages 308–9.

The threat of revolutionary change brings forth repression and reaction.

Its signs are evident in varying forms, in France, in the Soviet Union,

in the United States—not least, in the city where we are meeting. It is

natural, then, that we should consider, abstractly, the problems of

human freedom, and turn with interest and serious attention to the

thinking of an earlier period when archaic social institutions were

subjected to critical analysis and sustained attack. It is natural and

appropriate, so long as we bear in mind Schelling’s admonition, that man

is born not merely to speculate but also to act.

One of the earliest and most remarkable of the eighteenth-century

investigations of freedom and servitude is Rousseau’s Discourse on

Inequality (1755), in many ways a revolutionary tract. In it, he seeks

to “set forth the origin and progress of inequality, the establishment

and abuse of political societies, insofar as these things can be deduced

from the nature of man by the light of reason alone.” His conclusions

were sufficiently shocking that the judges of the prize competition of

the Academy of Dijon, to whom the work was originally submitted, refused

to hear the manuscript through.[137] In it, Rousseau challenges the

legitimacy of virtually every social institution, as well as individual

control of property and wealth. These are “usurpations ... established

only on a precarious and abusive right.... having been acquired only by

force, force could take them away without [the rich] having grounds for

complaint.” Not even property acquired by personal industry is held

“upon better titles.” Against such a claim, one might object: “Do you

not know that a multitude of your brethren die or suffer from need of

what you have in excess, and that you needed express and unanimous

consent of the human race to appropriate for yourself anything from

common subsistence that exceeded your own?” It is contrary to the law of

nature that “a handful of men be glutted with superfluities while the

starving multitude lacks necessities.”

Rousseau argues that civil society is hardly more than a conspiracy by

the rich to guarantee their plunder. Hypocritically, the rich call upon

their neighbors to “institute regulations of justice and peace to which

all are obliged to conform, which make an exception of no one, and which

compensate in some way for the caprices of fortune by equally subjecting

the powerful and the weak to mutual duties”—those laws which, as Anatole

France was to say, in their majesty deny to the rich and the poor

equally the right to sleep under the bridge at night. By such arguments,

the poor and weak were seduced: “All ran to meet their chains thinking

they secured their freedom....” Thus society and laws “gave new fetters

to the weak and new forces to the rich, destroyed natural freedom for

all time, established forever the law of property and inequality,

changed a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the

profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected the whole human race

to work, servitude and misery.” Governments inevitably tend towards

arbitrary power, as “their corruption and extreme limit.” This power is

“by its nature illegitimate,” and new revolutions must

dissolve the government altogether or bring it closer to its legitimate

institution.... The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a

sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day

before, of the lives and goods of his subjects. Force alone maintained

him, force alone overthrows him.

What is interesting, in the present connection, is the path that

Rousseau follows to reach these conclusions “by the light of reason

alone,” beginning with his ideas about the nature of man. He wants to

see man “as nature formed him.” It is from the nature of man that the

principles of natural right and the foundations of social existence must

be deduced.

This same study of original man, of his true needs, and of the

principles underlying his duties, is also the only good means one could

use to remove those crowds of difficulties which present themselves

concerning the origin of moral inequality, the true foundation of the

body politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and a thousand

similar questions as important as they are ill explained.

To determine the nature of man, Rousseau proceeds to compare man and

animal. Man is “intelligent, free ... the sole animal endowed with

reason.” Animals are “devoid of intellect and freedom.”

In every animal I see only an ingenious machine to which nature has

given senses in order to revitalize itself and guarantee itself, to a

certain point, from all that tends to destroy or upset it. I perceive

precisely the same things in the human machine, with the difference that

nature alone does everything in the operations of a beast, whereas man

contributes to his operations by being a free agent. The former chooses

or rejects by instinct and the latter by an act of freedom, so that a

beast cannot deviate from the rule that is prescribed to it even when it

would be advantageous for it to do so, and a man deviates from it often

to his detriment ... it is not so much understanding which constitutes

the distinction of man among the animals as it is his being a free

agent. Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man feels the

same impetus, but he realizes that he is free to acquiesce or resist;

and it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the

spirituality of his soul is shown. For physics explains in some way the

mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of

willing, or rather of choosing, and in the sentiment of this power are

found only purely spiritual acts about which the laws of mechanics

explain nothing.

Thus the essence of human nature is man’s freedom and his consciousness

of his freedom. So Rousseau can say that “the jurists, who have gravely

pronounced that the child of a slave would be born a slave, have decided

in other terms that a man would not be born a man.”[138]

Sophistic politicians and intellectuals search for ways to obscure the

fact that the essential and defining property of man is his freedom:

“they attribute to men a natural inclination to servitude, without

thinking that it is the same for freedom as for innocence and

virtue—their value is felt only as long as one enjoys them oneself and

the taste for them is lost as soon as one has lost them.” In contrast,

Rousseau asks rhetorically “whether, freedom being the most noble of

man’s faculties, it is not degrading one’s nature, putting oneself on

the level of beasts enslaved by instinct, even offending the author of

one’s being, to renounce without reservation the most precious of all

his gifts and subject ourselves to committing all the crimes he forbids

us in order to please a ferocious or insane master”—a question that has

been asked, in similar terms, by many an American draft resister in the

last few years, and by many others who are beginning to recover from the

catastrophe of twentieth-century Western civilization, which has so

tragically confirmed Rousseau’s judgment:

Hence arose the national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals which

make nature tremble and shock reason, and all those horrible prejudices

which rank the honor of shedding human blood among the virtues. The most

decent men learned to consider it one of their duties to murder their

fellowmen; at length men were seen to massacre each other by the

thousands without knowing why; more murders were committed on a single

day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single city than

were committed in the state of nature during whole centuries over the

entire face of the earth.

The proof of his doctrine that the struggle for freedom is an essential

human attribute, that the value of freedom is felt only as long as one

enjoys it, Rousseau sees in “the marvels done by all free peoples to

guard themselves from oppression.” True, those who have abandoned the

life of a free man

do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in

their chains.... But when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, repose,

wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good

which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born

free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their

prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European

voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve

only their independence, I feel that it does not behoove slaves to

reason about freedom.

Rather similar thoughts were expressed by Kant, forty years later. He

cannot, he says, accept the proposition that certain people “are not

ripe for freedom,” for example, the serfs of some landlord.

If one accepts this assumption, freedom will never be achieved; for one

can not arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already

acquired it; one must be free to learn how to make use of one’s powers

freely and usefully. The first attempts will surely be brutal and will

lead to a state of affairs more painful and dangerous than the former

condition under the dominance but also the protection of an external

authority. However, one can achieve reason only through one’s own

experiences and one must be free to be able to undertake them.... To

accept the principle that freedom is worthless for those under one’s

control and that one has the right to refuse it to them forever, is an

infringement on the rights of God himself, who has created man to be

free.[139]

The remark is particularly interesting because of its context. Kant was

defending the French Revolution, during the Terror, against those who

claimed that it showed the masses to be unready for the privilege of

freedom. Kant’s remarks have contemporary relevance. No rational person

will approve of violence and terror. In particular, the terror of the

post-revolutionary state, fallen into the hands of a grim autocracy, has

more than once reached indescribable levels of savagery. Yet no person

of understanding or humanity will too quickly condemn the violence that

often occurs when long-subdued masses rise against their oppressors, or

take their first steps towards liberty and social reconstruction.

Let me return now to Rousseau’s argument against the legitimacy of

established authority, whether that of political power or of wealth. It

is striking that his argument, up to this point, follows a familiar

Cartesian model. Man is uniquely beyond the bounds of physical

explanation; the beast, on the other hand, is merely an ingenious

machine, commanded by natural law. Man’s freedom and his consciousness

of this freedom distinguish him from the beast-machine. The principles

of mechanical explanation are incapable of accounting for these human

properties, though they can account for sensation and even the

combination of ideas, in which regard “man differs from a beast only in

degree.”

To Descartes and his followers, such as Cordemoy, the only sure sign

that another organism has a mind, and hence also lies beyond the bounds

of mechanical explanation, is its use of language in the normal,

creative human fashion, free from control by identifiable stimuli, novel

and innovative, appropriate to situations, coherent, and engendering in

our minds new thoughts and ideas.[140] To the Cartesians, it is obvious

by introspection that each man possesses a mind, a substance whose

essence is thought; his creative use of language reflects this freedom

of thought and conception. When we have evidence that another organism

too uses language in this free and creative fashion, we are led to

attribute to it as well a mind like ours. From similar assumptions

regarding the intrinsic limits of mechanical explanation, its inability

to account for man’s freedom and consciousness of his freedom, Rousseau

proceeds to develop his critique of authoritarian institutions, which

deny to man his essential attribute of freedom, in varying degree.

Were we to combine these speculations, we might develop an interesting

connection between language and freedom. Language, in its essential

properties and the manner of its use, provides the basic criterion for

determining that another organism is a being with a human mind and the

human capacity for free thought and self-expression, and with the

essential human need for freedom from the external constraints of

repressive authority. Furthermore, we might try to proceed from the

detailed investigation of language and its use to a deeper and more

specific understanding of the human mind. Proceeding on this model, we

might further attempt to study other aspects of that human nature which,

as Rousseau rightly observes, must be correctly conceived if we are to

be able to develop, in theory, the foundations for a rational social

order.

I will return to this problem, but first I would like to trace further

Rousseau’s thinking about the matter. Rousseau diverges from the

Cartesian tradition in several respects. He defines the “specific

characteristic of the human species” as man’s “faculty of

self-perfection,” which, “with the aid of circumstances, successively

develops all the others, and resides among us as much in the species as

in the individual.” The faculty of self-perfection and of perfection of

the human species through cultural transmission is not, to my knowledge,

discussed in any similar terms by the Cartesians. However, I think that

Rousseau’s remarks might be interpreted as a development of the

Cartesian tradition in an unexplored direction, rather than as a denial

and rejection of it. There is no inconsistency in the notion that the

restrictive attributes of mind underlie a historically evolving human

nature that develops within the limits that they set; or that these

attributes of mind provide the possibility for self-perfection; or that,

by providing the consciousness of freedom, these essential attributes of

human nature give man the opportunity to create social conditions and

social forms to maximize the possibilities for freedom, diversity, and

individual self-realization. To use an arithmetical analogy, the

integers do not fail to be an infinite set merely because they do not

exhaust the rational numbers. Analogously, it is no denial of man’s

capacity for infinite “self-perfection” to hold that there are intrinsic

properties of mind that constrain his development. I would like to argue

that in a sense the opposite is true, that without a system of formal

constraints there are no creative acts; specifically, in the absence of

intrinsic and restrictive properties of mind, there can be only “shaping

of behavior” but no creative acts of self-perfection. Furthermore,

Rousseau’s concern for the evolutionary character of self-perfection

brings us back, from another point of view, to a concern for human

language, which would appear to be a prerequisite for such evolution of

society and culture, for Rousseau’s perfection of the species, beyond

the most rudimentary forms.

Rousseau holds that “although the organ of speech is natural to man,

speech itself is nonetheless not natural to him.” Again, I see no

inconsistency between this observation and the typical Cartesian view

that innate abilities are “dispositional,” faculties that lead us to

produce ideas (specifically, innate ideas) in a particular manner under

given conditions of external stimulation, but that also provide us with

the ability to proceed in our thinking without such external factors.

Language too, then, is natural to man only in a specific way. This is an

important and, I believe, quite fundamental insight of the rationalist

linguists that was disregarded, very largely, under the impact of

empiricist psychology in the eighteenth century and since.[141]

Rousseau discusses the origin of language at some length, though he

confesses himself to be unable to come to grips with the problem in a

satisfactory way. Thus

if men needed speech in order to learn to think, they had even greater

need of knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speech....

So that one can hardly form tenable conjectures about this art of

communicating thoughts and establishing intercourse between minds; a

sublime art which is now very far from its origin....

He holds that “general ideas can come into the mind only with the aid of

words, and the understanding grasps them only through propositions”—a

fact which prevents animals, devoid of reason, from formulating such

ideas or ever acquiring “the perfectiblity which depends upon them.”

Thus he cannot conceive of the means by which “our new grammarians began

to extend their ideas and to generalize their words,” or to develop the

means “to express all the thoughts of men”: “numbers, abstract words,

aorists, and all the tenses of verbs, particles, syntax, the linking of

propositions, reasoning, and the forming of all the logic of discourse.”

He does speculate about later stages of the perfection of the species,

“when the ideas of men began to spread and multiply, and when closer

communication was established among them, [and] they sought more

numerous signs and a more extensive language.” But he must, unhappily,

abandon “the following difficult problem: which was most necessary,

previously formed society for the institution of languages, or

previously invented languages for the establishment of society?”

The Cartesians cut the Gordian knot by postulating the existence of a

species-specific characteristic, a second substance that serves as what

we might call a “creative principle” alongside the “mechanical

principle” that determines totally the behavior of animals. There was,

for them, no need to explain the origin of language in the course of

historical evolution. Rather, man’s nature is qualitatively distinct:

there is no passage from body to mind. We might reinterpret this idea in

more current terms by speculating that rather sudden and dramatic

mutations might have led to qualities of intelligence that are, so far

as we know, unique to man, possession of language in the human sense

being the most distinctive index of these qualities.[142] If this is

correct, as at least a first approximation to the facts, the study of

language might be expected to offer an entering wedge, or perhaps a

model, for an investigation of human nature that would provide the

grounding for a much broader theory of human nature.

To conclude these historical remarks, I would like to turn, as I have

elsewhere,[143] to Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the most stimulating and

intriguing thinkers of the period. Humboldt was, on the one hand, one of

the most profound theorists of general linguistics, and on the other, an

early and forceful advocate of libertarian values. The basic concept of

his philosophy is Bildung, by which, as J. W. Burrow expresses it, “he

meant the fullest, richest and most harmonious development of the

potentialities of the individual, the community or the human race.”[144]

His own thought might serve as an exemplary case. Though he does not, to

my knowledge, explicitly relate his ideas about language to his

libertarian social thought, there is quite clearly a common ground from

which they develop, a concept of human nature that inspires each. Mill’s

essay On Liberty takes as its epigraph Humboldt’s formulation of the

“leading principle” of his thought: “the absolute and essential

importance of human development in its richest diversity.” Humboldt

concludes his critique of the authoritarian state by saying: “I have

felt myself animated throughout with a sense of the deepest respect for

the inherent dignity of human nature, and for freedom, which alone

befits that dignity.” Briefly put, his concept of human nature is this:

The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and

immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient

desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to

a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable

condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes; but

there is besides another essential—intimately connected with freedom, it

is true—a variety of situations.[145]

Like Rousseau and Kant, he holds that

nothing promotes this ripeness for freedom so much as freedom itself.

This truth, perhaps, may not be acknowledged by those who have so often

used this unripeness as an excuse for continuing repression. But it

seems to me to follow unquestionably from the very nature of man. The

incapacity for freedom can only arise from a want of moral and

intellectual power; to heighten this power is the only way to supply

this want; but to do this presupposes the exercise of the power, and

this exercise presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous

activity. Only it is clear we cannot call it giving freedom, when bonds

are relaxed which are not felt as such by him who wears them. But of no

man on earth—however neglected by nature, and however degraded by

circumstances—is this true of all the bonds which oppress him. Let us

undo them one by one, as the feeling of freedom awakens in men’s hearts,

and we shall hasten progress at every step.

Those who do not comprehend this “may justly be suspected of

misunderstanding human nature, and of wishing to make men into

machines.”

Man is fundamentally a creative, searching, self-perfecting being: “to

inquire and to create—these are the centres around which all human

pursuits more or less directly revolve.” But freedom of thought and

enlightenment are not only for the elite. Once again echoing Rousseau,

Humboldt states: “There is something degrading to human nature in the

idea of refusing to any man the right to be a man.” He is, then,

optimistic about the effects on all of “the diffusion of scientific

knowledge by freedom and enlightenment.” But “all moral culture springs

solely and immediately from the inner life of the soul, and can only be

stimulated in human nature, and never produced by external and

artificial contrivances.” “The cultivation of the understanding, as of

any of man’s other faculties, is generally achieved by his own activity,

his own ingenuity, or his own methods of using the discoveries of

others....” Education, then, must provide the opportunities for

self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging

environment for the individual to explore, in his own way. Even a

language cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, but only “awakened in the

mind: one can only provide the thread along which it will develop of

itself.” I think that Humboldt would have found congenial much of

Dewey’s thinking about education. And he might also have appreciated the

recent revolutionary extension of such ideas, for example, by the

radical Catholics of Latin America who are concerned with the “awakening

of consciousness,” referring to “the transformation of the passive

exploited lower classes into conscious and critical masters of their own

destinies”[146] much in the manner of Third World revolutionaries

elsewhere. He would, I am sure, have approved of their criticism of

schools that are

more preoccupied with the transmission of knowledge than with the

creation, among other values, of a critical spirit. From the social

point of view, the educational systems are oriented to maintaining the

existing social and economic structures instead of transforming

them.[147]

But Humboldt’s concern for spontaneity goes well beyond educational

practice in the narrow sense. It touches also the question of labor and

exploitation. The remarks, just quoted, about the cultivation of

understanding through spontaneous action continue as follows:

... man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he

does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense

its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits.... In

view of this consideration,[148] it seems as if all peasants and

craftsmen might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their

labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and

inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their

character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would

be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in

themselves, so often serve to degrade it.... But, still, freedom is

undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits

most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in

producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a

man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance,

does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true

nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely

with mechanical exactness.

If a man acts in a purely mechanical way, reacting to external demands

or instruction rather than in ways determined by his own interests and

energies and power, “we may admire what he does, but we despise what he

is.”[149]

On such conceptions Humboldt grounds his ideas concerning the role of

the state, which tends to “make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary

ends, overlooking his individual purposes.” His doctrine is classical

liberal, strongly opposed to all but the most minimal forms of state

intervention in personal or social life.

Writing in the 1790s, Humboldt had no conception of the forms that

industrial capitalism would take. Hence he is not overly concerned with

the dangers of private power.

But when we reflect (still keeping theory distinct from practice) that

the influence of a private person is liable to diminution and decay,

from competition, dissipation of fortune, even death; and that clearly

none of these contingencies can be applied to the State; we are still

left with the principle that the latter is not to meddle in anything

which does not refer exclusively to security....

He speaks of the essential equality of the condition of private

citizens, and of course has no idea of the ways in which the notion

“private person” would come to be reinterpreted in the era of corporate

capitalism. He did not foresee that “Democracy with its motto of

equality of all citizens before the law and Liberalism with its right of

man over his own person both [would be] wrecked on realities of

capitalist economy.”[150] He did not foresee that in a predatory

capitalist economy, state intervention would be an absolute necessity to

preserve human existence and to prevent the destruction of the physical

environment—I speak optimistically. As Karl Polanyi, for one, has

pointed out, the self-adjusting market “could not exist for any length

of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society;

it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings

into a wilderness.”[151] Humboldt did not foresee the consequences of

the commodity character of labor, the doctrine (in Polanyi’s words) that

“it is not for the commodity to decide where it should be offered for

sale, to what purpose it should be used, at what price it should be

allowed to change hands, and in what manner it should be consumed or

destroyed.” But the commodity, in this case, is a human life, and social

protection was therefore a minimal necessity to constrain the irrational

and destructive workings of the classical free market. Nor did Humboldt

understand that capitalist economic relations perpetuated a form of

bondage which, as early as 1767, Simon Linguet had declared to be even

worse than slavery.

It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our

farm laborers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our

masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want

that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do

them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go

down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission

to enrich him.... What effective gain has the suppression of slavery

brought him? ... He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune. The

slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him.

But the handicraftsman costs nothing to the rich voluptuary who employs

him.... These men, it is said, have no master—they have one, and the

most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is need. It is this

that reduces them to the most cruel dependence.[152]

If there is something degrading to human nature in the idea of bondage,

then a new emancipation must be awaited, Fourier’s “third and last

emancipatory phase of history,” which will transform the proletariat to

free men by eliminating the commodity character of labor, ending wage

slavery, and bringing the commercial, industrial, and financial

institutions under democratic control.[153]

Perhaps Humboldt might have accepted these conclusions. He does agree

that state intervention in social life is legitimate if “freedom would

destroy the very conditions without which not only freedom but even

existence itself would be inconceivable”—precisely the circumstances

that arise in an unconstrained capitalist economy. In any event, his

criticism of bureaucracy and the autocratic state stands as an eloquent

forewarning of some of the most dismal aspects of modern history, and

the basis of his critique is applicable to a broader range of coercive

institutions than he imagined.

Though expressing a classical liberal doctrine, Humboldt is no primitive

individualist in the style of Rousseau. Rousseau extols the savage who

“lives within himself”; he has little use for “the sociable man, always

outside of himself, [who] knows how to live only in the opinion of

others ... from [whose] judgment alone ... he draws the sentiment of his

own existence.”[154] Humboldt’s vision is quite different:

... the whole tenor of the ideas and arguments unfolded in this essay

might fairly be reduced to this, that while they would break all fetters

in human society, they would attempt to find as many new social bonds as

possible. The isolated man is no more able to develop than the one who

is fettered.

Thus he looks forward to a community of free association without

coercion by the state or other authoritarian institutions, in which free

men can create and inquire, and achieve the highest development of their

powers—far ahead of his time, he presents an anarchist vision that is

appropriate, perhaps, to the next stage of industrial society. We can

perhaps look forward to a day when these various strands will be brought

together within the framework of libertarian socialism, a social form

that barely exists today though its elements can be perceived: in the

guarantee of individual rights that has achieved its highest form—though

still tragically flawed—in the Western democracies; in the Israeli

kibbutzim; in the experiments with workers’ councils in Yugoslavia; in

the effort to awaken popular consciousness and create a new involvement

in the social process which is a fundamental element in the Third World

revolutions, coexisting uneasily with indefensible authoritarian

practice.

A similar concept of human nature underlies Humboldt’s work on language.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are

fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is

free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words

involves a process of free creation. The normal use of language and the

acquisition of language depend on what Humboldt calls the fixed form of

language, a system of generative processes that is rooted in the nature

of the human mind and constrains but does not determine the free

creations of normal intelligence or, at a higher and more original

level, of the great writer or thinker. Humboldt is, on the one hand, a

Platonist who insists that learning is a kind of reminiscence, in which

the mind, stimulated by experience, draws from its own internal

resources and follows a path that it itself determines; and he is also a

romantic, attuned to cultural variety, and the endless possibilities for

the spiritual contributions of the creative genius. There is no

contradiction in this, any more than there is a contradiction in the

insistence of aesthetic theory that individual works of genius are

constrained by principle and rule. The normal, creative use of language,

which to the Cartesian rationalist is the best index of the existence of

another mind, presupposes a system of rules and generative principles of

a sort that the rationalist grammarians attempted, with some success, to

determine and make explicit.

The many modern critics who sense an inconsistency in the belief that

free creation takes place within—presupposes, in fact—a system of

constraints and governing principles are quite mistaken; unless, of

course, they speak of “contradiction” in the loose and metaphoric sense

of Schelling, when he writes that “without the contradiction of

necessity and freedom not only philosophy but every nobler ambition of

the spirit would sink to that death which is peculiar to those sciences

in which that contradiction serves no function.” Without this tension

between necessity and freedom, rule and choice, there can be no

creativity, no communication, no meaningful acts at all.

I have discussed these traditional ideas at some length, not out of

antiquarian interest, but because I think that they are valuable and

essentially correct, and that they project a course we can follow with

profit. Social action must be animated by a vision of a future society,

and by explicit judgments of value concerning the character of this

future society. These judgments must derive from some concept of the

nature of man, and one may seek empirical foundations by investigating

man’s nature as it is revealed by his behavior and his creations,

material, intellectual, and social. We have, perhaps, reached a point in

history when it is possible to think seriously about a society in which

freely constituted social bonds replace the fetters of autocratic

institutions, rather in the sense conveyed by the remarks of Humboldt

that I quoted, and elaborated more fully in the tradition of libertarian

socialism in the years that followed.[155]

Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced

technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice

and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now

being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the

mid-twentieth century. It is incapable of meeting human needs that can

be expressed only in collective terms, and its concept of competitive

man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to

market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is

antihuman and intolerable in the deepest sense. An autocratic state is

no acceptable substitute; nor can the militarized state capitalism

evolving in the United States or the bureaucratized, centralized welfare

state be accepted as the goal of human existence. The only justification

for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such

institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such

a deficit, and even threaten human survival. Modern science and

technology can relieve men of the necessity for specialized, imbecile

labor. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social

order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the

will to create it.

A vision of a future social order is in turn based on a concept of human

nature. If in fact man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic

being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a

cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the “shaping

of behavior” by the state authority, the corporate manager, the

technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the

human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the

intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for

intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural

achievement, and participation in a free community. In a partly

analogous way, a classical tradition spoke of artistic genius acting

within and in some ways challenging a framework of rule. Here we touch

on matters that are little understood. It seems to me that we must break

away, sharply and radically, from much of modern social and behavioral

science if we are to move towards a deeper understanding of these

matters.[156]

Here too, I think that the tradition I have briefly reviewed has a

contribution to offer. As I have already observed, those who were

concerned with human distinctiveness and potential repeatedly were led

to a consideration of the properties of language. I think that the study

of language can provide some glimmerings of understanding of

rule-governed behavior and the possibilities for free and creative

action within the framework of a system of rules that in part, at least,

reflect intrinsic properties of human mental organization. It seems to

me fair to regard the contemporary study of language as in some ways a

return to the Humboldtian concept of the form of language: a system of

generative processes rooted in innate properties of mind but permitting,

in Humboldt’s phrase, an infinite use of finite means. Language cannot

be described as a system of organization of behavior. Rather, to

understand how language is used, we must discover the abstract

Humboldtian form of language—its generative grammar, in modern terms. To

learn a language is to construct for oneself this abstract system, of

course unconsciously. The linguist and psychologist can proceed to study

the use and acquisition of language only insofar as he has some grasp of

the properties of the system that has been mastered by the person who

knows the language. Furthermore, it seems to me that a good case can be

made in support of the empirical claim that such a system can be

acquired, under the given conditions of time and access, only by a mind

that is endowed with certain specific properties that we can now

tentatively describe in some detail. As long as we restrict ourselves,

conceptually, to the investigation of behavior, its organization, its

development through interaction with the environment, we are bound to

miss these characteristics of language and mind. Other aspects of human

psychology and culture might, in principle, be studied in a similar way.

Conceivably, we might in this way develop a social science based on

empirically well-founded propositions concerning human nature. Just as

we study the range of humanly attainable languages, with some success,

we might also try to study the forms of artistic expression or, for that

matter, scientific knowledge that humans can conceive, and perhaps even

the range of ethical systems and social structures in which humans can

live and function, given their intrinsic capacities and needs. Perhaps

one might go on to project a concept of social organization that

would—under given conditions of material and spiritual culture—best

encourage and accommodate the fundamental human need—if such it is—for

spontaneous initiative, creative work, solidarity, pursuit of social

justice.

I do not want to exaggerate, as I no doubt have, the role of

investigation of language. Language is the product of human intelligence

that is, for the moment, most accessible to study. A rich tradition held

language to be a mirror of mind. To some extent, there is surely truth

and useful insight in this idea.

I am no less puzzled by the topic “language and freedom” than when I

began—and no less intrigued. In these speculative and sketchy remarks

there are gaps so vast that one might question what would remain, when

metaphor and unsubstantiated guess are removed. It is sobering to

realize—as I believe we must—how little we have progressed in our

knowledge of man and society, or even in formulating clearly the

problems that might be seriously studied. But there are, I think, a few

footholds that seem fairly firm. I like to believe that the intensive

study of one aspect of human psychology—human language—may contribute to

a humanistic social science that will serve, as well, as an instrument

for social action. It must, needless to say, be stressed that social

action cannot await a firmly established theory of man and society, nor

can the validity of the latter be determined by our hopes and moral

judgments. The two—speculation and action—must progress as best they

can, looking forward to the day when theoretical inquiry will provide a

firm guide to the unending, often grim, but never hopeless struggle for

freedom and social justice.

[1] Octave Mirbeau, quoted in James Joll, The Anarchists (Boston:

Little, Brown & Co., 1964), pp. 145–46.

[2] Rudolf Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938),

p. 31.

[3] Cited in ibid., p. 77. This quotation and that in the next sentence

are from Michael Bakunin, “The Program of the Alliance,” in Bakunin on

Anarchy, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972).

[4] Diego Abad de Santillán, After the Revolution (New York: Greenberg,

1937), p. 86. In the last chapter, written several months after the

revolution had begun, he expresses his dissatisfaction with what had so

far been achieved along these lines. On the accomplishments of the

social revolution in Spain, see my American Power and the New Mandarins

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), chap. 1, and references cited there;

the important study by Broué and Témime has since been translated into

English. Several other important studies have appeared since, in

particular: Frank Mintz, L’Autogestion dans l’Espagne révolutionnaire

(Paris: Editions Bélibaste, 1971); César M. Lorenzo, Les Anarchistes

espagnols et la pouvoir, 1868–1969 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969);

Gaston Leval, Espagné libertaire, 1936–1939: L’Oeuvre constructive de la

Révolution espagnole (Paris: Editions du Cercle, 1971). See also Vernon

Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939, enlarged edition

(London: Freedom Press, 1972).

[5] Cited by Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York:

W.W. Norton & Co., 1969).

[6] Bakunin, in a letter to Herzen and Ogareff, 1866. Cited by Daniel

Guérin, Jeunesse du socialism liberatire (Paris: Librairie Marcel

Rivière, 1959).

[7] Fernand Pelloutier, cited in Joll, Anarchists. The source is

“L’Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers,” Les Temps nouveaux, 1895,

reprinted in Ni Dieu, ni Maître, ed. Daniel Guerin (Lausanne: La Cité

Editeur, n.d.).

[8] Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958).

[9] “No state, however democratic,” Bakunin wrote, “not even the reddest

republic—can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free

self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the

bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because

every state, even the pseudo–People’s State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in

essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, through a

privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they

know what the people need and want better than do the people

themselves....” “But the people will feel no better if the stick with

which they are being beaten is labeled ‘the people’s stick’ ” (Statism

and Anarchy [1873], in Dolgoff, Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 338)—“the

people’s stick” being the democratic Republic.

Marx, of course, saw the matter differently.

For discussion of the impact of the Paris Commune on this dispute, see

Daniel Guérin’s comments in Ni Dieu, ni Maître; these also appear,

slightly extended, in his Pour un marxisme libertaire (Paris: Robert

Laffont, 1969). See also note 24.

[10] On Lenin’s “intellectual deviation” to the left during 1917, see

Robert Vincent Daniels, “The State and Revolution: A Case Study in the

Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology,” American Slavic and

East European Review 12, no. 1 (1953).

[11] Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy

(Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969), p. 295.

[12] Michael Bakunin, “La Commune de Paris et la notion de l’état,”

reprinted in Guérin, Ni Dieu, ni Maître. Bakunin’s final remark on the

laws of individual nature as the condition of freedom can be compared

with the approach to creative thought developed in the rationalist and

romantic traditions, discussed in chapter 9 of my For Reasons of State

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1973). See my Cartesian Linguistics (New

York: Harper & Row, 1966) and Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt,

Brace & World, 1968).

[13] Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx

(London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 142, referring to

comments in The Holy Family. Avineri states that within the socialist

movement only the Israeli kibbutzim “have perceived that the modes and

forms of present social organization will determine the structure of

future society.” This, however, was a characteristic position of

anarchosyndicalism, as noted earlier.

[14] Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 28.

[15] See Guérin’s works cited earlier.

[16] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme.

[17] Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, cited by

Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 306. In this connection, see also Mattick’s

essay “Workers’ Control,” in The New Left, ed. Priscilla Long (Boston:

P. Sargent, 1969); and Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Marx.

[18] Karl Marx, Capital, quoted by Robert Tucker, who rightly emphasizes

that Marx sees the revolutionary more as a “frustrated producer” than a

“dissatisfied consumer” (Marxian Revolutionary Idea). This more radical

critique of capitalist relations of production is a direct outgrowth of

the libertarian thought of the Enlightenment.

[19] Marx, Capital, cited by Avineri, Social and Political Thought of

Marx, p. 233.

[20] Pelloutier, “L’Anarchisme.”

[21] “Qu’est-ce que la propriéte?” The phrase “property is theft”

displeased Marx, who saw in its use a logical problem, theft

presupposing the legitimate existence of property. See Avineri, Social

and Political Thought of Marx.

[22] Cited in Buber’s Paths in Utopia, p. 19.

[23] Cited in J. Hampden Jackson, Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism

(New York: Collier Books, 1962).

[24] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (New York: International

Publishers, 1941), p. 24. Avineri observes that this and other comments

of Marx about the Commune refer pointedly to intentions and plans. As

Marx made plain elsewhere, his considered assessment was more critical

than in this address.

[25] For some background, see Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement

in Britain, 1900–1921 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969).

[26] Collectivisations: L’Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution

espagnole, p. 8.

[27] For discussion, see Mattick, Marx and Keynes, and Michael Kidron,

Western Capitalism Since the War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968).

See also discussion and references cited in my At War with Asia (New

York: Pantheon Books, 1970), chap. 1, pp. 23–26.

[28] See Hugh Scanlon, The Way Forward for Workers’ Control, Institute

for Workers’ Control Pamphlet Series, no. 1 (Nottingham, England, 1968).

[29] Guérin, Ni Dieu, ni Maître, introduction.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism from Marx to the First

Five Years’ Plan, trans. Ian F. Morrow (New York: Russell & Russell,

1965).

[32] Marx, Civil War in France, pp. 62–63.

[33] Cited in Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 93–94. A recent reformulation of

this view is given by Anton Pannekoek, the Dutch scientist and spokesman

for libertarian communism, in his Workers Councils (Melbourne, 1950),

pp. 36–37:

It is not for the first time that a ruling class tries to explain, and

so to perpetuate, its rule as the consequences of an inborn difference

between two kinds of people, one destined by nature to ride, the other

to be ridden. The landowning aristocracy of former centuries defended

their privileged position by boasting their extraction from a nobler

race of conquerors that had subdued the lower race of common people. Big

capitalists explain their dominating place by the assertion that they

have brains and other people have none. In the same way now especially

the intellectuals, considering themselves the rightful rulers of

to-morrow, claim their spiritual superiority. They form the rapidly

increasing class of university-trained officials and free professions,

specialized in mental work, in study of books and of science, and they

consider themselves as the people most gifted with intellect. Hence they

are destined to be leaders of the production, whereas the ungifted mass

shall execute the manual work, for which no brains are needed. They are

no defenders of capitalism; not capital, but intellect should direct

labor. The more so, since now society is such a complicated structure,

based on abstract and difficult science, that only the highest

intellectual acumen is capable of embracing, grasping and handling it.

Should the working masses, from lack of insight, fail to acknowledge

this need of superior intellectual lead, should they stupidly try to

take the direction into their own hands, chaos and ruin will be the

inevitable consequence.

[34] See Daniel Bell, “Notes on the Post-Industrial Society: Part I,”

Public Interest, no. 6 (1967), pp. 24–35. Albert Parry has suggested

that there are important similarities between the emergence of a

scientific elite in the Soviet Union and the United States, in their

growing role in decision making, citing Bell’s thesis in support. See

the New York Times, March 27, 1966, reporting on the Midwest Slavic

Conference.

[35] Letter to Herzen and Ogareff, 1866, cited in Daniel Guérin,

Jeunesse du socialism libertoire (Paris: Librairie Marcel Rivière,

1959), p. 119.

[36] Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, trans. Bertram D. Wolfe

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 71.

[37] Luxemburg, cited by Guérin, Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire, pp.

106–7.

[38] Rosa Luxemberg, Leninism or Marxism, in Russian Revolution, p. 102.

[39] For a very enlightening study of this matter, emphasizing domestic

issues, see Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The

Radical Specter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).

[40] Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965).

[41] Respectively, President of the Republic, Prime Minister from May

until the Franco insurrection, and member of the conservative wing of

the Popular Front selected by Azaña to try to set up a compromise

government after the insurrection.

[42] It is interesting that Douglas Pike’s very hostile account of the

National Liberation Front, cited earlier, emphasizes the popular and

voluntary element in its striking organizational successes. What he

describes, whether accurately or not one cannot tell, is a structure of

interlocking self-help organizations, loosely coordinated and developed

through persuasion rather than force—in certain respects, of a character

that would have appealed to anarchist thinkers. Those who speak so

freely of the “authoritarian Vietcong” may be correct, but they have

presented little evidence to support their judgment. Of course, it must

be understood that Pike regards the element of voluntary mass

participation in self-help associations as the most dangerous and

insidious feature of the NLF organizational structure.

Also relevant is the history of collectivization in China, which, as

compared with the Soviet Union, shows a much higher reliance on

persuasion and mutual aid than on force and terror, and appears to have

been more successful. See Thomas P. Bernstein, “Leadership and Mass

Mobilisation in the Soviet and Chinese Collectivization Campaigns of

1929–30 and 1955–56: A Comparison,” China Quarterly, no. 31

(July–September 1967), pp. 1–47, for some interesting and suggestive

comments and analysis.

The scale of the Chinese Revolution is so great and reports in depth are

so fragmentary that it would no doubt be foolhardy to attempt a general

evaluation. Still, all the reports I have been able to study suggest

that insofar as real successes were achieved in the several stages of

land reform, mutual aid, collectivization, and formation of communes,

they were traceable in large part to the complex interaction of the

Communist party cadres and the gradually evolving peasant associations,

a relation which seems to stray far from the Leninist model of

organization. This is particularly evident in William Hinton’s

magnificent study Fanshen (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), which

is unparalleled, to my knowledge, as an analysis of a moment of profound

revolutionary change. What seems to me particularly striking in his

account of the early stages of revolution in one Chinese village is not

only the extent to which party cadres submitted themselves to popular

control, but also, and more significant, the ways in which exercise of

control over steps of the revolutionary process was a factor in

developing the consciousness and insight of those who took part in the

revolution, not only from a political and social point of view, but also

with respect to the human relationships that were created. It is

interesting, in this connection, to note the strong populist element in

early Chinese Marxism. For some very illuminating observations about

this general matter, see Maurice Meisner, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of

Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

I am not suggesting that the anarchist revolution in Spain—with its

background of more than thirty years of education and struggle—is being

relived in Asia, but rather that the spontaneous and voluntary elements

in popular mass movements have probably been seriously misunderstood

because of the instinctive antipathy towards such phenomena among

intellectuals, and more recently, because of the insistence on

interpreting them in terms of Cold War mythology.

[43] Eric Hobsbawm, “The Spanish Background,” New Left Review, no. 40

(November–December 1966), pp. 85–90.

[44] José Peirats, La C.N.T. en la revolución española, 3 vols.

(Toulouse: Ediciones C.N.T., 1951–52). Jackson makes one passing

reference to it. Peirats has since published a general history of the

period, Los anarquistas en la crisis politica española (Buenos Aires:

Editorial Alfa-Argentina, 1964). This highly informative book should

certainly be made available to an English-speaking audience.

[45] An exception to the rather general failure to deal with the

anarchist revolution is Hugh Thomas’s “Anarchist Agrarian Collectives in

the Spanish Civil War,” in A Century of Conflict, 1850–1950: Essays for

A.J.P. Taylor, ed. Martin Gilbert (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1967),

pp. 245–63. See note 60 below for some discussion. There is also much

useful information in what to my mind is the best general history of the

Civil War, La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne, by Pierre Broué and

Émile Témime (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1961). A concise and

informative recent account is contained in Daniel Guérin, L’Anarchisme

(Paris: Gallimard, 1965). In his extensive study, The Spanish Civil War

(New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961; paperback ed., 1963), Hugh

Thomas barely refers to the popular revolution, and some of the major

events are not mentioned at all—see, for example, note 51 below.

[46] Collectivisations: l’oeuvre constructive de la Révolution

espagnole, 2^(nd) ed. (Toulouse: Éditions C.N.T., 1965). The first

edition was published in Barcelona (Éditions C.N.T.-F.A.I., 1937). There

is an excellent and sympathetic summary by the Marxist scholar Karl

Korsch, “Collectivization in Spain,” in Living Marxism 4 (April 1939),

pp. 179–82. In the same issue (pp. 170–71), the liberal-Communist

reaction to the Spanish Civil War is summarized succinctly, and I

believe accurately, as follows: “With their empty chatter as to the

wonders of Bolshevik discipline, the geniality of Caballero, and the

passions of the Pasionaria, the ‘modern liberals’ merely covered up

their real desire for the destruction of all revolutionary possibilities

in the Civil War, and their preparation for the possible war over the

Spanish issue in the interest of their diverse fatherlands ... what was

truly revolutionary in the Spanish Civil War resulted from the direct

actions of the workers and pauperized peasants, and not because of a

specific form of labor organization nor an especially gifted

leadership.” I think that the record bears out this analysis, and I also

think that it is this fact that accounts for the distaste for the

revolutionary phase of the Civil War and its neglect in historical

scholarship.

[47] An illuminating eyewitness account of this period is that of Franz

Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit (1938; reprinted Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1963).

[48] Figures from Guérin, L’Anarchisme, p. 154.

[49] A useful account of this period is given by Felix Morrow,

Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain (1938; reprinted London: New

Park Publications, 1963).

[50] Cited by Camillo Berneri in his “Lettre ouverte à la camarade

Frederica [sic] Montseny,” Guerre de classes en Espagne (Paris, 1946), a

collection of items translated from his journal Guerra di Classe.

Berneri was the outstanding anarchist intellectual in Spain. He opposed

the policy of joining the government and argued for an alternative, more

typically anarchist strategy to which I will return below. His own view

towards joining the government was stated succinctly by a Catalan worker

whom he quotes, with reference to the Republic of 1931: “It is always

the old dog with a new collar.” Events were to prove the accuracy of

this analysis.

Berneri had been a leading spokesman of Italian anarchism. He left Italy

after Mussolini’s rise to power, and came to Barcelona on July 19, 1936.

He formed the first Italian units for the antifascist war, according to

anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker (The Tragedy of Spain [New York: Freie

Arbeiter Stimme, 1937], p. 44). He was murdered, along with his older

comrade Barbieri, during the May Days of 1937. (Arrested on May 5 by the

Communist-controlled police, he was shot during the following night.)

Hugh Thomas, in The Spanish Civil War, p. 428, suggests that “the

assassins may have been Italian Communists” rather than the police.

Thomas’s book, which is largely devoted to military history, mentions

Berneri’s murder but makes no other reference to his ideas or role.

Berneri’s name does not appear in Jackson’s history.

[51] Burnett Bolloten, The Grand Camouflage: The Communist Conspiracy in

the Spanish Civil War (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1961), p.

86. This book, by a UP correspondent in Spain during the Civil War,

contains a great deal of important documentary evidence bearing on the

questions considered here. The attitude of the wealthy farmers of this

area, most of them former supporters of the right-wing organizations

that had now disappeared, is well described by the general secretary of

the Peasant Federation, Julio Mateu: “Such is the sympathy for us [that

is, the Communist party] in the Valencia countryside that hundreds and

thousands of farmers would join our party if we were to let them. These

farmers ... love our party like a sacred thing ... they [say] ‘The

Communist Party is our party.’ Comrades, what emotion the peasants

display when they utter these words” (cited in ibid., p. 86). There is

some interesting speculation about the backgrounds for the writing of

this very important book in H.R. Southworth, Le mythe de la croisade de

Franco (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1964; Spanish edition, same publisher,

1963).

The Communist headquarters in Valencia had on the wall two posters:

“Respect the property of the small peasant” and “Respect the property of

the small industrialist” (Borkenau, Spanish Cockpit, p. 117). Actually,

it was the rich farmer as well who sought protection from the

Communists, whom Borkenau describes as constituting the extreme right

wing of the Republican forces. By early 1937, according to Borkenau, the

Communist party was “to a large extent ... the party of the military and

administrative personnel, in the second place the party of the petty

bourgeoisie and certain well-to-do peasant groups, in the third place

the party of the employees, and only in the fourth place the party of

the industrial workers” (p. 192). The party also attracted many police

and army officers. The police chief in Madrid and the chief of

intelligence, for example, were party members. In general, the party,

which had been insignificant before the revolution, “gave the urban and

rural middle classes a powerful access of life and vigour” as it

defended them from the revolutionary forces (Bolloten, Grand Camouflage,

p. 86). Gerald Brenan describes the situation as follows, in The Spanish

Labyrinth (1943; reprinted Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960),

p. 325:

Unable to draw to themselves the manual workers, who remained firmly

fixed in their unions, the Communists found themselves the refuge for

all those who had suffered from the excesses of the Revolution or who

feared where it might lead them. Well-to-do Catholic orange-growers in

Valencia, peasants in Catalonia, small shopkeepers and business men,

Army officers and Government officials enrolled in their ranks.... Thus

[in Catalonia] one had a strange and novel situation: on the one side

stood the huge compact proletariat of Barcelona with its long

revolutionary tradition, and on the other the white-collar workers and

petite bourgeoisie of the city, organized and armed by the Communist

party against it.

Actually, the situation that Brenan describes is not as strange a one as

he suggests. It is, rather, a natural consequence of Bolshevik elitism

that the “Red bureaucracy” should act as a counterrevolutionary force

except under the conditions where its present or future representatives

are attempting to seize power for themselves, in the name of the masses

whom they pretend to represent.

[52] Bolloten, Grand Camouflage, p. 189. The legalization of

revolutionary actions already undertaken and completed recalls the

behavior of the “revolutionary vanguard” in the Soviet Union in 1918.

Cf. Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism (1932; republished in

translation from the original German, New York: Russell & Russell,

1965), chap. 6. He describes how the expropriations, “accomplished as

the result of spontaneous action on the part of workers and against the

will of the Bolsheviks,” were reluctantly legalized by Lenin months

later and then placed under central party control. On the relation of

the Bolsheviks to the anarchists in postrevolutionary Russia,

interpreted from a pro-anarchist point of view, see Guérin,

L’Anarchisme, pp. 96–125. See also Avrich, Russian Anarchists, Part II,

pp. 123–254.

[53] Bolloten, Grand Camouflage, p. 191.

[54] Ibid., p. 194.

[55] For some details, see Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish

Revolution (London: Freedom Press, 1953), pp. 83–88.

[56] For a moving eyewitness account, see George Orwell, Homage to

Catalonia (1938; reprinted New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952, and

Boston: Beacon Press, 1955; quotations in this book from Beacon Press

edition). This brilliant book received little notice at the time of its

first publication, no doubt because the picture Orwell drew was in sharp

conflict with established liberal dogma. The attention that it has

received as a cold-war document since its republication in 1952 would, I

suspect, have been of little comfort to the author.

[57] Cited by Rocker, Tragedy of Spain, p. 28.

[58] See ibid. for a brief review. It was a great annoyance to Hitler

that these interests were, to a large extent, protected by Franco.

[59] Ibid., p. 35.

[60] Brenan, Spanish Labyrinth, pp. 324f.

[61] Borkenau, Spanish Cockpit, pp. 289–92. It is because of the

essential accuracy of Borkenau’s account that I think Hobsbawm (“Spanish

Background”) is quite mistaken in believing that the Communist policy

“was undoubtedly the only one which could have won the Civil War.” In

fact, the Communist policy was bound to fail, because it was predicated

on the assumption that the Western democracies would join the

antifascist effort if only Spain could be preserved as, in effect, a

Western colony. Once the Communist leaders saw the futility of this

hope, they abandoned the struggle, which was not in their eyes an effort

to win the Civil War, but only to serve the interests of Russian foreign

policy. I also disagree with Hobsbawm’s analysis of the anarchist

revolution, cited earlier, for reasons that are implicit in this entire

discussion.

[62] Bolloten, Grand Camouflage, pp. 143–44.

[63] Cited by Rosenberg, History of Bolshevism, pp. 168–69.

[64] Bolloten, Grand Camouflage, p. 84.

[65] Ibid., p. 85. As noted earlier, the “small farmer” included the

prosperous orange growers, etc. (see note 51).

[66] Brenan, Spanish Labyrinth, p. 321.

[67] Correspondence from Companys to Prieto, 1939. While Companys, as a

Catalonian with separatist impulses, would naturally be inclined to

defend Catalonian achievements, he was surely not sympathetic to

collectivization, despite his cooperative attitude during the period

when the anarchists, with real power in their hands, permitted him to

retain nominal authority. I know of no attempt to challenge the accuracy

of his assessment. Morrow (Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain,

p. 77) quotes the Catalonian Premier, the entrepreneur Juan Tarradellas,

as defending the administration of the collectivized war industries

against a Communist (PSUC) attack, which he termed the “most arbitrary

falsehoods.” There are many other reports commenting on the functioning

of the collectivized industries by nonanarchist firsthand observers,

that tend to support Companys. For example, the Swiss socialist Andres

Oltmares is quoted by Rocker (Tragedy of Spain, p. 24) as saying that

after the revolution the Catalonian workers’ syndicates “in seven weeks

accomplished fully as much as France did in fourteen months after the

outbreak of the World War.” Continuing, he says:

“In the midst of the civil war the Anarchists have proved themselves to

be political organizers of the first rank. They kindled in everyone the

required sense of responsibility, and knew how by eloquent appeals to

keep alive the spirit of sacrifice for the general welfare of the

people.

“As a Social Democrat I speak here with inner joy and sincere admiration

of my experience in Catalonia. The anti-capitalist transformation took

place here without their having to resort to a dictatorship. The members

of the syndicates are their own masters, and carry on production and the

distribution of the products of labor under their own management with

the advice of technical experts in whom they have confidence. The

enthusiasm of the workers is so great that they scorn any personal

advantage and are concerned only for the welfare of all.”

Even Borkenau concludes, rather grudgingly, that industry was

functioning fairly well, as far as he could see. The matter deserves a

serious study.

[68] Quoted in Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, pp. 46–47.

[69] The quoted testimony is from September 1, 1937; presumably, the

reference is to September 1936.

[70] Ibid. Richards suggests that the refusal of the central government

to support the Aragon front may have been motivated in part by the

general policy of counterrevolution. “This front, largely manned by

members of the C.N.T.-F.A.I., was considered of great strategic

importance by the anarchists, having as its ultimate objective the

linking of Catalonia with the Basque country and Asturias, i.e., a

linking of the industrial region [of Catalonia] with an important source

of raw materials.” Again, it would be interesting to undertake a

detailed investigation of this topic.

That the Communists withheld arms from the Aragon front seems

established beyond question, and it can hardly be doubted that the

motivation was political. See, for example, D.T. Cattell, Communism and

the Spanish Civil War (1955; reprinted New York: Russell & Russell,

1965), p. 110. Cattell, who in general bends over backwards to try to

justify the behavior of the central government, concludes that in this

case there is little doubt that the refusal of aid was politically

motivated. Brenan takes the same view, claiming that the Communists

“kept the Aragon front without arms to spite the Anarchists.” The

Communists resorted to some of the most grotesque slanders to explain

the lack of arms on the Aragon front; for example, the Daily Worker

attributed the arms shortage to the fact that “the Trotskyist General

Kopp had been carting enormous supplies of arms and ammunition across

no-man’s land to the fascists” (cited by Morrow, Revolution and

Counter-Revolution in Spain, p. 145). As Morrow points out, George Kopp

is a particularly bad choice as a target for such accusations. His

record is well known, for example, from the account given by Orwell, who

served under his command (see Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, pp. 209f).

Orwell was also able to refute, from firsthand observation, many of the

other absurdities that were appearing in the liberal press about the

Aragon front, for example, the statement by Ralph Bates in the New

Republic that the POUM troops were “playing football with the Fascists

in no man’s land.” At that moment, as Orwell observes, “the P.O.U.M.

troops were suffering heavy casualties and a number of my personal

friends were killed and wounded.”

[71] Cited in Living Marxism, p. 172.

[72] Bolloten, Grand Camouflage, p. 49, comments on the collectivization

of the dairy trade in Barcelona, as follows: “The Anarchosyndicalists

eliminated as unhygienic over forty pasteurizing plants, pasteurized all

the milk in the remaining nine, and proceeded to displace all dealers by

establishing their own dairies. Many of the retailers entered the

collective, but some refused to do so: ‘They asked for a much higher

wage than that paid to the workers ..., claiming that they could not

manage on the one allotted to them’ [Tierra y Libertad, August 21,

1937—the newspaper of the FAI, the anarchist activists].” His

information is primarily from anarchist sources, which he uses much more

extensively than any historian other than Peirats. He does not present

any evaluation of these sources, which—like all others—must be used

critically.

[73] Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain, p. 136.

[74] Borkenau, Spanish Cockpit, p. 182.

[75] Ibid., p. 183.

[76] Ibid., p. 184. According to Borkenau, “it is doubtful whether

Comorera is personally responsible for this scarcity; it might have

arisen anyway, in pace with the consumption of the harvest.” This

speculation may or may not be correct. Like Borkenau, we can only

speculate as to whether the village and workers’ committees would have

been able to continue to provision Barcelona, with or without central

administration, had it not been for the policy of “abstract liberalism,”

which was of a piece with the general Communist-directed attempts to

destroy the Revolutionary organizations and the structures developed in

the Revolutionary period.

[77] Orwell had just returned from the Aragon front, where he had been

serving with the POUM militia in an area heavily dominated by left-wing

(POUM and anarchist) troops.

[78] Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, pp. 109–11. Orwell’s description of

Barcelona in December (pp. 4–5), when he arrived for the first time,

deserves more extensive quotation:

“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working

class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been

seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and

black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer

and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost

every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and

there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every

shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized;

even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red

and black. Walters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated

you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had

temporarily disappeared. Nobody said “Señor” or “Don” or even “Usted”;

everyone called everyone else “Comrade” and “Thou,” and said “Salud!”

instead of “Buenos dias.” Tipping had been forbidden by law since the

time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a

lecture from an hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were

no private motor cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams

and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black.

The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in

clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look

like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town

where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers

were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And

it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In

outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had

practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and

foreigners there were no “well-dressed” people at all. Practically

everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some

variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was

much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like

it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting

for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was

really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled,

been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not

realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low

and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being ...

“... waiting for that happy day when Communist power would reintroduce

the old state of society and destroy popular involvement in the war.”

In December 1936, however, the situation was still as described in the

following remarks (p. 6):

“Yet so far as one can judge the people were contented and hopeful.

There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely

low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars

except the gipsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and

the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality

and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not

as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were Anarchist

notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that

barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters

appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the

hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races there

was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these

idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that

time revolutionary ballads of the naïvest kind, all about proletarian

brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the

streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen an illiterate

militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words,

and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an

appropriate tune.”

Recall the dates. Orwell arrived in Barcelona in late December 1936.

Comorera’s decree abolishing the workers’ supply committees and the

bread committees was on January 7. Borkenau returned to Barcelona in

mid-January; Orwell, in April.

[79] See Bolloten, Grand Camouflage, p. 74, citing the anarchist

spokesman Juan Peiró, in September 1936. Like other anarchists and

left-wing Socialists, Peiró sharply condemns the use of force to

introduce collectivization, taking the position that was expressed by

most anarchists, as well as by left-wing socialists such as Ricardo

Zabalza, general secretary of the Federation of Land Workers, who

stated, on January 8, 1937: “I prefer a small, enthusiastic collective,

formed by a group of active and honest workers, to a large collective

set up by force and composed of peasants without enthusiasm, who would

sabotage it until it failed. Voluntary collectivization may seem the

longer course, but the example of the small, well-managed collective

will attract the entire peasantry, who are profoundly realistic and

practical, whereas forced collectivization would end by discrediting

socialized agriculture” (cited by Bolloten, Grand Camouflage, p. 59).

However, there seems no doubt that the precepts of the anarchist and

left-socialist spokesmen were often violated in practice.

[80] Borkenau, Spanish Cockpit, pp. 219–20. Of this officer, Jackson

says only that he was “a dependable professional officer.” After the

fall of Málaga, Lieutenant Colonel Villalba was tried for treason, for

having deserted the headquarters and abandoned his troops. Broué and

Témime remark that it is difficult to determine what justice there was

in the charge.

[81] Jesús Hernández and Juan Comorera, Spain Organises for Victory: The

Policy of the Communist Party of Spain Explained (London: Communist

Party of Great Britain, n.d.), cited by Richards, Lessons of the Spanish

Revolution, pp. 99–100. There was no accusation that the phone service

was restricted, but only that the revolutionary workers could maintain

“a close check on the conversations that took place between the

politicians.” As Richards further observes, “It is, of course, a quite

different matter when the ‘indiscreet ear’ is that of the O.G.P.U.”

[82] Broué and Témime, La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne, p. 266.

[83] Jackson, Spanish Republic and the Civil War, p. 370. Thomas

suggests that Sesé was probably killed accidentally (Spanish Civil War,

p. 428).

[84] The anarchist mayor of the border town of Puigcerdá had been

assassinated in April, after Negrín’s carabineros had taken over the

border posts. That same day a prominent UGT member, Roldán Cortada, was

murdered in Barcelona, it is presumed by CNT militants. This presumption

is disputed by Peirats (Los Anarquistos: see note 12), who argues, with

some evidence, that the murder may have been a Stalinist provocation. In

reprisal, a CNT man was killed. Orwell, whose eyewitness account of the

May Days is unforgettable, points out that “One can gauge the attitude

of the foreign capitalist Press towards the Communist-Anarchist feud by

the fact that Roldán’s murder was given wide publicity, while the

answering murder was carefully unmentioned” (Homage to Catalonia, p.

119). Similarly, one can gauge Jackson’s attitude towards this struggle

by his citation of Sesé‘s murder as a critical event, while the murder

of Berneri goes unmentioned (cf. notes 18 and 49). Orwell remarks

elsewhere that “In the English press, in particular, you would have to

search for a long time before finding any favourable reference, at any

period of the war, to the Spanish Anarchists. They have been

systematically denigrated, and, as I know by my own experience, it is

almost impossible to get anyone to print anything in their defence” (p.

159). Little has changed since.

[85] According to Orwell (Homage to Catalonia, pp. 153–54), “A British

cruiser and two British destroyers had closed in upon the harbour, and

no doubt there were other warships not far away. The English newspapers

gave it out that these ships were proceeding to Barcelona ‘to protect

British interests,’ but in fact they made no move to do so; that is,

they did not land any men or take off any refugees. There can be no

certainty about this, but it was at least inherently likely that the

British Government, which had not raised a finger to save the Spanish

Government from Franco, would intervene quickly enough to save it from

its own working class.” This assumption may well have influenced the

left-wing leadership to restrain the Barcelona workers from simply

taking control of the whole city, as apparently they could easily have

done in the initial stages of the May Days.

Hugh Thomas comments (Spanish Civil War, p. 428) that there was “no

reason” for Orwell’s “apprehension” on this matter. In the light of the

British record with regard to Spain, it seems to me that Thomas is

simply unrealistic, as compared with Orwell, in this respect.

[86] Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, pp. 143–44.

[87] Controversy, August 1937, cited by Morrow, Revolution and

Counter-Revolution in Spain, p. 173. The prediction was incorrect,

though not unreasonable. Had the Western powers and the Soviet Union

wished, compromise would have been possible, it appears, and Spain might

have been saved the terrible consequences of a Franco victory. See

Brenan, Spanish Labyrinth, p. 331. He attributes the British failure to

support an armistice and possible reconciliation to the fact that

Chamberlain “saw nothing disturbing in the prospect of an Italian and

German victory.” It would be interesting to explore more fully the

attitude of Winston Churchill. In April 1937 he stated that a Franco

victory would not harm British interests. Rather, the danger was a

“success of the trotskyists and anarchists” (cited by Broué and Témime,

La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne, p. 172). Of some interest, in this

connection, is the recent discovery of an unpublished Churchill essay

written in March 1939—six months after Munich—in which he said that

England “would welcome and aid a genuine Hitler of peace and toleration”

(see New York Times, December 12, 1965).

[88] I find no mention at all in Hugh Thomas, Spanish Civil War. The

account here is largely taken from Broué and Témime, La Révolution et la

guerre d’Espagne, pp. 279–80.

[89] Jackson, Spanish Republic and the Civil War, p. 405. A footnote

comments on the “leniency” of the government to those arrested. Jackson

has nothing to say about the charges against Ascaso and others, or the

manner in which the old order was restored in Aragon.

To appreciate these events more fully, one should consider, by

comparison, the concern for civil liberties shown by Negrín on the

second, antifascist front. In an interview after the war he explained to

John Whitaker (We Cannot Escape History [New York: Macmillan Company,

1943], pp. 116–18) why his government had been so ineffective in coping

with the fifth column, even in the case of known fascist agents. Negrín

explained that “we couldn’t arrest a man on suspicion; we couldn’t break

with the rules of evidence. You can’t risk arresting an innocent man

because you are positive in your own mind that he is guilty. You

prosecute a war, yes; but you also live with your conscience.”

Evidently, these scruples did not pertain when it was the rights of

anarchist and socialist workers, rather than fascist agents, that were

at stake.

[90] Cf. Broué and Témime, La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne, p. 262.

Ironically, the government forces included some anarchist troops, the

only ones to enter Barcelona.

[91] See Bolloten, Grand Camouflage, p. 55, n. 1, for an extensive list

of sources.

[92] Broué and Témime cite the socialists Alardo Prats, Fenner Brockway,

and Carlo Rosselli. Borkenau, on the other hand, suspected that the role

of terror was great in collectivization. He cites very little to

substantiate his feeling, though some evidence is available from

anarchist sources. See note 45 above. Some general remarks on

collectivization by Rosselli and Brockway are cited by Rudolf Rocker in

his essay “Anarchism and Anarchosyndicalism,” in n. 1, Anarchism, ed.

Paul Eltzbacher (London, Freedom Press, 1960), p. 266:

“Rosselli: In three months Catalonia has been able to set up a new

social order on the ruins of an ancient system. This is chiefly due to

the Anarchists, who have revealed a quite remarkable sense of

proportion, realistic understanding, and organizing ability.... All the

revolutionary forces of Catalonia have united in a program of

Syndicalist-Socialist character ... Anarcho-Syndicalism, hitherto so

despised, has revealed itself as a great constructive force. I am no

Anarchist, but I regard it as my duty to express here my opinion of the

Anarchists of Catalonia, who have all too often been represented as a

destructive if not a criminal element.

“Brockway: I was impressed by the strength of the C.N.T. It was

unnecessary to tell me that it is the largest and most vital of the

working class organizations in Spain. That was evident on all sides. The

large industries were clearly in the main in the hands of the

C.N.T.—railways, road transport, shipping, engineering, textiles,

electricity, building, agriculture.... I was immensely impressed by the

constructive revolutionary work which is being done by the C.N.T. Their

achievements of workers’ control in industry is an inspiration.... There

are still some Britishers and Americans who regard the Anarchists of

Spain as impossible, undisciplined uncontrollables. This is poles away

from the truth. The Anarchists of Spain, through the C.N.T., are doing

one of the biggest constructive jobs ever done by the working class. At

the front they are fighting Fascism. Behind the front they are actually

constructing the new workers’ society. They see that the war against

Fascism and the carrying through of the social revolution are

inseparable. Those who have seen them and understood what they are doing

must honor them and be grateful to them.... That is surely the biggest

thing which has hitherto been done by the workers in any part of the

world.”

[93] Cited by Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, pp. 76–81,

where long descriptive quotations are given.

[94] See Hugh Thomas, “Anarchist Agrarian Collectives in the Spanish

Civil War” (note 13). He cites figures showing that agricultural

production went up in Aragon and Castile, where collectivization was

extensive, and down in Catalonia and the Levant, where peasant

proprietors were the dominant element.

Thomas’s is, to my knowledge, the only attempt by a professional

historian to assess the data on agricultural collectivization in Spain

in a systematic way. He concludes that the collectives were probably “a

considerable social success” and must have had strong popular support,

but he is more doubtful about their economic viability. His suggestion

that “Communist pressure on the collectives may have given them the

necessary urge to survive” seems quite unwarranted, as does his

suggestion that “the very existence of the war ... may have been

responsible for some of the success the collectives had.” On the

contrary, their success and spontaneous creation throughout Republican

Spain suggest that they answered to deeply felt popular sentiments, and

both the war and Communist pressure appear to have been highly

disruptive factors—ultimately, of course, destructive factors.

Other dubious conclusions are that “in respect of redistribution of

wealth, anarchist collectives were hardly much improvement over

capitalism” since “no effective way of limiting consumption in richer

collectives was devised to help poorer ones,” and that there was no

possibility of developing large-scale planning. On the contrary,

Bolloten (Grand Camouflage, pp. 176–79) points out that “In order to

remedy the defects of collectivization, as well as to iron out

discrepancies in the living standards of the workers in flourishing and

impoverished enterprises, the Anarcho-syndicalists, although rootedly

opposed to nationalization, advocated the centralization—or,

socialization, as they called it—under trade union control, of entire

branches of production.” He mentions a number of examples of partial

socialization that had some success, citing as the major difficulty that

prevented still greater progress the insistence of the Communist party

and the UGT leadership—though apparently not all of the rank-and-file

members of the UGT—on government ownership and control. According to

Richards (Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, p. 82): “In June, 1937 ...

a National Plenum of Regional Federations of Peasants was held in

Valencia to discuss the formation of a National Federation of Peasants

for the coordination and extension of the collectivist movement and also

to ensure an equitable distribution of the produce of the land, not only

between the collectives but for the whole country. Again in Castille in

October 1937, a merging of the 100,000 members of the Regional

Federation of Peasants and the 13,000 members in the food distributive

trades took place. It represented a logical step in ensuring better

co-ordination, and was accepted for the whole of Spain at the National

Congress of Collectives held in Valencia in November 1937.” Still other

plans were under consideration for regional and national

coordination—see, for example, D.A. de Santillán, After the Revolution

(New York: Greenberg, 1937), for some ideas.

Thomas feels that collectives could not have survived more than “a few

years while primitive misery was being overcome.” I see nothing in his

data to support this conclusion. The Palestinian experience has shown

that collectives can remain both a social and an economic success over a

long period. The success of Spanish collectivization, under war

conditions, seems amazing. One can obviously not be certain whether

these successes could have been secured and extended had it not been for

the combined fascist, Communist, and liberal attack, but I can find no

objective basis for the almost universal skepticism. Again, this seems

to me merely a matter of irrational prejudice.

[95] The following is a brief description by the anarchist writer Gaston

Leval, Né Franco, Né Stalin, le collettività anarchiche spagnole nella

lotta contro Franco e la reazione staliniana (Milan: Istituto Editoriale

Italiano, 1952), pp. 303f; sections reprinted in Collectivités

anarchistes en Espagne révolutionnaire, Noir et Rouge, undated.

“In the middle of the month of June, the attack began in Aragon on a

grand scale and with hitherto unknown methods. The harvest was

approaching. Rifles in hand, treasury guards under Communist orders

stopped trucks loaded with provisions on the highways and brought them

to their offices. A little later, the same guards poured into the

collectives and confiscated great quantities of wheat under the

authority of the general staff with headquarters in Barbastro.... Later

open attacks began, under the command of Lister with troops withdrawn

from the front at Belchite more than 50 kilometers away, in the month of

August.... The final result was that 30 percent of the collectives were

completely destroyed. In Alcolea, the municipal council that governed

the collective was arrested; the people who lived in the Home for the

Aged ... were thrown out on the street. In Mas de las Matas, in Monzon,

in Barbastro, on all sides, there were arrests. Plundering took place

everywhere. The stores of the cooperatives and their grain supplies were

rifled; furnishings were destroyed. The governor of Aragon, who was

appointed by the central government after the dissolution of the Council

of Aragon—which appears to have been the signal for the armed attack

against the collectives—protested. He was told to go to the devil.

“On October 22, at the National Congress of Peasants, the delegation of

the Regional Committee of Aragon presented a report of which the

following is the summary: “‘More than 600 organizers of collectives have

been arrested. The government has appointed management committees that

seized the warehouses and distributed their contents at random. Land,

draught animals, and tools were given to individual families or to the

fascists who had been spared by the revolution. The harvest was

distributed in the same way. The animals raised by the collectives

suffered the same fate. A great number of collectivized pig farms,

stables, and dairies were destroyed. In certain communes, such as Bordon

and Calaceite, even seed was confiscated and the peasants are now unable

to work the land.’

“The estimate that 30 percent of the collectives were destroyed is

consistent with figures reported by Peirats (Los anarquistas en la

crisis política española, p. 300). He points out that only 200 delegates

attended the congress of collectives of Aragon in September 1937 (“held

under the shadow of the bayonets of the Eleventh Division” of Lister) as

compared with 500 delegates at the congress of the preceding February.

Peirats states that an army division of Catalan separatists and another

division of the PSUC also occupied parts of Aragon during this

operation, while three anarchist divisions remained at the front, under

orders from the CNT-FAI leadership. Compare Jackson’s explanation of the

occupation of Aragon: ‘The peasants were known to hate the Consejo, the

anarchists had deserted the front during the Barcelona fighting, and the

very existence of the Consejo was a standing challenge to the authority

of the central government’” (italics mine).

[96] Regarding Bolloten’s work, Jackson has this to say: “Throughout the

present chapter, I have drawn heavily on this carefully documented study

of the Communist Party in 1936–37. It is unrivaled in its coverage of

the wartime press, of which Bolloten, himself a UP correspondent in

Spain, made a large collection” (p. 363, n. 4).

[97] See note 50. A number of citations from Berneri’s writings are

given by Broué and Témime. Morrow also presents several passages from

his journal, Guerra di Classe. A collection of his works would be a very

useful contribution to our understanding of the Spanish Civil War and to

the problems of revolutionary war in general.

[98] Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War, p. 208. See also the

remarks by Borkenau, Brenan, and Bolloten cited earlier. Neither Cattell

nor Borkenau regards this decline of fighting spirit as a major factor,

however.

[99] Broué and Témime, La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne, p. 195, n.

7.

[100] To this extent, Trotsky took a similar position. See his Lesson of

Spain (London: Workers’ International Press, 1937).

[101] Cited in Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, p. 23.

[102] H.E. Kaminski, Ceux de Barcelone (Paris: Les Éditions Denoël,

1937), p. 181. This book contains very interesting observations on

anarchist Spain by a skeptical though sympathetic eyewitness.

[103] May 15, 1937. Cited by Richards, Lessons of the Spanish

Revolution, p. 106.

[104] Cited by Broué and Témime, La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne,

p. 258, n. 34. The conquest of Saragossa was the goal, never realized,

of the anarchist militia in Aragon.

[105] Ibid., p. 175.

[106] Ibid., p. 193.

[107] The fact was not lost on foreign journalists. Morrow (Revolution

and Counter-Revolution in Spain, p. 68) quotes James Minifie in the New

York Herald Tribune, April 28, 1937: “A reliable police force is being

built up quietly but surely. The Valencia government discovered an ideal

instrument for this purpose in the Carabineros. These were formerly

customs officers and guards, and always had a good reputation for

loyalty. It is reported on good authority that 40,000 have been

recruited for this force, and that 20,000 have already been armed and

equipped.... The anarchists have already noticed and complained about

the increased strength of this force at a time when we all know there’s

little enough traffic coming over the frontiers, land or sea. They

realize that it will be used against them.” Consider what these

soldiers, as well as Lister’s division or the asaltos described by

Orwell, might have accomplished on the Aragon front, for example.

Consider also the effect on the militiamen, deprived of arms by the

central government, of the knowledge that these well-armed, highly

trained troops were liquidating the accomplishments of their revolution.

[108] Cited in Rocker, Tragedy of Spain, p. 37.

[109] For references, see Bolloten, Grand Camouflage, p. 192, n. 12.

[110] Cited in Rocker, Tragedy of Spain, p. 37.

[111] Liston M. Oak, “Balance Sheet of the Spanish Revolution,”

Socialist Review 6 (September 1937), pp. 7–9, 26. This reference was

brought to my attention by William B. Watson. A striking example of the

distortion introduced by the propaganda efforts of the 1930s is the

strange story of the influential film The Spanish Earth, filmed in 1937

by Joris Ivens with a text (written afterwards) by Hemingway—a project

that was apparently intitiated by Dos Passos. A very revealing account

of this matter, and of the perception of the Civil War by Hemingway and

Dos Passos, is given in W.B. Watson and Barton Whaley, “The Spanish

Earth of Dos Passos and Hemingway,” unpublished, 1967. The film dealt

with the collectivized village of Fuentidueña in Valencia (a village

collectivized by the UGT, incidentally). For the libertarian Dos Passos,

the revolution was the dominant theme; it was the antifascist war,

however, that was to preoccupy Hemingway. The role of Dos Passos was

quickly forgotten, because of the fact (as Watson and Whaley point out)

that “Dos Passos had become anathema to the Left for his criticisms of

communist policies in Spain.”

[112] As far as the East is concerned, Rocker (Tragedy of Spain, p. 25)

claims that “the Russian press, for reasons that are easily understood,

never uttered one least little word about the efforts of the Spanish

workers and peasants at social reconstruction.” I cannot check the

accuracy of this claim, but it would hardly be surprising if it were

correct.

[113] See Patricia A.M. Van der Esch, Prelude to War: The International

Repercussions of the Spanish Civil War (1935–1939) (The Hague: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1951), p. 47, and Brenan, Spanish Labyrinth, p. 329, n. 1. The

conservative character of the Basque government was also, apparently,

largely a result of French pressure. See Broué and Témime, La Révolution

et la guerre d’Espagne, p. 172, n. 8.

[114] See Dante A. Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers: 1936–1941 (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 86f. This book gives a

detailed and very insightful analysis of the international background of

the Civil War.

[115] Jules Sauerwein, dispatch to the New York Times dated July 26.

Cited by Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, p. 84.

[116] To be more precise, pro-Franco officers were killed, and the

seamen remained loyal to the Republic, in many instances.

[117] Cf., for example, Jackson, Spanish Republic and the Civil War, pp.

248f.

[118] As reported by Herschel V. Johnson of the American embassy in

London; cited by Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, p. 100.

[119] See Broué and Témime, La Révolution et la guerre d’Espagne, pp.

288–89.

[120] Cited by Thomas, Spanish Civil War, p. 531, n. 3. Rocker, Tragedy

of Spain, p. 14, quotes (without reference) a proposal by Churchill for

a five-year “neutral dictatorship” to “tranquilize” the country, after

which they could “perhaps look for a revival of parliamentary

institutions.”

[121] Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, p. 116.

[122] Ibid., p. 147. Eden is referring, of course, to the Soviet Union.

For an analysis of Russian assistance to the Spanish Republic, see

Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War, chap. 8.

[123] Cf. Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, pp. 147–48.

[124] Ibid., p. 212.

[125] Ibid., p. 93.

[126] Jackson, Spanish Republic and the Civil War, p. 248.

[127] Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, pp. 151f.

[128] Ibid., pp. 154–55 and n. 27.

[129] For some references, see Allen Guttmann, The Wound in the Heart:

America and the Spanish Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1962), pp.

137–38. The earliest quasi-official reference that I know of is in

Herbert Feis, The Spanish Story (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), where

data is given in an appendix. Jackson (Spanish Republic and the Civil

War, p. 256) refers to this matter, without noting that Texaco was

violating a prior agreement with the Republic. He states that the

American government could do nothing about this, since “oil was not

considered a war material under the Neutrality Act.” He does not point

out, however, that Robert Cuse, the Martin Company, and the Mexican

government were put under heavy pressure to withhold supplies from the

Republic, although this too was quite legal. As noted, the Texaco

Company was never even branded “unethical” or “unpatriotic,” these

epithets of Roosevelt’s being reserved for those who tried to assist the

Republic. The cynic might ask just why oil was excluded from the

Neutrality Act of January 1937, noting that while Germany and Italy were

capable of supplying arms to Franco, they could not meet his demands for

oil.

The Texaco Oil Company continued to act upon the pro-Nazi sympathies of

its head, Captain Thorkild Rieber, until August 1940, when the publicity

began to be a threat to business. See Feis, Spanish Story, for further

details. For more on these matters, see Richard P. Traina, American

Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1968), pp. 166f.

[130] Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, p. 160. He remarks: “A

government in Madrid in which Socialists, Communists, and anarchists sat

was not without menace to American business interests both in Spain and

Latin America” (p. 165). Hull, incidentally, was in error about the acts

of the Spanish government. The irresponsible left-wing elements had not

been given arms but had seized them, thus preventing an immediate Franco

victory.

[131] See Jackson, Spanish Republic and the Civil War, p. 458.

[132] Cf. Guttmann, Wound in the Heart, p. 197. Of course, American

liberalism was always pro-loyalist, and opposed both to Franco and to

the revolution. The attitude towards the latter is indicated with

accuracy by this comparison, noted by Guttmann, p. 165: “300 people met

in Union Square to hear Liston Oak [see note 77] expose the Stalinists’

role in Spain; 20,000 met in Madison Square Garden to help Earl Browder

and Norman Thomas celebrate the preservation of bourgeois democracy,” in

July 1937.

[133] Ibid., p. 198.

[134] To conclude these observations about the international reaction,

it should be noted that the Vatican recognized the Franco government de

facto in August 1937 and de jure in May 1938. Immediately upon Franco’s

final victory, Pope Pius XII made the following statement: “Peace and

victory have been willed by God to Spain ... which has now given to

proselytes of the materialistic atheism of our age the highest proof

that above all things stands the eternal value of religion and of the

Spirit.” Of course, the position of the Catholic Church has since

undergone important shifts—something that cannot be said of the American

government.

[135] See note 46.

[136] F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human

Freedom, trans. and ed. James Gutmann (Chicago: Open Court Publishing

Co., 1936).

[137] R.D. Masters, introduction to his edition of First and Second

Discourses, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: St. Martin’s Press,

1964).

[138] Compare Proudhon, a century later: “No long discussion is

necessary to demonstrate that the power of denying a man his thought,

his will, his personality, is a power of life and death, and that to

make a man a slave is to assassinate him.”

[139] Cited in Michael Bakunin, Etatisme et anarchie, ed. Arthur Lehning

(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1967), editor’s note 50, from P. Schrecker, “Kant

et la revolution française,” Revue philosophique, September–December

1939.

[140] I have discussed this matter in Cartesian Linguistics (New York:

Harper & Row, 1966) and Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace &

World, 1968).

[141] See the references of note 5 and also my Aspects of the Theory of

Syntax (1965; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), chap. 1, sec. 8.

[142] I need hardly add that this is not the prevailing view. For

discussion, see Eric H. Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language

(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967); my Language and Mind; E.A. Drewe,

G. Ettlinger, A.D. Milner, and R.E. Passingham, “A Comparative Review of

the Results of Behavioral Research on Man and Monkey,” Institute of

Psychiatry, London, unpublished draft, 1969; P.H. Lieberman, D.H. Klatt,

and W.H. Wilson, “Vocal Tract Limitations on the Vowel Repertoires of

Rhesus Monkey and Other Nonhuman Primates,” Science, June 6, 1969; and

P.H. Lieberman, “Primate Vocalizations and Human Linguistic Ability,”

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 44, no. 6 (1968).

[143] In the books cited above and in my Current Issues in Linguistic

Theory (New York: Humanities Press, 1964).

[144] J.W. Burrow, introduction to his edition of The Limits of State

Action, by Wilhelm von Humboldt (London: Cambridge University Press,

1969), from which most of the following quotes are taken.

[145] Compare the remarks of Kant, quoted above. Kant’s essay appeared

in 1793; Humboldt’s was written in 1791–1792. Parts appeared but it did

not appear in full during his lifetime. See Burrow, introduction to

Humboldt, Limits of State Action.

[146] Thomas G. Sanders, “The Church in Latin America,” Foreign Affairs

48, no. 2 (1970).

[147] Ibid. The source is said to be the ideas of Paulo Freire. Similar

criticism is widespread in the student movement in the West. See, for

example, Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, eds., The New Student Left,

rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), chap. 3.

[148] Namely, that a man “only attains the most matured and graceful

consummation of his activity, when his way of life is harmoniously in

keeping with his character”—that is, when his actions flow from inner

impulse.

[149] The latter quote is from Humboldt’s comments on the French

Constitution, 1791—parts translated in Humanist Without Portfolio: An

Anthology, trans. and ed. Marianne Cowan (Detroit: Wayne State

University Press, 1963).

[150] Rudolf Rocker, “Anarchism and Anarcho-syndicalism,” in Paul

Eltzbacher, Anarchism: Exponents of the Anarchist Philosophy (London:

Freedom Press, 1960). In his book Nationalism and Culture (London:

Freedom Press, 1937), Rocker describes Humboldt as “the most prominent

representative in Germany” of the doctrine of natural rights and the

opposition to the authoritarian state. Rousseau he regards as a

precursor of authoritarian doctrine, but he considers only the Social

Contract, not the far more libertarian Discourse on Inequality. Burrow

observes that Humboldt’s essay anticipates “much nineteenth century

political theory of a populist, anarchist and syndicalist kind” and

notes the hints of the early Marx. See also my Cartesian Linguistics, n.

51, for some comments.

[151] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic

Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

[152] Cited by Paul Mattick, “Workers’ Control,” in The New Left, ed.

Priscilla Long (Boston: P. Sargent, 1969), p. 377. See also my For

Reasons of State (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), chap. 8.

[153] Cited in Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press,

1958).

[154] Yet Rousseau dedicates himself, as a man who has lost his

“original simplicity” and can no longer “do without laws and chiefs,” to

respect the sacred bonds” of his society and “scrupulously obey the

laws, and the men who are their authors and ministers,” while scorning

“a constitution that can be maintained only with the help of so many

respectable people ... and from which, despite all their care, always

arise more real calamities than apparent advantages.”

[155] See my For Reasons of State, chap. 8.

[156] See ibid., chap. 7, for a discussion of the fraudulent claims in

this regard of certain varieties of behavioral science.