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Title: The Meaning of Anarchism Author: Jack White Date: 1937 Language: en Topics: anti-authoritarianism, anti-Bolshevism, Spanish Civil War, Spanish Revolution Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20100711084952/http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/anarchists/jackwhite/texts/anarchism.html Notes: [Originally issued by the London Freedom Group, 1937. Republished as Anarchy (Belfast Anarchist Collective, Belfast, 1982) and The Meaning of Anarchism (Organise!, Belfast, 1998).]
There has been bloodshed between Anarchists and Stalinist Communists in
Catalonia. Many are asking:
(1) Is there so deep-rooted a difference of principle as to provide a
philosophical basis for a physical clash?
(2) What is the fundamental principle of Anarchism?
(3) If the Anarchists have a definite and different philosophy, will it
work in this wicked world?
I propose to contrast Anarchism with Socialism and Communism, confining
my use of the word Socialism to include points where Socialists and
Communists agree.
The socialists say: The State has been formed on a class basis to
preserve the domination of one class by the domination of the others. To
achieve liberation, therefore, we must get possession of the State. When
we become masters by election or by insurrection we will abolish its
raison d'être, which is the division of society into a possessing and an
exploited class. Then the State will wither away and will give place to
an economic administration of things, which will no longer have to
safeguard the privileges of a minority but to minister to the needs of
all. But to abolish the State one must first capture it and use it to
destroy the cause which has given it birth - the inequality between the
majority which produces everything and the minority which consumes a
disproportionate amount of the product of the majority's labour. That is
why it is all important to secure the election of as many MP's and
Municipal Councillors as possible. Their installation will mean so much
less to accomplish on the day of the revolution, when we shall have in
the persons of our elected representatives guards within the citadel to
throw open the gates to us.
To this the Anarchists reply: The State contains a corrupting influence
in itself. The people have always been deceived (when they are not
machine-gunned) by the revolutionaries who in their ignorance the people
have hoisted to power. Consequently, to destroy the State, one must not
begin by becoming, the State; for in doing so one becomes automatically
its preserver. One becomes so by force of circumstance, without
conscious dishonesty, inevitably, because things appear under a
different aspect and so many difficulties and duties crop up that no
revolutionary turned politician can remain a single minded
revolutionary. The State corrupts the purest and the best. So to keep
our revolutionary virtue, we must not expose ourselves to its pernicious
infection. It is not from above with the machinery of the oppressive
State, that one can abolish class society. It is from below that we must
wage the war against the privileged class and undermine the foundation
of their privileges. "We will expropriate them by law," say the
Socialists. "We can do it without you and your laws," reply the
Anarchists. "We know how to strip the bourgeoisie by direct action. Our
direct action is a series of attacks incessantly renewed, delivered at
one point today and another tomorrow; an endless sequence of major and
minor crises, schooling the exploited in practical war against the
exploiter and preparing them for the final crisis of the general strike.
We feel no need of voting to impose masters on ourselves. We are
anti-parliamentarians, abstentionists. In one thing we are faithful
Marxists: Did not Marx say, "The emancipation of the workers must be the
work of the workers themselves"? Well, we are workers and we will
emancipate ourselves. As for you Socialists who offer to liberate us, if
we listened to you we should only prepare one more disillusionment for
the proletariat. For once become a Government, you would do to us who
are the people just what every Government has always done."
It would seem that the Anarchists have justification for their mistrust,
not only in the lessons of history but in the nature of things.
Anarcho-syndicalism applies energy at the point of production; its human
solidarity is cemented by the association of people in common production
undiluted by mere groupings of opinion. Affinity of interests is more
stable and more powerful than affinity of opinions. Disunity begins
where differences of abstract opinion can no longer be harmonised and
resolved in collective work. We cannot surrender the cause of human
freedom to any combination of incongruities, to any "popular front"
whose incompatible elements can guarantee nothing but the obligation to
compromise. In any popular front, groups and elements are accepted whose
economic interests run counter to those of the proletariat. In the
people who compose it there are intellectual and moral affinities, which
may disappear under pressure. It is dangerous to place people between
the appeal of the conscience and reason and the appeal of these
interests. These fragile affinities cannot exist in the groupings of
anarcho-syndicalism; stronger than any bond of sentiment or of reason
there is a bond of interest which unites them, the only stable and solid
bond of unity.
The Socialists reply that Anarcho-syndicalist propaganda, just because
it makes flank attacks and raids on Capitalism, because its primary
object is the defence of local and regional interests, is inadequate to
make conscious revolutionaries. Anarcho-syndicalism is good for
guerrilla but unsuited to serious organised warfare. Its efforts must
automatically be lacking in concentration. Co-ordination and
centralisation of effort can be the work only of a Party whose horizon
is not limited to a town or an industry but embraces all the complex
factors of a national or international situation. In our common interest
of the revolution, Socialist and Anarcho-syndicalist action must
combine.
The Anarchists answer the Socialists: "Where is your logic? You assert
that in the society which you intend to build, economic groupings will
be the only ones and public authority will be limited to the necessary
administration to ensure the production and distribution of objects
necessary to people's existence. Why then wait for the revolution to
give to economic groupings their vital creative function? Let them take
the importance today hey will have tomorrow. You admit the State is the
effect of class exploitation and its function is to maintain it. We
prefer to attack the cause. Leave the workers to fight heir own battle
on their own ground. Don't ask them to idle themselves with political
masters, who the day after they conquer state power will want, like all
conquerors, to remain the masters. Between employer and worker there is
a brutal vis-à-vis. Against the tremendous power of the State one must
stoop to tactics; sometimes one has to combine these tactics with those
of other Parties. The proletariat finds it hard to follow these long
range operations, or it gets concerned with their detail, missing their
whole scope: thus it risks contradicting a political habit of mind,
which slowly atrophies the revolutionary spirit. The working class,
economically organised, is sufficient unto itself, it needs only to be
conscious of its power; electoral and parliamentary combinations can
only delay the day of self-realisation."
Steklov, in his history of the First international, speaks of the split
in it as caused by the past of the international proletariat rising in
revolt against its future. He means by this that Bakunin and the
Anarchists thought it was possible to jump straight from the decay of
feudal aristocracy, which from 1848 began definitely to collapse in
favour of bourgeois industrialism, to the proletarian revolution.
"The broad masses of the workers," says Steklov, "for the time led
astray by Bakunin, returned to the broad river of International
Socialism." Dare we reply that the broad river of revolutionary destiny,
for a time mapped correctly by Marx over a stage of its course, shows
signs of reverting to a deeper bed charted by the genius of Bakunin.
Marx was, "par excellence", the prophet of the industrial proletariat;
any developments depending solely on that proletariat had to await its
growth and class conscious solidarity; and that growth and solidarity
had to await in turn the maturity, not to say the overripe bursting, of
the bourgeois order. This patient dependence on ripening external
conditions gives to Marxism an element of fatalism in sharp contrast
with the unconditioned spontaneity of Anarchism.
"Anarchism does not wait. It acts in the individual and in small groups
to build up social forms, which shall be, as near as possible, embryos
of the fully developed Anarchist society."
"Hope deferred maketh the heart sick," and any philosophy of action
preaching present revolt as the best preparation for future revolution
on a wide scale starts with an appeal to the fighter and people of
action rather than the theoretician, which is psychologically sound. To
the seer the Kingdom of Heaven is always at hand, and its proximity
calls for immediate preparation. And though the seers are generally
wrong in their time forecast, they are often more right than the
scientist about the fundamentals of cataclysmic change.
Bakunin was a seer, Marx was a Scientist. Bakunin was greatly influenced
by the just and elemental protests of the peasants ruined by dawning
Capitalism, and he believed he could enlist the revolting bourgeois
intellectuals in the service of complete social liquidation. He was
wrong as to the time. But Marx was wrong in his scientific belief that
revolution would spread automatically out of the most highly
industrialised countries. The revolt not of Germany or France but of
Ireland and Russia during the Great War is one up for Bakunin's rapport
with elemental human and one down for Marx's analysis of the
scientifically conditioned mass.
"What!" I hear someone exclaim. "You place the Irish National Rebellion
on a par with the Russian proletarian revolution and use both to
discredit the accuracy of Marxian analysis! What heresy run to insanity
is this?"
Just a minute, friend; I am pleading for two things: spontaneous
voluntarism versus scientific social conditioning, and the elemental
vitality retained by a peasantry, as indispensable features in
revolution. I am suggesting that though the industrial proletariat has
the strongest incentive to make the revolution, they are too mechanised
and lack the vital force ever to do so unaided, and that therefore a
social science based on industrial economics alone as the determining
factor is inevitably misleading. Do the facts support me or do they not?
Has successful revolution ever been achieved in a highly industrialised
country? It has not. If we analyse the factors in the most recent
revolutions we are familiar with, those of Ireland, Russia and Spain, in
conjunction with the frustration of revolution in highly industrialised
countries, we may have to conclude it is something deeper than bad
tactics and treacherous leadership which has thrown out our
calculations.
Perhaps the Marxians and even Marx have omitted elemental and human
factors, which can express and manifest themselves better through the
vehicle of Anarchism. I am not saying Marx was wrong. Obviously he was
very largely right. I am suggesting that he did not say the last word
about the individual and collective "unconscious" when he interpreted so
scientifically the consciousness of the industrial worker.
If we compare the Irish and Russian revolutions, the former has two
advantages over the more exclusively proletarian nature of the latter.
It preceded it in time, the Dublin rising of 1916 antedating even the
Kerensky Revolution by about a year, and it is surpassed in its
voluntarism. It was essentially an insurrection of a conscious and
voluntary minority forestalling and creating mass conditions rather than
await their ripening. If Nationalism has any function in paving the way
for International Revolution, Ireland showed that function at its best.
In Ireland, Republican Nationalism combined with Irish International
Socialism (Connolly and the Citizen Army) against the common Imperial
enemy, and in so doing made the only repudiation of the Great War in
Western Europe long before the chaos and social military breakdown
caused by the war compelled that repudiation, as in Russia, and later to
some extent in Germany.
This voluntarism, scorning to calculate consequences and creative of new
mass conditions, is the essence of Anarchism with its distrust of
majorities and "l'illusion majoritaire" and its respect of spiritual
quality rather than numerical quantity. The Anarchist recognises,
implicitly if not explicitly, that there are two reasons, one emotional
and creative, arising from inner spontaneity, the other "rational" and
dead because its premises are in the past or present status quo and it
is therefore reduced to calculate consequences in terms of the past or
present status quo rather than create new forms.
The State worship of Communist and Socialism has its source in the
failure to lay enough stress on the inner spontaneity of people, and a
consequent enslavement to outer externalised forms, such as the State as
the source and key to power. The people's only road to real freedom lies
in the voluntary co-ordination of their maximum individual spontaneity.
All social panaceas that seek to supersede that co-ordinated
spontaneity, even as a means to the alleged end of restoring it, must
lead not to freedom but to the loss of such freedom as the people have
achieved and to increasing depths of tyranny.
Having brought the Anarchism v. Socialism argument, with which this
article opened, to its psychological and philosophical head, let us
apply it to recent history in Spain, recent history still pregnant with
problems of world-shaking importance.
If people's inner spontaneity is a factor of importance in revolution,
increasing in direct ratio with the mechanical perfection and
international consolidation of the forces of Fascist repression, are we
not apt to overlook the surprises in the unknown destiny of people in
our scientific forecasts of the mechanical destination of society? May
not our oversight damage our insight into unexpected factors in
revolutionary development? We must not divorce the spiritual qualities
of a people from our scientific assessment of their place in economic
evolution. Almost we might say that if human spontaneity has to become
more dynamic and intense to triumph over intensified and universalised
reaction, each succeeding revolution must be more Anarchist in its
principle and practice than the last. Socialistic centralisation would
thus become counter-revolutionary in effect and have latent affinity
with counter-revolutionary forces, no matter how revolutionary its
slogans or even its intentions.
Now Spain is deeply impregnated with the psychology, the principle and
the practice of Anarchism. It would, I think, be false to insulate this
principle and practice of Anarchism from the Spanish racial
characteristic of human dignity. The sense of human dignity seems to be
consubstantial with every Spaniard and undoubtedly it inspires the
Anarchist goal of general freedom and solidarity and the educational
voluntary associative methods leading towards it. The situation in Spain
today compels us to ask the question: What is the surest guarantee
against the triumph of Fascism? Is it the Anarchist psychology and
tradition of the Spanish people expressing itself in its own
Anarcho-Syndicalist forms or is it centralised State Socialism imposed,
or alleged to be imposed, in the interests of maximum military
efficiency and the maximum efficiency of production to feed the fighting
fronts? May not this efficiency be too dearly bought, if it is bought at
the price of damping the revolutionary enthusiasm of the Spanish people
and splitting their revolutionary unity even in the interests of a
unified command? One might even add with trepidation a further question:
Whither is this State centralisation in the interests of Spanish
"democracy" leading? We are assured it is aimed at, and will lead to the
speedy defeat of Franco, Have not the Second and Third Internationals
agreed to meet to further that most desirable object? So, I note, have
the Ambassadors of the capitalist Powers already met and conferred with
the Valencia Government. Let us hope they have agreed to co-operate in
the speedy defeat of Franco. That, however, is uncertain. One thing is
certain. Anarchist leaders have been displaced, imprisoned, murdered,
groups of Anarchists have been massacred by Socialist-Communists and the
Anarchist idea of revolution, collectivisation of industry and as far as
possible the agricultural village-communities, is being stopped and
undone. The Anarchists had defeated not only Franco in Catalonia but had
superseded the economic order, which Franco is fighting to save and
restore. Now the Socialist-Communists are saving and restoring it
instead, not for him, of course, but to speed up his defeat. Meanwhile
large sections of the Spanish people have misunderstood; things were too
puzzling.
When they saw their workers' military and economic committees dissolved,
their workers' militia abolished, themselves disarmed and finally the
telephone building which they had won by repeated attack from the
Fascists in July, forcibly seized from their syndicate by the Govt
assault guards, they came out on the streets and erected barricades.
They thought their revolution was being destroyed instead of saved.
Their misunderstanding was increased by the arrival of French and
British warships in Barcelona and the landing of French marines, while
the open allies of Franco, the Germans and Italians, continued to
blockade them outside the three mile limit. The strange coincidence of
the arrival of the French and British warships just at the moment when
the workers came out on the streets to save a revolution they believed
to be threatened, has been mixed up in their simple proletarian minds
with the previous fact that the French and British had been blockading
them all along under cover of a non-intervention pact and that the
Valencia Government sent troops and threatened to send more to suppress
what they thought was the defence of their revolution.
These simple people have been called "uncontrollables." In point of fact
they were very easily controlled and went back to their work after six
days of almost entirely defensive fighting. One can only hope they will
not regret their docility.
I note that the epithet "uncontrollable" is reserved for my Anarchist
comrades. Their fellow criminals in the joint misunderstanding are
mostly "Trotskyites." A "Trotskyite", so far as I understand the term is
someone who thinks Marx meant what he said when he spoke of the
necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the transition
period from Capitalism to Communism. Mr. Emile Burns, in his book
Communism, Capitalism, and the Transition, has put the matter in a
nutshell, not only as regards what should happen in theory but what did
actually happen in the Russian Revolution. He might have been writing of
the revolution that the simple Spanish "Trotskyites" thought they were
defending. "All executive positions," writes Mr. Burns, " which had
formerly been filled by appointment from above had to be made elective
and the elected persons had to be subject to recall at any moment by the
bodies that elected them; therefore from the first day of the revolution
the command of armed forces was taken over by elected deputies; the
factory workers were armed and fought all the most vital battles; the
officials in State Departments were replaced by workers; the managers in
the factories were replaced or controlled by councils of workers; the
existing Law Courts were abolished and Workers' Courts with elected
judges took their place; wherever Soviet order was established, elected
workers' Committees took the place of appointed officials."
Now that is precisely the kind of order that the Spanish "Trotskyites",
in common with other Spanish "uncontrollables", thought they were
fighting to preserve and maintain from May 2nd to 7th in Barcelona.
But I would hate to be thought a "Trotskyite", for I remember it was
Trotsky who helped to smash all that sort of thing at Kronstadt. So I
must perforce be an "uncontrollable."
What is the difference between a "Trotskyite" and an "uncontrollable"? I
expect I am simple, too, but I will give the only definition my
simplicity can rise to. A Trotskyite is a Marxist who has stuck to Marx,
who believes for instance, that it is their converging or conflicting
economic interests which will determine sooner or later - perhaps
sooner, alas! - whether the Capitalist "democracies" will or will not
help the Spanish people, led by the present Valencia Government, to
defeat Franco and the relics of the clerical aristocratic order, which
he seeks to preserve.
Not being a Marxist, I offer no opinion.
And an "uncontrollable" is an Anarchist who has stuck to Anarchy and who
is not, therefore, primarily concerned with the shades or strata of
Capitalism, but with revolution by direct action; who believes with Marx
indeed that emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers
themselves, but with Bakunin, Kropotkin and Maletesta, that free
humanity must be substituted for the State, and that when Anarchists
take part in a Government, they allow themselves to be deflected from
their proper task and become corrupted by association with an instrument
of tyranny. The first false step in Spain was the association of
Anarchist leaders with the Government and the State. Had they given all
their energies to co-ordination and unified command of CNT Collectives
and Anarchist military units, instead of sacrificing Anarchist
principles and control to compromises with a Government, the
uncontrollables would have remained in control of themselves and ready
for co-ordinated action with other sections instead of being sacrificed
to a State dictatorship through a political party.