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Title: Red Emma and the Reds Author: Anarcho Date: July 7, 2008 Language: en Topics: Emma Goldman, a reply Source: Retrieved on 28th January 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=96 Notes: A reply to a Leninist (ISO) article on Emma Goldman and her politics. It corrects the distortions and selective quoting, as well as showing her support for syndicalism. It shows that rather than being an elitist individualist, her politics were about collective class struggle while defending individuality. In other words, like all communist-anarchists, her ideas were rooted in both solidarity and freedom. It shows that it is the Leninist tradition which is elitist, before concluding that Goldman’s politics have important ideas for modern radicals.
Given that anarchist ideas are on the rise (particularly in the
“anti-capitalist” movement), it comes as no surprise that the guardians
of Leninist dogma seek to discredit anarchism. To do so, they rarely
ever attack anarchist ideas as such. Instead, they concentrate on
individuals and their personal failings. When that does not suffice,
they stoop to distortion, half-truths and even inventions to combat the
anarchist menace. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve fact
checked Leninist articles and discovered the references provided rarely
support the claims made (and, on numerous occasions, say the exact
opposite). [1] Which, of course, seems strange: after all, if anarchism
was so bad, they would not need to doctor the facts so.
The latest in a long series of such distortion dressed up as factual
analysis is Lance Selfa’s article “EMMA GOLDMAN: A life of controversy”
in International Socialist Review (Issue 34, March-April 2004). Even
after all these decades, the anarchist Emma Goldman still provokes, to
quote Lance Selfa’s deeply inaccurate article, “passionate political
debate.” For good reason: Red Emma’s ideas and life still inspire. Her
criticism’s of capitalism and the state still ring true, as do her
criticism’s of Marxism and Leninism. Undoubtedly, they will inspire a
new generation of radicals to embrace anarchism. And that, for
Leninists, is the problem.
Perhaps unsurprising, given the track record of the British parent party
of Selfa’s organisation (the Socialist Workers Party) attacks on
anarchism, his article is, to say the least, economical with the truth.
Needless to say, it will be impossible to correct every distortion, so I
will concentrate on just a few. Moreover, I will concentrate on the
references he himself uses in order to show how he cherry-picks
“evidence” to use against Emma, suppressing key aspects of her ideas and
life in order to distort her politics and, by implication, anarchism in
general.
The point of Selfa’s article is to evaluate anarchism: “what interests
us here is whether her politics, as reflected in her actions and her
writings, should guide a new generation of radicals today. By looking at
her ideas, we want to determine if the ideology she spent her whole life
promoting – anarchism – provides a guide to action for people who want
to change the world.” Sadly, he fails to do this, preferring quoting out
of context, half-truths and down-right inventions rather than presenting
a clear and honest account of her ideas. This is to be expected for if
he did present an honest account of Emma’s ideas, his readers would soon
realise that she was right not only about anarchism about also about
Selfa’s own brand of authoritarian politics and political tradition.
Ironically, he claims that “socialists” (as if Emma was not a
libertarian socialist!) have “a strong critique of anarchism.” If they
did, then Selfa would have no need to distort the truth as he does.
A good example of Selfa’s technique can be seen from his claim that Emma
held “ultraleft” positions. He states that it “was telling that the
first speeches she gave, under Most’s influence, were ‘about the waste
of energy and time the eight-hour struggle involved, scoffing at the
stupidity of the workers who fought for such trifles.’”
Based on these quotes from chapter five of Emma’s autobiography, “Living
My Life” he summarises that “so early on, Goldman displayed a trademark
of her politics throughout her life – a purist, ultraleft position on a
number of the questions of the day.”
For some strange reason, Selfa fails to mention that she changed her
opinion on this quite quickly. In fact, it took three meetings for her
to do so. As she recounted in the very same chapter of Living My Life,
when an old man questioned her position “his clear analysis of the
principle invoked in the eight-hour struggle, brought home to me the
falsity of Most’s position.” Thus her “first public experience” broke
her allegiance to what Selfa’s uses as an example of a “trademark of her
politics throughout her life.” [2]
Given that Emma wrote this in the very same chapter of her autobiography
as the quote Selfa provides it does not take a genius to discover why he
fails to mention it. To do so would be to expose his assertions to the
grim light of reality and show that Selfa’s proclaimed “trademark” did
not, in fact, exist. And so the fact that Emma quickly rejected this
“purist, ultraleft position” after discussing it with the masses he
claims she disdained goes unmentioned. Thus while Selfa uses this
example to illustrate her “earliest incarnation as ‘Red Emma’ ... which
lasts until about 1906” he fails to mention that she held this position
for three public meetings at the start of a career which lasted over six
decades. Hardly a “trademark” by anyone’s standard.
This is not an isolated example. Selfa systematically suppresses any and
all information on Emma’s ideas and life which fail to fit into his
distorted vision of Emma and, by extension, anarchism.
Which is to be expected, given the assumptions of the “socialist
tradition” Selfa identifies himself with, namely the neo-Trotskyism of
Tony Cliff. It is well known that, like most Leninists, the followers of
Cliff think that anarchists can be divided into two camps.
First, there is the anarchists proper. People like Bakunin, Kropotkin
and Emma are usually lumped into this camp. They are labelled “elitist”
and “individualist” and, it is asserted, they are utterly indifferent to
the importance of collective working class struggle and organisation.
Then there is the second camp, the “anarcho-syndicalists” (who are
somewhat patronisingly labelled the “best of the anarchists”). These are
generally limited to those anarchists who became Leninists, people like
Victor Serge and some French syndicalists. [3]
Both camps are mutually exclusive, regardless of the facts. In the
Leninist schema, camp one rejects “mass, collective struggle” and
working class organisation in spite of their well known support for such
things. Selfa’s essay is rooted in this utterly inaccurate
classification. This explains his total avoidance of Emma’s articles and
arguments for syndicalism and mass, collective struggle. That would
clash with his ideological assumptions about her and anarchism and so,
understandably, is placed into Memory Hole.
Of course, Selfa is aware that few real anarchists actually fit into the
model he is trying to paint by his distorting of Emma’s life and ideas.
He plays the usual Leninist card by mentioning that some anarchists do
stuff he approves of. For example, he somewhat lamely argues that “while
individual anarchists participated fully in trade union life and
issue-oriented campaigns for free speech and the like, their philosophy
impeded their ability to connect the immediate day-to-day issues with
the struggle for an anarchist future. No national anarchist organisation
existed.”
Obviously the lack of a “national anarchist organisation” is irrelevant
to whether anarchists were connected to “day-to-day issues.” Equally, if
“some” anarchists “participated fully” in the labour movement it hardly
follows that this is despite their politics rather than because of them.
Given that, as Kropotkin put, “Revolutionary Anarchist Communist
propaganda within the Labour Unions had always been a favourite mode of
action in the Federalist or ‘Bakuninist’ section of the International
Working Men’s Association” it would appear that anarchists did have a
means of connecting their current struggles with revolution. [4]
This can be seen from Emma’s vocal and consistent support for
syndicalism, a support Selfa consistently fails to mention. However, by
mentioning that “some” anarchists did not fit into his model of
anarchism, Selfa can defend his inventions by saying that any anarchist
which disproves his theory is simply an exception. In reality, of
course, it is his theory which is wrong and his “some” anarchists were,
in fact, the majority. And this majority included Emma, whose arguments
for syndicalism and economic direct action and organisation Selfa cannot
bring himself to mention.
This is understandable as Selfa’s aim is clear, to paint Emma as an
ineffectual elitist. Thus he claims that her fans “ignore her own
elitist politics” and he is at pains to paint a picture of her as being
indifferent to working class people and their struggles and
organisation. Selfa asserts that she was “an individualist who believed
that the enlightened few made social change. For her, the masses were an
abstraction, or often, a curse.” The article concludes that we should
come, like the “best of the anarchists” and rank and file wobblies “to
the conclusion that only collective, mass struggle [can] attain
socialism”
Thus Selfa claims two things, that as an elitist Emma ignored
collective, mass struggle as the means to achieve a free society. Both
claims are related and both are false. It is easy to see why when we do
what Selfa consistently does not, discuss Emma’s syndicalist ideas. Once
we do that, we can easily dismiss the claim of elitism he throws at her.
Selfa asserts that anarchist “philosophy impeded their ability to
connect the immediate day-to-day issues with the struggle for an
anarchist future.” Such an assertion could only be made by ignoring key
aspects of Emma’s politics. For all his claim to be “looking at her
ideas,” Selfa does not once mention her consistent and vocal support for
syndicalism, for, as she put it, “direct , revolutionary, economic
action” by labour unions. For Emma, direct action “is the logical
consistent method of Anarchism” and was to be applied “against the
authority in the shop ... against the authority of the law” and “against
the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code.” [5]
Clearly, Selfa considers mentioning her classic essay “Syndicalism: Its
Theory and Practice” would simply confuse the reader. After all, how
could an “elitist” who thought the “enlightened few made social change”
also subscribe to the ideas of “the best of the anarchists”? Best then
not to mention that Emma considered syndicalism to be (“in essence”) the
“economic expression of Anarchism” and as well as means of “daily
warfare against capitalism” one of its “most vital efforts” was “to
prepare the workers ... for their role in a free society ...so that when
labour finally takes over production and distribution, the people will
be fully prepared to manage successfully their own affairs.” Emma
wholehearted supported direct action (“the assertion of the economic
power of the workers”) and the general strike. [6]
Thus Emma stressed the need for collective class struggle and
organisation, urging workers to form militant unions to both combat and
replace capitalism. As she put it a few years after her essay on
syndicalism:
“It is this war of classes that we must concentrate upon, and in that
connection the war against false values, against evil institutions,
against all social atrocities. Those who appreciate the urgent need of
co-operating in great struggles ... must organise the preparedness of
the masses for the overthrow of both capitalism and the state.
Industrial and economic preparedness is what the workers need. That
alone leads to revolution at the bottom ... That alone will give the
people the means to take their children out of the slums, out of the
sweat shops and the cotton mills ... That alone leads to economic and
social freedom, and does away with all wars, all crimes, and all
injustice.” [7]
It seems strange that Selfa does not mention this, after all he quotes
from and references the same book (Red Emma Speaks) these quotes are
from. Nor can this be considered as a new development. After all, the
Haymarket Martyrs who so inspired Emma advocated and practised what was
to become known as “syndicalism.”
It does not take a genius to know why Selfa fails to inform his readers
of this essential aspect of Emma’s politics. Unsurprisingly, this is not
the only aspects of Emma’s ideas and life he fails to inform his
readers.
While arguing that she was an elitist who ignored the masses, he time
and time again has to acknowledge that Emma brought her ideas to the
general public. Rather than ignore the masses, she sought to spread her
ideas amongst them. He states, for example, that “Goldman’s speeches and
Mother Earth attempted to reach a wider audience” and Mother Earth was
used “to propagate their [Emma’s and Berkman’s] particular version of
anarchism,” an anarchism Selfa makes no attempt to discuss beyond a few
superficial denunciations of “elitism.” Looking at the contents of
Mother Earth, it can hardly be said to have ignored the “social
question” nor the mass struggles of the working class. [8] And even he
has to mention that she and Berkman formed the Non-Conscription League
in 1917 against the war, yet he fails to draw the obvious conclusion
from this.
Clearly, neither Mother Earth nor Berkman’s or Emma’s politics ignore
the masses. Rather, it is Selfa who ignores key aspects of her ideas in
his essay. Unsurprisingly, therefore, his own essay refutes his
argument. To get around this obvious contradiction, Selfa resorts to
failing to understand English. He argues that “other anarchists who were
more oriented on the working class accused her of going too far to seek
allies in the middle class” and quotes Emma defending herself as
follows: “The men and women who first take up the banner of a new
liberating idea generally emanate from the so-called respectable
classes…. [T]o limit oneself to propaganda exclusively among the
oppressed does not always bring the desired results.” Does Selfa not
know what “exclusively” or “limit” mean? Emma is clearly arguing that
anarchist propaganda must be directed to all interested people and not
purely to the oppressed. It is a jump of epic proportions to, as Selfa
does, assert that this meant that for Emma “broadening her appeal was to
appeal to the cultural Bohemia.”
The reader need not look far to get an idea of the activist Selfa calls
“Emma the Bohemian anarchist” did to spread the anarchist message. They
could read, for example, one of Selfa’s sources. In Living My Life, Emma
recounts that on her return to New York in 1909 “new struggles absorbed
me. There was the shirtwaist-makers strike, involving fifteen thousand
employees, and that of the steel-workers at McKeesport ... The
anarchists always being among the first to respond to every need, I had
to address numerous meeting and visit labour bodies to plead the cause
of their fellow unionists.” [9] And this is someone Selfa claims was not
“oriented on the working class”!
And should I remind our comrade that Lenin, like Emma, argued that
radicals should spread their ideas in all classes of society? Has he not
read “What is to be Done”? Perhaps not, as he would be less likely to
conclude Emma was an elitist after reading that true homage to the role
an elite vanguard plays in educating the masses. Or, perhaps, he is
arguing that working class people have no interest in art, sex
education, women’s liberation and the other non-economic class struggle
issues covered by Mother Earth and Emma? If so, then it is he who is the
true elitist. Be what may, the fact is that Emma, like (the
middle-class) Lenin, argued that radicals should not focus “exclusively”
on the oppressed and be willing to let non-working class people join the
movement. Hardly an example of “going too far to seek allies in the
middle class.”
Given that Leninism is based on elitist principles and glorifies the
role of the vanguard party, it seems strange that Selfa takes Goldman to
task for “elitism.” He notes that “Goldman never turned away from the
idea that heroic individuals, not masses, make history” and quotes from
her 1910 essay “Minorities Versus Majorities” to prove this. Strangely
enough, he does not actually refute the arguments Emma expounds in that
essay. He does, needless to say, misrepresent them. The aim of that
essay was to state the obvious — that the mass is not the source for new
ideas. Rather, new, progressive, ideas are the product of minorities and
which then spread to the majority by the actions of those minorities.
Even social movements and revolutions start when a minority takes
action. Trade unionism, for example, was (and still is) a minority
movement in most countries. Support for radical and sexual equality was
long despised (or, at best, ignored) by the majority and it took a
resolute minority to advance that cause and spread the idea in the
majority. The Russian Revolution did not start with the majority. It
started when a minority of women workers (ignoring the advice of the
local Bolsheviks) took to the streets and from these hundreds grew into
a movement of hundreds of thousands.
I could go on, but the facts are clearly on the side of Emma, not Selfa.
Given that Emma is expounding such an obvious law of social evolution,
it seems incredulous that Selfa has a problem with it. This is
particularly the case as Marxism (particularly its Leninist version)
implicitly recognises this. As Marx argued, the ruling ideas of any
epoch are those of the ruling class. Likewise for Emma: “Human thought
has always been falsified by tradition and custom, and perverted false
education in the interests of those who held power ... by the State and
the ruling class.” Hence the “continuous struggle” against “the State
and even against ‘society,’ that is, against the majority subdued and
hypnotised by the State and State worship.” If this were not the case,
as Emma notes, no state could save itself or private property from the
masses. [10] Hence the need for people to break from their conditioning,
to act for themselves. As Emma argued. She saw direct action as “the
salvation of man” as it “necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and
courage.” [11]
Thus Emma was not dismissing the masses, just stressing the obvious:
namely that socialism is a process of self-liberation and the task of
the conscious minority is to encourage this process by encouraging the
direct action of the masses. Hence Emma’s support for syndicalism and
direct action, a support Selfa fails to inform his readers of.
So was this position the elitism Selfa claims? No, far from it. What did
Emma mean? In a debate between her and a socialist she used the Lawrence
strike “as an example of direct action.” [12] The workers in one of the
mills started the strike by walking out. The next day five thousand at
another mill struck and marched to another mill and soon doubled their
number. The strikers soon had to supply food and fuel for 50,000. It was
the direct action of a minority which started the strike (a strike Emma
supported and fund raised for). Emma herself wrote of the general strike
be started by “one industry or by a small, conscious minority among the
workers” which “is soon taken up by many other industries, spreading
like wildfire.” [13] Is Selfa really arguing that this was “elitist”? If
so, then every spontaneous revolt is “elitist.”
It seems obvious that Selfa takes Emma to task for clearly stating what
he, in his own way, agrees with. By joining a vanguard party, Selfa
agrees with Emma. Every time he praises a struggle, strike or
demonstration which involves only a minority of the population then he
agrees with Emma. Every time he denounces a “backward” attitude within
the masses, he agrees with Emma. Every time he attacks left-wingers for
adjusting themselves to a reactionary “popular will” he agrees with
Emma. And every time the “moral majority” call for the suppression of
radicals, denounce “Reds” and attack unions, Emma is vindicated and
Selfa exposed as talking nonsense.
So why the hypocritical denunciations of Emma as an elitist by someone
who subscribes to the far more elitist politics of Leninism? As Emma
noted in her essay, the “Socialist demagogues know that [her argument is
true] as well as I, but they maintain the myth of the virtues of the
majority, because their very scheme means the perpetuation of power” and
“authority, coercion and dependence rest on the mass, but never
freedom.” [14] What with Selfa’s call for a “revolutionary workers’
government,” she is obviously still right. By urging that power be
concentrated into the hands of a few party leaders, he is implicitly
arguing that the masses cannot manage their own lives nor their own
revolution. The glorification of the masses is simply a means of
justifying minority power. As Lenin put it when he replied to a critic
in 1920 that ”[h]e says we understand by the words dictatorship of
proletariat what is actually the dictatorship of its determined and
conscious minority. And that is the fact.” This “minority ... may be
called a party,” Lenin stressed. [15] Not that Lenin was an elitist, of
course.
Somewhat embarrassingly for Selfa, Trotsky (a person whom Selfa
contrasts favourably with Emma despite the fact he was a practitioner
and advocate of party dictatorship) agreed with Emma on the importance
of minorities. As he put it during the debate on Kronstadt in the late
1930s, a “revolution is ‘made’ directly by a minority. The success of a
revolution is possible, however, only where this minority finds more or
less support, or at least friendly neutrality, on the part of the
majority. The shift in different stages of the revolution ... is
directly determined by changing political relations between the minority
and the majority, between the vanguard and the class.” [16] Trotsky did
not explicitly explain in that article what would happen if the majority
rejected the minority whose “support” had hoisted into power. A few
years later he did:
“The very same masses are at different times inspired by different moods
and objectives. It is just for this reason that a centralised
organisation of the vanguard is indispensable. Only a party, wielding
the authority it has won, is capable of overcoming the vacillation of
the masses themselves ... if the dictatorship of the proletariat means
anything at all, then it means that the vanguard of the proletariat is
armed with the resources of the state in order to repel dangers,
including those emanating from the backward layers of the proletariat
itself.” [17]
Of course, everyone is “backward” compared to the vanguard and Trotsky
is providing the ideological justification for party dictatorship. And
unsurprisingly Trotsky, like all leading Bolsheviks, had been a vocal
advocate of “the dictatorship of the party” for some time (from at least
1919). It is clear that Trotsky is simply acknowledging that the fate of
the Kronstadt rebels awaits the majority if it rejects the vanguard, the
Leninist ruling minority. Not that this makes Trotsky an elitist for
Selfa, of course.
To summarise, Selfa’s attack on Emma’s supposed “elitism” simply
backfires. Not only is it factually nonsense but in reality it is his
own political tradition which is elitist. It advocates the rule of the
majority by a small minority of party leaders. That these leaders talk
of and praise the masses whom they govern should not fool us for one
moment. Nor should Selfa’s cherry-picking evidence.
The first form of Socialism Emma critiqued was, of course, social
democracy, not Leninism. Selfa discusses “Goldman and American
socialism” and notes that “two strains of Goldman’s thought – elitism
and utopianism – put her at odds with the first attempts to form the
socialist party.” He talks about the rise of Social Democracy in America
and yet significantly fails to indicate that “attempting to assemble a
socialist party that would reach a mass audience” by means of
electioneering provided Bakunin, rather than Marx, right. As such,
Selfa, not Emma, is the utopian.
According to Selfa, Emma “argued that workers’ political action – that
is, any participation in electoral activity – was a betrayal of ideals.”
This is a half-truth, which becomes a whole lie. Yes, Emma (like many
anarchists) opposed “political action” on principle. However, this is
hardly the end of it. Emma, like other anarchists, also argued against
it in practical terms too. She correctly argued that such action saw
radicals “caught in the political trap.” This meant that such activity
promoted reformism in the ranks of labour, replacing principled
socialism with opportunism and vote chasing. She argued that “class
consciousness” could only develop by means of solidarity of interests as
“demonstrated in the Syndicalist and every other revolutionary
movement.” [18]
The history of pre-war “revolutionary” socialism confirms Emma’s
argument, an argument Selfa fails to mention or address. Just as the
antics of his sects parent organisation, the Socialist Workers Party, in
Britain today with the “Respect Unity Coalition” confirm Emma’s
argument. The SWP is happy to let Respect water down socialist politics
to gain more members and votes. Not that Selfa is not aware of Emma’s
argument against “political action.” He does quote from her essay, but
only to paint her as an elitist. He simply decides it is not in the best
interests of his readers to confuse them with an accurate and honest
account of the nature of her argument. Which is nice of him to save his
readers the heavy task of making their own minds up whether Emma was
right or not.
Ironically, he admits that “much of what Goldman said about the
Socialist Party was true.” Rest assured, however, as “the left of the
Socialist Party” also “criticised the large number of middle-class
members in the party, its lack of coherence, and its character” as well
as slamming “the decision of the party executive in 1912 to expel anyone
who advocated ‘direct action’ to take on the bosses – a move aimed
against supporters of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
in the party’s ranks.” He somewhat lamely argues that while “the left
made these points to win wider layers of workers within the Socialist
Party to its positions – and later to the necessity for forming an
explicitly revolutionary party – Goldman used them to attack socialism
in general.”
Which ignores two things. Firstly, the Socialist Party was meant to be
“an explicitly revolutionary party.” Years of electioneering had eroded
that position, as Emma correctly argued. Secondly, while “the left” may
have attacked the rise of reformism within the party, they could not
explain why it happened in the first place. Unlike Emma, who could
provide an analysis of tactics which explained the shift towards
reformism, “the left” could only seek to reproduce the same tactics and
hope they had a different result. Just as the Leninists of today are
doing, ironically enough.
This inability of Marxists to learn from history seems to have a long
legacy. Emma recounts how in one debate with the Socialists her opponent
“conveniently ignored” all the “historic data and current facts I
advanced to prove the deterioration of socialism in Germany, the
betrayal on the part of most socialists who had achieved power, the
tendency in their ranks everywhere towards petty reforms.” He simply
“repeated verbatim what he had said in his opening round.” [19] How
little things have changed!
So while Selfa summarises that “in her attacks on socialism, she
displayed the same elitist disdain for the masses she showed in other
contexts” he does not attempt to refute her analysis. Given its
validity, it is unsurprising that Selfa distorts it by ignoring its
central and most important aspect.
Selfa goes on to compare the size of the Socialist Party and the
circulation its paper to that of the anarchist movement and Emma’s
Mother Earth. So, apparently, size does matter when evaluating the
revolutionary potential of a movement. What matters if “almost 120,000”
were in the SP in 1912 if that party was reformist and expelling its
militant wing? Selfa does not ask the question.
He justifies his fixation on size by asserting that the “relative
influence of socialism and anarchism in the first decade of the
twentieth century spoke to the degree to which the two sets of politics
addressed the real questions that faced ordinary people at the time.”
Conversely, perhaps, it shows the willingness of socialism to become
reformist in order to attract votes — precisely what Emma so correctly
analysed. Moreover, given that Republican and Democratic politicians got
significantly more votes than the Socialists, does that mean for Selfa,
these capitalist parties “addressed the real questions that faced
ordinary people at the time”? It is doubtful, but logically he would
have to argue so. And will Selfa now join the Democratic Party or the
Greens? After all, they are much larger than his sect and, by the logic
of his argument, much more revolutionary than his branch of Leninism.
Equally, does the vastly larger size of Stalinist parties compared to
Trotskyist ones from the 1930s to 1980s means that Stalinism, not
Trotskyism, “addressed the real questions that faced ordinary people at
the time”?
So, clearly, size does not matter when evaluating the revolutionary
credentials of a movement. If it did, the Selfa would have to conclude
his own politics are irrelevant and do not express the interests of the
working class.
But, then again, Selfa does narrow down his terms of comparison. This is
because Emma’s activity was not limited to just Mother Earth. “Interest
in our ideas,” she noted, “was growing throughout the country. New
anarchist publications began to appear: Revolt in New York ...the Alarm
in Chicago ... and the Blast in San Francisco ... Directly or indirectly
it was connected with all of them.” The latter “was closest to her
heart” and it was edited by Berkman, who “had always wanted a forum from
which to speak to the masses, an anarchist weekly labour paper to arouse
the workers to conscious revolutionary activity.” [20] Needless to say,
Selfa never mentions these other papers Emma was involved with.
Unsurprisingly, as her support for the Blast, for example, would be hard
to square with his attempt to paint Emma as being uninteresting in
reaching the masses.
Given Selfa’s highly selective approach to Emma’s life and ideas, we
discover that he spends some time on “propaganda of the deed.” This, of
course, fits into his narrative of anarchism as “individualism” somewhat
better than Goldman’s syndicalism and so is stressed. Yet even on this
subject, reality of Emma’s politics can be seen through the whitewash he
covers them with.
Failing to indicate the collective struggle aspects of anarchism, Selfa
can therefore summarise by arguing that “the anarchism that Goldman
first subscribed to exalted this kind of individual act.” Yet he then
contradicts himself by quoting Emma issuing a leaflet that was “a
flaming call to the men of Homestead to throw off the yoke of
capitalism, to use their present struggle as a stepping-stone to the
destruction of the wage system.” Clearly, then, Emma was hardly ignorant
of the need for mass struggle and collective action. But rather than
discuss the interactions between her support for mass direct action and
propaganda of the deed, he instead focuses on Berkman’s attempted
assassination of Henry Frick.
It should be stressed that Selfa’s summary of why the act happened is at
odds with the rationale given by Goldman. In Living my Life, Emma is
quite clear that the assassination of Frick was not seen as ushering in
a revolution nor as a substitute for mass action. Rather it was an act
of revenge, an attempt to make Frick responsible for his decisions and
draw attention “to the real cause of the Homestead struggle.” [21] It
was not expected to led to revolution. As such, it suggests a distinct
failure of Selfa to understand that support for Berkman’s act did not
mean opposition to the strike, to mass, collective action. His
one-dimensional analysis — either for the “individual act” or for
“collective action” — simply fails to do justice to Emma’s ideas, i.e.
the obvious fact that you can support both and assign different roles to
each one.
Similarly, Selfa fails to mention that anarchists turned against the
idea of “propaganda of the deed” a long time before Trotsky wrote his
pamphlet against the Russian Populists. For example, Kropotkin argued
that a “structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed by a
few kilos of explosives.” One of Kropotkin’s biographers summarised his
position as being in favour of “mass resistance to the oppression of the
state, collective action against tyranny, and the spontaneous violence
of the people during a revolution. Masses, not individuals, make the
social revolution.” [22] During the height of support for “propaganda of
the deed” in anarchist circles, Kropotkin always stressed the need for
mass workers organisation and struggle. [23]
Given the incorrect assumptions he is working under, he quotes a
subsequent article by Most and Goldman: “We believe Anarchy – which is
freedom of each individual from harmful constraint by others, whether
these others be individuals or an organized government – cannot be
brought about without violence, and this violence is the same which won
at [the ancient battles of] Thermopylae and Marathon.” He notes that
“this seems to move away from the idea of individual acts of violence
and toward the idea, more accepted by Marxists, that force plays an
important role as the ‘midwife of history.’” Of course, it is nothing of
the kind. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance of the logic of
“propaganda of the deed” would know that such acts were seen as a
complement of mass revolutionary action, not its replacement. As such,
Goldman’s arguments are consistent with her previous ideas, not a “move
away.” And, as is obvious, is consistent with previous and subsequent
anarchist politics.
Clearly, Selfa is distorting Emma’s ideas on this subject, like so many
others, to fit into his ideology.
Selfa is on firmer ground when he argues that Emma did not form a
national anarchist organisation nor “attempt to build an anarchist
organisation in the way Debs’ speeches aimed to build the Socialist
Party.” Yet he has to admit that “local anarchist groups would sponsor
her talks,” which suggests that her activities and speeches built a
movement rather than a party. As is clear from Living My Life, Emma
spent a great deal of time travelling the country helping these local
groups who would also sell Mother Earth and produce their own
newspapers.
Selfa argues that while “decentralism may have been one of the
principles that she upheld ... it made for an incoherent movement that
operated as a collection of small groups.” Yet the leadership of the
centralised Socialist Party, as he acknowledged, sought to expel their
radical members. It also grew, as he acknowledges, increasingly
reformist as time went on. And has Selfa forgotten that he had just
lambasted the blessed Socialist Party for “its lack of coherence”?
Clearly Debs’ Socialist Party suffered from some of the same problems he
accuses the anarchist movement of having. While it cannot be denied that
a lack of federation can cause an apparently “incoherent” movement to
develop, the sad fact is that the Socialist alternative was much worse.
And, perhaps, the attempts by the right-wing of the party to expel the
members who supported direct action can be seen as an example of
imposing “coherence” from above? Rosa Luxemberg was aware of this
process, attacking Lenin’s vanguardism as being a means to “enslave a
young labour movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power.” It
would be a “bureaucratic straightjacket, which will immobilise the
movement and turn it into an automation manipulated by a Central
Committee.” [24]
As Lenin put it:
“Bureaucracy versus democracy is in fact centralism versus autonomism;
it is the organisational principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy as
opposed to the organisational principle of opportunist Social-Democracy.
The latter strives to proceed from the bottom upward, and, therefore,
wherever possible ... upholds autonomism and ‘democracy,’ carried (by
the overzealous) to the point of anarchism. The former strives to
proceed from the top downward...” [25]
Given that Selfa places himself in the tradition of “socialism from
below,” it seems strange that he recommends an organisational method
rooted in “the top downward.” Any such “coherence” so created would be
by means of “socialism from above” and doomed to failure. All it would
create would be, as in Russia, a new boss class.
As such, while there is a distinct need for anarchist groups to federate
together to be effective and co-ordinate their activities, Selfa’s
proposed cure of a vanguard party is worse than the disease. [26]
Which brings us to a key rationale of his article, to attack Emma’s
analysis of the Russian Revolution and the role and ideology of the
Bolsheviks. As Selfa notes, how Emma “responded to the Russian
Revolution and the Spanish Revolution defines not only her politics, but
also places in sharp relief the differences between socialism and
anarchism. In fact, the divide between socialism and anarchism that
opened up because of these two events largely shape the differences that
still exist between the two forces.” Ironically, how Selfa does this is
far more illuminating on the differences than he would like. Simply put,
his defence of Bolshevism rests on inaccuracies, illogical arguments and
hypocrisy. However much he may seek to deny it, Emma’s account of why,
when and how the revolution degenerated is much more accurate than his
and, furthermore, been confirmed by recent research.
Even Selfa has to admit that Emma was “willing to accept” that the
problems and evils of the Bolshevik regime were “small matters compared
to defending the revolution against counterrevolution, and working with
the revolution.” However, events made “her unable to defend the
Bolsheviks anymore,” namely the “1921 suppression of the Kronstadt
rebellion.” Then “she adopted the essential anarchist view of the
Russian Revolution – with the Russian people in the revolution, against
the Bolsheviks.” Given that the Bolsheviks had created a party
dictatorship over the masses, repressed their strikes and protests,
destroyed their basic rights and freedoms Emma’s perspective seems
justified.
Given this, Selfa seeks to distort Emma’s analysis and conclusions from
the Revolution. He argues that to Emma, “the civil war to defend the
revolution is merely the excuse the Bolsheviks use to unmask their real
agenda – or as she put it in the preface to My Disillusionment, ‘an
insignificant minority bent on creating an absolute State is necessarily
driven to oppression and terrorism.’” Selfa forgets two things.
Firstly, when Emma wrote this (in 1922) she had just returned from a
country where all the Bolsheviks she meet had talked about the need for
party dictatorship. Thus mainstream Bolshevik was based on the party
leaders exercising power in a highly centralised state system and,
moreover, happy to use any and all means to protect it. In Living My
Life she records that Zinoviev considered the main political policy as
the ”[c]oncentration of all power in the hands of the proletarian
avant-garde, which is the Communist Party.” He was convinced that the
“dictatorship of the proletariat is the only workable program during a
revolutionary period.” Thus once in power ”[a]ll the succeeding acts of
the Bolsheviki, all their following policies, changes of policies, their
compromises and retreats, their methods of suppression and persecution,
their terrorism and extermination of all other political views – all
were but the means to an end the retaining of the State power in the
hands of the Communist Party. Indeed, the Bolsheviki themselves (in
Russia) made no secret of it.”[27]
Secondly, this dogma of party dictatorship had been enshrined in
Bolshevik ideology for four years and was considered a fundamental
lesson of the revolution. Before that, in 1917, they had advocated party
power. In October 1917 they created the kind of “revolutionary
government” Selfa supports and the fate of the Russian masses now rested
with the handful of members of Lenin’s government and the Bolshevik
central committee. Thus an “insignificant minority” had ruled the
Russian masses from the start. Initially, the masses supported the
Bolsheviks but soon this changed. Faced with rejection in soviet
elections across Russia, the Bolsheviks disbanded them. They
gerrymandered others to ensure their majority. They even gerrymandered
the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets to maintain in power (which
provoked the revolt of the Left-SRs). This process started before the
start of the civil war Selfa seeks to used to justify and excuse
Bolshevik authoritarianism. The shift from party government to party
dictatorship was relatively quick, under six months in fact. [28]
Emma, regardless of Selfa’s claims, did not blame Bolshevism as such.
Rather she argued that the ideology of the Bolsheviks played a key role
in this process but that it “would be an error to assume that the
failure of the Revolution was due entirely to the character of the
Bolsheviki. Fundamentally, it was the result of the principles and
methods of Bolshevism. It was the authoritarian spirit and principles of
the State ... Were any other political party in control of the
government in Russia the result would have been essentially the same. It
is not so much the Bolsheviki who killed the Russian Revolution as the
Bolshevik idea. It was Marxism, however modified; in short, fanatical
governmentalism. Only this understanding of the underlying forces that
crushed the Revolution can- present the true lesson of that
world-stirring event.... The Russian Revolution was a libertarian step
defeated by the Bolshevik State, by the temporary victory of the
reactionary, the governmental idea.” [29]
Selfa repeats the usual Leninist apologetics for Bolshevik tyranny,
asserting that Emma’s account “may sound credible to someone picking up
her books for the first time” but “it ignores the most important point,”
namely “that it takes place two years into a civil war that has
devastated industrial production, and in which the workers’ government
is fighting for its survival.” However, he is simply taking the piss
here. No one reading her book could fail to notice that Emma indicates
and discusses the civil war and the collapse of industry. As even he had
to note, Emma’s break with the Bolsheviks took time as she struggled
with the reality of the regime and the excuses used to justify it.
Significantly, these excuses came not from the leading Bolsheviks but
from libertarians who sought to justify their co-operation with
politicians who did not consider their authoritarian policies and
actions as anything other than necessary and of no real concern. The
Bolsheviks, in other words, considered their actions and policies as
socialist and in no way detrimental to the fate and nature of the
revolution. As socialist Samuel Farber notes, “there is no evidence
indicating that Lenin or any of the mainstream Bolshevik leaders
lamented the loss of workers’ control or of democracy in the soviets, or
at least referred to these losses as a retreat, as Lenin declared with
the replacement of War Communism by NEP in 1921.” [30]
So when Selfa argues that “there is no doubt that these conditions led
to a degeneration of the revolution, committed communists felt the only
possibility of reinvigorating the revolution lay in its defence against
the counterrevolution” he is simply not accurately reporting the
opinions of the Bolshevik leadership. Rather the Bolshevik leadership
saw nothing wrong with their authoritarian policies. Quite the reverse.
Not only did they generalise their experiences and policies as lessons
for revolutionaries in the west, they refused to change them once the
civil war was finished. As we will see, Trotsky was defending party
dictatorship into the 1930s.
For the Bolshevik leaders, their policies were not the product of
holding “out against the indigenous counterrevolutionaries and fourteen
foreign armies, hoping that a revolution in Europe would come to its
aid” as Selfa claims. Rather they considered these “communist” policies
and generalised them into lessons for all revolutions. Now, even
assuming that Selfa’s claims were true, that Bolshevik policies were the
result the pressures of civil war (and I must stress, they were not as
they started before the civil war started and the Bolshevik leaders did
not justify them in those terms) a greater indictment of Bolshevism
could not be found. After all, Leninism is meant to recognise that civil
war is inevitable during a revolution. Is Selfa really claiming that
Leninism failed because the inevitable happened? That is hardly
convincing. [31]
Moreover, Selfa should know that when Emma arrived in Bolshevik Russia
in January 1920 the civil war “appeared to be over.” The Whites had
either been totally defeated or were in retreat. Yet Bolshevik policies
were not changing. In fact, “the Communist Party decreed that economic
reconstruction should be brought about by an intensification of War
Communism policies.” Emma was there when the “mood of euphoria which
gripped the Communist party after the defeat of the main leaders of the
White movement ... put it on a course leading to conflict with its
chosen political constituency — industrial workers.” The return of
conflict with the Polish war and Wrangel’s attack did not determine
Bolshevik policy, which continued as it was after the end of the civil
war in November, 1920. The “mood of optimism which prevailed in Soviet
Russia in the autumn of 1920 was even more intense than in the spring.”
The government, again, intensified its authoritarian its policies and
soon brought it into conflict with the working class. The “industrial
unrest which erupted in Soviet Russia in early 1921 ... encompassed most
of the country’s industrial regions,” which the Bolsheviks overcame “by
changing the direction of its economic policy and applying firm
repressive measures.” [32] The political policy of party dictatorship
remained sacrosanct. Indeed, it was only after the end of the civil war
that the Bolsheviks, under Lenin and Trotsky, finally crushed the other
left-wing parties.
Emma heard the Bolshevik’s defend of their dictatorship over the
proletariat and its central position in their ideology. She saw
firsthand how they used repression to crush the strikes in Petrograd and
the Kronstadt revolt in broke out in solidarity with the strikers. It is
to her credit she sided with the workers and not their political
masters. As she put it:
“the truth of the matter is that the Russian people have been locked out
and that the Bolshevik State — even as the bourgeois industrial master —
uses the sword and the gun to keep the people out. In the case of the
Bolsheviki this tyranny is masked by a world-stirring slogan ... Just
because I am a revolutionist I refuse to side with the master class,
which in Russia is called the Communist Party.” [33]
“The thought oppressed me,” she wrote, “that what [the Bolsheviks]
called ‘defence of the Revolution’ was really only the defence of
[their] party in power.” [34] And she was right.
As a Leninist, Selfa must defend their state repression against the
anarchists. After all, if he gets into power he will do the same so best
get the rationales practised now. He states that “Goldman wrote that the
government imprisoned anarchists for their ideas. But most of the
anarchists who fell victim to the Cheka police were those who took
action against the revolutionary state.” Selfa is just repeating
Bolshevik claims which Goldman herself heard and dismissed as the
self-serving nonsense it is. [35]
Of course, like most justifiers of state tyranny, he portrays the most
violent institution on earth, the state, as the victim. Anarchists, he
states, “didn’t confine their criticism of the government to words. In
fact, they engaged in terrorism against the regime and bank robberies to
finance their movement. Moscow anarchists organised Black Guards, which
criminal elements infiltrated, to carry out these actions.” However, in
1918 there are no accounts of terrorism against the regime. Yes, in
Moscow some criminal elements did infiltrate the Black Guards but the
anarchists opposed this rather than organise it. [36] To state otherwise
is simply a lie.
As for the bombing of the Moscow Communist Party in September 1919 by
anarchists and Left SRs, it should be remembered that it was in response
to a regime practising “Red terror” against the left as well as right.
Anarchists and Left SRs, along with ordinary workers and peasants, had
been imprisoned and shot by the Bolshevik secret police. As Emma records
in relation to this bombing, the Bolsheviks had “maligned, persecuted
and hounded the Anarchist movement as such” and it was “this Communist
treachery and despotism” which caused the attack. “It was an act of
protest” which resulted in “reprisals against all Anarchists,” including
those who “publicly expressed their condemnation of such methods.” [37]
Such state repression had been going on for some time. About 40
anarchists had been killed when the Cheka attacked the Anarchists in
April 1918, for example. Selfa fails to mention that the Bolsheviks had
been practising repression for some time, dating from before start of
civil war. Clearly, for Selfa, state terrorism is acceptable, not the
violence of its victims.
But rest assured, for “even with these outrages, the repression meted
out against the anarchists was far more inconsistent than Goldman made
it out to be. Anarchists arrested one week were released the next.” Yet
Goldman’s account is from first hand interviews with anarchists in
Lenin’s Russia. You would think that they would know how “inconsistent”
their repression was rather better than Selfa, but obviously not. I’m
also sure that if Selfa was continually arrested one week by the Bush
administration and released the next he would consider this as
unacceptable state repression. He would not consider it “inconsistent”
but rather a clear impediment to his liberty and political activity. Its
capricious nature would not make it any less horrific.
Selfa does not discuss what this “inconsistent” repression was like. He
does not discuss what it would be like to live under a regime which
could arrest you at the drop of a hat, what it would be like to be
incarcerated without knowing if you would be dead or free the following
week, to see your papers banned and your attempts at organisation forced
underground. To live, in other words, at the mercy of the secret police
and their whims. This, for Selfa, is of little concern. What matters is
that the repression was “inconsistent” not the terror of living under a
regime whose repression was arbitrary and could strike at any moment.
Not only was it “inconsistent,” “most [anarchists] who promised not to
take up arms against the government were released,” Selfa claims. Which,
of course, explains why Emma had to go to Red Trade Union Congress in
1921 to raise the issue of anarchists on hunger-strike in Soviet
prisons. After all, the head of the All-Russian Cheka had announced,
like Selfa, that there were no anarchists in soviet prisons, just
bandits and Makhnovists. [38] That Selfa repeats this state propaganda
is deeply worrying, but unexpected. Clearly injustice and repression is
acceptable when they are Red rather than White. So Emma’s experiences in
Lenin’s Russia utterly disprove Selfa’s assertion that “the government
repressed the anarchists who destabilised the regime during the civil
war.” For the Bolsheviks, holding alternative opinions and daring to
criticise them destabilised their regime. This is to be expected, as it
had no popular base at all in the Russian masses.
And what of the government taking up arms against the anarchists? Or the
Russian masses? Apparently, state violence against radicals is
acceptable, radical violence in self-defence is not. And, of course, the
Bolsheviks had arrested numerous anarchists when it broke its agreement
with the Makhnovists when the last White General had been defeated with
their help. Thus civil war cannot explain the Bolshevik repression
against the anarchists.
But put such minor concerns to one side. The important thing is that
“Anarchist bookstores remained open throughout the 1920s.” Who cares
about party dictatorship, repression of strikes, arrests by the secret
police and freedom of association and speech when you can go to an
anarchist bookshop? Then, of course, there is Selfa’s claims that “in
1921 the state organised a funeral for the death of anarchist leader
Peter Kropotkin at which Goldman spoke.” Except that is not how Emma
remembered it. While the state allowed the funeral (subject to its
approval and censorship), it was organised by anarchists. The state
refused to release anarchist prisoners to attend it. [39] Victor Serge
recounted how the “shadow of the Cheka fell everywhere.” [40] This was
the last officially allowed anarchist protest until the end of the USSR,
so it seems strange that Selfa should even mention it. It hardly amounts
to much evidence for his case.
The same can be said of his account of the Kronstadt revolt.
Selfa leaves no Leninist invention unuttered. Talking of Kronstadt, he
states that “the Kronstadt anarchists” demanded “Soviets without
Bolsheviks” which is wrong on every count. The Kronstadt rebels were not
anarchists nor did they raise that demand. Selfa quotes from Paul
Avrich’s book on Kronstadt in his essay yet he obviously has not read
it. If he had, he would know that neither of these two claims are true.
[41] But, then again, truth is usually absent when Leninists argue that
“the government suppression of the rebellion of sailors at the Kronstadt
garrison in 1921 ... can be defended.” [42]
The gist of his argument is that if the “sailors had succeeded in their
uprising against the government, the counterrevolutionary Whites would
have had a breach that they would have exploited to roll back the
revolution.” This would mean that the rebels would “get the elimination
of the soviets, the return of pogroms, and a right-wing dictatorship.”
It would be churlish to note that the Bolsheviks had eliminated the
soviets in all but name back in 1918 [43] or that they had been
proclaiming the necessity of the “dictatorship of the party” for quite a
few years by this time. [44] And given that the Bolshevik regime was a
party dictatorship with an “all-powerful, centralised Government with
State Capitalism as its economic expression” [45] within which the
working class had no freedom of speech, association, or to strike or
protest, what exactly was there left to “roll back”?
Let us move on from such trivial matters as working class freedom and
ask whether, in fact, the Kronstadt rebellion would ensured the victory
of the Whites. Sadly for Selfa, the whites were not a threat. [46] As
Lenin himself acknowledged during the revolt on March 16^(th) “the
enemies” around the Bolshevik state were “no longer able to wage their
war of intervention” [47]
Little wonder Kronstadt was so important to Emma. Occurring as it did
after the end of the civil war, Kronstadt played a key role in opening
her eyes to the real role of Bolshevism in the revolution. Until then,
she (like many others) had supported the Bolsheviks, rationalising their
dictatorship as a temporary measure necessitated by the civil war.
Kronstadt smashed that illusion, “broke the last thread that held me to
the Bolsheviki. The wanton slaughter they had instigated spoke more
eloquently against than aught else. Whatever the pretences of the past,
the Bolsheviki now proved themselves the most pernicious enemies of the
Revolution. I would have nothing further to do with them.” [48]
Kronstadt is important as it provides a deep insight into the political
thinking of contemporary revolutionaries. Its exposes their basic
attitude to what socialism is about. So when Leninists like Selfa
justify the suppression of Kronstadt, we can only draw the conclusion
that faced with a similar revolt against party power in a future
revolution then those in power will not hesitate to do the same again,
repressing the actual working class in the name of “workers’ power.” For
it must always be remembered that the suppression of Kronstadt was just
one of a series of actions by the Bolsheviks which began, before the
start of the Civil War, with them abolishing soviets which elected
non-Bolshevik majorities, abolishing elected officers and soldiers
soviets in the Red Army and Navy and replacing workers’ self-management
of production by state-appointed managers with “dictatorial” powers.
That the Leninist traditions seems based on the assumption of
unquestioning obedience to the party leadership seems clear when we look
at how Selfa describes Emma’s relationships with the Bolsheviks before
her break with them.
Interestingly he complains that unlike Serge or Shatoff, “Goldman and
Berkman were unwilling to compromise their autonomy by identifying too
closely with the government.” Presumably as an example, he indicates
that when the Comintern asked Berkman to translate Lenin’s Left Wing
Communism, he “agreed until he read its contents, which was an attack on
the ultraleft, antiparliamentary politics of people like him. He said he
would continue if he could write a rebuttal. The Comintern thought
better of that.” From this it appears that meekly doing what your
leaders ask is the task of a revolutionary. Needless to say, Selfa does
not explain why Berkman’s request was so outrageous. In the interests of
debate it would have been sensible for radicals to hear the opposing
viewpoint. But, then again, the opposing viewpoint is something most
Leninists are at pains to exclude (as Selfa proves). Given this, it
seems strange that he mentions this incident as it puts the Bolshevik
leadership in an exceedingly bad light.
Then there is Emma’s proposal that she and Berkman head up a group
called “Russian Friends of American Liberty” for political prisoners in
the United States. Selfa recounts how “Lenin enthusiastically endorsed”
this but that “they refused to continue on the project after Lenin
suggested that it be organised through the Comintern.” This, is however,
not true. Emma and Berkman had sound political reasons for refusing
Lenin’s “suggestion.” As she put it, their “efforts would prove
effective if free from any affiliation with known Bolshevik
organisations ... we knew the American psychology and how best to
conduct the work.” Moreover, they “wrote to Lenin” explaining their
concerns and, significantly, “enclosed a detailed outline of our plan.”
[49]
The relevant point of all this is one that by-passes Selfa totally.
Clearly Emma and Berkman “were eager to help Russia and to continue our
work for America’s liberation” but the Bolsheviks were not willing to
co-operate with them in this task as comrades and equals. Rather all
work was to be done under Bolshevik control. This was an early example
of the fact that “the dictatorship was all-pervading and that it would
brook no independent effort.” [50] Little wonder the revolution became
bureaucratic and top-down if that was the Bolshevik attitude to offers
of help from non-Bolshevik revolutionaries.
Obviously, for Selfa, Emma and Berkman should have simply done what they
were told and followed the orders from above. Just as the ex-anarchist
Victor Serge did.
A key aspect of his defence of Bolshevism consists in contrasting Emma
to the likes of Victor Serge. While both came to Russia as anarchists
seeking to help the revolution, their consequent political developments
were radically different. Emma broke with the Bolsheviks while Serge
became a Bolshevik. For Selfa, Serge is the hero, one of those he labels
“the best of the anarchists,” while Emma is an elitist. In reality, the
opposite is the case.
Selfa was at pains to cherry-pick quotes to paint Emma as an
ultra-leftist elitist and he does the same for Serge, simply ignoring
the elitism of Serge’s new-found Bolshevism. Not that this elitism is
hard to find, given that it is contained in the very same book Selfa
quotes Serge from. As such, he is aware of Serge’s elitism but fails to
consider it important enough to mention. But all is forgiven as Serge
was “an anarchist who joined the revolution.” More correctly, of course,
Serge joined the Bolsheviks. This equating of the Bolsheviks with the
revolution, Selfa is well on his way towards party dictatorship. In this
typically Bolshevik schema, opposition to the ruling party becomes, by
definition, counter-revolutionary. This mentality was exactly the reason
why Bolshevism proved to be such an authoritarian nightmare in practice.
So it must be stressed that those Anarchists who really did “align
themselves with the revolution” were precisely those ones who came into
conflict with the Bolshevik dictatorship over the proletariat not those
who became Communists.
Selfa quotes Serge writing to his anarchist comrades: “It is vital to
respond to this necessity for revolutionary defence, as to the necessity
for terror and dictatorship, on pain of death. For the grim reality of
revolutions is that half-measures and half-defeats are not possible, and
that victory means life, defeat means death.” He argues that Serge
“criticised the anarchists for being unable to offer anything other than
criticism and opposition to the regime” and quotes him saying those who
failed to “adopt a clear and distinct position…if they do not
unhesitatingly and everywhere align themselves with the revolution…then
they will be worthless.”
Yet Serge said much more than this. By “dictatorship” Serge did not mean
some kind of “proletarian” dictatorship by the masses. He, like Lenin
and Trotsky, explicitly argued against this. Yes, he wrote, “if we are
looking at what should, that is at what ought to, be the case” but this
“seems doubtful” in reality. “For it appears that by force of
circumstances one group is obliged to impose itself on the others and to
go ahead of them, breaking them if necessary, in order then to exercise
exclusive dictatorship.” The militants “leading the masses ... cannot
rely on the consciousness, the goodwill or the determination of those
they have to deal with; for the masses who will follow them or surround
them will be warped by the old regime, relatively uncultivated, often
aware, torn by feelings and instincts inherited from the past.” And so
“revolutionaries will have to take on the dictatorship without delay.”
The experience of Russia “reveals an energetic and innovative minority
which is compelled to make up for the deficiencies in the education of
the backward masses by the use of compulsion.” [51]
And so the party, he argued in 1919, “is in a sense the nervous system
of the class. Simultaneously the consciousness and the active, physical
organisation of the dispersed forces of the proletariat, which are often
ignorant of themselves and often remain latent or express themselves
contradictorily.” And what of the masses? What was their role? Serge is
equally blunt. While the party is “supported by the entire working
population,” strangely enough, “it maintains its unique situation in
dictatorial fashion.” He admits “the energies which have just triumphed
... exist outside” the party and that “they constitute its strength only
because it represents them knowingly.” Thus the workers are ”[b]ehind”
the communists, “sympathising instinctively with the party and carrying
out the menial tasks required by the revolution.” [52]
Such are the joys of socialist liberation. The party thinks for the
worker while they carry out the “menial tasks” of the revolution. Like
doing the work and following the orders. And Selfa calls this elitist
the “best of the anarchists”!
Selfa shows his grasp of facts by asserting that “one group of
anarchists whose libertarian ideas were most connected to workers’
struggles – people like Victor Serge, Alfred Rosmer, Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn, Lucy Parsons, and Big Bill Haywood -actually left the ranks of
anarchists and joined the Communist Parties.” Yet Flynn and Haywood were
Marxists. Parsons may have worked with the Communists (even after they
had become Stalinists) but she never joined the Party. Serge and Rosmer
embraced Bolshevik dictatorship over the proletariat. Nor was Serge
particularly “most connected to workers’ struggle” when he was an
anarchist. Rather he was an elitist individualist who dismissed such
struggle. It was only in 1917 when he was in Spain that he embraced
syndicalism. He soon after left for Russia where he eulogised Bolshevik
elitism and dictatorship. Once in Russia he was “connected to” workers
and their struggles in the same way a jailer is “connected to” the lives
and struggles of their prisoners.
And what of the Russian anarchists? Selfa writes that “noting the
dwindling of their influence, Serge wrote that anarchists would find
themselves either ‘trailing behind the more determined Communists’ or
‘following in the footsteps of reaction.’” Yet Selfa, like Serge, does
not mention the use of state repression by the Bolsheviks for the
“dwindling” influence of the Russia Anarchist movement. This repression
did not differentiate between anarchists of ideas and “bandits.” The
former became the latter whenever reasons of state dictated. Moreover,
the example of the Makhnovist movement and the “Nabat” anarchist
federation in the Ukraine show that the anarchists were able to “adopt a
clear and distinct position” and implement anarchist ideas successfully
in the Revolution. [53] These examples, both of which mentioned by Emma,
show the poverty of Serge’s (and Selfa’s) claims. Simply put, Russian
anarchism was betrayed by the Bolsheviks and crushed by state violence.
It was not a natural death nor was it a product of anarchist ideas or
ideals.
Selfa justifies Serge’s conversion to Bolshevik authoritarianism and
elitism by arguing that “he, like most anarchists in Russia who joined
the Communist Party, recognised that only victory against the
counterrevolution would create the possibility for anything the
anarchists said they stood for.” Needless to say, subsequent events
proved how wrong Serge was and how right Emma was to break with
Bolshevism. The means shape the ends. Non-libertarian means are unlikely
to result in libertarian ends. The rise of Stalinism proved who was
right between Serge and Emma.
Selfa is aware of this. Stalinism is hardly a glowing recommendation for
his argument and so he defends Serge, asserting he “was far from an
apologist for the Bolsheviks, and certainly no Stalinist.” Yet his
arguments in favour of Bolshevism in the 1920s were clearly apologetics
and while he did become “a Trotskyist, opposed to Stalin’s dictatorship”
he was wholeheartedly in favour of the Bolshevik party’s dictatorship
under Lenin. Serge in the 1920s was a true elitist, eulogising the role
and dictatorship of the vanguard.
He was not alone. As a good Trotskyist he supported the Left Opposition
in the 1920s. This wing of the ruling bureaucracy proclaimed in 1927
“the Leninist principle, inviolable for every Bolshevik, that the
dictatorship of the proletariat is and can be realised only through the
dictatorship of the party.” [54] In this it simply followed Trotsky’s
support for party dictatorship. [55] Serge’s more critical appraisal of
the Bolsheviks only came in the late 1930s, an appraisal which saw him
move back towards the classical anarchist positions expounded by Emma
and the other anarchists who rejected Bolshevism. Trotsky,
unsurprisingly, was unsparing in his attacks on Serge’s new found
critical voice. Ironically for Selfa, Trotsky labelled Serge’s belated
support for working class freedom and democracy an “anarchist” spirit.
For Trotsky when he was “demanding freedom ‘for the masses’” Serge “in
reality” only demanded “freedom for himself ... The ‘masses’ have
nothing at all to do with it.” Serge was just expressing “the
vacillations of a disillusioned petty-bourgeois intellectual” which
oppose “an assault on his individuality.” Which is, ironically, pretty
much Selfa’s conclusions about Emma. [56]
While Selfa acknowledges that Emma “called herself a small-c communist,”
he insists that “she was above all else, an individualist.”
His counterpoising of communism to “individualism” is significant. The
aim of communism is, after all, to increase individual liberty (to use
Marx’s expression, the full development of each individual). As such,
authentic communism is “individualist” in its aspirations. Given this,
Selfa’s comments simply expose the state capitalist nature of
Bolshevism. This can be seen from comparing Emma’s evaluation of
Stalinist Russia to Trotsky’s. Emma was clear, communism did not exist
in Russia, “state capitalism” did — under Lenin and Stalin. [57] Trotsky
defended the Stalinist economic system as being socialist. Perhaps this
is to be expected, as he had advocated and imposed similar policies (and
uttered similar rationales) when in power between 1918 and 1923.
But, then again, Selfa has problems understanding Emma’s communism. For
example, he states that Emma “immediately denounced” Lenin’s New
Economic Policy as “a reversal of communism itself.” Yet Emma did no
such thing. Looking at the page Selfa references, we discover her noting
that it was “most Communists” who saw it as “a reversal of communism
itself.” For Emma, ”[t]rue Communism was never attempted in Russia.”
[58] As such, Selfa’s comments are simply a distortion of what Emma
actually wrote.
Unlike the Leninist tradition, Emma had no more difficulty in seeing
Lenin’s regime for what it was (“state capitalist”) than she had seeing
what Stalin’s was (“state capitalist”). It should be stressed that the
tradition Selfa identifies with only came to the conclusion that
Stalin’s regime was “state capitalism” in the late 1940s. Yet even here
Emma is right. For Tony Cliff Stalinist Russia was “state capitalist”
not (as for Emma) due to the social relations in production and society
but because it was part of the global (capitalist) economy and locked in
military competition with the West. But, as Marx argued, capitalism is a
mode of production, not exchange. Thus the USSR could not be “state
capitalist” in Cliff’s sense for the same reason Native American tribes
producing tomahawks and arrows to resist White settlers did not become
“capitalist” or slave holding in the American South did not become
“capitalist” by selling its goods on the world market.
Perhaps this superficial analysis is understandable as the social
relations under Stalin did not differ from those under Lenin. Stalin
inherited a regime based on nationalised property, one-man management
and party dictatorship from Lenin. He simply intensified certain aspects
of it. And, ironically, even by Cliff’s own analysis Lenin’s Russia was
“state capitalist” as it was locked in military competition with the
West from the start.
I would say it is obvious that Emma represents the authentic communist
tradition, not Leninism. She remembered what socialism was meant to be
about and ably analysed the failings of both Lenin’s and Stalin’s
regimes based on this. Thus her “small-c” communism is a much more
reliable guide for radicals than the Bolshevik tradition which repeated
called (and still calls) regimes which are obviously state capitalist,
like Lenin’s, “socialist.”
Once they were out of Russia, Emma and Berkman wrote extensively on
their experiences and the lessons they drew from it. Even here Selfa
cannot get basic facts right. He notes that she was “a lifelong opponent
of Marxism and socialism” and that her “two years of praise for the
Bolsheviks in 1917–18 were the exception, not the rule.” He then states
“that’s why it was somewhat disingenuous of her to characterize her
experience in Russia as ‘disillusionment,’ since she wasn’t a supporter
of socialism.” Yet Emma made clear in the preface of her account, the
title was not her choice. It was imposed by the publisher without her
knowledge. [59] Selfa, let us not forget, quotes from this book. Does
this mean he has not bothered to read it?
Given that those who fail to understand the lessons of history are
doomed to repeat it, Emma’s account of her experiences in Russia should
have been essential reading for all radicals. Yet Selfa attacks her
decision to expose the truth about Leninist Russia, stating that the
capitalist press printed “her denunciations of the Bolsheviks throughout
the 1920s as evidence that one of ‘them’ had realized the error of her
ways.” Whatever happened to Gramsci’s famous words that “telling the
truth is a revolutionary act”? But, then again, telling the truth is
something Selfa is hardly familiar with. Moreover, his logic smacks more
of Stalinism than anything else. In the 1930s the Stalinists labelled
their opponents as “Trotsky-fascists” for denouncing (some of) the
horrors of the USSR. After the war, they attacked socialists who exposed
the obvious state capitalist nature of the regime as providing comfort
to capitalism. It seems sad that a modern-day Leninist fails to see the
obvious lesson here: the radical movement is still suffering the harm
done by the liars and apologists of Stalinism and, before that,
Leninism.
The question is, would Selfa have preferred Emma and Berkman not to
discuss their experiences and try to learn from them? Or to warn the
working class of the dangers of Bolshevism? If so, would he have also
urged Trotsky to remain silent about the evils of Stalinism? I doubt it.
Selfa claims that “in public, Berkman denounced the government. But in
private, he considered the criticisms of comrades like Serge” and quotes
from Berkman’s diary from December 1920. Yet, at this time Berkman was
still in Bolshevik Russia and was struggling with the reality of the
Bolshevik dictatorship and whether his support for the revolution
against the capitalist counter-revolution could be squared with his
support for the Bolsheviks. He did not publicly denounce the regime as
there was no free speech under Lenin and so his comments were (by
necessity) limited to people he could trust. It was only once he had
left Russia that Berkman could denounce the government to the public
without fear of arrest (or worse).
So what Selfa inaccurately suggests was hypocrisy was, in reality,
Berkman’s evaluation of arguments like Serge’s. It is to his credit that
Berkman rejected Serge’s arguments, particularly as Serge was himself
utterly hypocritical in praising the government in public while
denouncing it in private to other radicals:
“In the summer of 1921 the anarchist Gaston Leval came to Moscow in the
Spanish delegation to the Third Congress of the Communist International.
In private, Serge confided to him that ‘the Communist Party no longer
practices the dictatorship of the proletariat but dictatorship over the
proletariat.’ Returning to France, Leval published articles in Le
Libertaire using well documented facts, and placing side by side what
Victor Serge had told him confidentially and his public statements,
which he described as ‘conscious lies.’” [60]
So what did Berkman record in his diary? “Many vital problems find no
adequate answer in our books and theories,” Berkman wrote. “Result – the
tragedy of the Anarchists in the midst of the revolution and unable to
find their place or activity?” It wasn’t good enough just to oppose the
”’dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Have we anything to offer in its
place?” Selfa states that “the possibility of answering Berkman’s
question arose fifteen years after Goldman and Berkman left Russia in
1921.” Yet this is false. If you read Berkman’s “What is Anarchism?” you
discover exactly what anarchism had to “offer in its place,” namely a
federation of self-managed workers’ councils and a free militia to
defend the revolution. [61] Which was what the Makhnovists had applied
in the Ukraine and which Berkman himself points to in his classic
introduction to anarchism. [62]
In general, most of Berkman’s book simply mirrors his own and Emma’s
conclusions from their experiences in Russia. These confirmed her
anarchism. As she put it, only “popular participation in the affairs of
the revolution can prevent the terrible blunders committed in Russia.”
Thus the “industrial power of the masses, expressed through their
libertarian associations — Anarchosyndicalism — is alone able to
organize successfully the economic life and carry on production.” She
pointed to “the Soviets, the trade unions and the co-operatives-three
great factors for the realization of the hopes of the Revolution.” [63]
Ironically, this is what modern day Leninists say they believe in. The
key difference is that anarchists do not undermine and marginalise these
organs of popular self-management by placing a highly centralised state
and Leninist government over them. If Selfa is arguing against Emma’s
conclusions then he is arguing that revolution makes working class
self-management of society impossible. If so, he should, like Lenin and
Trotsky, admit it.
As such, it seems incredulous for Selfa not to mention that both Berkman
and Emma had answered his own question from 1920 in his subsequent
writings. But not surprising. After all, Selfa’s major technique in his
essay is to ignore those facts and ideas of Emma’s which utterly
contradict his case. Thus, for example, he fails to discuss her support
for anarcho-syndicalism. Should we be surprised that he fails to mention
those writings of Emma and Berkman which summarise the lessons from the
Russian Revolution? Of course not.
By failing to acknowledge that Berkman (like Emma) had summarised the
anarchist lessons of the Russian Revolution, Selfa is now open to go
onto his real target: the role of the anarchists in the Spanish
Revolution.
The Spanish revolution is a favourite of Leninists when it comes to
attacking anarchism. On the face of it, this is understandable. The
anarchists after all failed to smash the state and agreed to join a
bourgeois government. Selfa presents the usual Leninist case, stating
that “the choice was stark: the CNT-FAI could overthrow the existing
government and set up a revolutionary workers’ government or it could
leave the bourgeois government in power. The Catalonian CNT debated it
and resolved to leave Companys in power because to take power in a
revolutionary government would mean a compromise of anarchist principles
– a compromise with the state. So they let an opportunity to take power
pass them by.”
However, such an argument is rooted in philosophical idealism of the
worse kind. It significantly fails to present, never mind discuss, the
circumstances in which the Catalan CNT made its decision. This is
unsurprising, for once these conditions are discussed the decisions
reached by the CNT can be understood, if not approved of. More
importantly, it also indicates that anarchist theory cannot be blamed
for the decision. Simply put, it was not a choice between seizing power
or not but rather between co-operating with the Republic against Franco
or applying anarchist ideas and, potentially, having to fight both the
fascists and the Republic. [64]
These were the circumstances that the CNT faced. After defeating the
military in Barcelona, the Catalan CNT militants did not know for sure
the situation in the rest of the country. To pursue anarchist politics
at such a time, it was argued, would have resulted in the CNT fighting
on two fronts — against the fascists and also against the Republican
government. Such a situation would have been unbearable and so it was
better to accept collaboration than aid Fascism by dividing the forces
of the anti-fascist camp. In the words of a CNT report from 1937:
“The CNT showed a conscientious scrupulousness in the face of a
difficult alternative: to destroy completely the State in Catalonia, to
declare war against the Rebels [i.e. the fascists], the government,
foreign capitalism, and thus assuming complete control of Catalan
society; or collaborating in the responsibilities of government with the
other antifascist fractions.” [65]
While the CNT leadership did provide numerous spurious arguments to
defend their decision in terms of libertarian principles, these came
long after the decision and when the CNT itself had changed. [66] When
the decision to postpone the revolution, to not implement anarchism, was
made what was driving the CNT was simply the immediate issue of fighting
fascism, the fear of isolation within Spain and dividing the
anti-fascist forces. Selfa’s “revolutionary government” would have been
faced with the same problems. He seems unconcerned about how the central
government or the imperialist powers would have reacted to such a
development. For him, all that seems required is a Spanish Lenin to
seize power and the real and pressing problems facing the revolution
would have been solved. In reality, the problems of isolation and
hostility by the Republic would have remained.
Few anarchists today would deny that the CNT made the wrong decision yet
to blame anarchist theory for the decision as Leninists do seems an
extremely superficial explanation of what happened.
Selfa is, however, right to note that the CNT’s decision “caused quite a
scandal in anarchist ranks around the world” but he is wrong to state
that “even the critics conceded that they really had no alternative to
offer their comrades in Spain. The CNT could have maintained its
principles and abstained from the government, but they didn’t have a
positive alternative to offer.” Most critics of the CNT did offer an
alternative, namely apply anarchist principles from the start. In other
words, smash the state, organise a federation of
communes/councils/collectives and a militia to defend against the
counter-revolution. This had been the position of anarchism since
Bakunin. Berkman had recommended it in his classic introduction to
anarchism, “What is Anarchism?” And, unmentioned by Selfa, this was
actually done in Aragon with remarkable success. Unsurprisingly, most
Leninists fail to mention the Council of Aragon when attacking Spanish
anarchism. To do so shows the weakness of the Marxist argument. The
continuity of what happened in Aragon with the ideas of anarchism and
the CNT’s 1936 Zaragoza Resolution on Libertarian Communism is clear.
[67]
But rest assured. While he fails to mention the anarchist alternative,
he does mention a Leninist one. “That alternative,” he argues, “would
have meant building a Bolshevik-type organization that would campaign
for workers’ power – for a workers’ solution to the crisis (i.e. doing
exactly what they had refused to do in Catalonia when power was within
reach).” What does that mean? Let us see what Trotsky had to say. It
was, to say the least, interesting.
Trotsky was clear what “workers’ power” meant. As he put it, the
“revolutionary party, even having seized power (of which the anarchist
leaders were incapable in spite of the heroism of the anarchist
workers), is still by no means the sovereign ruler of society.” [68]
Thus “workers’ power” meant the party leadership seizing power, not the
workers. A strange definition of “workers’ power,” I must admit. The
“leaders” of the CNT and FAI quite rightly rejected such a position —
unfortunately they also rejected the anarchist position at the same time
due to fear of isolation and splitting the antifascist struggle.
So rather than seeing, as anarchism does, working class organisations
running society, Trotsky saw the party doing this. “Because the leaders
of the CNT renounced dictatorship for themselves they left the place
open for the Stalinist dictatorship,” he argued. This was part of a
general argument about how the “revolutionary dictatorship of a
proletarian party” was “an objective necessity imposed upon us by the
social realities.” While the “dictatorship of a party belongs to the
barbarian prehistory” we could “not jump over this chapter.” In fact,
the “revolutionary party (vanguard) which renounces its own dictatorship
surrenders the masses to the counter-revolution.” Simply put, “it would
be very well if the party dictatorship could be replaced by the
‘dictatorship’ of the whole toiling people without any party, but this
presupposes such a high level of political development among the masses
that it can never be achieved under capitalist conditions.” [69]
Sadly Selfa does not explain how the “dictatorship of a party” which
would not renounce “its own dictatorship” would result in a “workers’
solution.” Perhaps he is unaware of this advice by the world’s the
leading Bolshevik? However, it should not come as a surprise as Trotsky,
like all the Bolshevik leaders, had been arguing this since at least
1919. Which was a key reason why Emma broke with them and proposed the
traditional anarchist ideas of workers’ self-management as an
alternative.
Aware that some anarchists in Spain did propose anarchist solutions to
the problems facing the Spanish revolution, Selfa tries to present them
as Marxists. He calls the Friends of Durruti (FoD) a “group of
anarchists who began to draw these conclusions” and “broke from
anarchism and moved toward revolutionary Marxism. For this decision, the
CNT expelled them.” Trotskyist Felix Morrow made those claims in his
book “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain” and Leninists have
parroted them every since. However, the facts are radically different.
Rather than move towards Marxism, the FoD in fact returned to the ideas
current in the CNT before the start of the civil war. In other words,
they remained true to anarchism while the CNT leadership did not. The
attempt at expulsion and the smearing of them as “Marxists” was not due
to any “decision” to move “toward revolutionary Marxism” by the FoD but
rather an attempt to neutralise a growing alternative within the CNT to
the leadership’s bureaucratic and failed policies. And while the CNT
leadership tried to expel them, the rank and file did not let them. [70]
I will not discuss Emma’s decision to defend the leadership of CNT and
FAI and their “abandoning of principle.” She does so well enough
herself. I do think, however, she strayed too far from the needs of
solidarity by not being critical in public and posing an alternative.
One thing is true, when Selfa states that Emma’s defence of her position
“encapsulated all of the problems of anarchism when faced with
revolution” he is simply wrong. He asserts that the anarchists “could
remain irrelevant to the struggle and true to their principles, or they
could junk their principles to become relevant.” Yet looking at the
unions, collectives and militias created by the Spanish anarchists, it
is obvious that this is nonsense. If we look to, say, Bakunin, we
discover what they should have done:
”[T]he federated Alliance of all labour associations ... will constitute
the Commune ... there will be a federation of the standing barricades
and a Revolutionary Communal Council will operate on the basis of one or
two delegates from each barricade ... these deputies being invested with
binding mandates and accountable and revocable at all times... An appeal
will be issued to all provinces, communes and associations inviting them
to follow the example set ... [and] to reorganise along revolutionary
lines ... and to then delegate deputies to an agreed place of assembly
(all of those deputies invested with binding mandates and accountable
and subject to recall), in order to found the federation of insurgent
associations, communes and provinces ... Thus it is through the very act
of extrapolation and organisation of the Revolution with an eye to the
mutual defences of insurgent areas that the ... Revolution, founded upon
... the ruins of States, will emerge triumphant...
“Since it is the people which must make the revolution everywhere, and
since the ultimate direction of it must at all times be vested in the
people organised into a free federation of agricultural and industrial
organisations ... being organised from the bottom up through
revolutionary delegation ...” [71]
The tragedy of Spain is that the anarchists did not follow Bakunin’s
advice. Contra Selfa, it was because they junked their principles that
they failed. Rather than this being a product of anarchist theory, this
junking was driven by the real problems they faced after defeating the
fascist coup in Barcelona. To divorce the decisions made by the CNT
militants from the circumstances they were made in and blame anarchist
theory is simply incredulous. But unsurprising, as to give an accurate
account of that theory or the pressures driving the Catalan CNT’s
decision would totally undermine Selfa’s argument.
Selfa argues that “the socialist tradition” cannot “embrace” Emma
Goldman.[72] If Selfa is anything to go by then all I can say is thank
goodness for that!
Perhaps “the socialist tradition” could do us all a favour and “embrace”
the truth and such minor things as honest debate? His essay on Emma
shows the typical revisionist techniques that would shame any genuinely
revolutionary tradition. I have indicated how Selfa distorts Emma’s life
and ideas to fit into his ideologically driven picture of both her and
anarchism. He consistently suppresses facts which contradict his claims
even though they are in the same books he references (sometimes even in
the same chapters!).
Anarchists can draw comfort from the fact he stoops so low simply
because our ideas, not his, are on the rise. We can also thank him for
his terrible essay as it provides an opportunity to not only discuss
anarchist ideas but also to highlight the bankruptcy of an ideology
whose advocates which would sink to rewriting history so. Perhaps we
should be grateful that Selfa, unlike one of “the best of the
anarchists” who became a Communist (and later a Stalinist!), did not
claim she was an agent of the American state! [74]
Selfa’s aim is two-fold. Firstly, to paint Emma as an elitist whose
politics were impractical. And, secondly, to contrast her with other
anarchists who became Bolsheviks. The aim of both is clear, to convince
modern-day anarchists to do the same. Therefore he compares Emma to the
“Sovietsky” anarchists who, he claims, “realized not only the necessity
of defending the revolution, but the necessity of participating in the
construction of the new society. Worldwide, the best of the anarchists –
the anarcho-syndicalists – whose libertarian ideas were most connected
to workers’ struggles, joined the Communist Parties.” Emma, he asserts,
“like many other anarchists, never really articulated a strategy of
getting from here to the society she desired.”
Yet, as I have shown, he can only say this by ignoring Emma’s
syndicalism and long standing active support for labour struggles and
organisations. And it should not be forgotten that by “best of” Selfa
means those libertarians embraced the Bolshevik position of the
“dictatorship of the party” and the suppression of basic working class
freedoms and rights. Moreover, “worldwide” most anarcho-syndicalists did
not, in fact, join the Communist Parties — quite the reverse. Once the
truth about the Bolsheviks became known in Spain, Italy, Sweden and
elsewhere, the syndicalist unions disaffiliated from the Russian
dominated Red Trade Union International. Syndicalists across the globe
saw the errors of Bolshevism and rejected it. Only in Britain, America
and France did more than a few syndicalists become Leninists and even in
those countries syndicalists remained active in the labour movement.
So most anarchists who were “connected to workers’ struggles” also they
rejected Bolshevism for what it was — a dictatorship of a minority over
the masses. They knew that replacing capitalist autocracy over the
workers with a Marxist one could never produce socialism. And they were
right. Anarchists like Emma, in other words. Little wonder, then, Selfa
continually fails to mention her syndicalism and other class struggle
ideas.
This makes a mockery of Selfa claim that people like Serge “came to the
conclusion that only collective, mass struggle could attain socialism
and that only a revolutionary party could organise that struggle.” Yet
anarchists like Emma knew that the former was true but the latter was
not. It is interesting that for all his scorn at Emma’s “elitism” Selfa
concludes by arguing that the masses themselves cannot organise
“collective, mass struggle for socialism.” For Selfa, only “a
revolutionary party” can. Unlike Emma who continually stressed that the
masses could organise their own “collective, mass struggle” as well as
create a (to use her words) “revolution at the bottom” by their own
efforts (aided as equals by anarchists, one of the “enlightened”
minorities the concept of which the vanguardist Selfa has such problems
with).
While Selfa acknowledges that Emma “called herself a small-c communist,”
he insists that “she was above all else, an individualist who believed
that the enlightened few made social change. For her, the masses were an
abstraction, or often, a curse.” This, as I have proven, is nonsense and
can only be maintained if you ignore important aspects of her ideas
which, of course, Selfa does. As I have indicated, Selfa’s “enlightened
few” comment could not be further from the truth. Emma was a
communist-anarchist and a firm supporter of syndicalism. Her defence of
minorities against majorities amounted to little more than acknowledging
the simple fact that radical ideas and actions always start with a
minority and spread to the majority. As such, she is expressing a law of
evolution and society. She saw the task of the “enlightened few” to aid
the process of self-liberation and to encourage tactics (such as direct
action in the workplace and in society) which encouraged the majority to
break their conditioning, the conditioning which class society requires
to continue.
As for the masses being an “abstraction” or a “curse,” it seems strange
that Selfa goes not compare Emma’s position to that of Victor Serge. If
he did, then the reader would have to consider that Emma was the true
friend of the masses while Serge and the Bolshevism he eulogised its
enemy. Given that Selfa knows about the extreme elitism of Serge, it is
clear that he is simply not reflecting reality by dismissing Emma’s
politics in this way.
While Selfa argues that she did not “really build an organization of
anarchists that could carry that vision forward,” he presents enough
evidence to show she built a movement by her activism. A movement which
participated in the class struggle and proposed a means (syndicalism) to
that end. He casts her as a “sideline critic, holding to anarchist
ideals even when the struggle demanded answers that were practical and
concrete.” However, these ideals were both practical and concrete. If we
look at the Russian revolution, it strikes the impartial investigator
that the anarchist Makhnovists were much more successful in creating the
proclaimed goals of socialism than the Bolsheviks. Where the latter
crushed soviet democracy and working class freedoms, the former
encouraged them. If we look at Spain, the libertarian militias and
collectives are far more inspiring from a socialist perspective than
Bolshevik party dictatorship and one-man management.
Selfa argues that that this “was the main political reason why the
Socialist and Communist Parties eclipsed anarchists in the early part of
the last century.” Would Selfa apply this logic to his own tradition?
After all, Trotskyist parties were dwarfed by both Social Democracy and
Stalinism. Is he really suggesting that Stalinism is more “practical and
concrete” than Trotskyism? That Stalinist parties can “carry that vision
forward” better than Trotskyist ones? It is doubtful.
For Selfa, “in a period when real world, revolutionary events put
anarchist theories to the test, the theories came up short.” Unlike
Marxism? Social Democracy failed (as Bakunin predicted). Bolshevism
produced a “dictatorship over the proletariat” (as Bakunin predicted).
Neither form of Marxism produced the claimed results and, as such, they
“came up short.” And what of anarchism? Here the conclusion to be drawn
is more complex than Selfa can admit to. In Russia, state repression
broke the back of the movement yet the Makhnovists in the Ukraine show
the anarchism can be successfully applied in a revolution. In Spain, the
anarchists failed to apply their ideas in the face of extremely
difficult circumstances but even in their failure the Spanish revolution
is still the most advanced working class revolution of all time.
Yes, anarchism is not perfect. No theory can be. It needs to develop and
change to take into account the new situations we face. We need to learn
from the past. However, this is not what Selfa does. He rewrites it to
bolster a bankrupt ideology whose cure (state socialism) is worse than
the disease (capitalism). Selfa’s dishonest diatribe on Emma, in its own
way, shows why more and more radicals are turning to anarchism. An
honest account of Red Emma and her ideas would confirm their
constructive and practical nature. That is why Selfa does not provide
one.
[1] For those interested in these articles, please visit my webpage at:
[2] Living My Life, vol. 1, Dover Publications, New York, 1970, pp. 52–3
[3] And, in the case of Selfa, non-anarchists! He states that Elizabeth
Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood “actually left the ranks of anarchists
and joined the Communist Parties.” Yet Flynn and Haywood were (Marxist)
socialists, which gives you a flavour of his grasp of the facts.
[4] Act For Yourselves: articles from Freedom 1886–1907, N. Walter and
H. Becker (eds), Freedom Press, London, 1988, pp. 119–20
[5] “Anarchism: What it really stands for”, Red Emma Speaks, 3^(rd)
Edition, Humanity Books, New York, 1998, p. 76–7
[6] “Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice”, Red Emma Speaks, p. 91, p.
92, pp. 99–100 and pp. 94–5
[7] “Preparedness: The road to universal slaughter,” Red Emma Speaks,
pp. 309–10
[8] A useful anthology has recently been published called “Anarchy! An
Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, Peter Glassgold (ed.),
Counterpoint, Washington, 2001. It contains 10 essays on “The social
war” including Max Baginski’s “Aim and Tactics of the Trade-Union
Movement” and Voltarine de Cleyre’s “A Study of the General Strike in
Philadelphia.” Clearly a paper which ignored collective mass struggle!
Significantly, Selfa quotes from this book in his essay and so is aware
of such articles in Emma’s paper.
[9] Living My Life, vol. 1, p. 456
[10] “The Individual, Society and the State,” Red Emma Speaks, p. 111;
“Minorities versus Majorities”, Red Emma Speaks, p. 85
[11] “Anarchism: What it really stands for”, p. 76
[12] Living My Life, vol. 1., p. 491
[13] “Syndicalism: its theory of and practice,” Red Emma Speaks, p. 95;
For details of the Lawrence strike see Howard Zinn’s A People’s History
of the United States, (2^(nd) ed.), Longman, Essex, 1996, pp. 327–8
[14] “Minorities versus Majorities”, p. 85
[15] quoted by Arthur Ransome, The Crisis in Russia 1920, Redwords,
London, 1992, p. 35
[16] “Hue and Cry over Kronstadt”, Kronstadt, , Monad Press, New York,
1986, p. 85
[17] “The Moralists and Sycophants”, Their Morals and Ours, Pathfinder,
New York, 1973, p. 59
[18] “Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap”, Red Emma Speaks, p. 107
[19] Living My Life, vol. 1, p. 491
[20] Living My Life, vol. 2, p. 567
[21] Living My Life, vol. 1, p. 87
[22] Martin A. Miller, Anarchism, The University of Chicago Press,
London, 1976, pp. 174–5
[23] See Caroline Cahm’s Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary
Anarchism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989.
[24] “Organisational Question of Social Democracy”, Rosa Luxemburg
Speaks, Mary-Alice Waters (ed.), Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970, pp.
126–7
[25] Collected Works, vol. 7, pp. 396–7
[26] For more on the limitations and failures of vanguardism, see
“Section H.5: What is vanguardism and why do anarchists reject it?” of
An Anarchist FAQ”.
[27] Living My Life, vol. 2, pp. 738–9; My Disillusionment in Russia,
Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York, 1970, p. 245
[28] For more on Bolshevik onslaught against the soviets in 1918, see
”“Section H.6: Why did the Russian Revolution fail?” and “Section 6:
What happened to the soviets after October?” of An Anarchist FAQ”.
[29] My Disillusionment in Russia, p. 250
[30] Before Stalinism : The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy, Polity
Press, Oxford, 1990, p. 44
[31] For further discussion of this see the “Appendix: What caused the
degeneration of the Russian Revolution?” of An Anarchist FAQ.
[32] Jonathan Aves, Workers against Lenin: Labour protest and the
Bolshevik dictatorship, Tauris Academic Studies, London, 1996, p. 5, p.
93, p. 111 and pp. 155–6. Aves book is essential reading to get a feel
of the dynamics of the class war against the Bolshevik dictatorship. See
also “Section H.6.3: Were the Russian workers “declassed” and
“atomised”?”
[33] My Disillusionment in Russia, p. xlix
[34] My Disillusionment in Russia, p. 57
[35] My Disillusionment in Russia, pp. 33–4; Living My Life, vol. 2,
765–6
[36] Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, W.W. Norton & Company, New
York, 1978, pp. 183–4
[37] My Disillusionment in Russia, p. 206
[38] Living My Life, vol. 2, pp. 910–2
[39] My Disillusionment in Russia, pp. 189–192
[40] Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901–41, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1963. p. 124
[41] Avrich notes that ”’Soviets without Communists’ was not, as is
often maintained by both Soviet and non-Soviet writers, a Kronstadt
slogan.” As far as being anarchists, he points out that while the
“influence of the anarchists ... had always been strong within the
fleet” and “had by no means dissipated” in 1921, in fact the “Political
group clostest to the rebels” were the SR Maximalists who occupied “a
place in the revolutionary spectrum between the Left SR’s and the
anarchists while sharing elements of both.” (Kronstadt 1921, W.W. Norton
and Company Inc., New York, 1970, p. 181, p. 168, p. 169 and p. 171)
[42] For more on Kronstadt and Leninist lies against it, see the
“Appendix: What was the Kronstadt Rebellion?” of An Anarchist FAQ
[43] See “Section H.6.1: Can objective factors explain the failure of
the Russian Revolution?” and “Section 6: What happened to the soviets
after October?” of An Anarchist FAQ
[44] At the 1920 Comintern congress, Zinoviev announced to the world
that “the dictatorship of the proletariat is at the same time the
dictatorship of the Communist Party.” This was applicable everywhere:
“Today, people like Kautsky come along and say that in Russia you do not
have the dictatorship of the working class but the dictatorship of the
party. They think this is a reproach against us. Not in the least! We
have a dictatorship of the working class and that is precisely why we
also have a dictatorship of the Communist Party.” (Proceedings and
Documents of the Second Congress 1920, vol. 1, Pathfinder, New York,
1991, pp. 151–2)
[45] My Disillusionment in Russia, p. 247
[46] For details see , “Section 11: Were the Whites a threat during the
Kronstadt revolt?” of An Anarchist FAQ
[47] “The Campaign of Lies”, Kronstadt, p. 52
[48] My Disillusionment in Russia, p. 200
[49] Living My Life, vol. 2, pp. 767–8
[50] Living My Life, vol. 2, p. 768
[51] Revolution in Danger, p. 106, p. 92 and p. 115
[52] Revolution in Danger, p. 67, p. 66 and p. 6
[53] For more on Makhnovists, see the “Appendix: Why does the Makhnovist
movement show there is an alternative to Bolshevism?” of An Anarchist
FAQ
[54] “The Platform of the Opposition” available at:
[55] For more on Trotsky’s support for party dictatorship in the 1920s
see “Section 3 What about Trotsky’s “Left Opposition” in the 1920s?” of
An Anarchist FAQ
[56] “The Moralists and Sycophants”, Their Morals and Ours, pp. 59–60
[57] “There is no Communism in Russia,” Red Emma Speaks
[58] “Afterword to My Disillusionment in Russia,” Red Emma Speaks, p.
387 and p. 389
[59] My Disillusionment in Russia, p. li
[60] Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From theory to practice, , Monthly Review
Press, New York/London, 1970, p. 97
[61] What is Anarchism?, AK Press, Edinburgh/London/Oakland, 2003. Of
particular interest are chapters XXVII (“Organisation of Labor for the
Social Revolution” — which discusses the need for the working class to
organise itself), XXVII (“Principles and Practice” — which covers the
need federations of shop and factory councils) and XXXI (“Defense of the
Revolution”). Also of note is chapter XIII (“Socialism”) which surely
covers some of the ground of his proposed reply to Lenin’s “Left-wing
Communism”.
[62] see the Appendix: Why does the Makhnovist movement show there is an
alternative to Bolshevism? of An Anarchist FAQ”.
[63] See “Section I.8.10: Why did the C.N.T. collaborate with the
state?” of An Anarchist FAQ
[64] See “Section I.8.10: Why did the C.N.T. collaborate with the
state?” of An Anarchist FAQ
[65] quoted by Robert Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil
War, vol. 2, , Janus Publishing Company, London, 1999, p. 1156
[66] See “Appendix 3.2: 8. Did the Friends of Durruti ‘break with’
anarchism?” of An Anarchist FAQ
[67] See “Appendix 3.2: 8. Did the Friends of Durruti ‘break with’
anarchism?” of An Anarchist FAQ
[68] Writings 1936–37, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1978, pp. 513–4
[69] Writings 1936–37, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1978, pp. 513–4
[70] For a discussion of the Friends of Durruti and their (non-)relation
to Marxism see “Appendix 3.2: 7. Were the Friends of Durruti Marxists?”
of An Anarchist FAQ
[71] No God, No Masters, vol. 1, Guerin, Daniel (ed.), AK Press,
Edinburgh/San Francisco, 1998, pp. 155–6
[72] Living My Life, vol. 2, p. 954