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Title: Revolution and Dictatorship
Author: Luigi Fabbri
Date: 1921
Language: en
Topics: State socialism, Victor Serge, Russian Revolution, revolution, Paul Sharkey
Source: Retrieved on June 12, 2012 from http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/8932r8
Notes: Translated by Paul Sharkey.

Luigi Fabbri

Revolution and Dictatorship

In the latest edition of Vie Ouvriere to have arrived from Paris, we

find a long letter from a Russian comrade, Victor Serge, known in France

— where he lived before 1915 — under the pseudonym of Kibaltchitch. He

writes from Moscow about the Russian Revolution, living as he is in the

middle of it all.

In truth, he has no news to deliver.

His letter is, more than anything else, a polemic against the newspaper

Le Libertaire which he takes to task for keeping faith with our beliefs,

according to which, if we may quote Bakunin’s phrase, the authoritarian

communists’ notion that a revolution can be decreed and organised

“either by a dictatorship or by a Constituent Assembly, is quite

mistaken”. Kibaltchitch thinks otherwise. He has changed his mind and is

a supporter of the so-called proletarian revolution.

But as is the policy of every renegade who is, or appears to be,

sincere, he deludes himself that he has evolved and reproaches the

anarchists who have stayed faithful to their own principles with being

traditionalists, of being stick-in-the-muds, whereas anarchism — so he

says — is not traditionalist and not static but dynamic. Precisely! But

he fails to appreciate that under the pretext of breaking free from a

so-called anarchist tradition, he fails into the orbit of the old

statist, authoritarian tradition of the bourgeois socialists, if not

directly into the absolutist and militaristic tradition of the ancien

regimes. He is the very archetype of the anarchist who has moulded

anarchy like a beautiful dream of his imagination, because, deep down,

he has little faith in it: and as soon as events crop up, in the face of

which he is called upon to abide by his own ideas, even should it cause

friction, conflict and sacrifices, he promptly scampers off in the

opposite direction. And to any who might be surprised by this, he

replies:

“One has to march in step with life, and face reality. One has to remain

on the terrain of facts.” This is precisely the same language employed

in 1914 by anarchy’s other renegades in their embrace of war-mongering

policy, renegades who forgot their own principles and whose assertions

were so brilliantly exposed as false by our Malatesta.

Kibaltchitch is a State anarchist (the contradiction between those two

words is indicative of his wrongheaded stance) just as Grave and Malato

were in 1914: just as the Vanderveldes, Guesdes and Bissolatis were

State socialists, except that they were less at odds with their own

teachings. just as the interventionists of 1914–1915 used to call us

traditionalists and worshippers of words, and argued, as Kibaltchitch

does, that one had to revise one’s own ideas in the light of the reality

of the facts, etc., But just as they were unable to offer anything in

place of anarchist ideas other than the empty, deceitful verbiage

suitable for bourgeois democrats, so Kibaltchitch too can offer no more

details as to how and in what particulars anarchist ideas stand in need

of amendment and he simply retreats behind the “phenomenon occurring” in

Russia in order to mouth the authoritarian marxist formula about the

State being an instrument of revolution.

He, like some other anarchists we know, has failed to understand that

the most important part of the anarchist programme consists, not of some

far-off dream, which we would also like to have come true, of a society

without masters and no government, but, above all else, of the

libertarian notion of revolution, of revolution against the State and

not with the State, the notion that freedom is also a means as well as

an end, a more appropriate weapon against the old world than the State

authority preferred by Kibaltchitch and less of a two-edged sword, a

weapon less treacherous than that authority.

Therein lies the whole essence of the anarchist teaching: not sprung all

at one stroke, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, from the mind of

one isolated thinker, however gifted: but deduced from the experience of

previous revolutions, from contact with which and in the heat of which,

after 1794, 1848 and 1871, people like Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin,

Arnould, Pisacane and Lefrancais, etc… have drawn the appropriate

lessons which the First International largely adopted as its own and

which are known today by the generic description of anarchism.

If one denies this revolutionary function of anarchism, one is an

anarchist no more. If the whole of anarchism consisted of a distant

vision of a Society without government, or of the individual’s assertion

of self, or of the intellectual and spiritual conundrum of abstract

individual perception of lived reality, there would be neither need nor

room for an anarchist political or social movement. Were anarchism only

an personal ethic for self-improvement, adaptable in material existence

to the most widely divergent actions, to movements that would fly in the

face of that existence, we might be called “anarchists” whilst belonging

to other parties, and the description “anarchist” might be applied to

all who, even though intellectually and spiritually liberated, are and

remain our enemies in terms of practicalities.

But that is not how we understand it, nor do those who have detected in

anarchism, not some means of retreating into an ivory tower, but a

revolutionary proletarian movement, an active involvement in the

emancipation of the workers, with equality and freedom alikeas its

criteria and its object! Kibaltchitch, who does not accept that object,

automatically places himself outside the anarchist family. In order to

stay within it, when he reaches conclusions of his own, he implicitly

admits that he is neither an anarchist nor an anarchist-communist: he

confines himself to the assertion — I am a communist. That comes within

an ace of flying false colours, for it is far from certain that, as he

contends, communism is of itself anti-State and libertarian in its

immediate aims, as soon as they can look upon the State not as some

impediment and deviation, but as a weapon against the old world. He

deceives himself and deceives us when he seeks to reconcile dictatorial

communism with anarchy, since Lenin himself cautioned (in The

Reconstructive Task of the Soviets) that “anarchism and anarchist

syndicalism are irreconcilable with proletarian dictatorship, with

socialism, with communism”. Socialism and communism in the sense in

which Lenin understands them, which is to say, Bolshevism.

Whilst we wait to hear from Kibaltchitch just what this non-traditional

anarchism is, we note that his own is more properly described as a

non-anarchism. Indeed, he speaks in the most pessimistic manner possible

about the Russian anarchist movement which so flourished in 1905, 1906

and 1917–18. “After having done the revolution immeasurable service and

afforded it a legion of heroes — he says this Russian anarchist movement

has been rent by utter ideological, moral and practical confusion.”

That would be depressing news indeed, if we did not know already that

all who quit one party for another discover that everything is going

from bad to worse in the one they have just left. All renegades see

things through the same spectacles! Our reply is that a movement that

has been strong enough to do the revolution immeasurable service and

provided a legion of heroes cannot be destroyed so easily.

It may perhaps have happened in Russia as it has in other revolutions

that the burning idealism and revolutionary vigour of the combatants may

have paved the way for the ruling party, which later disposed or them,

or rather, rid itself of those who proved incapable of accommodating

themselves to becoming functionaries of the new government and who were

unwilling to forswear expression of their own dissenting ideas.

Kibaltchitch might supply us with news of Emma Goldman and let us know

if it is true that this courageous woman, who arrived in Russia brimful

of faith in and enthusiasm for the revolution, is presently walled up in

the prisons in Moscow. Let Kibaltchitch try to get hold of Russian

language anarchist papers, and if he can find none, let him tell us why

and let us know if it is true that the anarchist press is not allowed

under the dictatorship. That would account for the “destruction” of the

Russian anarchist movement better than subtle distinctions between

traditional and non-traditional anarchisms.

If these be baseless rumours and calumnies, let him deny it — himself or

someone else — for it is right that light should be shed on events in

Russia, even from the revolutionary point of view, from the point of

view of liberty, now that the threat from the Western states has been

neutralised and the Moscow government senses victory. For example: is

there any truth in reports of compulsory labour in Russian factories,

military discipline, extended hours, restricted wages, bans on strikes,

etc? It is not important that we should know about steps taken against

the bourgeois, reactionaries, nobles, monks, etc.. and we might even

endorse those, but the important thing is that we find out what

effective freedom is enjoyed by proletarians, revolutionaries, our

anarchist comrades: freedom of the press, freedom of association,

freedom of thought, freedom of enterprise, etc?

And it is on those counts precisely that we are kept most in the dark.

In his article, Kibaltchitch talks only of the least important matters:

intellectual work on Communist Party history, open air festivals and

theatres, etc.. Even the Roman tyrants offered the people “bread and

circuses” and it is very true that in Russia there are spectacles

aplenty and the news that food supply in Moscow and Petrograd is better

than before is a comfort to us too. But Kibaltchitch does not talk to us

about what most interests anarchists, precisely because they are

anarchists: that is, freedom. And should the reports reaching us from

various quarters, and which we have spelled out above, are correct, that

would confirm our profound belief that communism without anarchy,

communism in its statist form, is the negation of freedom. When

Kibaltchitch says that “communism itself in its governmental form

guarantees the individual greater well-being, more happiness and more

freedom than any other current form of social organisation” he is saying

something that, to say the least, still awaits practical substantiation.

As he himself admits, in Russia today, there is none of that. We are

well aware that a large part of the reasons why the revolution cannot

bring the Russian people greater well-being, comfort and freedom can be

put down to the infamous blockade by the capitalist countries, to the

war waged against the Soviet Republic by the Entente powers, and to the

countless, unspeakable acts of infamy perpetrated against it by the

international bourgeoisie. We know ail that, but we are convinced that

for some of its afflictions, especially its internal afflictions, the

Russian revolution is indebted to its dictatorial character, to its

government and those who govern. “This is no time to call it to account

for its sins”, says Kibaltchitch. Perhaps. But nor should a veil be

drawn over mistakes or others be encouraged to repeat them.

What, in essence, would Kibaltchitch like? That even the French

anarchists abjure their principles so as to join the communist faction

of the Socialist Party, “in order to reduce the dangers of State

socialism and combat the influence of power” .Very well, charge! We know

from all too great experience that all who have defected from anarchism

to authoritarian socialism have ended in the worst

reformist-legalitarian and authoritarian hyperbole. The best means of

bringing an effective anarchist influence to bear is to stay an

anarchist in one’s ends as well as in one’s means.

But Kibaltchitch says that dictatorship is a means, a weapon, just as

much as a revolver. “All violence is dictatorial!” Thus does our Russian

ex-comrade indulge in a rather fraudulent play on words. By insulting

it, he confuses the violence of the rebel with the violence of the

gendarme: the violence of a risen people against that of the oppressor

government, the violence of the breaker of shackles, breaking free and

freeing others with the violence of the State, not that of the

revolution: and although it may claim and hold itself to be

revolutionary, dictatorship holds the revolution in check and drives it

off course. Rejecting, resisting and lining up with the opposition to

that certainly does not amount to “withdrawing from the fray”, as

Kibaltchitch argues, but instead amounts to prosecuting a different

action which is simultaneously more revolutionary and more libertarian.

Kibaltchitch says that, at a time when entire generations are being

sacrificed “he has no desire to engage in futile discussion of personal

preferences”, but the anarchist conception of revolution is not a matter

of the preferences of Peter or Paul, nor is it partisan apriorism. It is

for the good of the revolution that anarchists are against dictatorship:

so that the revolution is not aborted, does not place limits upon its

aims, does not mould an organism which would inevitably pave the way for

a new form of statist rule, a new ruling class. We fervently hope that

that does not happen in Russia. Whilst there is every reason to fear so,

and whilst the struggle is even today taking such a heavy toil, and our

best comrades are thrown into prison by the bourgeoisie’s “Royal

Guards”, we have no wish to be reduced tomorrow to the sole satisfaction

of being tossed into prison by the “Red Guards” of the proletarian

dictatorship! And what matters, Kibaltchitch continues, is that we

should be “unreservedly in favour of Red Russia if it is to survive!”

Certainly! Whether we would say as much if we were in Russia, we cannot

tell, but we would certainly make a distinction between the Russia of

the People and that of the Government, the official Russia. As we are

living in a context of bourgeois rule, opposed to the State and the

bourgeoisie hereabouts, we stand unreservedly alongside revolutionary

Russia. But that does not imply that we should give ground on the

question of dictatorship, on the problem of revolutionary leadership,

for the revolution may begin even outside of Russia. Let us defend the

Russian revolution against bourgeois vilification: let us cry out to the

peoples to rally to its defence against the attacks from capitalist

countries, but let us not close our eyes to its errors and let us not be

in a hurry to repeat them. Let us not be so seduced by success that we

utterly forget our principles.

By remaining above all else anarchists, we will have done our first duty

by the Revolution!

“CATILINA” (aka Luigi Fabbri)