đŸ Archived View for library.inu.red âș file âș gilles-dauve-when-insurrections-die.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:31:14. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
âĄïž Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: When Insurrections Die Author: Gilles DauvĂ© Date: 1999 Language: en Topics: communist, anti-fascism, democracy, Spanish Revolution, Left Communism, Germany, Italy, revolution, Insurrection, Libertarian Communism, fascism, democracy, self-abolition of the proletariat, Endnotes Source: Retrieved December 7, 2014 from [[http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/9]] Notes: This is a shorter, entirely reconceived version of the preface to the selection of articles on Spain 1936â39 from the Italian Left magazine Bilan, published in French in 1979 under the pen-name Jean Barrot, and now out of print. The first English edition was published in October 1999. This edition from Endnotes #1 (2008) corrects some typographical errors and improves layout, but has no substantive alterations.
âIf the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian
revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present
Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a
communist development.â[1]
This perspective was not realised. The European proletariat missed its
rendezvous with a revitalised Russian peasant commune.[2]
Brest-Litovsk, Poland, December 1917: the Bolsheviks proposed peace
without annexations to a Germany intent on taking over a large swath of
the old Tsarist empire, stretching from Finland to the Caucasus. But in
February 1918, the German soldiers, âproletarians in uniformâ though
they were, obeyed their officers and resumed the offensive against a
soviet Russia as if they were still facing the Tsarist army. No
fraternisation occurred, and the revolutionary war advocated by the
Bolshevik Left proved impossible. In March, Trotsky had to sign a peace
treaty dictated by the Kaiserâs generals. âWeâre trading space for
timeâ, as Lenin put it, and in fact, in November, the German defeat
turned the treaty into a scrap of paper. Nevertheless, practical proof
of the international link-up of the exploited had failed to materialise.
A few months later, returning to civilian life with the warâs end, these
same proletarians confronted the alliance of the official workersâ
movement and the Freikorps. Defeat followed defeat: in Berlin, Bavaria
and Hungary in 1919; then the Red Army of the Ruhr in 1920; the March
Action in 1921âŠ
September 1939. Hitler and Stalin have just carved up Poland. At the
border bridge of Brest-Litovsk, several hundred members of the KPD,
refugees in the USSR subsequently arrested as âcounter-revolutionariesâ,
are taken from Stalinist prisons and handed over to the Gestapo. Years
later, one of them would explain the scars on her back â âGPU did itâ â
and her torn fingernails â âand thatâs the Gestapoâ. A fair account of
the first half of this century.
1917â37: twenty years that shook the world. The succession of horrors
represented by fascism, then World War II and the subsequent upheavals,
are the effect of a gigantic social crisis opening with the mutinies of
1917 and closed by the Spanish Civil War.
According to current left-wing wisdom, fascism is raw state power and
brutal capital unmasked, so the only way to do away with fascism is to
get rid of capitalism altogether.
So far, so good. Unfortunately, the analysis usually turns round on
itself: since fascism is capitalism at its worst, we ought to prevent it
from actually producing its worst, i.e. we ought to fight for a
ânormalâ, non-fascist capitalism, and even rally non-fascist
capitalists.
Moreover, as fascism is capital in its most reactionary forms, such a
vision means trying to promote capital in its most modern, non-feudal,
non-militarist, non-racist, non-repressive, non-reactionary forms, i.e.
a more liberal capitalism, in other words a more capitalist capitalism.
While it goes on at length to explain how fascism serves the interests
of âbig businessâ[3], anti-fascism maintains that fascism could have
been averted in 1922 or 1933 anyway, that is without destroying big
business, if the workersâ movement and/or the democrats had mounted
enough pressure to bar Mussolini and Hitler from power. Anti-fascism is
an endless comedy of sorrows: if only, in 1921, the Italian Socialist
Party and the newly-founded Italian Communist Party had allied with
Republican forces to stop Mussolini⊠if only, at the beginning of the
1930âs, the KPD had not launched a fratricidal struggle against the SPD,
Europe would have been spared one of the most ferocious dictatorships in
history, a second world war, a Nazi empire of almost continental
dimensions, the concentration camps, and the extermination of the Jews.
Above and beyond its very true observations about classes, the state,
and the ties between fascism and big industry, this vision fails to see
that fascism arose out of a two-fold failure: the failure of
revolutionaries after World War I, crushed as they were by
social-democracy and parliamentary democracy, and then, in the course of
the 1920âs, the failure of the democrats and social-democrats in
managing capital. Without a grasp of the preceding period as well as of
the earlier phase of class struggle and its limits, the coming to power,
and still more the nature of fascism, remain incomprehensible.
What is the real thrust of fascism, if not the economic and political
unification of capital, a tendency which has become general since 1914?
Fascism was a particular way of bringing about that unity in countries â
Italy and Germany â where, even though the revolution had been snuffed
out, the state was unable to impose order, including order in the ranks
of the bourgeoisie. Mussolini was no Thiers, with a solid base in power,
ordering regular forces to massacre the Communards. An essential aspect
of fascism is its birth in the streets, its use of disorder to impose
order, its mobilisation of the old middle classes crazed by their own
decline, and its regeneration, from without, of a state unable to deal
with the crisis of capitalism. Fascism was an effort of the bourgeoisie
to forcibly tame its own contradictions, to turn working class methods
of mobilisation to its own advantage, and to deploy all the resources of
the modern state, first against an internal enemy, then against an
external one.
This was indeed a crisis of the state, during the transition to the
total domination of capital over society. First, workersâ organisations
had been necessary to deal with the proletarian upsurge; then, fascism
was required to put an end to the ensuing disorder. This disorder was,
of course, not revolutionary, but it was paralysing, and stood in the
way of solutions which, as a result, could only be violent. This crisis
was only erratically overcome at the time: the fascist state was
efficient only in appearance, because it forcibly integrated the
wage-labour work force, and artificially buried conflicts by projecting
them into militarist adventure. But the crisis was overcome, relatively,
by the multi-tentacled democratic state established in 1945, which
potentially appropriated all of fascismâs methods, and added some of its
own, since it neutralises wage-worker organisations without destroying
them. Parliaments have lost control over the executive. With welfare or
with workfare, by modern techniques of surveillance or by state
assistance extended to millions of individuals, in short by a system
which makes everyone more and more dependent, social unification goes
beyond anything achieved by fascist terror, but fascism as a specific
movement has disappeared. It corresponded to the forced-march discipline
of the bourgeoisie, under the pressure of the state, in the particular
context of newly created states hard-pressed to constitute themselves as
nations.
The bourgeoisie even took the word âfascismâ from working class
organisations in Italy, which were often called fasci. It is significant
that fascism first defined itself as a form of organisation and not as a
programme. The word referred both to a symbol of state power (fasces, or
bundles, borne before high officials in Ancient Rome), and to a will to
get people together in bundles (groups). Fascismâs only programme is to
organise, to forcibly make the components of society converge.
Dictatorship is not a weapon of capital (as if capital could replace it
with other, less brutal weapons): dictatorship is one of its tendencies,
a tendency realised whenever it is deemed necessary. A âreturnâ to
parliamentary democracy, as it occurred in Germany after 1945, indicates
that dictatorship is useless for integrating the masses into the state
(at least until the next time). The problem is therefore not that
democracy ensures a more pliant domination than dictatorship: anyone
would prefer being exploited in the Swedish mode to being abducted by
the henchmen of Pinochet. But does one have the choice? Even the gentle
democracy of Scandinavia would be turned into a dictatorship if
circumstances demanded it. The state can only have one function, which
it fulfils democratically or dictatorially. The fact that the former is
less harsh does not mean that it is possible to reorient the state to
dispense with the latter. Capitalismâs forms depend no more on the
preferences of wage workers than they do on the intentions of the
bourgeoisie. Weimar capitulated to Hitler with open arms. LĂ©on Blumâs
Popular Front did not âavoid fascismâ, because in 1936 France required
neither an authoritarian unification of capital nor a shrinking of its
middle classes.
There is no political âchoiceâ to which proletarians could be enticed or
which could be forcibly imposed. Democracy is not dictatorship, but
democracy does prepare dictatorship, and prepares itself for
dictatorship.
The essence of anti-fascism consists in resisting fascism by defending
democracy: one no longer struggles against capitalism but seeks to
pressure capitalism into renouncing the totalitarian option. Since
socialism is identified with total democracy, and capitalism with an
accelerating tendency to fascism, the antagonisms between proletariat
and capital, communism and wage-labour, proletariat and state, are
rejected for a counter-position of democracy and fascism presented as
the quintessential revolutionary perspective. The official left and far
left tell us that a real change would be the realisation, at last, of
the ideals of 1789, endlessly betrayed by the bourgeoisie. The new
world? Why, it is already here, to some extent, in embryos to be
preserved, in little buds to be tended: already existing democratic
rights must be pushed further and further within an infinitely
perfectible society, with ever-greater daily doses of democracy, until
the achievement of complete democracy, or socialism.
Thus reduced to anti-fascist resistance, social critique is enlisted in
dithyrambs to everything it once denounced, and gives up nothing less
than that shop-worn affair, revolution, for gradualism, a variant on the
âpeaceful transition to socialismâ once advocated by the CPs, and
derided, thirty years ago, by anyone serious about changing the world.
The retrogression is palpable.
We wonât invite ridicule by accusing the left and far left of having
discarded a communist perspective which they knew in reality only when
opposing it. It is all too obvious that anti-fascism renounces
revolution. But anti-fascism fails exactly where its realism claims to
be effective: in preventing a possible dictatorial mutation of society.
Bourgeois democracy is a phase in capitalâs seizure of power, and its
extension in the 20^(th) century completes capitalâs domination by
intensifying the isolation of individuals. Proposed as a remedy for the
separation between man and community, between human activity and
society, and between classes, democracy will never be able to solve the
problem of the most separated society in history. As a form forever
incapable of modifying its content, democracy is only a part of the
problem to which it claims to be the solution. Each time it claims to
strengthen the âsocial bondâ, democracy contributes to its dissolution.
Each time it papers over the contradictions of the commodity, it does so
by tightening the hold of the net which the state has placed over social
relations.
Even in their own desperately resigned terms, the anti-fascists, to be
credible, have to explain to us how local democracy is compatible with
the colonisation of the commodity which empties out public space, and
fills up the shopping malls. They have to explain how an omnipresent
state to which people turn for protection and help, this veritable
machine for producing social âgoodâ, will not commit âevilâ when
explosive contradictions require it to restore order. Fascism is the
adulation of the statist monster, while anti-fascism is its more subtle
apology. The fight for a democratic state is inevitably a fight to
consolidate the state, and far from crippling totalitarianism, such a
fight increases totalitarianismâs stranglehold on society.
Fascism triumphed in countries in which the revolutionary assault after
World War I matured into a series of armed insurrections. In Italy, an
important part of the proletariat, using its own methods and goals,
directly confronted fascism. There was nothing specifically anti-fascist
about its struggle: fighting capital compelled workers and the young CP
(created at Livorno, January 1921, and led by the âBordigistâ faction)
to fight both the Black Shirts and the cops of parliamentary
democracy.[4]
Fascism is unique in giving counter-revolution a mass base and in
mimicking revolution. Fascism turns the call to âtransform the
imperialist war into civil warâ against the workersâ movement, and it
appears as a reaction of demobilised veterans returning to civilian
life, where they are nothing, only held together by collective violence,
and bent on destroying everything they imagine to be a cause of their
dispossession: subversives, enemies of the nation, etc. In July 1918,
Mussoliniâs paper, Il Popolo dâItalia, added to its title âVeteransâ and
Producersâ Dailyâ.
Thus from the outset fascism became an auxiliary of the police in rural
areas, putting down the agricultural proletariat with bullets, but at
the same time developing a frenzied anti-capitalist demagogy. In 1919,
it represented nothing: in Milan, in the November general election, it
got less than 5000 votes, while the socialists got 170,000. Yet it
demanded the abolition of the monarchy, of the senate and all titles of
nobility, the vote for women, the confiscation of the property of the
clergy, and the expropriation of the big landowners and industrialists.
Fighting against the worker in the name of the âproducerâ, Mussolini
exalted the memory of the Red Week of 1914 (which had seen a wave a
riots, particularly in Ancona and Naples), and hailed the positive role
of unions in linking the worker to the nation. Fascismâs goal was the
authoritarian restoration of the state, in order to create a new state
structure capable (in contrast to democracy, Mussolini said) of limiting
big capital and of controlling the commodity logic which was eroding
values, social ties and work.
For decades, the bourgeoisie had denied the reality of social
contradictions. Fascism, on the contrary, proclaimed them with violence,
denying their existence between classes and transposing them to the
struggle between nations, denouncing Italyâs fate as a âproletarian
nationâ. Mussolini was archaic in so far as he upheld traditional values
ruined by capital, and modern in so far as he claimed to defend the
social rights of the people.
Fascist repression was unleashed after a proletarian failure engineered
mainly by democracy and its main fallback options: the parties and
unions, which alone can defeat the workers by employing direct and
indirect methods in tandem. Fascismâs arrival in power was not the
culmination of street battles. Italian and German proles had been
crushed before, by both ballots and bullets.
In 1919, federating pre-existing elements with others close to him,
Mussolini founded his fasci. To counter clubs and revolvers, while Italy
was exploding along with the rest of Europe, democracy called for⊠a
vote, from which a moderate and socialist majority emerged. Forty years
after these events Bordiga commented:
âEnthusiastic involvement in the 1919 electoral celebration was
tantamount to removing all obstacles on the path of fascism, which was
shooting ahead while the masses were put to sleep as they waited for the
big parliamentary showdown⊠Victory, the election of 150 socialist MPs,
was won at the cost of the ebb of the insurrectionary movement and of
the general political strike, and the rollback of the gains that had
already been won.â
At the time of the factory occupations of 1920, the state, holding back
from a head-on-assault, allowed the proletariat to exhaust itself, with
the support of the CGL (a majority-socialist union), which wore down the
strikes when it did not break them openly. The institutionalisation of
âworkersâ controlâ over the factories, under state supervision, was
approved by bosses and unions alike.
As soon as the fasciappeared, sacking the Case di Popolo, the police
either turned a blind eye or confiscated the workersâ guns. The courts
showed the fasci the greatest indulgence, and the army tolerated their
exactions when it did not actually assist them. This open but unofficial
support became quasi-official with the âBonomi circularâ. After being
expelled from the socialist party in 1912, with Mussoliniâs agreement,
for supporting Italyâs war against Libya, Ivanoe Bonomi held several
ministerial posts, and was head of government in 1921â22. His October
20, 1921 circular provided 60,000 demobilised officers to take command
of Mussoliniâs assault groups.
Meanwhile, what were the parties doing? Those liberals allied with the
right did not hesitate to form a ânational blocâ, including the
fascists, for the elections of May 1921. In June-July of the same year,
confronting an adversary without the slightest scruple, the PSI
concluded a meaningless âpacification pactâ whose only concrete effect
was to further disorient the workers.
Faced with an obvious political reaction, the CGL declared itself
a-political. Sensing that Mussolini had power within his grasp, the
union leaders dreamed of a tacit agreement of mutual tolerance with the
fascists, and called on the proletariat to stay out of the face-off
between the CP and the National Fascist Party.
Until August 1922, fascism rarely existed outside the agrarian regions,
mainly in the north, where it eradicated all traces of autonomous
agrarian worker unionism. In 1919, fascists did burn the headquarters of
the socialist daily paper, but they held back from any role as
strike-breakers in 1920, and even gave verbal support to worker demands:
Mussolini took great pains to stand behind the strikers and dissociate
himself from troublemakers, i.e. communists. In the urban areas, the
fasci were rarely dominant. Their âMarch on Ravennaâ (September 1921)
was easily routed. In Rome in November 1921 a general strike prevented a
fascist congress from taking place. In May 1922 the fascists tried
again, and were stopped again.
The scenario varied little. A localised fascist onslaught would be met
by a working-class counter-attack, which would then relent (following
calls for moderation from the reformist workersâ movement) as soon as
reactionary pressure tapered off: the proletarians trusted the democrats
to dismantle the armed bands. The fascist threat would pull back,
regroup and go elsewhere, over time making itself credible to the same
state from which the masses were expecting a solution. The proletarians
were quicker to recognise the enemy in the black shirt of the street
thug than in the ânormalâ uniform of a cop or soldier, draped in a
legality sanctioned by habit, law and universal suffrage. The workers
were militant, used guns, and turned many a Labour Exchange or Casa di
Popolo into a fortress, but stayed nearly always on the defensive,
waging a trench war against an ever mobile opponent.
At the beginning of July 1922, the CGL, by a two-thirds majority
(against the communist minorityâs one-third), declared its support for
âany government guaranteeing the restoration of basic freedomsâ. In the
same month, the fascists seriously stepped up their attempts to
penetrate the northern citiesâŠ
On August 1^(st), the Alliance of Labour, which included the railway
workersâ union, the CGL and the anarchist USI, called a general strike.
Despite broad success, the Alliance officially called off the strike on
the 3^(rd). In numerous cities, however, it continued in insurrectionary
form, which was finally contained only by a combined effort of the
police and the military, supported by naval cannon, and, of course,
reinforced by the fascists.
Who defeated this proletarian energy? The general strike was broken by
the state and the fasci, but it was also smothered by democracy, and its
failure opened the way to a fascist solution to the crisis.
What followed was less a coup dâĂ©tat than a transfer of power with the
support of a whole array of forces. The âMarch on Romeâ of the Duce (who
actually took the train) was less a showdown than a bit of theatre: the
fascists went through the motions of assaulting the state, the state
went through the motions of defending itself, and Mussolini took power.
His ultimatum of October 24 (âWe Want To Become the State!â) was not a
threat of civil war, but a signal to the ruling class that the National
Fascist Party represented the only force capable of restoring state
authority, and of assuring the political unity of the country. The army
could still have contained the fascist groups gathered in Rome, which
were badly equipped and notoriously inferior on the military level, and
the state could have withstood the seditious pressure. But the game was
not being played on the military level. Under the influence of Badoglio
in particular (the commander-in-chief in 1919â21) legitimate authority
caved in. The king refused to proclaim a state of emergency, and on the
30^(th) he asked the Duce to form a new government.
The liberals â the same people anti-fascism counts on to stop fascism â
joined the government. With the exception of the socialists and the
communists, all parties sought a rapprochement with the PNF and voted
for Mussolini: the parliament, with only 35 fascist MPs, supported
Mussoliniâs investiture 306â116. Giolitti himself, the great liberal
icon of the time, an authoritarian reformer who had been head of state
many times before the war, and then again in 1920â21, whom fashionable
thought still fancies in retrospect as the sole politician capable of
opposing Mussolini, supported him up to 1924. Democracy not only
surrendered its powers to the dictator, but ratified them.
We might add that in the following months, several unions, including
those of the railway workers and the sailors, declared themselves
ânationalâ, patriotic, and therefore not hostile to the regime:
repression did not spare them.
If Italian democracy yielded to fascism without a fight, the latter
spawned democracy anew when it found itself no longer corresponding to
the balance of social and political forces.
The central question after 1943, as in 1919, was how to control the
working-class. In Italy more than in other countries, the end of World
War II shows the class dimension of international conflict, which can
never be explained by military logic alone. A general strike erupted at
FIAT in October 1942. In March 1943, a strike wave rocked Turin and
Milan, including attempts at forming workersâ councils. In 1943â45,
worker groups emerged, sometimes independent of the CP, sometimes
calling themselves âBordigistsâ, often simultaneously antifascist,
rossi, and armed. The regime could no longer maintain social
equilibrium, just as the German alliance was becoming untenable against
the rise of the Anglo-Americans, who were seen in every quarter as the
future masters of Western Europe. Changing sides meant allying with the
winners-to-be, but also meant rerouting worker revolts and partisan
groups into a patriotic objective with a social content. On July 10,
1943, the Allies landed in Sicily. On the 24^(th), finding himself in a
19â17 minority on the Grand Fascist Council, Mussolini resigned. Rarely
has a dictator had to step aside for a majority vote.
Marshal Badoglio, who had been a dignitary of the regime ever since his
support for the March on Rome, and who wanted to prevent, in his own
words, âthe collapse of the regime from swinging too far to the leftâ,
formed a government which was still fascist but which no longer included
the Duce, and turned to the democratic opposition. The democrats refused
to participate, making the departure of the king a condition. After a
second transitional government, Badoglio formed a third in April 1944,
which included the leader of the CP, Togliatti. Under the pressure of
the Allies and of the CP, the democrats agreed to accept the king (the
Republic would be proclaimed by referendum in 1946). But Badoglio
stirred up too many bad memories. In June, Bonomi, who 23 years earlier
had ordered the officers to join the fasci, formed the first ministry to
actually exclude the fascists. This is how Bonomi, ex-socialist,
ex-warmonger, ex-minister, ex-ânational blocâ (fascists included) MP,
ex-government leader from July 1921 to February 1922, ex-everything,
took office for six months as an anti-fascist. Later the situation was
reoriented around the tripartite formula (Stalinists + Socialists +
Christian Democrats) which would dominate both Italy and France in the
first years after the war.
This game of musical chairs, often played by the self-same political
class, was the theatre prop behind which democracy metamorphosed into
dictatorship, and vice-versa. The phases of equilibrium and
disequilibrium in class conflicts brought about a succession of
political forms aimed at maintaining the same state, underwriting the
same content. No one was more qualified to say it than the Spanish CP,
when it declared, out of cynicism or naivety, during the transition from
Francoism to democratic monarchy in the mid-70âs:
âSpanish society wants everything to be transformed so that the normal
functioning of the state can be assured, without detours or social
convulsions. The continuity of the state requires the non-continuity of
the regime.â
Counter-revolution inevitably triumphs on the terrain of revolution.
Through its âpeopleâs communityâ National Socialism would claim to have
eliminated the parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy against which the
proletariat revolted after 1917. But the conservative revolution also
took over old anti-capitalist tendencies (the return to nature, the
flight from citiesâŠ) that the workersâ parties, even the extremist ones,
had misestimated by their refusal to integrate the a-classist and
communitarian dimension of the proletariat, and their inability to think
of the future as anything but an extension of heavy industry. In the
first half of the 19^(th) century, these themes were at the centre of
the socialist movementâs preoccupations, before Marxism abandoned them
in the name of progress and science, and they survived only in anarchism
and in sects.
Volksgemeinschaft vs. Gemeinwesen, peopleâs community or the human
community⊠1933 was not the defeat, only the consummation of the defeat.
Nazism arose and triumphed to defuse, resolve and to close a social
crisis so deep that we still donât appreciate its magnitude. Germany,
cradle of the largest Social Democracy in the world, also gave rise to
the strongest radical, anti-parliamentary, anti-union movement, one
aspiring to a âworkersââ world but also capable of attracting to itself
many other anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist revolts. The presence of
avant-garde artists in the ranks of the âGerman Leftâ is no accident. It
was symptomatic of an attack on capital as âcivilisationâ in the way
Fourier criticised it. The loss of community, individualism and
gregariousness, sexual poverty, the family both undermined but affirmed
as a refuge, the estrangement from nature, industrialised food,
increasing artificiality, the prostheticisation of man, regimentation of
time, social relations increasingly mediated by money and technique: all
these alienations passed through the fire of a diffuse and multi-formed
critique. Only a superficial backward glance sees this ferment purely
through the prism of its inevitable recuperation.
The counter-revolution triumphed in the 1920âs only by laying the
foundations, in Germany and in the US, of a consumer society and of
Fordism, and by pulling millions of Germans, including workers, into
industrial, commodified modernity. Ten years of fragile rule, as the mad
hyperinflation of 1923 shows. This was followed in 1929 by an earthquake
in which not the proletariat but capitalist practice itself repudiated
the ideology of progress and an ever-increasing consumption of objects
and signs.
Capitalist modernity was questioned twice in ten years, first by
proletarians, then by capital. Nazi extremism and its violence were
adequate to the depth of the revolutionary movement National-Socialism
took over and negated. Like the radicals of 1919â21, Nazism proposed a
community of wage-workers, but one which was authoritarian, closed,
national, and racial, and for twelve years it succeeded in transforming
proletarians into wage-workers and into soldiers.
Fascism grew out of capital, but out of a capital which destroyed old
relationships without producing new stable ones brought about by
consumerism. Commodities failed to give birth to modern capitalist
community.
Dictatorship always comes after the defeat of social movements, once
they have been chloroformed and massacred by democracy, the leftist
parties and the unions. In Italy, several months separated the final
proletarian failures from the appointment of Mussolini as head of state.
In Germany, a gap of a dozen years broke the continuity and made January
30, 1933 appear as an essentially political or ideological phenomenon,
not as the effect of an earlier social earthquake. The popular basis of
National Socialism and the murderous energy it unleashed remain
mysteries if one ignores the question of the submission, revolt, and
control of labour.
The German defeat of 1918 and the fall of the empire set in motion a
proletarian assault strong enough to shake the foundations of society,
but impotent when it came to revolutionising it, thus bringing Social
Democracy and the unions to centre stage as the key to political
equilibrium. Their leaders emerged as men of order, and had no scruples
about calling in the Freikorps, fully fascist groupings with many future
Nazis in their ranks, to repress a radical worker minority in the name
of the interests of the reformist majority. First defeated by the rules
of bourgeois democracy, the communists were also defeated by
working-class democracy: the âworks councilsâ placed their trust in the
traditional organisations, not in the revolutionaries easily denounced
as anti-democrats.
In this juncture, democracy and Social Democracy were indispensable to
German capitalism for killing off the spirit of revolt in the polling
booth, winning a series of reforms from the bosses, and dispersing the
revolutionaries.[5]
After 1929, on the other hand, capitalism needed to eliminate part of
the middle classes, and to discipline the proletarians, and even the
bourgeoisie. The workersâ movement, defending as it did political
pluralism and immediate worker interests, had become an obstacle. As
mediators between capital and labour, working-class organisations derive
their function from both, but also try to remain autonomous from both,
and from the state. Social Democracy has meaning only as a force
contending with the employers and the state, not as an organ absorbed by
them. Its vocation is the management of an enormous political,
municipal, social, mutualist and cultural network. The KPD, moreover,
had quickly constituted its own empire, smaller but vast nonetheless.
But as capital becomes more and more organised, it tends to pull
together all its different strands, bringing a statist element to the
enterprise, a bourgeois element to the trade-union bureaucracy, and a
social element to public administration. The weight of working-class
reformism, which ultimately pervaded the state, and its existence as a
âcounter-societyâ made it a factor of social conservation which capital
in crisis had to eliminate. By their defence of wage-labour as a
component of capital, the SPD and the unions played an indispensable
anti-communist part in 1918â21, but this same function later led them to
put the interest of wage-labour ahead of everything else, to the
detriment of the reorganisation of capital as a whole.
A stable bourgeois state would have tried to solve this problem by
anti-union legislation, by recapturing the âworker fortressâ, and by
pitting the middle classes, in the name of modernity, against the
archaism of the proles, as Thatcherâs England did much later. Such an
offensive assumes that capital is relatively united under the control of
a few dominant factions. But the German bourgeoisie of 1930 was
profoundly divided, the middle classes had collapsed, and the
nation-state was in shambles.
By negotiation or by force, modern democracy represents and reconciles
antagonistic interests, to the extent that this is possible. Endless
parliamentary crises and real or imagined plots (for which Germany was
the stage after the fall of the last socialist chancellor in 1930) in a
democracy are the invariable sign of long-term disarray in ruling
circles. At the beginning of the 1930âs, the crisis whipsawed the
bourgeoisie between irreconcilable social and geopolitical strategies:
either the increased integration or the elimination of the workersâ
movement; international trade and pacifism, or autarchy laying the
foundations of a military expansion. The solution did not necessarily
imply a Hitler, but it did presuppose a concentration of force and
violence in the hands of central government. Once the centrist-reformist
compromise had exhausted itself, the only option left was statist,
protectionist and repressive.
A programme of this kind required the violent dismantling of Social
Democracy, which in its domestication of the workers had come to
exercise excessive influence, while still being incapable of unifying
all of Germany behind it. This unification was the task of Nazism, which
was able to appeal to all classes, from the unemployed to the industrial
tycoons, with a demagogy that even surpassed that of the bourgeois
politicians, and an anti-semitism intended to build cohesion through
exclusion.
How could the working-class parties have made themselves into an
obstacle to such xenophobic and racist madness, after having so often
been the fellow travellers of nationalism? For the SPD, this had been
clear since the turn of the century, obvious in 1914, and signed in
blood in the 1919 pact with the Freikorps, who were cast very much in
the same warrior mould as their contemporaries, the fasci.
Besides, socialists had not been immune to anti-semitism. Abraham
Berlauâs The German Social-Democratic Party 1914â1921 (Columbia 1949)
describes how many SPD or union leaders, and even the prestigious Neue
Zeit, openly raved against âforeignâ (i.e. Polish and Russian) Jews. In
March 1920 the Berlin police (under socialist supervision) raided the
Jewish district and sent about 1000 people to a concentration camp. All
were freed later, but the labour movement did contribute to the spread
of anti-semitism.
The KPD, for its part, had not hesitated to ally with the nationalists
against the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. No Comintern
theoretician opposed Radek when he stated that âonly the working-class
can save the nationâ. The KPD leader Thalheimer made it clear that the
party should fight alongside the German bourgeoisie, which played âan
objectively revolutionary role through its foreign policyâ. Later,
around 1930, the KPD demanded a ânational and social liberationâ and
denounced fascism as a âtraitor to the nationâ. Talk of ânational
revolutionâ was so common among German Stalinists that it inspired
Trotskyâs 1931 pamphlet Against National-Communism.
In January 1933, the die was cast. No one can deny that the Weimar
Republic willingly gave itself to Hitler. Both the right and the centre
had come round to seeing him as a viable solution to get the country out
of its impasse, or as a temporary lesser evil. âBig capitalâ, reticent
about any uncontrollable upheaval, had not, up to that time, been any
more generous with the NSDAP than with the other nationalist and
right-wing formations. Only in November 1932 did Schacht, an intimate
adviser of the bourgeoisie, convince business circles to support Hitler
(who had, moreover, just seen his electoral support slightly decline)
because he saw in Hitler a force capable of unifying the state and
society. The fact that industrial magnates did not foresee what then
ensued, leading to war and defeat, is another question, and in any event
they were not notable by their presence in the clandestine resistance to
the regime.
On January 30, 1933 Hitler was appointed chancellor in complete legality
by Hindenburg, who himself had been constitutionally elected president a
year earlier with the support of the socialists, who saw in him a
rampart against⊠Hitler. The Nazis were a minority in the first
government formed by the leader of the NSDAP.
In the following weeks, the masks were taken off: working-class
militants were hunted down, their offices were sacked, and a reign of
terror was launched. In the elections of March 1933, held against the
backdrop of violence by both the storm-troopers and the police, 288
NSDAP MPs were sent to the Reichstag (while the KPD still retained 80
and the SPD 120).
Naive people might express surprise at the docility with which the
repressive apparatus goes over to dictators, but the state machine obeys
the authority commanding it. Did the new leaders not enjoy full
legitimacy? Did eminent jurists not write their decrees in conformity
with the higher laws of the land? In the democratic state â and Weimar
was one â if there is conflict between the two components of the
binomial, it is not democracy which will win out. In a âstate founded on
lawâ â and Weimar was also one â if there is a contradiction, it is law
which must bend to serve the state, and never the opposite.
During these few months, what did the democrats do? Those on the right
accepted the new dispensation. The Zentrum, the Catholic party of the
centre, which had even seen its support increase in the March 1933
elections, voted to give four years of full emergency powers to Hitler,
powers which became the legal basis of Nazi dictatorship.
The socialists, for their part, attempted to avoid the fate of the KPD,
which had been outlawed on February 28 in the wake of the Reichstag
fire. On March 30, 1933, they left the Second International to prove
their national German character. On May 17 their parliamentary group
voted in support of Hitlerâs foreign policy.
On June 22, the SPD was dissolved as âan enemy of the people and the
stateâ. A few weeks later, the Zentrum was forced to dissolve itself.
The unions followed in the footsteps of the Italian CGL, and hoped to
salvage what they could by insisting that they were a-political. In
1932, the union leaders had proclaimed their independence from all
parties and their indifference to the form of the state. This did not
stop them from seeking an accord with Schleicher, who was chancellor
from November 1932 to January 1933, and who was looking for a base and
some credible pro-worker demagogy. Once the Nazis had formed a
government, the union leaders convinced themselves that if they
recognised National Socialism, the regime would leave them some small
space. This strategy culminated in the farce of union members marching
under the swastika on May Day 1933, which had been renamed âFestival of
German Labourâ. It was wasted effort. In the following days, the Nazis
liquidated the unions and arrested the militants.
Having been schooled to contain the masses and to negotiate in their
name or, that failing, to repress them, the working-class bureaucracy
was still fighting the previous war. The labour bureaucrats were not
being attacked for their lack of patriotism. What bothered the
bourgeoisie was not the bureaucratsâ lingering lip service to the old
pre-1914 internationalism, but rather the existence of trade-unions,
however servile, retaining a certain independence in an era in which
even an institution of class collaboration became superfluous if the
state did not completely control it.
In Italy and in Germany, fascism took over the state by legal means.
Democracy capitulated to dictatorship, or, worse still, greeted
dictatorship with open arms. But what about Spain? Far from being the
exceptional case of a resolute action that was nonetheless, and sadly,
defeated, Spain was the extreme case of armed confrontation between
democracy and fascism in which the nature of the struggle still remained
the same clash of two forms of capitalist development, two political
forms of the capitalist state, two state structures fighting for
legitimacy in the same country.
Objection!! â âSo, in your opinion, Franco and a working-class militia
are the same thing? The big landowners and impoverished peasants
collectivising land are in the same camp?!â
First of all, the confrontation happened only because the workers rose
up against fascism. All the contradictions of the movement were manifest
in its first weeks: an undeniable class war was transformed into a
capitalist civil war (though of course there was no assignment of roles
in which the two bourgeois factions orchestrated every act: history is
not a play).[6]
The dynamic of a class-divided society is ultimately shaped by the need
to unify those classes. When, as happened in Spain, a popular explosion
combines with the disarray of the ruling groups, a social crisis becomes
a crisis of the state. Mussolini and Hitler triumphed in countries with
weak, recently unified nation-states and powerful regionalist currents.
In Spain, from the Renaissance until modern times, the state was the
colonial armed might of a commercial society it ultimately ruined,
choking off one of the pre-conditions of industrial expansion: an
agrarian reform. In fact, Spanish industrialisation had to make its way
through monopolies, the misappropriation of public funds, and
parasitism.
Space is lacking here for a summary of the 19^(th) century crazy quilt
of countless reforms and liberal impasses, dynastic squabbles, the
Carlist wars, the tragicomic succession of regimes and parties after
World War I, and the cycle of insurrections and repressions that
followed the establishment of the Republic in 1931. Beneath all these
rumblings was the weakness of the rising bourgeoisie, caught as it was
between its rivalry with the landed oligarchy and the absolute necessity
of containing peasant and worker revolts. In 1936, the land question had
not been resolved: unlike France after 1789, the mid-19^(th) century
sell-off of the Spanish clergyâs lands wound up strengthening a
latifundist bourgeoisie. Even in the years after 1931, the Institute for
Agrarian Reform only used one-third of the funds at its disposal to buy
up large holdings. The conflagration of 1936â39 would never have reached
such political extremes, including the explosion of the state into two
factions fighting a three-year civil war, without the tremors which had
been rising from the social depths for a century.
Spain had no large centre-left bourgeois party like the âParti Radicalâ
which was the centre of gravity of French politics for over sixty years.
Before July 1936, Spanish Social Democracy kept a much more militant
outlook in a country where land was often occupied by wage-labourers,
where strikes were rampant, where Madrid tram workers tried to manage
the workplace, and where crowds stormed jails to free some of the 30,000
political prisoners. As a socialist leader put it: âThe possibilities of
stabilising a democratic republic in our country are decreasing every
day. Elections are but a variant of civil war.â (One might add: a
variant of how to keep it at bay.)
In the summer of 1936, it was an open secret that a military coup was
coming. After giving the rebels every chance to prepare themselves, the
Popular Front elected in February was willing to negotiate and perhaps
even to surrender. The politicians would have made their peace with the
rebels, as they had done during the dictatorship of Primo de Riveira
(1932â31), which was supported by eminent socialists (Caballero had
served it as a technical counsellor, before becoming Minister of Labour
in 1931, and then head of the Republican government from September 1936
to May 1937). Furthermore, the general who had obeyed Republican orders
two years earlier and crushed the Asturias insurrection â Franco â
couldnât be all that bad.
But the proletariat rose up, blocked the putsch in half of the country,
and hung on to its weapons. In so doing, the workers were obviously
fighting fascism, but they were not acting as anti-fascists, because
their actions were directed against Franco and against a democratic
state more unsettled by the massesâ initiative than by the military
revolt. Three prime ministers came and went in 24 hours before the fait
accompli of the arming of the people was accepted.
Once again, the unfolding of the insurrection showed that the problem of
violence is not primarily a technical one. Victory does not go to the
side with the advantage in weaponry (the military) or in numbers (the
people), but rather to who dares to take the initiative. Where workers
trusted the state, the state remained passive or promised the moon, as
happened in Zaragoza. When their struggle was focused and sharp (as in
Malaga) the workers won; if it was lacking in vigour, it was drowned in
blood (20,000 killed in Seville).
Thus the Spanish Civil War began with an authentic insurrection, but
such a characterisation is incomplete. It holds true only for the
opening moment: an effectively proletarian uprising. After defeating the
forces of reaction in a large number of cities, the workers had the
power. But what were they going to do with it? Should they give it back
to the republican state, or should they use it to go further in a
communist direction?
Created immediately after the insurrection, the Central Committee of
Antifascist Militias included delegates from the CNT, the FAI, the UGT
(socialist union), the POUM, the PSUC (product of the recent fusion of
the CP and the socialists in Catalonia), and four representatives of the
Generalitat, the Catalan regional government. As a veritable bridge
between the workersâ movement and the state, and, moreover, tied if not
integrated into the Generalitatâs Department of Defence by the presence
in its midst of the latterâs council of defence, the commissar of public
order, etc., the Central Committee of the Militias quickly began to
unravel.
Of course in giving up their autonomy most proletarians believed that
they were, in spite of everything, hanging onto real power and giving
the politicians only the facade of authority, which they mistrusted, and
which they could control and orient in a favourable direction. Were they
not armed?
This was a fatal error. The question is not: who has the guns? But
rather: what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000
proletarians armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in
anything beside their own power to change the world. Otherwise, the next
day, the next month or the next year, the power whose authority they
recognise will take away the guns which they failed to use against it.
âIn fact, the fight in Spain between âlegalâ government and ârebel
forcesâ is in no way a fight for ideals, but a struggle between
determined capitalist groups entrenched in the bourgeois Republic and
other capitalist groups ⊠The Spanish cabinet is no different in its
principles from the bloody Leroux regime which massacred thousands of
Spanish proletarians in 1934 ⊠Spanish workers are now being oppressed
with guns in their hands!â[7]
The insurgents did not take on the legal government, in other words the
state as it then existed, and all their subsequent actions took place
under its auspices. âA revolution had begun but never consolidatedâ, as
Orwell wrote. This is the main point which determined the course of an
increasingly losing armed struggle against Franco, as well as the
exhaustion and destruction by both camps of the collectivisations and
socialisations. After the summer of 1936, real power in Spain was
exercised by the state and not by organisations, unions, collectivities,
committees, etc. Even though Nin, the head of the POUM, was an adviser
to the Ministry of Justice, âThe POUM nowhere succeeded in having any
influence over the policeâ, as one defender of that party admitted.[8]
While the workersâ militias were indeed the flower of the Republican
army and paid a heavy price in combat, they carried no weight in the
decisions of the high command, which steadily integrated them into
regular units (a process completed by the beginning of 1937), preferring
to wear them down rather than tolerating their autonomy. As for the
powerful CNT, it ceded ground to a CP which had been very weak before
July 1936 (having 14 MPs in the Popular Front chamber in February, as
opposed to 85 socialists), but which was able to insinuate itself into
part of the state apparatus and turn the state increasingly to its own
advantage against the radicals, and particularly against the militants
of the CNT. The question was: who mastered the situation? And the answer
was: the state makes subtle and brutal use of its power when it has to.
If the Republican bourgeoisie and the Stalinists lost precious time
dismantling the peasant communes, disarming the POUM militias, and
hunting down Trotskyist âsaboteursâ and other âHitler agentsâ at the
very moment when anti-fascism was supposed to be throwing everything in
the struggle against Franco, they did not do so from a suicidal impulse.
For the state and the CP (which was becoming the backbone of the state
through the military and police) these operations were not a waste of
time. The head of the PSUC supposedly said: âBefore taking Zaragoza, we
have to take Barcelona.â Their main objective was never crushing Franco,
but retaining control of the masses, for this is what states are for,
and this is how Stalinism got its power. Barcelona was taken away from
the proletarians. Zaragoza remained in fascist hands.
On May 3, the police attempted to occupy the Telephone Exchange, which
was under the control of anarchist (and socialist) workers. In the
Catalan metropolis, heart and symbol of the revolution, legal authority
stopped at nothing in disarming whatever remained alive, spontaneous and
anti-bourgeois. The local police, moreover, was in the hands of the
PSUC. Confronted by an openly hostile power, the workers finally
understood that this power was not their own, that they had given it the
gift of their insurrection ten months earlier, and that their
insurrection had been turned against them. In reaction to the power grab
by the state, a general strike paralysed Barcelona. It was too late. The
workers still had the capacity to rise up against the state (this time
in its democratic form), but they could no longer push their struggle to
the point of an open break.
As always, the âsocialâ question predominated over the military one.
Legal authority could not impose itself by street battles. Within a few
hours, instead of urban guerrilla warfare, a war of position, a face-off
of apartment building against apartment building set in. It was a
defensive stalemate in which no one could win because no one was
attacking. With its own offensive bogged down, the police would not risk
its forces in attacks on buildings held by the anarchists. Broadly
speaking, the CP and the state held the centre of the city, while the
CNT and the POUM held the working-class districts.
The status quo ultimately won out by political means. The masses placed
their trust in the two organisations under attack, while the latter,
afraid of alienating the state, got people to go back to work (though
not without difficulty) and thereby undermined the only force capable of
saving them politically and⊠âphysicallyâ. As soon as the strike was
over, knowing that it henceforth controlled the situation, the
government brought in 6,000 Assault Guards â the elite of the police.
Because they accepted the mediation of ârepresentative organisationsâ
and counsels of moderation from the POUM and the CNT, the very same
masses who had defeated the fascist military in July 1936 surrendered
without a fight to the Republican police in May 1937.
At that point repression could begin. Only a few weeks were necessary to
outlaw the POUM, to arrest its leaders, to kill them legally or
otherwise, and to dispose of Nin. A parallel police was established,
organised by the NKVD and the secret apparatus of the Comintern, and
answering only to Moscow. Anyone showing the slightest opposition to the
Republican state and its main ally, the USSR, could be denounced and
hunted down as a âfascistâ, and all around the world an army of
well-meaning, gentle souls would repeat the slander, some from
ignorance, others from self-interest, but every one of them convinced
that no denunciation was too excessive when fascism was on the march.
The fury unleashed against the POUM was no aberration. By opposing the
Moscow Trials, the POUM condemned itself to be destroyed by a Stalinism
locked in a merciless world struggle against its rivals for the control
of the masses. At the time, not just CP fellow-travellers, but many
political parties, lawyers, reporters and even the French League for the
Rights of Man came out in endorsement of the guilt of the accused. Sixty
years later, mainstream ideology sees these trials as a sign of the
Kremlinâs mad will to power. As if Stalinist crimes had nothing to do
with anti-fascism! Anti-fascist logic will always align itself with the
most moderate forces and always turn against the most radical ones.
On the purely political level, May 1937 gave rise to what, a few months
before, would have been unthinkable: a Socialist even farther to the
right than Caballero: Negrin, heading a government which came down hard
on the side of law and order, including open repression against the
workers. Orwell â who almost lost his life in the events â realised that
the war âfor democracyâ was obviously over: âthat meant that the general
movement would be in the direction of some kind of fascism.â What
remained was a competition between two fascisms, Orwell wrote, with the
difference that one was less inhuman than its rival: he therefore clung
to the necessity of avoiding the âmore naked and developed fascism of
Hitler and Francoâ.[9] From then on, the only issue was fighting for a
fascism less bad than the opposing oneâŠ
Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from
a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its âmilitaryâ dimension is
never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to
break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are:
commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as
commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and
machine guns flow from this âweaponâ. The greater the change in social
life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will
be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any
nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers
included) than it actually destroys.
To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to
conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political
revolution or a war (seizing someoneâs power, occupying their
territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the
insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for
specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve
problems â in short for everything that plays down the role of the
common man. In Spain, from the fall of 1936 onward, the revolution
dissolved into the war effort and into a kind of combat typical of
states: a war of fronts. Soon the working-class âmilitia manâ evolved
into a âsoldierâ.
Formed into âcolumnsâ, workers left Barcelona to defeat the fascists in
other cities, starting from Zaragoza. Taking the revolution beyond areas
under Republican control, however, would have meant completing the
revolution in the Republican areas as well. But even Durruti did not
seem to realise that the state was everywhere still intact. As his
column (70% of whose members were anarchists) advanced, it extended the
collectivisations: the militias helped the peasants and spread
revolutionary ideas. Yet however much Durruti declared that âthese
militias will never defend the bourgeoisieâ they did not attack it
either. Two weeks before his death he delivered a speech broadcast on
November 4, 1936:
âAt the front and in the trenches there is only one idea and one aim â
the destruction of fascism.
âWe call on the Catalan people to stop all internal conflicts and
intrigues, to forget all jealousy and politics and to think of the war
only. The politicians are only playing tricks to secure for themselves
an agreeable life. This dubious art must be replaced by the art to work.
The people of Catalonia must be worthy of their brothers fighting at the
front. If the workers of Catalonia have taken the supreme task to fight
at the different fronts, those living in towns and cities will also have
to be mobilised to do their share. Our heroic militia, ready to lie down
their lives on the battlefield want to be assured whom they have behind
them. They feel that no one should be deterred from their duty because
of lack of wage increase or shorter hours of work. Today all toilers and
especially those of the CNT must be ready for the utmost sacrifices. For
in that way alone can we hope to triumph over fascism.
âI address myself to all organisations, asking them to bury their
conflicts and grudgesâŠ
âThe militarisation of the militias has been decreed. If this has been
done to frighten us, to impose on us an iron discipline, this is a
mistaken policy. We challenge those who have issued this decree to come
to the front and see for themselves our moral and our discipline and
compare it with the moral and discipline in the rear. We will not accept
dictated discipline. We are doing our duty. Come to the front to see our
organisation! Later we shall come to Barcelona to examine your
discipline, your organisation and your control!
âThere is no chaos at the front, no lack of discipline. We all have a
strong sense of responsibility. We know what you have entrusted us with.
You can sleep quietly. But remember we have left Barcelona in your
hands. We demand responsibility and discipline from you too. Let us
prove our capacity to prevent the creation of new differences after our
war against fascism. Those who want their movement to be the strongest
are working in the wrong direction. Against tyranny there is only one
front possible, one organisation and only one sort of discipline.â[10]
Listeners would think that a revolution had actually taken place,
politically and socially, and just needed its military completion:
smashing the fascists. Durruti and his comrades embodied an energy which
had not waited for 1936 to storm the existing world. But all the
combative will in the world is not enough when workers aim all their
blows against one particular form of the state, and not against the
state as such. In mid-1936, accepting a war of fronts meant leaving
social and political weapons in the hands of the bourgeoisie behind the
lines, and moreover meant depriving military action itself of the
initial vigour it drew from another terrain, the only one where the
proletariat has the upper hand. As the âDutch Leftâ wrote:
âIf the workers really want to build up a defence front against the
Whites, they can only do so by taking over political power themselves,
instead of leaving it in the hands of a Popular Front government. In
other words, defending the revolution is only possible through the
dictatorship of the proletariat, and not through the collaboration of
all anti-fascist parties ⊠Proletarian revolution revolves around the
destruction of the old state machine, and the exercise of the central
functions of power by the workers themselves.â[11]
In the summer of 1936, far from having decisive military superiority,
the nationalists held no major city. Their main strength lay in the
Foreign Legion and in the Moroccan âMoorsâ. In 1912, Morocco had been
split by France and Spain into two protectorates, but had long since
rebelled against the colonial dreams of both countries. The Spanish
royal army had been badly defeated there in 1921, largely due to the
defection of Moroccan troops. Despite Franco-Spanish collaboration, the
Rif war (in which a general named Franco had distinguished himself)
ended only when Abd el-Krim surrendered in 1926. Ten years later, the
announcement of immediate and unconditional independence for Spanish
Morocco would, at minimum, have stirred up trouble among the shock
troops of reaction. The Republic obviously gave short shrift to this
solution, under a combined pressure from conservative milieus and from
the democracies of England and France, which had little enthusiasm for
the possible break-up of their own empires. At the very time, moreover,
the French Popular Front not only refused to grant any reform worthy of
any name to its colonial subjects, but dissolved the Etoile
Nord-Africaine, a proletarian movement in Algeria.
Everyone knows that the policy of ânon-interventionâ in Spain was a
farce. One week after the putsch London announced its opposition to any
arms shipment to what was then the legal Spanish government, and its
neutrality in the event that France would become drawn into a conflict.
Democratic England thus put the Republic and fascism on the same level.
As a result, the France of Blum and Thorez sent a few planes, while
Italy and Germany sent whole divisions with their supplies. As for the
International Brigades, controlled by the Soviet Union and the CPs,
their military value came at a heavy price, namely the elimination of
any opposition to Stalinism in working-class ranks. It was at the
beginning of 1937, after the first arms shipments, that Catalonia
removed Nin from his post as adviser to the Ministry of Justice.
Rarely has the narrow conception of history as a list of battles,
cannons and strategies been more inept in explaining the course of a
directly âsocialâ war, shaped as it was by the internal dynamic of
anti-fascism. Revolutionary Ă©lan initially broke the Ă©lan of the
nationalists. Then the workers accepted legality: the conflict was
stalemated and then institutionalised. From late 1936 onward, the
militia columns were bogged down in the siege of Zaragoza. The state
armed only the military units it trusted, i.e. the ones which would not
confiscate property. By early 1937, in the poorly equipped POUM militias
fighting the Francoists with old guns, a revolver was a luxury. In the
cities, militia men rubbed shoulders with perfectly outfitted regular
soldiers. The fronts got stuck, like the Barcelona proletarians against
the cops. The last burst of energy was the Republican victory at Madrid.
Soon hereafter, the government ordered private individuals to hand in
their weapons. The decree had little immediate effect, but it showed an
unabashed will to disarm the people. Disappointment and suspicions
undermined morale. The war was increasingly in the hands of specialists.
Finally, the Republic increasingly lost ground as all social content and
revolutionary appearances faded away in the anti-fascist camp.
Reducing the revolution to war simplifies and falsifies the social
question into the alternative of winning or losing, and in being âthe
strongestâ. The issue becomes one of having disciplined soldiers,
superior logistics, competent officers and the support of allies whose
own political nature gets as little scrutiny as possible. Curiously, all
this means taking the conflict further from daily life. It is a peculiar
quality of warfare that, even for its enthusiasts, no one wants to lose
but everyone wants it to end. In contrast to revolution, except in the
case of defeat, war does not cross my doorstep. Transformed into a
military conflict, the struggle against Franco ceased to be a personal
commitment, lost its immediate reality, and became a mobilisation from
above, like in any other war situation. After January 1937, voluntary
enlistments tapered off, and the civil war, in both camps, came to
depend mainly on compulsory military service. As a result a militia man
of July 1936 leaving his column a year later, disgusted with Republican
politics, could be arrested and shot as a âdeserterâ!
In different historical conditions, the military evolution from
insurrection to militias and then to a regular army is reminiscent of
the anti-Napoleonic âguerrillaâ warfare (the term was borrowed from
Spanish at the time) described by Marx:
âBy comparing the three periods of guerrilla warfare with the political
history of Spain, it is found that they represent the respective degrees
into which the counter-revolutionary spirit of the Government had
succeeded in cooling the spirit of the people. Beginning with the rise
of whole populations, the partisan war was next carried on by guerrilla
bands, of which whole districts formed the reserve, and terminated in
corps francs continually on the point of dwindling into banditti, or
sinking down to the level of standing regiments.â[12]
For 1936, as for 1808, the evolution of the military situation cannot be
explained exclusively or even mainly by the art of war, but flows from
the balance of political and social forces and its modification in an
anti-revolutionary direction. The compromise evoked by Durruti, the
necessity of unity at any cost, could only hand victory first to the
Republican state (over the proletariat) and then to the Francoist state
(over the Republic).
There was the beginning of a revolution in Spain, but it turned into its
opposite as the proletarians, convinced that they had effective power,
placed their trust in the state to fight against Franco. On that basis,
the multiplicity of subversive initiatives and measures taken in
production and in daily life were doomed by the simple and terrible fact
that they took place in the shadow of an intact state structure, which
had initially been put on hold, and then reinvigorated by the
necessities of the war against Franco, a paradox which remained opaque
to most revolutionary groups at the time. In order to be consolidated
and extended, the transformations without which revolution becomes an
empty word had to pose themselves as antagonistic to a state clearly
designed as the adversary.
The trouble was, after July 1936, dual power existed in appearance only.
Not only did the instruments of proletarian power which emerged from the
insurrection, and those which subsequently oversaw the socialisations,
tolerate the state, but they accorded the state a primacy in the
anti-Franco struggle, as if it were tactically necessary to pass through
the state in order to defeat Franco. In terms of ârealismâ, the recourse
to traditional military methods accepted by the far left (including the
POUM and the CNT) in the name of effectiveness almost invariably proved
ineffective. Sixty years later, people still deplore the fact. But the
democratic state is as little suited for armed struggle against fascism
as it is for stopping its peaceful accession to power. States are
normally loath to deal with social war, and normally fear rather than
encourage fraternisation. When, in Guadalajara, the anti-fascists
addressed themselves as workers to the Italian soldiers sent by
Mussolini, a group of Italians defected. Such an episode remained the
exception.
From the battle for Madrid (March â37) to the final fall of Catalonia
(February â39), the cadaver of the aborted revolution decomposed on the
battlefield. One can speak of war in Spain, not of revolution. This war
wound up having as its first function the resolution of a capitalist
problem: the constitution in Spain of a legitimate state which succeeded
in developing its national capital while keeping the popular masses in
check. In February 1939, the Surrealist and (then) Trotskyist Benjamin
PĂ©ret analysed the consummation of the defeat as follows:
âThe working class⊠having lost sight of its own goals, no longer sees
any urgent reason to be killed defending the bourgeois democratic clan
against the fascist clan, i.e. in the last analysis, for the defence of
Anglo-French capital against Italo-German imperialism. The civil war
increasingly became an imperialist war.â[13]
That same year, Bruno Rizzi made a similar comment in his essay on
âcollective bureaucratismâ in the USSR:
âThe old democracies play the game of anti-fascist politics in order to
let the sleeping dog lie. One must keep the proletarians quiet⊠at any
time, the old democracies feed the working class with anti-fascismâŠ
Spain had turned into a slaughter of proletarians of all nationalities,
in order to calm down unruly revolutionary workers, and to sell off the
products of heavy industry.â
The two camps undeniably had quite different sociological compositions.
If the bourgeoisie was present on both sides, the immense majority of
workers and poor peasants supported the Republic, whereas the archaic
and reactionary strata (landed property, small holders, clergy) lined up
behind Franco. This class polarisation gave a progressive aura to the
Republican state, but it did not disclose the historical meaning of the
conflict, any more than the large working-class membership of socialist
or Stalinist parties told us all about their nature. Such facts were
real, but secondary to the social function of these parties: in fact,
because they were grass-roots bodies, they were able to control or
oppose any proletarian upsurge. Likewise the Republican army had a large
number of workers, but for what, with whom and under whose orders were
they fighting? To ask the question is to answer it, unless one it
considers possible to fight the bourgeoisie in an alliance with the
bourgeoisie.
âCivil war is the supreme expression of the class struggleâ, Trotsky
wrote in Their Morals and Ours (1938). Quite⊠as long as one adds that,
from the âWars of Religionâ to the Irish or Lebanese convulsions of our
own time, civil war is also, and indeed most often, the form of an
impossible or failed social struggle: when class contradictions cannot
assert themselves as such, they erupt as ideological or ethnic blocs,
still further delaying any human emancipation.
Social Democracy did not âcapitulateâ in August 1914, like a fighter
throwing in the towel: it followed the normal trajectory of a powerful
movement which was internationalist in rhetoric and which, in reality,
had become profoundly national long before. The SPD may well have been
the leading electoral force in Germany in 1912, but it was powerful only
for the purpose of reform, within the framework of capitalism and
according to its laws, which included for example accepting colonialism,
and also war when the latter became the sole solution to social and
political contradictions.
In the same way, the integration of Spanish anarchism in the state in
1936 is only surprising if one forgets its nature: the CNT was a union,
an original union undoubtedly but a union all the same, and there is no
such thing as an anti-union union. Function transforms the organ.
Whatever its original ideals, every permanent organism for defending
wage labourers as such becomes a mediator, and then a conciliator. Even
when it is in the hands of radicals, even when it is repressed, the
institution is bound to escape control of the base and to turn into a
moderating instrument. Anarchist union though it may have been, the CNT
was a union before it was anarchist. A world separated the rank-and-file
from the leader seated at the bossesâ table, but the CNT as a whole was
little different from the UGT. Both of them worked to modernise and
rationally manage the economy: in a word, to socialise capitalism. A
single thread connects the socialist vote for war credits in August 1914
to the participation in the government of the anarchist leaders, first
in Catalonia (September â36) and then in the Spanish Republic (November
â36). As early as 1914, Malatesta had called those of his comrades
(including Kropotkin) who had accepted national defence âgovernment
anarchistsâ.
The CNT had long been both institutionalised and subversive. The
contradiction ended in the 1931 general election, when the CNT gave up
its anti-parliamentary stand, asking the masses to vote for Republican
candidates. The anarchist organisation was turning into âa union
aspiring to the conquest of powerâ, that would âinevitably lead to a
dictatorship over the proletariatâ.[14]
From one compromise to the next, the CNT wound up renouncing the
anti-statism which was its raison dâĂȘtre, even after the Republic and
its Russian ally or master had shown their real faces in May â37, not to
mention everything that followed, in the jails and secrets cellars. Like
the POUM, the CNT was effective in disarming proletarians, calling on
them to give up their struggle against the official and Stalinist police
bent on finishing them off. As the GIC put it,
ââŠthe CNT was among those chiefly responsible for the crushing of the
insurrection. It demoralised the proletariat at a time when the latter
was moving against democratic reactionaries.â[15]
Some radicals even had the bitter surprise of being locked up in a
prison administered by an old anarchist comrade, stripped of any real
power over what went on in his jail. Adding insult to injury, a CNT
delegation which had gone to the Soviet Union requesting material aid
did not even raise the issue of the Moscow Trials.
Everything for the anti-fascist struggle!
Everything for cannons and guns!
But even so, some people might object, anarchists by their very nature
are vaccinated against the statist virus. Isnât anarchism the arch-enemy
of the state? Yes, butâŠ
Some Marxists can recite whole pages of The Civil War in France on the
destruction of the state machine, and quote the passage from State and
Revolution where Lenin says that one day cooks will administer society
instead of politicians. But these same Marxists can practice the most
servile state idolatry, once they come to see the state as the agent of
progress or historical necessity. Because they imagine the future as a
capitalist socialisation without capitalists, as a world still based on
wage labour but egalitarian, democratised and planned, everything
prepares them to accept a state (transitional, to be sure) and to go off
to war for a capitalist state they see as bad, against another they see
as worse.
Anarchism overestimates state power by regarding authority as the main
enemy, and at the same time underestimates the stateâs force of inertia.
The state is the guarantor, but not the creator, of social
relationships. It represents and unifies capital, it is neither
capitalâs motor nor its centrepiece. From the undeniable fact that the
Spanish masses were armed after July 1936, anarchism deduced that the
state was losing its substance. But the substance of the state resides
not in institutional forms, but in its unifying function. The state
ensures the tie which human beings cannot and dare not create among
themselves, and creates a web of services which are both parasitic and
real.
In the summer of 1936, the state apparatus may have seemed derelict in
Republican Spain, because it only subsisted as a potential framework
capable of picking up the pieces of capitalist society and re-arranging
them one day. In the meantime, it continued to live, in social
hibernation. Then it gained new strength when the relations opened up by
subversion were loosened or torn apart. It revived its organs, and, the
occasion permitting, assumed control over those bodies which subversion
had caused to emerge. What had been seen as an empty shell showed itself
capable not only of revival, but of actually emptying out the parallel
forms of power in which the revolution thought it had best embodied
itself.
The CNTâs ultimate justification of its role comes down to the idea that
the government no longer really had power, because the workersâ movement
had taken power de facto.
ââŠthe government has ceased to be a force oppressing the working-class,
in the same way that the state is no longer the organism dividing
society into classes. And if CNT members work within the state and
government, the people will be less and less oppressed.â[16]
No less than Marxism, anarchism fetishizes the state and imagines it as
being incarnated in a place. Blanqui had already thrown his little armed
flock into attacks on city halls or on barracks, but he at least never
claimed to base his actions on the proletarian movement, only on a
minority that would awaken the people. A century later, the CNT declared
the Spanish state to be a phantom relative to the tangible reality of
the âsocial organisationsâ (i.e. militias, unions). But the existence of
the state, its raison dâĂȘtre, is to paper over the shortcomings of
âcivilâ society by a system of relations, of links, of a concentration
of forces, an administrative, police, judicial, and military network
which goes âon holdâ as a backup in times of crisis, awaiting the moment
when a police investigator can go sniffing into the files of the social
worker. The revolution has no Bastille, police station or governorâs
mansion to âtakeâ: its task is to render harmless or destroy everything
from which such places draw their substance.
The depth and breadth of the industrial and agrarian socialisations
after July 1936 was no historical fluke. Marx noted the Spanish
tradition of popular autonomy, and the gap between the people and the
state which made itself manifest in the anti-Napoleonic war, and then in
the revolutions of the 19^(th) century, which renewed age-old communal
resistance to the power of the dynasty. The absolute monarchy, he
observed, did not shake up various strata to forge a modern state, but
rather left the living forces of the country intact. Napoleon could see
Spain as a âcadaver,
⊠but if the Spanish state was indeed dead, Spanish society was full of
lifeâ and âwhat we call the state in the modern sense of the word is
materialised, in reality, only in the army, in keeping with the
exclusive âprovincialâ life of the people.â[17]
In the Spain of 1936, the bourgeois revolution had been made, and it was
vain to dream of scenarios such as 1917, not to mention 1848 or 1789.
But if the bourgeoisie dominated politically, and capital dominated
economically, they were nowhere near the creation of a unified internal
market and a modern state apparatus, the subjugation of society as a
whole, and the domination of local life and its particularism. For Marx
in 1854 a âdespoticâ government coexisted with a lack of unity that
extended to the point of different currencies and different systems of
taxation: his observation still had some validity eighty years later.
The state was neither able to stimulate industry nor carry out agrarian
reform; it could neither extract from agriculture the profits necessary
for capital accumulation, nor unify the provinces, nor less keep down
the proletarians of the cities and the countryside.
It was thus almost naturally that the shock of July â36 gave rise, on
the margins of political power, to a social movement whose real
expressions, while containing communist potential, were later reabsorbed
by the state they allowed to remain intact. The first months of a
revolution already ebbing, but whose extent still concealed its failure,
looked like a splintering process: each region, commune, enterprise,
collective and municipality escaped the central authority without
actually attacking it, and set out to live differently. Anarchism, and
even the regionalism of the POUM, express this Spanish originality,
which is wrongly grasped if one sees only the negative side of this
âlateâ capitalist development. Even the ebb of 1937 did not eradicate
the Ă©lan of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants who took over
land, factories, neighbourhoods, villages, seizing property and
socialising production with an autonomy and a solidarity in daily life
that struck both observers and participants.[18] Communism is also the
re-appropriation of the conditions of existence.
Sad to say, if these countless acts and deeds, sometimes extending over
several years, bear witness (as do, in their own way, the Russian and
German experience) to a communist movement remaking all of society, and
to its formidable subversive capacities when it emerges on a large
scale, it is equally true that its fate was sealed from the summer of
1936 onward. The Spanish Civil War proved both the revolutionary vigour
of communitarian bonds and forms which have been penetrated by capital
but which are not yet daily reproduced by capital, and also their
impotence, taken by themselves, in bringing off a revolution. The
absence of an assault against the state condemned the establishment of
different relationships to a fragmentary self-management preserving the
content and often the forms of capitalism, notably money and the
division of activities by individual enterprises. Any persistence of
wage-labour perpetuates the hierarchy of functions and incomes.
Communist measures could have undermined the social bases of the two
states (Republican and Nationalist), if only by solving the agrarian
question: in the 1930âs, more than half of the population went hungry. A
subversive force erupted, bringing to the fore the most oppressed
strata, those farthest from âpolitical lifeâ (e.g. women), but it could
not go all the way and eradicate the system root and branch.
At the time, the workersâ movement in the major industrial countries
corresponded to those regions of the world which had been socialised by
a total domination of capital over society, where communism was both
closer at hand as a result of this socialisation, and at the same time
farther away because of the dissolution of all relations into commodity
form. The new world, in these countries, was most commonly conceived as
a workerâs world, even as an industrial one.
The Spanish proletariat, on the contrary, continued to be shaped by a
capitalist penetration of society that was more quantitative than
qualitative. From this reality it drew both its strength and its
weakness, as attested by the tradition and demands for autonomy
represented by anarchism.
âIn the last hundred years, there has not been a single uprising in
Andalusia which has not resulted in the creation of communes, the
sharing out of land, the abolition of money and a declaration of
independence ⊠the anarchism of the workers is not very different. They
too demand, first of all, the possibility of managing their industrial
community or their union themselves, and then the reduction of working
hours and of the effort required from everyone âŠâ[19]
One of the main weaknesses was the attitude towards money. The
âdisappearance of moneyâ is meaningful only if it entails more than the
replacement of one instrument for measuring value with another one (such
as labour coupons). Like most radical groups, whether they called
themselves Marxist or anarchist, Spanish proletarians did not see money
as the expression and abstraction of real relationships, but as a tool
of measurement, an accounting device, and they reduced socialism to a
different management of the same categories and fundamental components
of capitalism.
The failure of the measures taken against commodity relations was not
due to the power of the UGT (which was opposed to the collectivisations)
over the banks. The closing of private banks and of the central bank
puts an end to mercantile relations only if production and life are
organised in a way no longer mediated by the commodity, and if such a
communal production and life gradually come to dominate the totality of
social relationships. Money is not the âevilâ to be removed from an
otherwise âgoodâ production, but the manifestation (today becoming
increasingly immaterial) of the commodity character of all aspects of
life. It cannot be destroyed by eliminating signs, but only when
exchange withers away as a social relationship.
In fact, only agrarian collectives managed to do without money, and they
often did so with the help of local currencies, with coupons often being
used as âinternal moneyâ. Sometimes money was handed over to the
collective. Sometimes workers were given vouchers according to the size
of their families, not to the amount of work done (âto each according to
their needâ). Sometimes money played no part: goods were shared. An
egalitarian spirit prevailed, as well as a rejection of âluxuryâ.[20]
However, unable to extend non-commodity production beyond different
autonomous zones with no scope for global action, the soviets,
collectives and liberated villages were transformed into precarious
communities, and sooner or later were either destroyed from within or
violently suppressed by the fascists⊠or the Republicans. In Aragon, the
column of the Stalinist Lister made this a speciality. Entering the
village of Calanda, his first act was to write on a wall:
âCollectivisations are theft.â
Ever since the First International, anarchism has counterposed the
collective appropriation of the means of production to Social Democratic
statism. Both visions, nonetheless, have the same starting point: the
need for collective management. The problem is: management of what? Of
course, what Social Democracy carried out from above, bureaucratically,
the Spanish proletarians practised at the base, armed, with each
individual responsible to everyone, thereby taking the land and the
factories away from a minority specialised in the organising and
exploitation of others. The opposite, in short, of the co-management of
the Coal Board by socialist or Stalinist union officials. Nevertheless,
the fact that a collectivity, rather than the state or a bureaucracy,
takes the production of its material life into its own hands does not,
by itself, do away with the capitalist character of that life.
Wage labour means the passage of an activity, whatever it might be,
ploughing a field or printing a newspaper, through the form of money.
This money, while it makes the activity possible, is expanded by it.
Equalising wages, deciding everything collectively, and replacing
currency by coupons has never been enough to do away with wage labour.
What money brings together cannot be free, and sooner or later money
becomes its master.
Substituting association for competition on a local basis was a
guaranteed recipe for disaster. Because if the collective did abolish
private property within itself, it also set itself up as a distinct
entity and as a particular element among others in the global economy,
and therefore as a private collective, compelled to buy and sell, to
trade with the outside world, thereby becoming in its turn an enterprise
which like it or not, had to play its part in regional, national and
world competition or else disappear.
One can only rejoice in the fact that half of Spain imploded: what
mainstream opinion calls âanarchyâ is a necessary condition for
revolution, as Marx wrote in his own time. But these movements made
their subversive impact on the basis of a centrifugal force. Rejuvenated
communitarian ties also locked everyone into their village and their
barrio, as if the point were to discover a lost world and a degraded
humanity, to counterpose the working-class neighbourhood to the
metropolis, the self-managed commune to the vast capitalist domain, the
countryside of the common folk to the commercialized city, in a word the
poor to the rich, the small to the large and the local to the
international, all the while forgetting that a co-operative is often the
longest road to capitalism.
There is no revolution without the destruction of the state. But how?
Beating off armed bands, getting rid of state structures and habits,
setting up new modes of debate and decision â all these tasks are
impossible if they do no go hand in hand with communisation. We donât
want âpowerâ, we want the power to change all of life. As an historical
process extending over generations, can one imagine over such a time
frame continuing to pay wages for food and lodging? If the revolution is
supposed to be political first and social later, it would create an
apparatus whose sole function would be the struggle against the
supporters of the old world, i.e. a negative function of repression, a
system of control resting on no other content than its âprogrammeâ and
its will to realise communism the day that conditions finally allow for
it. This is how a revolution ideologises itself and legitimises the
birth of a specialised stratum assigned to oversee the maturation and
the expectation of the ever-radiant day after tomorrow. The very stuff
of politics is not being able, and not wanting, to change anything: it
brings together what is separated without going any further. Power is
there, it manages, it administers, it oversees, it calms, it represses:
it is.
Political domination (in which a whole school of thought sees problem
number one) flows from the incapacity of human beings to take charge of
themselves, and to organise their lives and their activity. This
domination persists only through the radical dispossession which
characterises the proletarian. When everyone participates in the
production of their existence, the capacity for pressure and oppression
now in the hands of the state will cease to be operative. It is because
wage-labour society deprives us of our means of living, producing and
communicating, not stopping short of the invasion of once-private space
and of our emotional lives, that the state is all-powerful. The best
guarantee against the reappearance of a new structure of power over us
is the deepest possible appropriation of the conditions of existence, at
every level. For example, even if we donât want everyone generating
their own electricity in their basements, the domination of the
Leviathan also comes from the fact that energy (a significant term,
another word for which is power) makes us dependent on industrial
complexes which, nuclear or not, inevitably remain external to us and
escape any control.
To conceive the destruction of the state as an armed struggle against
the police and the armed forces is to mistake the part for the whole.
Communism is first of all activity. A mode of life in which men and
women produce their social existence paralyses or reabsorbs the
emergence of separate powers.
The alternative upheld by Bordiga: âShall we take over the factory, or
take over power?â (Il Soviet, February 20, 1920) can and must be
superseded. We donât say: it does not matter who manages production,
whether an executive or a council, because what counts is to have
production without value. We say: as long as production for value
continues, as long as it is separated from the rest of life, as long as
humankind does not collectively produce its ways and means of existence,
as long as there is an âeconomyâ, any council is bound to lose its power
to an executive. This is where we differ both from âcouncilistsâ and
âBordigistsâ, and why we are likely to be called Bordigists by the
former, and councilists by the latter.
The Spanish failure of 1936â37 is symmetrical to the Russian failure of
1917â21. The Russian workers were able to seize power, not to use it for
a communist transformation. Backwardness, economic ruin and
international isolation by themselves do not explain the involution. The
perspective set out by Marx, and perhaps applicable in a different way
after 1917, of a renaissance in a new form of communal agrarian
structures, was at the time not even thinkable. Leaving aside Leninâs
eulogy for Taylorism, and Trotskyâs justification of military labour,
for almost all the Bolsheviks and the overwhelming majority of the Third
International, including the Communist Left, socialism meant a
capitalist socialisation plus soviets, and the agriculture of the future
was conceived as democratically managed large landholdings. (The
difference â and it is a major one! â between the German-Dutch left and
the Comintern was that the Left took soviets and worker democracy
seriously, whereas the Russian communists, as their practice proved, saw
in them nothing but tactical formulas.)
The Bolsheviks are the best illustration of what happens to a power
which is only a power, and which has to hold on without changing real
conditions very much.
What distinguishes reform from revolution is not that revolution is
violent, but that it links insurrection and communisation. The Russian
civil war was won in 1919, but sealed the fate of the revolution, as the
victory over the Whites was achieved without communising society, and
ended in a new state power. In his 1939 Brown Fascism, Red Fascism, Otto
RĂŒhle pointed out how the French Revolution had given birth to a
military structure and strategy adequate to its social content. It
unified the bourgeoisie with the people, while the Russian revolution
failed to create an army based on proletarian principles. The Red Army
that Poland defeated in 1920 hardly kept any revolutionary significance.
As early as mid-1918, Trotsky summed it up in three words: âwork,
discipline, orderâ.
Very logically and, at least in the beginning, in perfectly good faith,
the soviet state perpetuated itself at any cost, first in the
perspective of world revolution, then for itself, with the absolute
priority being to preserve the unity of a society coming apart at the
seams. This explains, on one hand, the concessions to small peasant
property, followed by requisitions, both of which resulted in a further
unravelling of any communal life or production. On the other hand, it
also explains the repression against workers and against any opposition
within the party.
In January 1921, the wheel had come full circle. The 1917 revolutionary
wave set in motion by mutinies and basic democratic demands ended in the
same way â except this time proles were being repressed by a
âproletarianâ state. A power which gets to the point of massacring the
Kronstadt mutineers in the name of a socialism it could not realise, and
which goes on to justify its action with lies and calumny, is only
demonstrating that it no longer has any communist character. Lenin died
his physical death in 1924, but the revolutionary Lenin had died as head
of state in 1921, if not earlier. Bolshevism was left with no option but
to become the manager of capitalism.
As the hypertrophy of a political perspective hell bent on eliminating
the obstacles which it could not subvert, the October Revolution
dissolved in a self-cannibalising civil war. Its pathos was that of a
power which, unable to transform society, degenerated into a
counter-revolutionary force.
In the Spanish tragedy, the proletarians, because they had left their
own terrain, wound up prisoners of a conflict in which the bourgeoisie
and its state were present behind the front lines on both sides. In
1936â37, the proletarians of Spain were not fighting against Franco
alone, but also against the fascist countries, against the democracies
and the farce of ânon-interventionâ, against their own state, against
the Soviet Union, against...
The âItalianâ and âGerman-Dutchâ communist Left (including Mattick in
the US) were among the very few who defined the post-1933 period as
utterly anti-revolutionary, whereas many groups (Trotskyists, for
example) were prompt to foresee subversive potentials in France, in
Spain, in America, etc.
1937 closed the historical moment opened by 1917. From then on, capital
would not accept any other community but its own, which meant there
could no longer be permanent radical proletarian groups of any
significant size. The demise of the POUM was tantamount to the end of
the former workersâ movement.
In a future revolutionary period, the most subtle and most dangerous
defenders of capitalism will not be the people shouting pro-capitalist
and pro-statist slogans, but those who have understood the possible
point of a total rupture. Far from eulogising TV commercials and social
submission, they will propose to change life⊠but, to that end, call for
building a true democratic power first. If they succeed in dominating
the situation, the creation of this new political form will use up
peopleâs energy, fritter away radical aspirations and, with the means
becoming the end, will once again turn revolution into an ideology.
Against them, and of course against overtly capitalist reaction, the
proletariansâ only path to success will be the multiplication of
concrete communist initiatives, which will naturally often be denounced
as anti-democratic or even as⊠âfascistâ. The struggle to establish
places and moments for deliberation and decision, making possible the
autonomy of the movement, will prove inseparable from practical measures
aimed at changing life.
ââŠin all past revolutions, the mode of activity has always remained
intact and the only issue has been a different distribution of this
activity and a redistribution of work among different persons; whereas
the communist revolution is directed against the mode of activity as it
has existed up till now and abolishes work and the domination of all
classes by abolishing classes themselves, because it is carried out by
the class which no longer counts as a class in society, which is not
recognised as a class, and is in itself the expression of the
dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc. within present
societyâŠâ[21]
[1] Marx & Engels, Preface to Russian Edition 1882, Communist Manifesto
(MECW 24), p. 426.
[2] Originally published as Quand Meurent les Insurrections, ADEL,
Paris, 1998. This version was translated by Loren Goldner, revised by
the author, and first published by Antagonism Press, 1999. An earlier
version was published in 1979 as a preface to the selection of articles
from Bilan on Spain 1936â39. Chapters of this preface have been
translated in English as Fascism and Anti-Fascism by several publishers,
for instance Unpopular Books.
[3] For example, Daniel Guérin, Fascism and Big Business (New
International vol. 4 no. 10, 1938)
[4] Angelo Tasca, The Rise of Italian Fascism 1918â1922 (Gordon 1976).
Phillip Bourrinet, The Italian Communist Left 1927â45 (ICC 1992).
[5] See Serge Bricianer, Anton Pannekoek and the Workersâ Councils
(Telos 1978) and Phillip Bourrinet, The German/Dutch Left (NZW 2003).
[6] Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution 1936â1939
(Freedom Press 1953). Michael Seidman, Workers Against Work during the
Popular Front (UCLA 1993).
[7] Proletariër, published by the councilist group in The Hague, July
27, 1936.
[8] Victor Alba, Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: a History of
the POUM (Transaction Press, 1988).
[9] Homage to Catalonia, April 1938. In 1951, it had sold less than
1,500 copies. It was first published in the US in 1952.
[10] BoletĂn de InformaciĂłn, CNT-ait-FAI, Via Layetana, 32 y 34,
Barcelona, November 11, 1936.
[11] P.I.C., published by the GIC, Amsterdam, October 1936
[12] Marx, Revolutionary Spain, 1854 (MECW 13), p. 422.
[13] Clé, 2^(nd) issue.
[14] P.I.C., German edition, December 1931.
[15] RĂ€te-Korrespondenz, June 1937.
[16] Solidaridad Obrera, November 1936.
[17] Marx, cited by Marie Laffranque, âMarx et lâEspagneâ (Cahiers de
lâISEA, sĂ©rie S. n°15).
[18] Among others: Orwell, and Low & Brea, Red Spanish Notebook, (City
Lights, 1979).
[19] Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge, 1990).
[20] Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit (Faber & Faber, 1937).
[21] Marx & Engels, The German Ideology (MECW 5), p. 52.