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Title: Anarchists Author: Eric Hobsbawm Date: 1973 Language: en Topics: anarchist movement, history of anarchism, history, Russian revolution, Spanish Revolution, not anarchist Source: Retrieved on 8th June 2022 from http://www.ditext.com/hobsbawm/anarchists.html Notes: From Volume II of Revolutionaries.
The libertarian tradition of communism — anarchism — has been bitterly
hostile to the marxist ever since Bakunin, or for that matter Proudhon.
Marxism, and even more leninism, have been equally hostile to anarchism
as theory and programme and contemptuous of it as a political movement.
Yet if we investigate the history of the international communist
movement in the period of the Russian revolution and the Communist
International, we find a curious asymmetry. While the leading spokesmen
of anarchism maintained their hostility to bolshevism with, at best, a
momentary wavering during the actual revolution, or at the moment when
the news of October reached them, the attitude of the bolsheviks, in and
outside Russia, was for a time considerably more benevolent to the
anarchists. This is the subject of the present paper.
The theoretical attitude with which bolshevism approached anarchist and
anarcho-syndicalist movements after 1917, was quite clear. Marx, Engels
and Lenin had all written on the subject, and in general there seemed to
be no ambiguity or mutual inconsistency about their views, which may be
summarized as follows:
anarchists, i.e. a libertarian communism in which exploitation, classes
and the state will have ceased to exist.
overthrow of bourgeois power through proletarian revolution, by a more
or less protracted interval characterized by the ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’ and other transitional arrangements, in which state power
would play some part. There was room for some argument about the precise
meaning of the classical marxist writings on these problems of
transition, but no ambiguity at all about the marxist view that the
proletarian revolution would not give rise immediately to communism, and
that the state could not be abolished, but would ‘wither away’. On this
point the conflict with anarchist doctrine was total and clearly
defined.
power of a revolutionary state used for revolutionary purposes, marxism
was actively committed to a firm belief in the superiority of
centralization to decentralization or federalism and (especially in the
leninist version), to a belief in the indispensability of leadership,
organization and discipline and the inadequacy of any movement based on
mere ‘spontaneity’.
marxists took it for granted that socialist and communist movements
would engage in it as much as in any other activities which could
contribute to advance the overthrow of capitalism.
authoritarian and/or bureaucratic tendencies of parties based on the
classical marxist tradition, none of these critics abandoned their
characteristic lack of sympathy for anarchist movements, so long as they
considered themselves to be marxists.
The record of the political relations between marxist movements and
anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist ones, appeared equally unambiguous in
1917. In fact, these relations had been considerably more acrimonious in
the lifetime of Marx, Engels and the Second International than they were
to be in that of the Comintern. Marx himself had fought and criticized
Proudhon and Bakunin, and the other way round. The major social
democratic parties had done their best to exclude anarchists, or been
obliged to do so. Unlike the First International, the Second no longer
included them, at all events after the London Congress of 1896. Where
marxist and anarchist movements coexisted, it was as rivals, if not as
enemies. However, though the marxists were intensely exasperated by the
anarchists in practice revolutionary marxists, who shared with them an
increasing hostility to the reformism of the Second International,
tended to regard them as revolutionaries, if misguided ones. This was in
line with the theoretical view summarized in (a) above. At least
anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism might be regarded as a
comprehensible reaction against reformism and opportunism. Indeed, it
might be — and was — argued that reformism and anarcho-syndicalism were
part of the same phenomenon: without the one, the other would not have
gained so much ground. It could further be argued that the collapse of
reformism would also automatically weaken anarcho-syndicalism.
It is not clear how far these views of the ideologists and political
leaders were shared by the rank-and-file militants and supporters of the
marxist movements. We may suppose that the differences were often much
less clearly felt at this level. It is a well-known fact that doctrinal,
ideological and programmatic distinctions which are of major importance
at one level, are of negligible importance at another- e.g. that as late
as 1917 ‘social democratic’ workers in many Russian towns were barely if
at all aware of the differences between bolsheviks and mensheviks. The
historian of labour movements and their doctrines forgets such facts at
his peril.
This general background must be supplemented by a discussion of the
differences between the situation in various parts of the world, in so
far as these affected the relations between communists and anarchists or
anarcho-syndicalists. No comprehensive survey can be made here, but at
least three different types of countries must be distinguished:
labour movement, e.g. most of north-western Europe (except the
Netherlands), and several colonial areas in which labour and socialist
movements had hardly developed before 1917.
diminished dramatically, and perhaps decisively, in the period 1914–36.
These must include part of the Latin world, e.g. France, Italy and some
Latin American countries, as also China, Japan and — for somewhat
different reasons — Russia.
dominant, until the latter part of the 1930s. Spain is the most obvious
case.
In regions of the first type relations with movements describing
themselves as anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist were of no significance
to communist movements. The existence of small numbers of anarchists,
mainly artists and intellectuals, raised no political problem, and
neither did the presence of anarchist political refugees, immigrant
communities in which anarchism might be influential, and other phenomena
marginal to the native labour movement. This appears to have been the
case in, say, Britain and Germany after the 1870s and 1880s, when
anarchist trends had played some part, mainly disruptive, in the special
circumstances of extremely small socialist movements or socialist
movements temporarily pressed into semi-illegality as by Bismarck’s
anti-socialist law. The struggles between centralized and decentralized
types of movement, between bureaucratic and anti-bureaucratic,
‘spontaneous’ and ‘disciplined’ movements were fought out without any
special reference (except by academic writers or a few very erudite
marxists) to the anarchists. This was the case in Britain in the period
corresponding to that of revolutionary syndicalism on the continent. The
extent to which communist parties showed themselves to be aware of
anarchism as a political problem in their countries, remains to be
seriously studied by a systematic analysis of their polemical
publications (in so far as these did not merely echo the preoccupations
of the International), of their translation and/or re-publication of
classical marxist writings on anarchism, etc. However, it may be
suggested with some confidence that they regarded the problem as
negligible, compared to that of reformism, doctrinal schisms within the
communist movement, or certain kinds of petty-bourgeois ideological
trends such as, in Britain, pacifism. It was certainly entirely possible
to be deeply involved in the communist movement in Germany in the early
1930s, in Britain in the later 1930s, without paying more than the most
cursory or academic attention to anarchism, or indeed without ever
having to discuss the subject.
The regions of the second type are in some respects the most interesting
from the point of view of the present discussion. We are here dealing
with countries or areas in which anarchism was an important, in some
periods or sectors a dominant influence in the trade unions or the
political movements of the extreme left.
The crucial historical fact here is the dramatic decline of anarchist
(or anarcho-syndicalist) influence in the decade after 1914. In the
belligerent countries of Europe this was a neglected aspect of the
general collapse of the prewar left. This is usually presented primarily
as a crisis of social democracy, and with much justification. At the
same time it was also a crisis of the libertarian or anti-bureaucratic
revolutionaries in two ways. First, many of them (e.g. among
‘revolutionary syndicalists’) joined the bulk of marxist social
democrats in the rush to the patriotic banners — at least for a time.
Second, those who did not, proved, on the whole, quite ineffective in
their opposition to the war, and even less effective at the end of the
war in their attempts to provide an alternative libertarian
revolutionary movement to the bolsheviks. To cite only one decisive
example. In France (as Professor Kriegel has shown), the ‘Carnet B’
drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior to include all those
‘consideres comme dangereux pour l’ordre social’, i.e. ‘les
revolutionnaires, les syndicalistes et les anarchistes’, in fact
contained mainly anarchists, or rather ‘la faction des anarchistes qui
milite dans le mouvement syndical’. On 1 August 1914 the Minister of the
Interior, Malvy, decided to pay no attention to the Carnet B, i.e. to
leave at liberty the very men who, in the government’s opinion, had
convincingly established their intention to oppose war by all means, and
who might presumably have become the cadres of a working-class anti-war
movement. In fact, few of them had made any concrete preparations for
resistance or sabotage, and none any preparation likely to worry the
authorities. In a word, Malvy decided that the entire body of men
accepted as being the most dangerous revolutionaries, was negligible. He
was, of course, quite correct.
The failure of the syndicalist and libertarian revolutionaries, further
confirmed in 1918–20, contrasted dramatically with the success of the
Russian bolsheviks. In fact, it sealed the fate of anarchism as a major
independent force on the left outside a few exceptional countries for
the next fifty years. It became hard to recall that in 1905–14 the
marxist left had in most countries been on the fringe of the
revolutionary movement, the main body of marxists had been identified
with a de facto non-revolutionary social democracy, while the bulk of
the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer
to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of
classical marxism. Marxism was henceforth identified with actively
revolutionary movements, and with communist parties and groups, or with
social democratic parties which, like the Austrian, prided themselves on
being markedly left wing. Anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism entered upon
a dramatic and uninterrupted decline. In Italy the triumph of fascism
accelerated it, but where, in the France of 1924, let alone of 1929 or
1934 was the anarchist movement which had been the characteristic form
of the revolutionary left in 1914?
The question is not merely rhetorical. The answer is and must be:
largely in the new communist or communist-led movements. In the absence
of adequate research this can not yet be adequately documented, but the
broad facts seem clear. Even some of the leading figures or well-known
activists of the ‘bolshevized’ communist parties came from the former
libertarian movements or from the militant trade union movements with
their libertarian ambiance: thus in France Monmousseau and probably
Duclos. This is all the more striking, since it was rather unlikely that
leading members of marxist parties would be drawn from former
anarcho-syndicalists, and even less likely that leading figures in the
libertarian movement would opt for leninism.[1] It is indeed highly
likely that (as the leader of the Dutch cp, De Groot observes, perhaps
not without some parti pris) that ex-libertarian workers adapted
themselves better to life in the new cps than ex-libertarian
intellectuals or petty bourgeois. After all, at the level of the
working-class militant, the doctrinal or programmatic differences which
divide ideologists and political leaders so sharply, are often quite
unreal, and may have little significance, unless at this level — i.e. in
the worker’s specific locality or trade union — different organizations
or leaders have long-established patterns of rivalry.
Nothing is more likely, therefore, than that workers previously adhering
to the most militant or revolutionary union in their locality or
occupation should, after its disappearance shift without much difficulty
into the communist union which now represented militancy or
revolutionary attitudes. When old movements disappear, such a transfer
is common. The old movement may retain its mass influence here and
there, and the leaders and militants who have identified themselves with
it, may continue to hold it together on a diminishing scale as best they
can, in so far as they do not retire de jure or de facto into an
unreconciled inactivity. Some of the rank and file may also drop out.
But a large proportion must be expected to transfer to the most suitable
alternative, if one is available. Such transfers have not been
investigated seriously, so that we know no more about what happened to
ex-anarcho-syndicalists (and those who had followed their lead) than we
know about ex-members or followers of the Independent Labour Party in
Britain after the 1930s, or ex-communists in Western Germany after 1945.
If a large part of the rank and file of the new communist parties, and
more especially, the new revolutionary trade unions, was composed of
former libertarians, it would be natural to expect this to have had some
effect on them. On the whole there is little sign of this within the
communist parties. To take merely one representative example, the
discussions on ‘bolshevizing the Communist International’ in the
Enlarged Executive of that organization, March-April 1925, which dealt
specifically with the problem of non-communist influences within the
communist movement. There are little more than a half-dozen references
to syndicalist and none to anarchist influence in this document.[2] They
are confined entirely to the cases of France, Italy and the United
States. As for France, the loss ‘of the larger part of the former
leading officials [of social democratic origins in Germany], and of
petty-bourgeois syndicalist origins in France’ is noted (p. 38). Treint
reported that ‘our Party has eliminated all the errors of Trotskyism:
all the individualist quasi-anarchist errors, the errors of the belief
in legitimacy, of the coexistence of diverse factions in the Party. It
has also learned to know the Luxemburgist errors’ (p. 99). The ECCI
resolution recommended, as one of ten points concerning the French party
‘in spite of all former French traditions, establishment of a
well-organized Communist Mass Party’ (p. 160). As for Italy, ‘the
numerous and diverse origin of the deviations which have arisen in
Italy’ are noted, but without reference to any libertarian trends.
Bordiga’s similarity to ‘Italian syndicalism’ is mentioned, though it is
not claimed that he ‘identifies himself completely’ with this and other
analogous views. The Marxist-Syndicalist faction (Avanguardia group) is
mentioned as one of the reactions against the opportunism of the Second
International, as is its dissolution ‘into trade syndicalism’ after
leaving the party (pp. 192–3). The recruitment of the CPUSAU from two
sources — the Socialist Party and syndicalist organizations — is
mentioned (p. 45). If we compare these scattered references to the
preoccupation of the International in the same document with a variety
of other ideological deviations and other problems, the relatively minor
impact of libertarian-syndicalist traditions within communism, or at
least within the major communist parties of the middle 1920s, is
evident.
This may to some extent be an illusion, for it is clear that behind
several of the tendencies which troubled the International more
urgently, such traditions may be discerned. The insistence of the
dangers of ‘Luxemburgism’ with its stress on spontaneity, its hostility
to nationalism and other similar ideas, may well be aimed at the
attitudes of militants formed in the libertarian-syndicalist school, as
also the hostility — by this time no longer a matter of very serious
concern — to electoral abstentionism. Behind ‘Bordighism’, we can
certainly discern a preoccupation with such tendencies. In various
western parties Trotskyism and other marxist deviations probably
attracted communists of syndicalist origins, uncomfortable in the
‘bolshevized’ parties — e.g. Rosmer and Monatte. Yet it is significant
that the Cahiers du Bolchevisme (28 November 1924), in analyzing the
ideological trends within the French cp, make no allusion to
syndicalism. The journal divided the party into ’20 per cent
ofjauresism, 10 per cent of marxism, 20 per cent of leninism, 20 per
cent of Trotskyism, and 30 per cent of Confusionism’. Whatever the
actual strength of ideas and attitudes derived from the old syndicalist
tradition, that tradition itself had ceased to be significant, except as
a component of various left-wing, sectarian or schismatic versions of
marxism.
However, for obvious reasons, anarchist problems preoccupied the
communist movement more in those parts of the world where before the
October revolution the political labour movement had been almost
entirely anarchist and social democratic movements had been negligible,
or where the anarcho-syndicalists maintained their strength and
influence during the 1920s; as in large regions of Latin America. It is
not surprising that the Red International of Labour Unions in the 1920s
was much preoccupied with these problems in Latin America, or that as
late as 1935 the Communist International observed that ‘the remnants of
anarcho-syndicalism have not yet been completely overcome’ in the cp of
Brazil (whose original membership consisted overwhelmingly of former
anarchists). Nevertheless, when we consider the significance of
anarcho-syndicalism in this continent, the problems arising from it seem
to have caused the Comintern little real preoccupation after the Great
Depression of 1929–30. Its chief criticism of the local communist
parties in this respect appears to have been that they were unable to
benefit sufficiently from the rapid decline of the anarchist and
anarcho-syndicalist organizations and the growing sympathy for communism
of their members.[3]
In a word, the libertarian movements were now regarded as rapidly
declining forces which no longer posed major political problems.
Was this complacency entirely justified? We may suspect that the old
traditions were stronger than official communist literature suggests, at
any rate within the trade union movements. Thus it is fairly clear that
the transfer of the Cuban tobacco workers’ union from
anarcho-syndicalist to communist leadership made no substantial
difference either to its trade union activities or to the attitude of
its members and militants.[4] A good deal of research is needed to
discover how far, in former strongholds of anarcho-syndicalism the
subsequent communist trade union movement showed signs of the survival
of old habits and practices.
Spain was virtually the only country in which anarchism continued to be
a major force in the labour movement after the Great Depression, while
at the same time communism was — until the Civil War — comparatively
negligible. The problem of the communist attitude to Spanish anarchism
was of no international significance before the second republic, and in
the period of the Popular Front and Civil War became too vast and
complex for cursory treatment. I shall therefore omit discussion of it.
The fundamental attitude of the bolsheviks towards anarchists thus was
that they were misguided revolutionaries, as distinct from the social
democrats who were pillars of the bourgeoisie. As Zinoviev put it in
1920, in discussion with the Italians who were considerably less well
disposed towards their own anarchists: ‘In times of revolution Malatesta
is better than d’Aragona. They do stupid things, but they’re
revolutionaries. We fought side by side with the syndicalists and the
anarchists against Kerensky and the Mensheviks. We mobilized thousands
of workers in this way. In times of revolution one needs
revolutionaries. We have to approach them and form a bloc with them in
revolutionary periods.’[5] This comparatively lenient attitude of the
bolsheviks was probably determined by two factors: the relative
insignificance of anarchists in Russia, and the visible readiness of
anarchists and syndicalists after the October revolution to turn to
Moscow, at all events until it was clear that the terms for union were
unacceptable. It was no doubt reinforced later by the rapid decline of
anarchism and syndicalism, which — outside a small and diminishing
number of countries — made it seem increasingly insignificant as a trend
in the labour movement. ‘I have seen and talked to few anarchists in my
life’, said Lenin at the Third Congress of the ci (Protokoll, Hamburg,
1921, p. 510.) Anarchism had never been more than a minor or local
problem for the bolsheviks. An official ci annual for 1922–3 illustrates
this attitude. The appearance of anarchist groups in 1905 is mentioned,
as is the fact that they lacked all contact with the mass movement and
were ‘as good as annihilated’ by the victory of reaction. In 1917
anarchist groups appeared in all important centres of the country, but
in spite of various direct action they lacked contact with the masses in
most places and hardly anywhere succeeded in taking over leadership.
‘Against the bourgeois government they operated in practice as the
“left”, and incidentally disorganized, wing of the Bolsheviks.’ Their
struggle lacked independent significance. ‘Individuals who came from the
ranks of the anarchists, performed important services for the
revolution; many anarchists joined the Russian cp.’ The October
revolution split them into ‘sovietist’, some of whom joined the
bolsheviks while others remained benevolently neutral, and ‘consequent’
anarchists who rejected Soviet power, split into various and sometimes
eccentric factions, and are insignificant. The various illegal anarchist
groups active during the Kronstadt rising, have almost totally
disappeared.[6] Such was the background against which the leading party
of the Comintern judged the nature of the anarchist and syndicalist
problem.
It need hardly be said that neither the bolsheviks nor the communist
parties outside Russia were inclined to compromise their views in order
to draw the libertarians towards them. Angel Pestafia, who represented
the Spanish cnt at the Second Congress of the ci found himself isolated
and his views rejected. The Third Congress, which discussed relations
with syndicalists and anarchists at greater length, established the
distance between them and the communists even more clearly, under the
impact of some trends within the communist parties and what was believed
to be an increase in anarchist and syndicalist influence in Italy after
the occupation of the factories.[7] Lenin intervened on this point,
observing that agreement with anarchists might be possible on objectives
— i.e. the abolition of exploitation and classes — but not on principles
— i.e. ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat and the use of state power
during the transitional period’.[8] Nevertheless, the increasingly sharp
critique of anarcho-syndicalist views was combined with a positive
attitude towards the movement especially in France. Even in the Fourth
Congress the syndicalists were still, in France, contrasted to their
advantage not only with the social democrats, but with ex-social
democratic communists. ‘We have to look for quite a lot of elements for
a Communist Party in the ranks of the Syndicalists, in the ranks of the
best parts of the Syndicalists. This is strange but true’ (Zinoviev).[9]
Not until after the Fifth Congress — i.e. during the period of
‘bolshevization’ does the negative critique of anarcho-syndicalism
clearly begin to prevail over the positive appreciation of the movement
— but by then it is so far merged with the critique of Trotskyism,
Luxemburgism and other intra-communist deviations as to lose its
specific political point.[10] By this time, of course, anarchism and
syndicalism were in rapid decline, outside a few special areas.
It is therefore at first sight surprising that anti-anarchist propaganda
seems to have developed on a more systematic basis within the
international communist movement in the middle 1930s. This period saw
the publication of the pamphlet, Marx et Engels contre I’anarchisme, in
France (1935), in the series ‘Elements du communisme’, and an obviously
polemical History of Anarchism in Russia, by E. Yaroslavsky (English
edition 1937). It may also be worth noting the distinctly more negative
tone of the references to anarchism in Stalin’s Short History of the
CPSU (b) (1938),[11] compared to the account of the early 1920s, quoted
above.
The most obvious reason for this revival of anti-anarchist sentiment was
the situation in Spain, a country which became increasingly important in
international communist strategy from 1931, and certainly from 1934.
This is evident in the extended polemics of Lozovsky which are
specifically aimed at the Spanish cnt.[12] However, until the Civil War
the anarchist problem in Spain was considered much less urgent than the
social democratic problem, especially between 1928 and the turn in
Comintern policy after June-July 1934. The bulk of the references in
official ci documents in this period concentrates, as might be expected,
on the misdeeds of Spanish socialists. During the Civil War the
situation changed, and it is evident that, for instance, Yaroslavsky’s
book is aimed primarily at Spain: ‘The workers in those countries where
they now have to choose between the doctrine of the anarchists and those
of the Communists should know which of the two roads of revolution to
choose.’[13]
However, perhaps another — though perhaps relatively minor — element in
the revived anti-anarchist polemics should also be noted. It is evident
both from the basic text which is constantly quoted and reprinted —
Stalin’s critique of Bukharin’s alleged semi-anarchism, made in 1929 —
and from other references, that anarchizing tendencies are condemned
primarily because they ‘repudiate the state in the period of transition
from capitalism to socialism’ (Stalin). The classical critique of
anarchism by Marx, Engels and Lenin, tends to be identified with the
defence of the tendencies of state development in the Stalinist period.
To sum up:
The bolshevik hostility to anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism as a
theory, strategy or form of organized movement was clear and unwavering,
and all ‘deviations’ within the communist movement in this direction
were firmly rejected. For practical purposes such ‘deviations’ or what
could be regarded as such, ceased to be of significance in and outside
Russia from the early 1920s.
The bolshevik attitude to the actual anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist
movements was surprisingly benevolent. It was determined by three main
factors:
revolutionaries, and both objective and, given the right circumstances,
subjective allies of communism against social democracy, and potential
communist;
many syndicalists and even anarchists in the years immediately following
1917;
and anarcho-syndicalism as a mass movement in all but a very few of its
old centres.
For the reasons mentioned above, the bolsheviks devoted little attention
to the problem of anarchism outside the few areas in which it retained
its strength (and, in so far as the local communist parties were weak,
not much even within those areas) after the early 1920s. However, the
rise to international significance of Spain, and perhaps also the
attempt to give a theoretical legitimation to the Stalinist development
of a dictatorial and terrorist state, led to a revival of anti-anarchist
polemics in the period between the Great Slump and the end of the
Spanish Civil War.
(1969)
The Iberian peninsula has problems but no solutions, a state of affairs
which is common or even normal in the ‘third world’, but extremely rare
in Europe. For better or worse most states on our continent have a
stable and potentially permanent economic and social structure, an
established line of development. The problems of almost all of Europe,
serious and even fundamental though they may be, arise out of the
solution of earlier ones. In western and northern Europe they arose
mainly on the basis of successful capitalist development, in eastern
Europe (much of which was in a situation analogous to Spain until 1945)
on the basis of a soviet-type socialism. In neither case do the basic
economic and social patterns look provisional, as, for instance, the
patterns of national relations within and between states still so often
appear to be. Belgian capitalism or Yugoslav socialism may well change,
perhaps fundamentally; but both are obviously far less likely to
collapse at slight provocation than the complex ad hoc administrative
formulae for ensuring the coexistence of Flemings and Walloons, or of
various mutually suspicious Balkan nationalities.
Spain is different. Capitalism has persistently failed in that country
and so has social revolution, in spite of its constant imminence and
occasional eruption. The problems of Spain arise out of the failures,
not the successes, of the past. Its political structure is nothing if
not provisional. Even Franco’s regime, which has lasted longer than any
other since 1808 (it has beaten the record of the Canovas era 1875–97),
is patently temporary. Its future is so undetermined that even the
restoration of hereditary monarchy can be seriously considered as a
political prospect. Spain’s problems have been obvious to every
intelligent observer since the eighteenth century. A variety of
solutions have been proposed and occasionally applied. The point is that
all of them have failed. Spain has not by any means stood still. By its
own standards the economic and social changes of the nineteenth century
were substantial, and anyone who has watched the country’s evolution in
the past fifteen years knows how unrealistic it is to think of it as
essentially the same as in 1936. (An Aragonese pueblo demonstrates this
very clearly, if only in the increase of local tractors from two to
thirty-two, of motor vehicles from three to sixty-eight, of bank
branches from nought to six.) Nevertheless the fundamental economic and
social problems of the country remain unresolved, and the gap between it
and more developed (or more fundamentally transformed) European states
remains.
Raymond Carr, whose remarkable book probably supersedes all other
histories of nineteenth — and twentieth-century Spain for the time
being,[14] formulates the problem as that of the failure of Spanish
liberalism; that is to say of an essentially capitalist economic
development, a bourgeois-parliamentary political system, and a culture
and intellectual development of the familiar western kind. It might be
equally well, and perhaps more profitably, formulated as that of the
failure of Spanish social revolution. For if, as Carr admits, liberalism
never had serious chances of success, social revolution was, perhaps for
this reason, a much more serious prospect. Whatever we may think of the
upheavals of the Napoleonic period, the 1830s (which Carr analyzes with
particular brilliance), of 1854–6 or 1868–74, there can be no denying
that social revolution actually broke out in 1931–6, that it did so
without any significant assistance from the international situation, and
that the case is practically unique in western Europe since 1848.
Yet it failed; and not only, or even primarily because of the foreign
aid given to its enemies. One would not wish to underestimate the
importance of Italian and German aid or Anglo-French ‘non-intervention’
in the Civil War, the greater single-mindedness of Axis than of Soviet
support, or the remarkable military achievements of the Republic, which
Carr rightly recognizes. It is quite conceivable that, given a different
international configuration, the Republic could have won. But it is
equally undeniable that the Civil War was a double struggle against
armed counter-revolution and the gigantic, and in the last analysis
fatal, internal weaknesses of revolution. Successful revolutions, from
the French Jacobins to the Vietnamese, have shown a capacity to win
against equally long or even longer odds. The Spanish Republic did not.
There is no great mystery about the failure of Spanish liberalism,
though so much of the nineteenth-century history of the country and of
its basic social and economic situation is too little known for
excessively confident analysis. ‘The changes in the classic agricultural
structure of Spain between 1750 and 1850 were achieved by a
rearrangement of the traditional economy, by its expansion in space, not
by any fundamental change’ (p. 29). (Carr’s explanation that poverty of
soil and capital resources made this inevitable, is not entirely
convincing.) What it amounted to was that Spain maintained a rapidly
growing population, not by industrial and agricultural revolution, but
by a vast increase in the extensive cultivation of cereals, which in
time exhausted the soil and turned inland Spain into an even more
impoverished semi-desert than it already was. Logically, the politics of
agricultural inefficiency gave way to those of peasant revolution. ‘In
the nineties politicians were bullied by the powerfully organized wheat
interest; in the twentieth century they were alarmed by the threat of
revolution on the great estates.’ The alternative, intensive cash crops
for export (e.g. oranges) was not generally applicable without
prohibitively costly investment, perhaps not even with it; though Carr
seems ultra-sceptical of the possibilities of irrigation, though less so
of afforestation. Spanish industry was a marginal phenomenon,
uncompetitive on the world market, and therefore dependent on the feeble
domestic market and (notably in the case of Catalonia) the relics of the
empire. It was liberal Barcelona which resisted Cuban independence most
ferociously, since 60 per cent of its exports went there. The Catalan
and Basque bourgeoisie were not an adequate basis for Spanish
capitalism. As Vilar has shown, the Catalan businessmen failed to
capture the direction of the national economic policy, and therefore
retreated into the defensive posture of autonomism, which the Republic
eventually conceded to them and the Basques.
Under these circumstances the economic and social basis of liberalism
and its political striking-force, were feeble. As in so many
underdeveloped countries, there were two active forces in politics: the
urban petty-bourgeoisie, standing in the shadow of the urban plebs, and
the army, an institution for furthering the careers of energetic members
of the same stratum, and a militant trade union for the most powerfully
organized sector of the white-collar unemployed, who had to look to the
state because the economy could not employ them. The ‘pronunciamento’, a
curious Iberian invention whose rituals became highly traditional,
replaced liberal politics in the first half of the nineteenth century.
In the second half it became ‘a speculative business enterprise for
generals’ and in the twentieth century it ceased to have any connection
with liberalism.
Revolutions began with a pronunciamento or with what Carr calls the
‘primitive provincial revolution’ — plebeian risings spreading from town
to town by contagion — or both. The fighting poor were essential, but
perilous. Local notables, not to mention national ones, retreated from
the ever-present danger of social revolution into the ‘committee stage’,
when local power passed to juntas of notables with an optional
representative or two of the people, while the national government
collapsed. ‘The final stage was the reimposition, by a ministry that
“represented” the revolution, of central government control.’ Kiernan’s
monograph on 1854 describes and explains this process in full
detail.[15] Of course in the nineteenth century a proletariat barely
existed outside Barcelona, which consequently became the classical
revolutionary city of western Europe. The peasantry long remained
politically ineffective, or Carlist, i.e. attached to ultra-reactionary
politicians and hostile on principle to the towns.
Spanish liberalism was thus squeezed into the narrow space of manoeuvre
between the ‘primitive revolution’, without which nothing would change,
and the need to damp it down almost immediately. It was not surprising
that a vehicle obliged to brake almost as soon as the foot hit the
accelerator, could not get very far. The best hope of the bourgeois
moderates was to put some regime in power which would allow the forces
of capitalist development to develop; but they never developed enough.
Their most usual achievement was to find some formula which neutralized
social revolution or the ultra-reactionaries for a while by the
combination of at least two of the three forces of ‘official’ politics:
the army, the crown and the ‘official’ parties. As Carr shows, this was
the pattern of Spanish politics: army plus politicians in the 1840s,
crown plus politicians after 1875, army plus crown under Primo de Rivera
in the 1920s, and a collapse of the crown when it alienated the other
two, as in 1854, 1868 and 1931. When there was no crown there had to be
an ‘ad hoc military dictatorship’.
Yet Franco is not simply the successor of Alfonso. For in the twentieth
century the forces of social revolution grew stronger than they had been
in the nineteenth, because revolution retained its ‘primitive’ assets
while acquiring two new and formidable assets: peasant revolution and
the labour movement. It is their failure which poses the major problem
of Spanish history and may perhaps throw light on a number of other
underdeveloped countries. That failure was due to the anarchists.
This does not mean that the remarkable ineffectiveness of the Spanish
revolution is due merely to the historic accident that Spain was
colonized by Bakunin more than by Marx. (Even this is not quite an
accident. It is characteristic of the cultural isolation of
underdeveloped countries in the nineteenth century that so often ideas
which were unimportant in the wider world became immensely influential
there, like the philosophy of a certain Krause in Spain, or the politics
of August Comte in Mexico and Brazil.) The facts of Spanish geography
and history are against a nationally coordinated movement, but countries
with at least as much regional and more national diversity have achieved
one, like Yugoslavia. The self-contained universe of the Spanish pueblo
long made national changes the result of periodic plebiscites by direct
action of its municipalities. But other countries also know the
phenomenon of extreme localism, for instance Italy. All the Spanish
revolutions, as Carr shows, had an archaic house-style, irrespective of
the ideological labels they brandished. It is doubtful whether ‘Belmonte
de los Caballeros’ an Aragonese pueblo, would have behaved differently
in 1931–6 had it been organized by the CNT rather than by the socialist
UGT. Anarchism succeeded so well, because it was content to provide a
mere label for the traditional political habits of revolutionary
Spaniards. Yet political movements are not obliged to accept the
historic characteristics of their environment, though they will be
ineffective if they pay no attention to them. Anarchism was a disaster
because it made no attempt to change the style of primitive Spanish
revolt, and deliberately reinforced it.
It legitimized the traditional impotence of the poor. It turned
politics, which even in its revolutionary form is a practical activity,
into a form of moral gymnastics, a display of individual or collective
devotion, self-sacrifice, heroism or self-improvement which justified
its failure to achieve any concrete results by the argument that only
revolution was worth fighting for, and its failure in revolution by the
argument that anything which involved organization and discipline did
not deserve the name. Spanish anarchism is a profoundly moving spectacle
for the student of popular religion — it was really a form of secular
millennialism — but not, alas, for the student of politics. It threw
away political chances with a marvellously blind persistence. The
attempts to steer it into a less suicidal course succeeded too late,
though they were enough to defeat the generals’ rising in 1936. Even
then, they succeeded incompletely. The noble gunman Durruti, who
symbolized both the ideal of the anarchist militant and conversion to
the Organization and discipline of real war, was probably killed by one
of his own purist comrades.
This is not to deny the remarkable achievement of Spanish anarchism
which was to create a working-class movement that remained genuinely
revolutionary. Social democratic and in recent years even communist
trade unions have rarely been able to escape either schizophrenia or
betrayal of their socialist convictions, since for practical purposes —
i.e. when acting as trade union militants or leaders — they must usually
act on the assumption that the capitalist system is permanent. The CNT
did not, though this did not make it a particularly effective body for
trade unionist purposes, and on the whole it lost ground to the
socialist UGT from the trienio bolchevique of 1918–20 till after the
outbreak of the Civil War, except where the force of anarchist gunmen
and long tradition kept rivals out of the field, as in Catalonia and
Aragon. Still, Spanish workers as well as peasants remained
revolutionary and acted accordingly when the occasion arose. True, they
were not the only ones to retain the reflex of insurrection. In several
other countries workers brought up in the communist tradition, or in
that of maximalist socialism, reacted in a similiar way when nobody
stopped them, and it was not until the middle 1930s that this reflex was
actively discouraged in the international communist movement
Again, neither the Spanish socialists nor the communists can be
acquitted of responsibility for the failure of the Spanish revolution.
The communists were fettered by the extreme sectarianism of the
International’s policy in 1928–34, at the very moment when the fall of
the monarchy in 1931 opened up possibilities of strategies of alliance
which they were not permitted (and probably unwilling) to use until some
years later. Whether their weakness would have allowed them to use these
effectively at the time is another matter. The socialists veered from
opportunism to a strategically blind maximalism after 1934, which served
to strengthen the right rather than to unite the left. Since they were
visibly much more dangerous to the right than the anarchists (who were
never more than a routine police problem), both because they were better
organized and because they were in republican governments, the backlash
of reaction was much more serious.
Nevertheless, the anarchists cannot escape major responsibility.[16]
Theirs was the basic tradition of labour in most parts of the republic
which survived the initial military rising, and such deeply rooted
traditions are difficult to change. Moreover, theirs was potentially
still the majority movement of the left in the republic. They were in no
position to ‘make’ the revolution of which they dreamed. But when the
decision of the Popular Front government to resist the military rising
by all means, including arming the people, turned a situation of social
ferment into a revolution, they were its chief initial beneficiaries.
There seems little doubt about the initial preponderance of the
anarcho-syndicalists in the armed militia, and none about their
domination of the great process of ‘sovietization’ (in the original
sense of the word) in Catalonia, Aragon and the Mediterranean coast
which (with Madrid) formed the core of the republic.
The anarchists thus shaped or formulated the revolution which the
generals had risen to prevent, but had in fact provoked. But the war
against the generals remained to be fought, and they were incapable of
fighting it effectively either in the military or political sense. This
was evident to the great majority of foreign observers and volunteers,
especially in Catalonia and Aragon. There it proved impossible even to
get the sixty thousand rifles parading on the city streets, let alone
the available machine-guns and tanks, to the under-strength and
under-equipped units which actually went to the crucial Aragon front.
The inefficacy of the anarchist way of fighting the war has recently
been doubted by a new school of libertarian historians (including the
formidable intellect of Noam Chomsky), reluctant to admit that the
communists had the only practical and effective policy for this purpose,
and that their rapidly growing influence reflected this fact.
Unfortunately it cannot be denied. And the war had to be won, because
without this victory the Spanish revolution, however inspiring and
perhaps even workable, would merely turn into yet another episode of
heroic defeat, like the Paris Commune. And this is what actually
happened. The communists, whose policy was the one which could have won
the war, gained strength too late and never satisfactorily overcame the
handicap of their original lack of mass support.
For the student of politics in general, Spain may merely be a salutary
warning against libertarian gestures (with or without pistols and
dynamite), and against the sort of people who, like Ferrer, boasted that
‘plutot qu’un revolutionnaire je suis un revoke’. For the historian, the
abnormal strength of anarchism, or the ineffective ‘primitive’
revolutionism still needs some explanation. Was it due to the proverbial
neglect of the peasantry by the marxists of western Europe, which left
so much of the countryside to the Bakuninists? Was it the persistence of
small-scale industry and the pre-industrial sub-proletariat? These
explanations are not entirely satisfactory. Was it the isolation of
Spain, which saved Spanish libertarianism from the crisis of 1914–20
which bankrupted it in France and Italy, thus leaving the way open for
communist mass movements? Was it the curious absence of intellectuals
from the Spanish labour movement, so unusual in twentieth-century
underdeveloped countries? Intellectuals were democrats, republicans,
cultural populists, perhaps above all anti-clericals, and active enough
in some phases of opposition: but few of them were socialists and
virtually none anarchists. (Their role seems in any case to have been
limited — even educated Spain, as Carr says rightly, was not a reading
nation — and the cafe-table or Ateneo was not, except in Madrid, a form
of nation-wide political action.) At all events the leadership of
Spanish revolutionary movements suffered from their absence. At present
we cannot answer these questions except by speculation.
We can, however, place the spontaneous revolutionism of Spain in a wider
context, and recent writers like Malefakis[17] have begun to do so.
Social revolutions are not made: they occur and develop. To this extent
the metaphors of military organization, strategy and tactics, which are
so often applied to them both by marxists and their adversaries, can be
actively misleading. However, they cannot succeed without establishing
the capacity of a national army or government, i.e. to exercise
effective national coordination and direction. Where this is totally
absent, what might otherwise have turned into a social revolution may be
no more than a nationwide aggregate of waves of local social unrest (as
in Peru 1960–3), or it may collapse into an anarchic era of mutual
massacre (as in Colombia in the years after 1948). This is the crux of
the marxist critique of anarchism as a political strategy, whether such
a belief in the virtues of spontaneous militancy at all times and places
is held by nominal Bakuninists or by other ideologists. Spontaneity can
bring down regimes, or at least make them unworkable, but can provide no
alternative suitable to any society more advanced than an archaic
self-sufficient peasantry, and even then only on the assumption that the
forces of the state and of modern economic life will simply go away and
leave the self-governing village community in peace. This is unlikely.
There are various ways in which a revolutionary party or movement can
establish itself as a potentially national regime before the actual
taking of power or during it. The Chinese, Vietnamese and Yugoslav
Communist Parties were able to do so in the course of a prolonged
guerrilla war, from which they emerged as the state power, but on the
evidence of our century this seems to be exceptional. In Russia a
brilliantly led Bolshevik Party succeeded in establishing itself as the
leader of the decisive political force — the working class in the
capital cities and a section of the armed forces — between February and
October 1917, and as the only effective contender for state power, which
it then exercised as soon as it had taken over the national centre of
government, defeating — admittedly with great difficulty and at great
cost — the counter-revolutionary armies and local or regional dissidence
which lacked this coordination. This was essentially the pattern of the
successful French revolutions between 1789 and 1848 which rested on the
capture of the capital city combined with the collapse of the old
government and the failure to establish an effective alternative
national centre of counter-revolution. When the provinces failed to fall
into line and an alternative counter-revolutionary government did
establish itself, as in 1870–1, the commune of Paris was doomed.
A revolution may establish itself over a longer period of apparently
complex and opaque conflict by the combination of a fairly stable class
alliance (under the hegemony of one social force) with certain strong
regional bases of power. Thus the Mexican revolution emerged as a stable
regime after ten years of murderous civil strife, thanks to the alliance
of what was to become the national bourgeoisie with the (subaltern)
urban working class, conquering the country from a stable power-base in
the north.[18] Within this framework the necessary concessions were made
to the revolutionary peasant areas and several virtually independent
warlords, a stable national regime being constructed step by step during
the twenty years or so after the Sonora base had established itself.
The most difficult situation for revolution is probably that in which it
is expected to grow out of reforming politics, rather than the initial
shock of insurrectionary crisis combined with mass mobilization. The
fall of the Spanish monarchy in 1931 was not the result of social
revolution, but rather the public ratification of a very general shift
of opinion among the political classes of Spain away from the monarchy.
The new Republicans might have been pushed decisively towards the left —
more specifically, towards agrarian revolution — by the pressure of the
masses. But at the time when they were most susceptible to and afraid of
it, in 1931, this did not occur. The moderate socialists may or may not
have wanted to organize it, but the communists and anarchists who
certainly did, failed in their attempt to do so. One cannot simply blame
them for this failure. There were both avoidable and — perhaps
predominantly — inevitable reasons why ‘CNT and communist recruiters in
general were so distant from the prevailing peasant mood that both
organizations remained primarily urban based even so late as 1936’
(Malefakis). The fact remains that ‘peasant rebellion became a
significant force after 1933, not in 1931, when it might have been
politically more efficacious’. And after 1933 it served to mobilize
reaction as effectively as — in the long run more effectively than — the
forces of revolution. The Spanish revolution was unable to exploit the
historical moment when most successful revolutions establish their
hegemony: the spell of time during which its potential or actual enemies
are demoralized, disorganized and uncertain what to do.
When it broke out it met a mobilized enemy. Perhaps this was inevitable.
But it also faced the battle for survival, which it proved incapable of
winning. Probably this was not inevitable. And so we remember it,
especially those of us to whose lives it belongs, as a marvellous dream
of what might have been, an epic of heroism, the Iliad of those who were
young in the 1930s. But unless we think of revolutions merely as a
series of dreams and epics, the time for analysis must succeed that of
heroic memories.
(1966)
The present revival of interest in anarchism is a curious and at first
sight unexpected phenomenon. Even ten years ago it would have seemed in
the highest degree unlikely. At that time anarchism, both as a movement
and as an ideology, looked like a chapter in the development of the
modern revolutionary and labour movements that had been definitely
closed.
As a movement it seemed to belong to the pre-industrial period, and in
any case to the era before the first world war and the October
revolution, except in Spain, where it can hardly be said to have
survived the Civil War of 1936–9. One might say that it disappeared with
the kings and emperors whom its militants had so often tried to
assassinate. Nothing seemed to be able to halt, or even to slow down,
its rapid and inevitable decline, even in those parts of the world in
which it had once constituted a major political force — in France,
Italy, Latin America. A careful searcher, who knew where to look, might
still discover some anarchists even in the 1950s, and very many more
ex-anarchists, easily recognizable by such signs as an interest in the
poet Shelley. (It is characteristic that this most romantic school of
revolutionaries has been more loyal than anyone else, including the
literary critics of his own country, to the most revolutionary among
English romantic poets.) When I tried to make contact, about this time,
with activists in the Spanish anarchist underground in Paris, I was
given a rendezvous at a cafe in Montmartre, by the Place Blanche, and
somehow this reminder of a long-lost era of bohemians, rebels and
avant-garde seemed only too characteristic.
As an ideology, anarchism did not decline so dramatically because it had
never had anything like as much success, at least among intellectuals
who are the social stratum most interested in ideas. There have probably
always been eminent figures in the world of culture who called
themselves anarchists (except, curiously enough, in Spain), but most of
them seem to have been artists in the wider — or like Pissarro and
Signac, the narrower — sense of the word. In any case, anarchism never
had an attraction comparable to, say marxism, for intellectuals even
before the October revolution. With the exception of Kropotkin, it is
not easy to think of an anarchist theorist who could be read with real
interest by non-anarchists. There seemed, indeed, no real intellectual
room for anarchist theory. The belief in the libertarian communism of
self-governing cooperatives as the final aim of revolutionaries, it
shared with marxism. The old Utopian socialists had thought more deeply
and concretely about the nature of such communities than most
anarchists. Even the strongest point in the anarchists’ intellectual
armoury, their awareness of the dangers of dictatorship and bureaucracy
implicit in marxism, was not peculiar to them. This type of critique was
made with equal effect and greater intellectual sophistication both by
‘unofficial’ marxists and by opponents of all kinds of socialism.
In brief, the main appeal of anarchism was emotional and not
intellectual. That appeal was not negligible. Everyone who has ever
studied, or had anything to do with the real anarchist movement, has
been deeply moved by the idealism, the heroism, the sacrifice, the
saintliness which it so often produced, side by side with the brutality
of the Ukrainian Makhnovshchina or the dedicated gunmen and
church-burners of Spain. The very extremism of the anarchist rejection
of state and organization, the totality of their commitment to the
overthrow of the present society, could not but arouse admiration;
except perhaps among those who had to be active in politics by the side
of the anarchists, and found them almost impossible to work with. It is
suitable that Spain, the country of Don Quixote, should have been their
last fortress.
The most touching epitaph I have heard on an anarchist terrorist, killed
a few years ago by the police in Catalonia, was spoken by one of his
comrades, without any sense of irony: ‘When we were young, and the
Republic was founded, we were knightly but also spiritual. We have grown
older, but not he. He was a guerrillero by instinct. Yes, he was one of
the Quixotes who come out of Spain.’
Admirable, but hopeless, It was almost certainly the monumental
ineffectiveness of anarchism which, for most people of my generation —
the one which came to maturity in the years of the Spanish Civil War —
determined our rejection of it. I still recall in the very earliest days
of that war, the small town of Puigcerda in the Pyrenees, a little
revolutionary republic, filled with free men and women, guns and an
immensity of discussion. A few trucks stood in the plaza. They were for
the war. When anyone felt like going to fight on the Aragonese front, he
went to the trucks. When a truck was full, it went to the front.
Presumably, when the volunteers wanted to come back, they came back. The
phrase C’est magnifique, mais ce nest pas la guerre should have been
invented for such a situation. It was marvellous, but the main effect of
this experience on me was, that it took me twenty years before I was
prepared to see Spanish anarchism as anything but a tragic farce.
It was much more than this. And yet, no amount of sympathy can alter the
fact that anarchism as a revolutionary movement has failed, that it has
almost been designed for failure.
As Gerald Brenan, the author of the best book on modern Spain, has put
it: a single strike of (socialist) miners in the Asturias shook the
Spanish government more than seventy years of massive anarchist
revolutionary activity, which presented little more than a routine
police problem. (Indeed, subsequent research has shown that in the era
of maximum bomb-throwing in Barcelona, there were probably not a hundred
policemen looking after public order in that city, and their number was
not notably reinforced.) The ineffectiveness of anarchist revolutionary
activities could be documented at length, and for all countries in which
this ideology played an important role in politics. This is not the
place for such a documentation. My point is simply to explain why the
revival of interest in anarchism today seems so unexpected, surprising
and — if I am to speak frankly — unjustified.
Unjustified, but not inexplicable. There are two powerful reasons which
explain the vogue for anarchism: the crisis of the world communist
movement after Stalin’s death and the rise of revolutionary discontent
among students and intellectuals, at a time when objective historical
factors in the developed countries do not make revolution appear very
probable.
For most revolutionaries the crisis of communism is essentially that of
the USSR and the regimes founded under its auspices in eastern Europe;
that is to say of socialist systems as understood in the years between
the October revolution and the fall of Hitler. Two aspects of these
regimes now seemed more vulnerable to the traditional anarchist critique
than before 1945, because the October revolution was no longer the only
successful revolution made by communists, the USSR was no longer
isolated, weak and threatened with destruction, and because the two most
powerful arguments for the USSR — its immunity to the economic crisis of
1929 and its resistance to fascism — lost their force after 1945.
Stalinism, that hypertrophy of the bureaucratized dictatorial state,
seemed to justify the Bakuninite argument that the dictatorship of the
proletariat would inevitably become simple dictatorship, and that
socialism could not be constructed on such a basis. At the same time the
removal of the worst excesses of Stalinism made it clear that even
without purges and labour camps the kind of socialism introduced in the
USSR was very far from what most socialists had had in mind before 1917,
and the major objectives of that country’s policy, rapid economic
growth, technological and scientific development, national security
etc., had no special connections with socialism, democracy or freedom.
Backward nations might see in the USSR a model of how to escape from
their backwardness, and might conclude from its experience and from
their own that the methods of economic development pioneered and
advocated by capitalism did not work in their conditions, whereas social
revolution followed by central planning did, but the main object was
‘development’. Socialism was the means to it and not the end. Developed
nations, which already enjoyed the material level of production to which
the USSR still aspired, and in many cases far more freedom and cultural
variety for their citizens, could hardly take it as their model, and
when they did (as in Czechoslovakia and the gdr) the results were
distinctly disappointing.
Here again it seemed reasonable to conclude that this was not the way to
build socialism. Extremist critics — and they became increasingly
numerous — concluded that it was not socialism at all, however distorted
or degenerate. The anarchists were among those revolutionaries who had
always held this view, and their ideas therefore became more attractive.
All the more so as the crucial argument of the 1917–45 period, that
Soviet Russia however imperfect, was the only successful revolutionary
regime and the essential basis for the success of revolution elsewhere,
sounded much less convincing in the 1950s and hardly convincing at all
in the 1960s.
The second and more powerful reason for the vogue of anarchism has
nothing to do with the USSR, except in so far as it was fairly clear
after 1945 that its government did not encourage revolutionary seizures
of power in other countries. It arose out of the predicament of
revolutionaries in non-revolutionary situations. As in the years before
1914, so in the 1950s and early 1960s western capitalism was stable and
looked like remaining stable. The most powerful argument of classic
marxist analysis, the historic inevitability of proletarian revolution,
therefore lost its force; at least in the developed countries. But if
history was not likely to bring revolution nearer, how would it come
about?
Both before 1914 and again in our time anarchism provided an apparent
answer. The very primitiveness of its theory became an asset. Revolution
would come because revolutionaries wanted it with such passion, and
undertook acts of revolt constantly, one of which would, sooner or
later, turn out to be the spark which would set the world on fire. The
appeal of this simple belief lay not in its more sophisticated
formulations, though such extreme voluntarism could be given a
philosophical basis (the pre-1914 anarchists often tended to admire
Nietzsche as well as Stirner) or founded on social psychology as with
Sorel. (It is a not altogether accidental irony of history that such
theoretical justifications of anarchist irrationalism were soon to be
adapted into theoretical justifications of fascism.) The strength of the
anarchist belief lay in the fact that there seemed to be no alternative
other than to give up the hope of revolution.
Of course neither before 1914 nor today were anarchists the only
revolutionary voluntarists. All revolutionaries must always believe in
the necessity of taking the initiative, the refusal to wait upon events
to make the revolution for them. At some times — as in the Kautsky era
of social democracy and the comparable era of postponed hope in the
orthodox communist movement of the 1950s and 1960s — a dose of
voluntarism is particularly salutary. Lenin was accused of Blanquism,
just as Guevara and Regis Debray have been, with somewhat greater
justification. At first sight such non-anarchist versions of the revolt
against ‘historic inevitability’ seem much the more attractive since
they do not deny the importance of objective factors in the making of
revolution, of organization, discipline, strategy and tactics.
Nevertheless, and paradoxically, the anarchists may today have an
occasional advantage over these more systematic revolutionaries. It has
recently become fairly clear that the analysis on which most intelligent
observers based their assessment of political prospects in the world
must be badly deficient. There is no other explanation for the fact that
several of the most dramatic and far-reaching developments in world
politics recently have been not merely unpredicted, but so unexpected as
to appear almost incredible at first sight. The events of May 1968 in
France are probably the most striking example. When rational analysis
and prediction leads so many astray, including even most marxists, the
irrational belief that anything is possible at any moment may seem to
have some advantages. After all, on 1 May 1968, not even in Peking or
Havana did anyone seriously expect that within a matter of days
barricades would rise in Paris, soon to be followed by the greatest
general strike in living memory. On the night of 9 May it was not only
the official communists who opposed the building of barricades, but a
good many of the Trotskyist and Maoist students also, for the apparently
sound reason that if the police really had orders to fire, the result
would be a brief but substantial massacre. Those who went ahead without
hesitation were the anarchists, the anarchizers, the situationnistes.
There are moments when simple revolutionary or Napoleonic phrases like
del’audace, encore de l’audace or on s’engage etpuis on voit work. This
was one of them. One might even say that this was an occasion when only
the blind chicken was in a position to find the grain of corn.
No doubt, statistically speaking, such moments are bound to be rare. The
failure of Latin American guerrilla movements and the death of Guevara
are reminders that it is not enough to want a revolution, however
passionately, or even to start guerrilla war. No doubt the limits of
anarchism became evident within a few days, even in Paris. Yet the fact
that once or twice pure voluntarism has produced results cannot be
denied. Inevitably it has increased the appeal of anarchism.
Anarchism is therefore today once again a political force. Probably it
has no mass basis outside the movement of students and intellectuals and
even within the movement it is influential rather as a persistent
current of ‘spontaneity’ and activism rather than through the relatively
few people who claim to be anarchists. The question is therefore once
again worth asking what is the value of the anarchist tradition today?
In terms of ideology, theory and programmes, that value remains
marginal. Anarchism is a critique of the dangers of authoritarianism and
bureaucracy in states, parties and movements, but this is primarily a
symptom that these dangers are widely recognized. If all anarchists had
disappeared from the face of the earth the discussion about these
problems would go on much as it does. Anarchism also suggests a solution
in terms of direct democracy and small self-governing groups, but I do
not think its own proposals for the future have so far been either very
valuable or very fully thought out. To mention only two considerations.
First, small self-governing direct democracies are unfortunately not
necessarily libertarian. They may indeed function only because they
establish a consensus so powerful that those who do not share it
voluntarily refrain from expressing their dissent; alternatively,
because those who do not share the prevailing view leave the community,
or are expelled. There is a good deal of information about the operation
of such small communities, which I have not seen realistically discussed
in anarchist literature. Second, both the nature of the modern social
economy and of modern scientific technology raise problems of
considerable complexity for those who see the future as a world of
self-governing small groups. These may not be insoluble, but
unfortunately they are certainly not solved by the simple call for the
abolition of the state and bureaucracy, nor by the suspicion of
technology and the natural sciences which so often goes with modern
anarchism.[19] It is possible to construct a theoretical model of
libertarian anarchism which will be compatible with modern scientific
technology, but unfortunately it will not be socialist. It will be much
closer to the views of Mr Goldwater and his economic adviser Professor
Milton Friedman of Chicago than to the views of Kropotkin. For (as
Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago in his pamphlet on the Impossibilities
of Anarchism), the extreme versions of individualist liberalism are
logically as anarchist as Bakunin.
It will be clear that in my view anarchism has no significant
contribution to socialist theory to make, though it is a useful critical
element. If socialists want theories about the present and the future,
they will still have to look elsewhere, to Marx and his followers, and
probably also to the earlier Utopian socialists, such as Fourier. To be
more precise: if anarchists want to make a significant contribution they
will have to do much more serious thinking than most of them have
recently done.
The contribution of anarchism to revolutionary strategy and tactics
cannot be so easily dismissed. It is true that anarchists are as
unlikely to make successful revolutions in the future as they have been
in the past. To adapt a phrase used by Bakunin of the peasantry: they
may be invaluable on the first day of a revolution, but they are almost
certain to be an obstacle on the second day. Nevertheless, historically
their insistence on spontaneity has much to teach us. For it is the
great weakness of revolutionaries brought up in any of the versions
derived from classical marxism, that they tend to think of revolutions
as occurring under conditions which can be specified in advance, as
things which can be, at least in outline, foreseen, planned and
organized. But in practice this is not so.
Or rather, most of the great revolutions which have occurred and
succeeded, have begun as ‘happenings’ rather than as planned
productions. Sometimes they have grown rapidly and unexpectedly out of
what looked like ordinary mass demonstrations, sometimes out of
resistance to the acts of their enemies, sometimes in other ways — but
rarely if ever did they take the form expected by organized
revolutionary movements, even when these had predicted the imminent
occurrence of revolution. That is why the test of greatness in
revolutionaries has always been their capacity to discover the new and
unexpected characteristics of revolutionary situations and to adapt
their tactics to them. Like the surfer, the revolutionary does not
create the waves on which he rides, but balances on them. Unlike the
surfer — and here serious revolutionary theory diverges from anarchist
practice — sooner or later he stops riding on the wave and must control
its direction and movement.
Anarchism has valuable lessons to teach, because it has — in practice
rather than in theory — been unusually sensitive to the spontaneous
elements in mass movements. Any large and disciplined movement can order
a strike or demonstration to take place, and if it is sufficiently large
and disciplined, it can make a reasonably impressive showing. Yet there
is all the difference between the CGT’s token general strike of 13 May
1968 and the ten millions who occupied their places of work a few days
later without a national directive. The very organizational feebleness
of anarchist and anarchizing movements has forced them to explore the
means of discovering or securing that spontaneous consensus among
militants and masses which produces action. (Admittedly it has also led
them to experiment with ineffective tactics such as individual or
small-group terrorism which can be practised without mobilizing any
masses and for which, incidentally, the organizational defects of
anarchism do not suit anarchists.)
The student movements of the past few years have been like anarchist
movements, at least in their early stages, in so far as they have
consisted not of mass organizations but of small groups of militants
mobilizing the masses of their fellow students from time to time. They
have been obliged to make themselves sensitive to the mood of these
masses, to the times and issues which will permit mass mobilization.
In the United States, for instance they belong to a primitive kind of
movement, and its weaknesses are evident — a lack of theory, of agreed
strategic perspectives, of quick tactical reaction on a national scale.
At the same time it is doubtful whether any other form of mobilization
could have created, maintained and developed so powerful a national
student movement in the United States in the 1960s. Quite certainly this
could not have bden done by the disciplined small groups of
revolutionaries in the old tradition — communist, Trotskyist or Maoist —
who constantly seek to impose their specific ideas and perspectives on
the masses and in doing so isolate themselves more often than they
mobilize them.
These are lessons to be learned not so much from the actual anarchists
of today whose practice is rarely impressive, as from a study of the
historic experience of anarchist movements. They are particularly
valuable in the present situation, in which new revolutionary movements
have often had to be built on and out of the ruins of the older ones.
For let us not be under any illusions. The impressive ‘new left’ of
recent years is admirable, but in many respects it is not only new, but
also a regression to an earlier weaker, less developed form of the
socialist movement, unwilling or unable to benefit from the major
achievements of the international working-class and revolutionary
movements in the century between the Communist Manifesto and the Cold
War.
Tactics derived from anarchist experience are a reflection of this
relative primitiveness and weakness, but in such circumstances they may
be the best ones to pursue for a time. The important thing is to know
when the limits of such tactics have been reached. What happened in
France in May 1968 was less like 1917 than like 1830 or 1848. It is
inspiring to discover that, in the developed countries of western
Europe, any kind of revolutionary situation, however momentary, is
possible once again. But it would be equally unwise to forget that 1848
is at the same time the great example of a successful spontaneous
European revolution, and of its rapid and unmitigated failure.
(1969)
[1] Of a small random sample of French communist MPS between the wars,
the Dictionnaire des Parlementaires Francais 1889–1940, gives the
following indications about their pre-communist past: Socialist 5;
‘Sillon’, then socialist 1; trade union activity (tendency unknown) 3;
libertarian 1; no pre-communist past 1.
[2] Bolshevising the Communist International, London, 1925.
[3] ‘The growth of discontent among the masses and of their resistance
to the attacks of the ruling classes and of imperialism have sharpened
the process of disintegration among socialist, anarchist and
anarcho-syndicalist organizations. In the most recent period the
recognition of the need for a united front with the communists has sunk
quite deep roots among rather wide strata of their rank and file. At the
same time the tendency for a direct entry into the ranks of the
revolutionary unions and communist parties has grown stronger
(especially in Cuba, Brazil, Paraguay). After the sixth World Congress
there has been a marked drop in the specific weight of
anarcho-syndicalism within the labour movements of South and Caribbean
America. In some countries the best elements of the anarcho-syndicalist
movement have joined the Communist Party, e.g. in Argentina, Brazil,
Paraguay and Cuba [...]. In other countries the weakening of
anarcho-syndicalist influence was accompanied by a strengthening of
socialist and reformist organizations (Argentina), the
“national-reformist parties” (Mexico, Cuba)’: Die Kommunistische
Internationale vor dem 7. Weltkongress, p. 472.
[4] I owe this point to Miss Jean Stubbs, who is preparing a doctoral
thesis on the Cuban tobacco workers.
[5] P.Spriano, Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, vol. 1, p. 77.
[6] ‘Jahrbuch für Wirschaft, Politik und Arbeiterbewegung’ (Hamburg),
1922–3, pp. 247, 250, 481–2.
[7] Decisions of the Third Congress of the Communist International,
London, 1921, p. 10.
[8] Protokoll, p. 510.
[9] Fourth Congress of the Communist International. Abridged Report.
London, 1923, p. 18.
[10] Cf. Manuilsky. ‘We think, for instance, that so-called Trotskyism
has a great deal in common with individualistic Proudhonism [... ] It is
not by accident that Rosmer and Monatte, in their new organ directed
against the Communist Party, resuscitate theoretically the ideas of the
old revolutionary syndicalism, mixed with a defence of Russian
Trotskyism’: The Communist International, English edition, no. 10, new
series, p. 58.
[11] ‘As to the Anarchists, a group whose influence was insignificant to
start with, they now definitely disintegrated into minute groups, some
of which merged with criminal elements, thieves and provocateurs, the
dregs of society; others became expropriators “by conviction”, robbing
the peasants and small townsfolk, and appropriating the premises and
funds of workers’ clubs; while others still openly went over to the camp
of the counter-revolutionaries, and devoted themselves to feathering
their own nests as menials of the bourgeoisie. They were all opposed to
authority of any kind, particularly and especially to the revolutionary
authority of the workers and peasants, for they knew that a
revolutionary government would not allow them to rob the people and
steal public property’, p. 203.
[12]
A. Lozovsky, Marx and the Trade Unions, London, 1935 (first edn. 1933),
pp. 35h5 and especially pp. 146–54.
[13] Op. cit., p. 10.
[14] Raymond Carr, Spain 1808–1939, Oxford, 1966.
[15]
V. G. Kiernan, The Revolution of 1854 in Spanish History, Oxford,
1966.
[16] They can be criticized not only for lending themselves to the
irrelevant vendettas of Stalin’s secret police, but for discouraging not
merely the unpopular or counterproductive excesses of the revolution,
but the revolution itself, whose existence they preferred not to stress
in their propaganda. But the basic point is that they fought to win the
war and that without victory the revolution was dead anyway. Had the
republic survived, there might be more point to criticisms of their
policy which, alas, remain academic.
[17]
E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain, New
Haven and London, 1970. This book ought to be required reading for
all students of the Spanish revolution.
[18] From the days of Obregon until 1934 the presidents came almost
without exception from the state of Sonora.
[19] An illustration of this complexity may be given from the history of
anarchism. I take it from J. Martinez Alier’s valuable study of landless
labourers in Andalusia in 1964–5. From the author’s careful questioning
it is clear that the landless labourers of Cordova, traditionally the
mass basis of Spanish rural anarchism, have not changed their ideas
since 1936 — except in one respect. The social and economic activities
of even the Franco regime have convinced them that the state cannot
simply be rejected, but has some positive functions. This may help to
explain why they no longer seem to be anarchists.