No Gods, No Masters? – Pagan Anarchism (2017)

From the March 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 29 September 2016, one user of the website ‘revleft’ introduced themselves as follows: ‘I’ve struggled to find information on different political theories that wasn’t heavily academic and inaccessible to me as someone with cognitive disabilities and neurodivergencies that otherwise make it *really hard* to understand a lot of the leftist “sub-groups” I guess I’ll call them? Ideologies? Only the Pagan Anti-Capitalist Primer and the Gods and Radicals website in general has actually made any of this accessible to me so far’.

The ‘Gods and Radicals’ website (godsandradicals.org) publishes the twice-yearly publication Beautiful Resistance and published the Pagan Anti-Capitalist Primer in 2015, written by Alley Valkyrie (Nightingale Public Advocacy Collection, respectexistence.org) and Rhyd Wildermuth (paganarch.com, Managing Editor at Gods and Radicals):

  ‘Once, humans made contracts with the land and the gods for sovereignty. Take too much and the land revolted with famine or pestilence. … We Pagans are trying to re-enchant the world, to bring back the magic of the forests and the mountains. We are trying to hear and revere the wild places, the sacred forgotten places, the spirits of ocean and rivers and lakes. And yet Capitalism is always poisoning these places because it considers nothing sacred except profit, nothing holy except wealth.’
‘Grand programs and one-size-fits-all solutions don’t work… One answer cannot possibly fit every single one of the almost 8 billion people sharing this planet with us. Anyone who does come up with that answer should probably be shot on sight, as they’re pretty likely gonna start shooting people themselves pretty soon. Besides, ‘one-answer’ sounds a lot like ‘one-god,’ and we Pagans have lots of reason to be rue [sic] that one-god trend.’

The Primer goes on to urge the reader to ‘Build Community’, ‘Make Common Cause’, ‘Invest in Each Other, Divest from Capitalism’, ‘Consume Less, Create More’ and ‘Resist Often and Everywhere’. This ‘political theory’ wasn’t clear or ‘accessible’ and although this is only a 32 page e-zine, various other ‘pagan anarchist’ websites weren’t either. Not even the description of the book titled Pagan Anarchism (2016), by Christopher Scott Thomas could help;

  ‘Witches who poison bosses and landlords. Slave revolts instigated by a god of ecstasy. Eviction notices issued in the name of land spirits and Faerie queens. A ghostly general leading loom-breakers. Elves who destroy factories. Were these all merely myths, they’d still be more true than the superstitions upholding Empire and Capital. Yet they’re not myths, but our own history: the history of uprisings, of a fierce magic and a revolutionary current woven throughout the threads of Paganism and anarchism.’

This is a fantasy and not one likely to be welcomed by anarchists (or even some ‘pagans’ judging by comments online). Three quotes by Marx are included in the Pagan Anti-Capitalist Primer, but Marx and socialists have always rejected superstition including ‘paganism’. Marx called this rejection of superstition part of ‘materialism’. As Marx wrote: ‘The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.’

The preface to the German Ideology reads ‘… men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away.’

Religious superstition doesn’t have to be monotheistic, ostensibly apolitical, Abrahamic or even an organised religion to be opposed by socialists as a barrier to socialism. This includes ‘pagan anarchism’.

DJW

From The UN To Anarchism (2017)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent years, the BBC has developed an interesting sideline in polemics: broadcasters like Adam Curtis, Dominic Sandbrook and Simon Amstell have appeared on our screens presenting their original interpretations of society’s changing cultural and economic trends. Refreshing as it is to see thoughtful critiques of capitalism on the telly, alternatives are rarely discussed. So, it’s a nice surprise to see an anarchist get an hour of screen time to make his case, in Accidental Anarchist: Life Without Government, part of BBC4’s Storyville strand, as well as in one of Newsnight’s video podcasts.

Why this particular anarchist has been able to get his views on the Beeb is the career path which led to his viewpoint. Carne Ross began work in the government’s Foreign Office in 1989, with the optimism that came with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Between 1998 and 2002 he was the UK state’s expert on Iraq at the UN Security Council, where he negotiated on issues such as weapons inspections and sanctions, and took pride in being a ‘ferocious negotiator’. Ross says that the effect the economic sanctions on Iraq had on the Iraqi people was just ‘paper suffering’ to the UN because of its distance from those affected. Noticing the divide between governments and the majority led him to doubt the whole system’s effectiveness. His trust in the state was finally lost after the death of Dr David Kelly, the expert on biological warfare and UN weapons inspector who, according to Ross ‘was driven to suicide by the disgraceful campaign of vilification by [Tony] Blair’s officials after he was revealed as the source of a BBC story that the Number Ten ‘dossier’ alleging the threat from Iraq had been considerably exaggerated’ (www.carneross.com). Ross resigned his job in the Foreign Office in 2004 after giving then-secret evidence to the inquiry into the Iraq war. He told it that at no time did the government judge that Iraq held ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which posed a threat to the UK, despite what we were told. He says that the public was lied to over the reasons for going to war, and this is ‘the worst thing any government can possibly do’. He now feels ashamed of how he acted in his previous life.

Ross’ journey to anarchism is unexpected because he’s managed to change his mindset away from the acceptance of the system which is encouraged and needed by those working at that level for the state. His role allowed him to see first-hand how governments act, so in a way he was better placed than many to see the system’s faults. Far from being the ‘accidental’ anarchist of the show’s title, he has thought about what he’s experienced and reached a perfectly reasonable interpretation.

Ross tells us that he grew up to believe the economy works like a machine, complicated but understandable, and now believes that society is too complex to fully comprehend, let alone control. He even finds a government minister – Rory Stewart OBE – who admits that politicians don’t have nearly as much power over our economic and political system as most people assume. Because of this, Ross argues, our framework of leadership isn’t tenable. Instead, he says, ‘No-one should have power over another. People should govern themselves’ (LINK).

As proof that self-organisation can work better for everyone, Ross gives some examples of where people have worked together in a more equitable and effective way. Members of Occupy New York used their experience in planning and organising to co-ordinate aid for victims of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy more efficiently than the government’s efforts. And in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, the community arranged support for survivors quicker than the state. It shouldn’t take a disaster to make people come together, although other attempts at greater co-operation and self-organisation have developed in difficult circumstances. Rojava, an area of northern Syria, is run according to the political ideology of Abdullah Ocalan, a leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who was inspired by anarchist Murray Bookchin. While hierarchies still exist there, people living in Rojava are able to directly contribute to decisions affecting their community, and there is more gender equality and less sectarianism than elsewhere in the region.

According to Ross, the peak of anarchism was in 1930s Spain, before it was crushed by Stalin’s forces and Franco’s fascists won the Spanish Civil War. He says that anarchist ideals live on there now, such as in the town of Marinaleda in Andalucia, where the populace occupied land and buildings and established a farming co-operative with many municipal tasks organised together. Of course, these and any other examples have to work within capitalism. Ross doesn’t seem to see this as much of a setback, and cites ‘worker owned co-operatives like John Lewis’ (ibid) and the Brazilian city of Porto Allegre, where the population has had input into funding decisions which improved public services, as examples of where ideals of self-organisation have flourished. While he’s surely overstating how radical John Lewis and the other examples are, he’s more on the ball when he adds wryly that the shabbier a group’s assembly room is, the more democratic it will be.

Ross favours a ‘gentle revolution [which] should begin with direct democracy’ (ibid) in workplaces and the community. This would involve worker-run groups, which could then join up to manage larger-scale projects. He suggests that these groups would be more legitimate than politicians, and therefore would replace them. Whether governments would allow themselves to be shunted out in this way isn’t considered here. As Ross worked within the state, he should realise it won’t just offer to relinquish its power. The same applies to corporations: how realistic is it for co-operatives to out-perform them without adopting more cut-throat strategies to remain competitive? Unfortunately, the programme doesn’t go into detail about how far Ross thinks his examples of self-organisation can go towards replacing capitalism itself. However, they demonstrate that people can work together co-operatively and equally, and this is certainly a step towards revolution.

Mike Foster

‘A Very Short Introduction To . . . Anarchism’ (2007)

Book Review from the March 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anarchism, A Very Short Introduction, by Colin Ward. Oxford University Press. £6.99.

This is a reminder of what anarchists in Britain used to be like before the 1980s when a new breed, borrowing vanguardist tactics from the trotskyists, appeared calling themselves “class struggle anarchists”. Ward puts the case for a pacifist, reformist anarchism, concerned with gradually breaking down authoritarian attitudes in education, sex, the family, prisons, censorship and with promoting decentralization and voluntary self-help even within capitalism.

Adam Buick

Bumper Anarchism (2013)

Book Review from the August 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anarchism: Volume 3 (1974-2012). Edited by Robert Graham. (Black Rose Books, 2013. £19.99)

‘There is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light [on] the brightest day, and more rays will not interfere with the first.’ (Thoreau)

Does this book really illuminate the darkness of our souls? Or more prosaically, is there room on our bookshelves for another Bumper Book of Anarchism? The answer is probably no. There are, it must be said, some interesting essays in this work, subtitled ‘A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas’. Some like Ashanti Alston’s personal history of ‘Black Anarchism’ are even inspiring. Others are a useful potted history of recent events, eg. the Interprofessional Workers’ Union account of ‘Russian Capitalism’. However, outside the borderlands where the spark of Malatesta and Goldman clearly still burns bright, it would seem from this book that contemporary anarchist commentary is little more than an academic sport. It comes as no surprise that the first item in Graham’s selection is from the New Left Review, Britain’s premier distributor of intellectual flannel.

The selection and arrangement of material are by no means objective. Indeed, it is markedly obvious that the author has a hidden agenda. This is particularly noticeable in the core section on ‘Libertarian Alternatives’. In the author’s mind, this is doubtless supposed to pose the classic anarchist dilemma of mutualism versus collectivism. That the terms have no particular meaning or interest to a revolutionary is made abundantly clear by the concise contribution jointly authored by Socialist Party member Adam Buick and the late John Crump. The final article in the sequence comes down firmly in favour of mutualism, the nonsensical ‘exploration of forms of market capable of moving beyond the capitalist market’, or as we might term it ‘Capitalism writ small’. Given this preference, socialists should by no means imagine that anarchists per se are naturally ‘on our side’.

Kaz.

Anarchist economics (2012)

Book Review from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics. AK Press. 2012

Anarchists have a reputation for being weak in economics. This collection of articles is an attempt to refute this. It doesn’t succeed entirely and in fact tends to confirm that most modern-day anarchists get their economic ideas from Marx (as did Bakunin who was once going to translate Capital into Russian). Some of the writers don’t seem to be anarchists at all, in particular Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert, the inventors of a blueprint for an ideal future society they call “parecon”. Hahnel seems to be a Keynesian, advocating more state intervention (yes!) as a way out of the present crisis and of avoiding future ones. Albert is a supporter of President Chavez of Venezuela, and urges people to vote for him.

Even so, the book does give a view of the range of opinion amongst anarchists. Some – the modern-day followers of Proudhon – are “market anarchists” who hold that there is nothing wrong with production for the market, except that the competitors should be worker-cooperatives rather than capitalist corporations and there should be no state to interfere in it. This is a minority view these days (though well represented in the US), but there are other anarchists who are against full, free-access communism (known as “collectivists” rather than “communists”) who favour instead relating people’s consumption to the amount of work they do.

Marx himself sort of endorsed this for the very early days of post-capitalist society and some in the Marxist tradition still argue for labour-time vouchers. We don’t. Neither do some anarchists. In fact, two contributors to this book describing themselves as “libertarian communists” – Deric Shannon and Scott Nappalos – argue against this in the same terms that we do. Nappalos even quotes from our pamphlet Socialism As A Practical Alternative.

Nappalos says that, as a libertarian communist, he stands for “a society based on the abolition of remuneration in the form of wages and democratic control” and “an economy based on the destruction of the wage system, and a de-linking of the value of labor in production from the distribution of society’s wealth to its members.” He makes the valid point that it is not possible anyway to measure an individual’s contribution to production. He writes “in our time, production is largely social. The contribution of an individual is very difficult to isolate from the contributions of countless others that make work possible”. Any such attribution can only be arbitrary, as in the parecon blueprint, of which he says: “having co-workers judge each other’s work would turn gossip and infighting at work presently from an annoyance into a system of power over wages.”

Shannon’s criticism is directed more at “market anarchists”. He quotes another libertarian communist, Joseph Kay:

  “The assets of a co-op do not cease being capital when votes are taken on how they are used within a society of generalised commodity production and wage labour. That is to say there remains an imperative to accumulate with all the drive to minimise the labour time taken to do a task this requires, even in a co-op.”

Other articles describe anarchist economic practice such as factory occupations, setting up vegan cafés and campaigns directed at particular capitalist firms (called PEDCs or “political-economic disruptive campaigns”). However, these are not specifically anarchist activities, only activities in which some anarchists engage.

Adam Buick

New Publications (1942)

Book Reviews from the December 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

Parliament, Traitors and Beer

"Vote—What For" (Freedom Press, 2d.), by E. Malatesta, is an adaptation from a work by that author. It is the familiar Anarchist attack on parliamentary methods and government presented in the form of a discussion between two workers, George and Jack, over a glass of beer. George, supporter of parliamentary methods and of the Labour Party, puts up a defence which is demolished by Jack, the Anarchist. The demolition' is rapid. Perhaps it is because the leaflet is only fifteen pages. The vote, says Jack, is a fraud: those elected further their own interests except at election times, when they make fulsome promises to the gullible workers. George, unshaken, replies that we should elect workers, and then we should not be fooled. In reply to this the Anarchist makes two points: one, a majority in Parliament would be a ‘"paradise,” but only for the "elected”: and two—but let Jack speak for himself: "The rich are always in power. Just imagine a poor worker, perhaps with an ill wife and four kids, and you [that is, hard-hearted George] tell him to risk his job and get thrown out of' his house to starve; just to give his vote to a candidate his master doesn't like." From which one gathers that Anarchist Jack's indignation is righteously aroused at the suggestion that the worker should exercise his vote because such action would bring in the bailiffs and impose starvation on an ill wife and four hungry kids and all. Does E. Malatesta (or his adaptor) mean this? It is difficult to say. Anarchist writings do not always mean what they seem to say. However, for tuppence, Freedom Press will enable the reader to judge for himself.

This leaflet, in typical Anarchist fashion, confuses the issue on the question of parliamentary methods. It would have the ingenuous believe that the effort to achieve Socialism through Parliament has failed. Ramsay MacDonald is instanced as a Socialist who was won over by the rich. "As soon as you send anyone to office they turn traitor," the Anarchist says. The answer to such childish nonsense is: (1) Ramsay MacDonald was not a Socialist, nor was the Labour Party which he led; (2) The Labour Governments of 1924 and 1929-31 were not returned on Socialist programmes by the votes of Socialist supporters; (3) The two Labour Governments did not fail to introduce Socialism because of the illusory character of the vote, but because they were elected on reformist programmes to carry on the administration of capitalism. They learned bitterly that they could not reform out of existence working class problems, and that capitalism can only function in the interests of the capitalists.

That the Anarchists persist in accepting the Labour Party as a Socialist party might be regarded as a measure of what they understand Socialism to stand for. (This leaflet describes the I.L.P. as revolutionary whilst another Anarchist pamphlet issued by Freedom Press, "New Life to the Land," by George Woodcock, describes the I.L.P. as semi-revolutionary.) To accept the Labour Party as Socialist and to imply it stands for Socialism exposes the Anarchist claim to stand for a classless society and the abolition of the wages system as a mere form of words. A leaflet which sacrifices logic to propaganda argument. Crude, flat—but perhaps the latter was due to the beer with which George and Jack started the argument.

The Take (or Sit) and Hold Theory

"Trade Unionism or Syndicalism?" by Tom Brown (Freedom Press, 3d.).  The author of this pamphlet makes out a case for the Syndicalist practice to replace existing trade union organisation and for the Syndicalist method of taking over the means of production from the capitalists. He discusses what he thinks is the weak spot in trade union organisation, the organising of workers on the basis of their craft, i.e., "according to the tools they use.” The result is that the workers in any one industry find themselves organised in several trade unions (engineering workers are organised in fifty unions). In his trade union branch, usually near where he lives and away from his work, the trade unionist finds his fellow branch members connected with any industry but that in which he himself works. The result is lack of interest. The author advocates workers organised on the basis of one union for each industry. Mr. Brown's criticisms show all the obvious advantages likely to be gained from organisation by industry. That is, however, not the whole story, as the advocates of the rival conception will maintain, and experience in industries where the industrial idea has been more or less fully applied does not show any startling improvement. Moreover—and this should be remembered by both schools—the border lines of an industry are not always clear and fixed. Hence, for example, the conflicting claims of those who would argue that the railways are a self-contained industry and those who retort that they are only part of the transport industry.

Socialists are, however, more concerned with the further aspect. Mr. Brown does not advocate the one union one industry form of industrial organisation for the workers as an end in itself but as a means also for presenting the class struggle along Syndicalist lines, as a means for wresting ownership and control of the factories from the capitalists. The author proposes the " Social General Strike," or the "General Lock-out of the Employing Class" as he would prefer to describe it, and the management and administration of factories and industries along Syndicalist lines by the workers, such industries to be organised on a federal basis. On page 10 he says: "Against this action we hear raised the Social Democratic wail, “If you do that the bosses will shoot and baton you!' We reply, if you don't, they will shoot and baton (and starve) you, but with much greater success, as the history of passive starvation strikes shows. But in order to beat the workers, they must first start knocking about their own property, as they discovered in the 1937 automobile stay-in-strike in the U.S.A. If Mr. Brown is saying that the capitalists would acquiesce in parting with the ownership of the factories rather than see them knocked about, the present war demonstrates the contrary. They accept the facts of quite a lot of " knocking about" even where the certain loss of ownership is not involved. In any case, the sit-down strikes in America, and those in France which he also quotes, were not strikes which had for their purpose the taking over of the factories concerned on Syndicalist lines. Another example is given, with approval, of French shop girls who engaged in a sit-down strike and locked out the customers. Surely they acted wrongly. Ought they not have served the customers and informed the employers that the proceeds were for the benefit of the workers? Commenting on the example of the French shop girls Mr. Brown almost gushes: "And the bloodshed, the vast sea of gore, predicted by the Socialist. NONE!" Might a Socialist humbly suggest that the capitalist state would apply such methods as were dictated by the extent of the menace.

Well written, in a superficially plausible style, the hollowness of the Syndicalist case as stated in this pamphlet is nevertheless almost self-apparent.

Russia To-day

"Soviet Russia in Maps" (edited by George Goodal, M.A., price 2/6, and published by George Phillip & Sons, Ltd.), is a useful addition to an existing library of books on Russia. It consists of thirty-two pages of maps with notes and commentaries illustrating main changes in Russian economics, social and political changes, over seven centuries; it includes figures and comparisons of industrial developments to date.

Harry Waite

The History of the International - Part 2 (1928)

Book Review from the July 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last issue.)

History of First International by G. M. Stekloff. (Martin Lawrence. 12/6.)

The International Working Men's Association was dominated numerically by the followers of Proudhon, who appealed to the petty bourgeois outlook of the lands where petty enterprise still held the field.

One of Proudhon’s supporters, “Fribourg,” writing a history of the International, brings out the Proudhonists’ opposition to strikes and their belief in petty credit reforms as the road to prosperity. He says:

  The question of strikes, so inopportunely raised by the Blanquists at this epoch (the time of the first bureau), had no more determined opponents than the members of the International. Their advice was sometimes listened to, and to the International belongs the honour of having frustrated all attempts at a strike in the building trade during the years 1865, 1866 and 1867. Consumption, production, credit, solidarity, building societies, penny banks, mutual credit, societies —such were for years the questions discussed every evening by this little comity of workers. (Page 74.)

There we have an indication of the tremendous difficulties under which Marx and his supporters worked. On the one side, English Labour leaders, like George Odger, George Howell and Randall Cremer, who | were really Liberals (masquerading as Labour men), and, on the other side, the anarchist and reformist supporters of Proudhon and Bakunin.

The latter, with his high-sounding fury and anti-political policy, was able to win a good deal of support.

From the time the International was organised, in 1862, till its last Congress took place at the Hague in 1872, its history was a struggle between these elements with a widely-diverging policy. Marx struggled to teach the necessity of organisation and of independent political action to promote the victory of the International Working Class.

Writing of Bakunin, the author of this history gives a good summary of the background of his ideas. He says:

   Bourgeois society was breaking the chains imposed on it by the pre-capitalist system, and was undermining the foundations of the old order; but it was itself still unstable, and had not yet been able to organise its strength for a fight on two fronts, with the feudalists, on the one hand, and with the developing forces of the working class on the other. The titanic figure of Bakunin seems to have been a natural outgrowth of this critical period when the pre-bourgeois order was giving place to the bourgeois order. His figure was an appropriate one in such an epoch, when social ties, political institutions, and ideas were all in a state of flux. It was appropriate to days when the old governing class had been defeated, and when the new governing class was still weak but was inspired with vague but grandiose hopes—hopes begotten of the chaotic ferment that characterised this transition period. Naturally, people’s heads were easily turned, especially when the people were hot-heads like Bakunin. Thus, although this historic convulsion was nothing more than that caused by the efforts of bourgeois society to throw off its swaddling-clothes, Bakunin fancied that the final collapse of capitalism was imminent. What had really arrived was the end of the first phase in the development of capitalist society; but he, taking the beginning for the end, believed that the prologue of the social revolution was being played. This mistake arose from the fact that, substantially, he was not the ideological expression of the industrial proletariat, now undergoing consolidation, and developing concurrently with the development of the bourgeoisie. What Bakunin represented, ideologically speaking, was the economically backward countries like Russia and Italy. In these, and especially in Russia, capitalism was still in the period of what is known as "primitive accumulation,” and capitalist exploitation of the workers and the semi-proletarian sections of the peasantry was only in its initial stages. In actual fact, the aspirations, instincts, and elemental protests of those among the peasants who were being ruined by capitalist developments, played a considerable part in Bakunin's philosophy. They were the cause of his hostility to Communism; and of his still greater hostility to Social Democracy; they accounted for his antagonism to the State in all its forms, and for his anarchist activities; to a great extent, they determined both the form and the content of his insurrectionist philosophy. (Pages 151-152.)

The Bolsheviks of the Marx-Engels Institute at Moscow, who publish this work, can draw many lessons from paragraphs such as that just quoted.

It seems applicable in a large degree to the rise of Bolshevism in Russia to-day, and the direct action and insurrection policy of modern Communists seems to be largely borrowed from Bakunin.

Bakunin formed many secret societies in opposition to the International itself, and the programme of one of the Bakunist “Alliances” is quoted by the author:

  Atheism, the complete negation of all authority, the annulment of law, the denial of civil obligations, the substitution of free humanity for the State, collective ownership; labour was in this programme represented to be the foundation of social organisation, manifesting itself in the form of a great federation from below upwards. (Page 153.)

Marx was so much occupied by his writings and his work on the General Council in London that he was only able to attend the last Congress. But the history under review shows the advice and suggestions constantly made by him to endeavour to defeat the enemies of the International who turned up at the various Congresses.

The keen efforts of Marx and the part he played in the International is shown in the Manifestoes written for the International before and after the Commune of Paris, when such a crushing blow was made against the International.

The efforts made to unite the world’s workers from 1864 to 1872 suffered from the lack of development of the workers, due to their social environment and the mixture of reactionary notions to which they succumbed. The International, however, was worth while as a pioneer step in bringing home to all the need for international solidarity. Its weaknesses belonged to its time. Many of the causes of its decline explain to-day the decline of the Third International, which endeavoured to bring together a collection of mutually warring policies and hammer them into a movement with a programme adopted from the most backward country economically—Russia.

In the course of narrating the history of the International, the author frequently attempts to oppose Anarchist policies by policies equally absurd. On the question of reform, he ignores the fact that the workers’ struggles for reforms may be justified in the early days of the system, but that such efforts are now out of date.

One such optimistic statement may be quoted. He says:

  Reforms that are wrested by the workers from their class antagonists are blows that shake the bourgeois State, and when frequently repeated they may shake it to its foundations. Whereas to the bourgeoisie partial reforms seem buttresses that are needed to strengthen the capitalist building, in the hands of the working class these same reforms may become levers used to shake the stability of the edifice—provided always that those who are to utilise the reforms in this way have a true understanding of the general course of the historical struggle of the proletariat. (Page 171.)

But a little later he makes another statement, which shows the dangers of reform agitation. He says:

  Of course, from time to time, an unsuccessful struggle for reform may end in the destruction of the working class organisations which that struggle has called into existence. Such was the fate of the Chartist Movement. Nevertheless the usual effect of the struggle for reforms is to promote the growth of working class organisations. We must not generalise unduly. Sometimes the realisation of reforms for which a struggle halt been in progress, will take the fire out of large sections of the working class, and may even lead to the temporary arrest of the whole working class movement. That is what happened in Britain, for instance, during the late 'sixties, and the early ’seventies of the nineteenth century (see below). In other cases, the impossibility of achieving the reforms that are desired by the proletariat has the same result. (Page 173.)

In a short article we cannot do justice to this book, which is a mine of information and would well repay a worker’s study. In closing, we will quote the farewell speech of Marx after the last Congress (1872), which was held at the Hague. Addressing the meeting (at Amsterdam), Marx said:

   Fellow-citizens! Let us think of the fundamental principle of the International—Solidarity. We shall attain our great goal if we can establish this life-giving principle firmly among all the workers of all lands. The revolution must be the work of solidarised efforts. We can learn this from the great example of the Commune of Paris. Why did the Commune fall? It fell because there did not simultaneously occur in all the capitals—in Berlin, in Madrid and the rest—a great revolutionary movement linked with the mighty upheaval of the Parisian proletariat.
  For my own part, I shall continue to work at my chief task, at promoting the solidarity of the workers, which I regard as so momentous for the future. Rest assured that I shall not cease to work for the International; and that the years that remain to me, like the years I have already lived, will be consecrated to the triumph of the Socialist idea, which we doubt not, will one day lead to the dominion of the proletariat. (Page 242.)

Adolph Kohn

Anarchism (2004)

Book Review from the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anarchism by Seán M. Sheehan. (Reaktion Books, 192 pp. £12.95)

The term “anarchism” covers a multitude of sins. From the egoism of Stirner, through the free market for small producers advocated by Proudhon, the revolutionary romanticism and posturings of Bakunin, Kroptotkin’s anarcho-communism, revolutionary syndicalism, to various avant-garde artists and writers.

Sheehan’s book was prompted by what he sees as the unconscious re-emergence of anarchist ideas and tactics in the “anti-globalisation” protests that began in Seattle in 1999. His aim is to present anarchism to such activists, even though not an anarchist himself. The result is a readable run-through of anarchist ideas.

Marx also comes into it Sheehan realises that there is a world of difference between Marx’s ideas and what in the 20th century came to be widely regarded as “Marxism”, i.e., the official doctrine of the Russian State, but which is more properly called Leninism and which, in its various forms, stands for state capitalism rather than socialism as understood by Marx.

Sheehan in fact pleads for a rapprochement between Marxism and anarchism. Certainly, those in the Marxist tradition and a minority of anarchists — the anarcho-communists and the class-struggle anarchists — share a common analysis of capitalism as a society based on the exploitation of the working class and want to see it replaced by a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society. But most anarchists today are into “direct action”, as an alternative to reformist electoral action, to try to get changes within capitalism and are not interested in longer-term, global change. When it comes down to it, they are just as reformist as any Labourite (or Liberal-Democrat) or Trotskyist, differing from them only in completely ruling out elections as a way to get reforms.

Marx, on the other hand, always insisted (as we do) on the need for the working class to win control of state power before attempting to change the basis of society from class ownership to common ownership. He also saw elections as one possible way of doing this. For anarchists, political action in this sense is anathema. The state must not be captured, it must be confronted. Anti-capitalists should not contest elections, they should boycott them. Confronting the state — as some of Sheehan's “anti-capitalists” tried in Genoa — is a senseless policy, especially when it’s a question of a minority confronting a state supported, even if only passively, by a majority. The state will always win in such confrontations since it has much more force at its disposable.

As to the time when there will be many, many more anti-capitalists (socialists), then boycotting elections — agreed there’s not much point in voting today, where all the candidates stand for the continuance of capitalism in one form or another — would also be senseless since this would be to leave state power in the hands of the pro-capitalists. Much more sensible would be to organise to take this power from them. That’s the difference between Marxian socialists and anarchism, a gap which, despite Sheehan, could only be bridged by anarchists dropping their dogmatic opposition to elections and political action. Hopefully, they will.

Adam Buick

Housing: An Anarchist Approach (1976)

Book Review from the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Housing: An Anarchist Approach by Colin Ward. Freedom Press, £1.25.

This is a collection of articles by the former editor of Anarchy, published between 1945 and 1957: some in anarchist journals, others in architects’ and planning publications. They are informative, and the book can be read as a survey of the housing situation in Britain over the past thirty years. None of the problems has dated, of course. Like the motif of Cathy Come Home, which last month was repeated on television ten years after its original showing, they are still crying out as hopelessly as ever.

The difficulty about the book is in its title. “An anarchist approach” implies that other anarchists would take different views, even opposite ones (the cover describes Colin Ward as a well-known authority, which may well have given some anarchists apoplexy). In fact the approach is a liberal-type reformist one, full of suggestions to the Housing Minister, local councils, and architects’ associations. The book ends with an advocacy of “dweller control”. Though earlier chapters enthuse about the squatter movements of 1946 and 1968 as examples of direct action, in a 1974 article the writer expresses doubt whether seizure of housing is a practical thing to advocate: 

It would certainly save a lot of tedious calculation if we could count on tenant militancy to do the trick, but the possibility, short of a revolutionary situation, is not great. It did not need Clay Cross to demonstrate that in view of the powers of the district auditor and of central government over housing, it needs more than local direct action to win.

The “tenant take-over” advocated comes down, therefore, to self-management under government supervision, or a variation on the principles of the Co-operative Society.

The chapters under the heading “Self Help” give accounts of “cities the poor build” in Latin America, and the shanty-bungalow towns of the Laindon-Pitsea area, in Essex. As Colin Ward says, building regulations and land prices have made sure there won’t be any more of these. He argues that they could provide the guidelines for “a desirable experiment”, helped by the government, to solve the housing problem. Helped by the government, we can guess what it would turn out like. However, these settlements indicate something much more important. If a housing shortage were discovered in Socialist society, it would not constitute a “housing problem”: without the pressures of cost and economic policies, people can create homes and communities anywhere.

As it is, the housing problem in capitalism is neither a shortage nor an architectural poser. It is from first to last an aspect of the poverty problem: huge numbers of the working class are either badly housed or not housed at all because they are workers, their lives’ aspirations bound and gagged by wages. That state of affairs can only be remedied by abolishing the wage-system and establishing Socialism.

Robert Barltrop

Old Anarchy Writ New (1922)

Book Review from the March 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Socialism and Personal Liberty." By Robert Dell (Leonard Parsons, 4 s. 6d. net.) 

In what was perhaps the finest novel of the 19th century, George Meredith wrote an aphorism, “Our new thoughts have thrilled dead bosoms." This aphorism at once springs to the mind on reading Mr. Dell’s book. The old Anarchist fallacies that were pulverised years ago are trotted out as new and profound truths. Moreover, to the anger, no doubt, of Anarchists, he hails the Guild Socialists as the discoverers of ideas that are nearly a century old in the Anarchist armoury. Thus he gives the Guild Socialists credit for the statement that “a human being as an individual is fundamentally incapable of being represented” (p. 39). As a matter of fact, this fallacy is as old as Stirner, though the latter certainly followed the idea to a logical conclusion, which the Guild Socialists do not. Mr. G. D. H. Cole is quoted as saying that:—

"He can be represented only in relation to some particular purpose or group of purposes ” (ibid).

As this is the only possible meaning to representation, Mr. Cole gives away his whole case, though Mr. Dell fails to see this glaring fact.

The objections he raises against the “State” are simply those of Bakunin, and have formed part of the Anarchist propaganda for over half a century. Mr. Dell, however, admits one or two facts that Anarchists deny. Thus he says :—

“In any form of society there will have to be regulations in collective production’’ (p. 32). 

and on page 33 :—

“Socialism—the socialisation or collective ownership of the means of production—is now the only alternative to private monopoly.”

After placing himself in a dilemma by his contradictory attitudes, Mr. Dell flounders further in his attempts to reconcile the oppositions of his case. A, few years ago he supported the Syndicalists, who, in their crude ignorance, claimed that the various means of production should belong to those operating them, as: "The Mines to the Miners," "The Railways to the Railwaymen," etc. One enthusiast suggested that they should carry their list to a logical conclusion by adding such items as "The Sewers to the Scavengers," "The Prisons to the Convicts," “The Asylums to the Insane," etc; but his suggestions were not received with any enthusiasm.

Mr. Dell now realises that there are many difficulties in the Syndicalist case, and he finds partial salvation in Guild "Socialism." But his dread of democracy is so great that he wishes to combine certain features of both Syndicalism and Guild "Socialism." While Mr. Cole would have collective ownership of the means of production, with management and operation of the various industries by the different Guilds, Mr. Dell prefers that—except for certain collective services as railways, banks, posts, .mines, etc.—the workers in the various industries should have "absolute ownership" of their particular branch. The idiocy of this proposal should be apparent to a child. Food is of immensely greater importance to the members of society than railways. Yet the production and distribution of food is left in the "absolute ownership" of a particular group, while the railways are to be collectively owned! And this although he had previously admitted that "collective ownership of the means of production is now the only alternative to private monopoly."

The fear of democracy carries Mr. Dell into other contradictions. A long chapter is devoted to "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat," where he opposes both Marxian Socialism and the system established in Russia by the Bolsheviks. What does Mr. Dell offer as an alternative? This :—

“But democracy is impossible except in small areas where the elector can always be in close touch with his representatives, and no real control of representatives is possible without the right of recall, which can be efficiently exercised only in small areas. Democracy, therefore, involves decentralisation. Direct election should be restricted to small areas—the commune or ward— and the representatives so elected should send delegates to the provincial or national bodies ” (p. 39. Italics ours).

To the questions that at once spring forward, "Why is democracy only possible in small areas?" "Why cannot the right of recall be exercised in large areas?" no answers are given—and for the best of reasons. There are none that would bear a moment’s examination. But the cream of the joke is that this scheme of Mr. Dell’s is what operates in Russia, and which he condemns there.

We have criticised this anti-Socialist system before, and have shown that it is ruled by oligarchy, and is deliberately designed to prevent the members of society having control over the national executives. With all its faults, the Parliamentary system in England and France, that Mr. Dell condemns, does give this power to the electors if they care to exercise it. 

Other contradictions and fallacies abound in this book, but we have no room to deal with them all. One other example, however, is worth noting. On page 64 he says that “an extraordinary ignorance of Marxism is general in England," and quotes a writer in the “Times” as an example. He then says (p. 65): “Everybody has not time to read ‘Das Kapital,’ which is not easy reading,” and he suggests that the “Times” writer might, at least, have read the “Civil War in France.” We know from experience that it is the common practise for journalists and others to criticise and condemn Marx before they have read his works, but this reads suspiciously like an apology for Mr. Dell himself, for in the section on pages 144-150 he not only confuses price and value, but displays a complete ignorance of Marx’s discovery of the base of value in social labour-time, when he (Mr. Dell) is dealing with two articles produced by two individuals. His other absurdities of money, wages, competition, employment of one person by another for private gain, etc., all being necessary under Socialism, shows how a lack of knowledge of Marxism may cause a writer to flounder among endless contradictions. Still, his taste in drama is exquisite. He believes Charlie Chaplin is a great artist.

Jack Fitzgerald

Debate - Socialism or Anarchism? (1957)

Debate from the August 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

Report of a Public Debate held at Bethnal Green Library on Friday, 16th May.

Donald Rooum for the London Anarchist Group,

R. Coster for the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Chairman George Plume (P.P.U.) 

The Socialist speaker opened by referring to the title of the debate. It would perhaps sound cryptic to non-Socialists and non-Anarchists; the subject of the debate, fully stated, was whether it was the Socialist case or Anarchist arguments that held the solution to the problems of mankind.

The Socialist case was against Capitalism and for Socialism. Capitalism was the latest stage in man’s social development; from his beginnings man had organized socially for survival and for the satisfaction of his needs. We had no knowledge of man as an individual, only as a social being in a social context.

All societies—primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism—were founded upon the manner in which man set about organizing to produce for the satisfaction of his needs: what Marx had termed the mode of production. On the different bases of different modes of production, he had found necessary different institutions, different mores, different religions, different laws, different attitudes and concepts, and different kinds of government. Always, however, the distinguishing feature between societies was none of these by itself, but the mode of production which gave rise to them all.

Capitalist society was based on the ownership of all of the means of life by a small class. The remainder, the majority, had to be wage-workers, all more or less poorly paid. This basic class-structure had never changed within Capitalism; the techniques of production might have altered, but not the basis.

The consequences of Capitalism in the form of social troubles were innumerable. War and its horrifying weapons, economic crises, poverty and its results, disease, bad housing, crime: all these and countless other problems were direct results of the system which was concerned only with sale and profit. The only standard by which a society could be judged was whether it satisfied the needs of the people living within it, and by this measure Capitalism—for all its spectacular achievements —failed completely.

The speaker referred also to attempts to reform Capitalism. If it were true that social problems were the outcome of the system itself, and not of mismanagement of it then it followed that all policies of reform were useless, since they aimed to abolish effects while retaining the cause.

The capitalist class, however, did not rule by their own strength. Many of them had never seen, had little knowledge of, the factories, land, workshops and enterprises which they owned. Their ownership was maintained and protected by the State, which had no other function. It was in this coercive agency, with its fighting forces and penal systems, that capitalist power resided.

It followed, therefore, that any body of people wishing to change the ownership basis of society must go to the place where ownership was kept: that is, it could only seek to take hold of the powers of government as the means of taking away capitalist ownership. This was the aim of the Socialist Party. Its policy was to make Socialists, for a conscious and politically organized working class to go to the State and make the ownership of the means of life common to everybody.

In the Socialist society, thus based on common ownership, the competition which led to wars, crises and chaos, would have ended. So would poverty; there would be no wages, no money barrier to the satisfaction of needs. The aim of society would be simply for all people to share, according to their needs, in all that the earth produced.

It might be thought that this was the common objective of Socialists and Anarchists, and that they differed only as to the means of achieving it. This was not so. The Anarchists had only the nebulous aim of overthrowing “authority,” and all their proposals were founded on complete misunderstanding of the nature of society. Indeed, by ignoring the role of the State and urging people to “direct action" against it, they sought to harm the interests of working people. The Socialist Party aimed at making Socialists; the Anarchist movement could make only martyrs.

Donald Rooum, opening for the Anarchists, said that in stating their case he would repeat much of what the Socialist speaker had said. The Socialist was completely mistaken about the idea of Anarchy, however. He would say that though Socialists and Anarchists had the same professed aim. Socialists did not mean what they said, whereas the Anarchists wanted people to act on their ideas. All factions but the Anarchists wanted people on their knees before some authority, and in the end would only swindle their followers.

"Anarchy” came from the Greek and meant "without government." Until the eighteen-eighties Anarchists had called themselves Anarchist-Socialists. They abandoned this because of confusion of thought among Socialists, as they had later to abandon the name Anarchist-Communists. The basis of Anarchist ideas was that society existed for the benefit of individuals, and the aim of Anarchist society would be to increase individual opportunities. There were two kinds of social relationships—free and coercive; Anarchy meant a society founded on free co-operation.

Our society was dominated by coercion. We hated work because we were forced by employers, police and money; we were all in danger of being bombed because mentally unhealthy politicians insisted on continuing with bomb tests. We suffered from having such people in power, with the right to do such things; they were insane and irresponsible—only delinquent lunatics could be politicians. Even if perfect beings formed a government, they would soon be imperfect.

Governments kept going by violence and the threat of it from bombs, police and possible poverty and unemployment. Thus, the world was made unpleasant for individuals. The alternative was for society to be based not on government, but on co-operative relationships: “common ownership" if you liked to call it that. In such a society workers would control the factories, land and so on themselves.

Anarchy could be brought about by making people Anarchists. Anarchists did not seek, as the Russian Communists had done, to take power dishonestly. They said that the way to get rid of coercion was to stop letting oneself be coerced. The Russian Communists had said the State would wither away, but they retained the police and the armies, like all other governments; the fact was that power corrupted all those who took it. Thirty centuries of grinding-down by governments proved this.

The solution, then, was for everybody to co-operate with his equals, and refuse to allow anybody to take power over him.

R. Coster, making the second speech for the Socialist Party, said the Anarchist speaker had not met the point that governmental power and coercion were founded on the private ownership of the means of production.

The Socialist case was that the problems of the present-day world originated in the capitalist economic system, and that a co-operative world could only be established on a different ownership basis. While private ownership existed, politicians—delinquent or otherwise —could only when they were in power carry out the requirements of capitalism. He instanced the recent history of the Labour Party, which had once had a strong pacifist strain, but when in office had instituted military conscription and begun the biggest armaments drive in history. Its members were not drunk with power, but were simply having to prepare for war because they had undertaken running the system which led to war.

The proposition that wars were caused by delinquent politicians was, in fact, capitalist nonsense; people had gone to war precisely because they had been told that the wars were begun by irresponsible and wicked rulers who must be opposed. It was equally silly to say that people were coerced to work by police and armies; they went to work because, having no ownership of the means of life, they could only live by selling their labour-power.

To change society there must be a body of people who knew what was needed and how it was to be done. It ill became the Anarchists to speak of "different kinds of Socialists," for they had little or no agreement Mr. Rooum had said he wanted the abolition of the wages system; many Anarchists were unsure about this, however, and some appeared to love the wages system. The means proposed were varied, too, though they were equally futile. Some thought Anarchy would be established by the practice of mutual aid within Capitalism: but it had already been shown that man was prevented from acting co-operatively by Capitalism. Others wanted to force Anarchist reforms until Capitalism turned into Anarchy; but reformism was the antithesis of revolution. And others still proposed a “social general strike"— that is, they wanted workers to do the most foolish thing of all, to throw themselves under the Juggernaut of the State.

Donald Rooum began his second speech by complaining of the nature of the debate; he had not wanted to continue making speeches, but to have the audience participate in questions and discussion.

He denied what the Socialist speaker had said of Anarchists and the wages system. The statement that some Anarchists were unsure about and even thought they would keep the wages system, showed Coster to be, if he was not a liar, daft in the head. As for Capitalism preventing cooperative relationships, people were coerced simply because they allowed other people to coerce them; if they refused to allow the capitalist into the factory, he could not be there. Working-class power existed only in the factories—the vote was useless as a means to change.

Clause Six of the Socialist Party’s Principles said that the working class must organize to conquer the powers of government to convert them “from an instrument of oppression into an agent of emancipation clear proof that the Socialist Party wanted not to change society, but to become the government. The Bolsheviks had done this—they were Socialists, they had been benevolent, but their good intentions faded when they had taken power.

Everyone was taught to revere authority from childhood; the authority might come from Capitalism, but whether or not it did so it was still authority. The Socialists asked people to surrender themselves to a body of people, and were either deceiving the people or deceiving themselves. The methods mentioned for establishing Anarchy were the only ones possible; the alternative to them was putting somebody else in power.

Before making his summing-up speech, Donald Rooum again said he did not like the form of the debate. He thought that Socialists regarded Anarchists as namby-pamby middle-class people, and had understood from the platform this evening that the Socialist Party was going to usher in Socialism in a very short time.

At this point the Anarchist speaker said he had nothing further to say and would let his opponent have any remaining time.

Summing-up for the Socialist Party, R. Coster replied to various points which had been made for Anarchism. He read quotations from Anarchist papers and from Berkman’s ABC of Anarchism to show the varied views of Anarchists on the wages system, from those who advocated a complicated system of credit and currency under Anarchy to those who proposed simply equalization of incomes and a standard working week.

The allegation that the Socialist Party wanted to govern could not be supported by a single word from fifty-three years of party literature. Comparison with Russia was meaningless, but the Anarchists, lacking in scientific analysis, had groped in the dark over the Russian Revolution: a quotation described how prominent Anarchists had supported the Bolshevik Revolution and become “disillusioned.” To be disillusioned one had to have illusions first.

The Anarchist speaker had said it did not matter where authority came from. This was the most extraordinary statement of all. The Anarchists were concerned solely with authority—its abolition was the only aim upon which they agreed—yet they were unconcerned and did not wish to know whence it came. To the Socialist, causes had always to be sought. The whole of history showed that, so far from the nature of government being unimportant, every class which had aspired to change society in its own interests had had to gain control of the powers of government This was the real lesson from countless centuries of political history; this was the aim of Socialists, who sought to replace Capitalism with Socialism and to do so by going to the seat of capitalist power.

C. R.

The Heroic Tragedy: Civil War and Social Revolution in Spain (2016)

From the September 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Back the revolutionary general strike the very instant anyone [i.e. the military] revolts. We, the people of Catalonia, let us be on a war footing and ready to act. Be valiant. Arm yourselves and do battle. Long Live the CNT! Long Live Libertarian Communism! Launch the revolutionary general strike against fascism.' - CNT statement of 19 July 1936

Eighty years ago this summer, Spain saw an attempted military coup being temporarily defeated by ordinary people in many parts of the country. This was the beginning of what was to be a three year long civil war, resulting in half a million deaths, and followed by the four decade dictatorship of General Franco. This article will aim to describe some of the key features of the conflict, paying close attention to the ‘social revolution’ in Catalonia and Aragon which is of most relevance to socialists.

To understand the outbreak of the civil war it is first necessary to understand some of the background to the conflict. Spain in the early twentieth century was a predominately agrarian society; large scale industrialisation had only taken place in the north of the country and in Catalonia, around Barcelona. In the countryside an entrenched land owning class, of which the church was a significant section, had been resistant to agrarian economic reform, rural workers were locked into a state of poverty, often forced to work for long hours for little more than subsistence wages. Decades of agitation and self education had given birth to a strong and militant anarchist and syndicalist movement. Spain had become the only country where the anarchist ideas of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta and others had given rise to a social movement of significant numbers. By the time of the 1930’s the major workers unions where the CNT (National Confederation of Labour) and the UGT (General Workers’Union). Despite ideological differences and occasional conflict there was often cooperation between the two organisations. The CNT was an anarcho-syndicalist organisation that shunned parliamentary elections and advocated industrial direct action as a means of overcoming capitalism. From the late twenties onwards, the FAI (Anarchist Federation of Iberia) had gained influence within the CNT. The FAI pushed for a programme of insurrectional ‘revolutionary gymnastics’with the intent of immediately bringing about anarchism through violent confrontation with the state. These policies clashed with those of the more orthodox syndicalists within the CNT who saw the social revolution as only being possible after a longer period of working class self-education and self-organisation. The UGT was affiliated to the labourist social-democratic PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers Party) and pursued a line that was more in favour of winning legal concessions from the government.

The military declaration of 1936, which bought the beginning of the civil war, was not the first time that Spain had faced dictatorship. The dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera came about in 1923 when the government resigned in the face of a similar pronunciamiento from the Army. Following a bloodless coup, Primo de Rivera stayed in power until 1931, when the support of the military and the wealthy classes was lost. Subsequent elections gave victory to anti-monarchist parties, causing the King to abdicate and flee the country, thus bringing into being the Second Republic of Spain.

The coming of the Second Republic saw a sudden rise in working class activity as workers looked to it as a means to finally solve their economic and social problems. Rural and urban workers, even in areas not previously known for their radicalism, began to demand improvements to working conditions, public meetings became commonplace and the church, seen by many to be defending the privileged and the wealthy, often became a target for grievances. The increase in working class militancy, and particularly attacks on the Roman Catholic Church, enraged certain sections of the ruling class. In the election of 1933 a confederation of Catholic parties, the CEDA, operating on a quasi-fascist platform, won the largest amount of seats but not enough of a majority to form a government. Despite this, power was offered to the second largest party, the Radical Republican Party. The Radicals co-operated with the CEDA and in 1934 they ceded, giving three ministerial positions to the CEDA.

In protest against the CEDA entering the government the PSOE declared a general strike on 5th October 1934. In most parts of the country the strike was rapidly defeated as the government declared a state of martial law and the army took over the running of essential services. In Barcelona the regional government declared an independent state of Catalonia. A blood bath was avoided, when a request to arm the workers was refused, and when the military general in charge of re-establishing the authority of the Madrid central government ordered his troops to be ‘deaf, dumb and blind’ towards any provocations. The only place the strike held on for any amount of time was in the northern mining area of Asturias where, unlike in other areas, the strike had the backing of all the workers organisations. There the situation rapidly became insurrectional. An estimated 15,000 to 30,000 armed miners took part in an uprising. Civil Guard posts and public buildings were attacked and several towns being successfully occupied. Comunismo libertario was declared with revolutionary committees taking on the social responsibilities of government, the use of money was restricted and ration vouchers were distributed to families. In response the government sent General Franco and the Moroccan Army of Africa, as well as the navy and airforce, to quell the disturbance. Retribution was brutal, around 2000 miners were killed and a further 20,000 to 30,000 imprisoned. Moorish troops unleashed a wave of looting, rape and summary executions on the surrounding mining villages. The Asturian uprising showed a pattern of events that would be repeated on a larger scale two years later, as the civil war took its course.

The military rebellion

In 1936 a leftist popular front, supported for the first time by the votes of the anarcho-syndicalists, won the election. The victory was partly due to the promise to release the thousands of prisoners who were still being held following the uprisings of ‘34 and to also reverse and improve on wage reductions imposed by the previous government. Determined to put a stop to the growth of working class militancy, anti-religiosity and regional separatism that had accompanied the coming of the republic, a conspiracy of officers in the military sought to reimpose what they saw as being the true will of the nation. A coup was organised to take place in July 1936. The generals hoped that they would achieve a rapid victory. However, this was not to be. In the event, beginning on the 18 July, significant elements in the military and security forces remained loyal to the Republic. The whole of the Navy remained loyal, just over half of the Guardia Civil (Civil Guard –a rural paramilitary police force) as did over 70 percent of the Guardias de Asalto (Assault Guards –an urban paramilitary police force set up during the time of the republic).

On hearing of the military rising the government, in the beginning in denial about the seriousness of the situation, was at first unwilling to arm the workers organisations. So initially through their own initiatives, by raiding gun-shops, digging up weapons stored since the Asturias uprising or by being provided weapons by loyal Assault Guards, ordinary workers began to come out against the rising. In Madrid a crowd stormed the Montanna barracks. In Barcelona factory sirens sounded to warn of the rising and an immediate general strike came into effect. Thousands of people took to the streets, setting up barricades to hinder the incursions of the military. Where the workers movement was strong, and opposition was organised quickly, the rising was defeated. In areas which failed to offer resistance, the rising was successful and the military rebels (henceforth referred to as the ‘Nationalists’) began serving out a brutal repression of the workers organisations and anyone who was seen as being loyal to the republic. Spain was split into two zones, as noted by Raymond Carr ‘those who happened to be in a zone that was hostile to their beliefs had to conform, escape, or risk imprisonment or shooting. Loyalty was often a matter of locality.’Though, where given the choice, the working classes generally supported the Republic and the upper classes, the Nationalists.

The working class in the saddle

The effect of arming the unions meant that the workers organisations were in control. In Barcelona, the CNT was offered full control of the Generalitat (Catalonian regional government) but refused to take it, partly because they did not want to set up a ‘workers’ dictatorship’, and partly because they were not sure how to deal with the situation. Instead they took a place on the Anti-Fascist Militia Committee, which was in effect a sub-committee of the regional government. This committee was later dissolved and the CNT took a minority position within the Generalitat. While the CNT held power in the factories and workplaces, a vast swathe of governmental state power, including the administration of military affairs and the overseeing of justice, was left with the Generalitat. This would later be used as a level to prise power away from the syndicalists.

In Barcelona, Catalonia, Aragon and the surrounding areas the CNT enacted their anarcho-syndicalist ideology and set about collectivising large sections of industry, though it was in the countryside that the most far reaching attempts at realising ‘libertarian communism’ where attempted. Following the upheavals, most large landowners in republican controlled areas had fled. With the landowning class absent, rural workers began spontaneously commandeering and collectivising land. Collectivisation meant that access to equipment, resources and labour could be pooled, leading to and increase in output and productivity and an improvement in living conditions. Within the collectives attempts at achieving an equitable distribution of goods and services were conducted in a various different ways. Some, a minority, practised a system of free access where people could simply take what they needed from the communal store. Others printed their own forms of currency or ration cards. As time went on the normal state of affairs gravitated towards that of being paid a fixed ‘family wage’ where collective members where entitled to certain quantities of various household items. To say that money was abolished is to push too far, ‘money’ does not necessarily mean only state minted currency but whatever can serve as a general measure of value and means of exchange. Whilst some agricultural collectives did not pay their workers in state currency, it was still used as a means of accounting between units. Despite the collectivisations the basic economic unit was still that of separate and competing enterprises.

“Anarchists abandoned the idea of a substitute for national money. The agrarian collectives decided to abolish money, only to adopt other systems of exchange…. The difficulties created by local money and the lack of a unified currency soon became evident. Very soon the collectivists of Aragon saw the advantages of a kind of national bank”–Frank Mintz

In Catalonia and Aragon nearly 70 percent of the workforce was involved in the collectives. Across the whole of the Republican territory there were almost 800,000 involved on the land and just over one million in industry.

Industrial collectivisation was not as deep or far reaching as the efforts in the countryside. In the first days of the revolution workers simply seized abandoned factories and restarted production. Workers in a collectivised enterprise would organise themselves into committees, and the committees would be federated regionally. The basic unit of organisation was the factory committee. The requisitions where retrospectively made legal in late October 1936. This was partly in an effort for the central government to regain control of industry. Part of the legislation meant that each factory council had a designated ‘controller’ that was responsible to the government. The vast majority of industry in Catalonia was organised in this way. While the workers certainly had more control over their working conditions than in a privately or state owned enterprise, the industrial situation could best be described as kind of trade-union controlled capitalism; production was still being conducted for the purpose of exchange, both within the Republic and with the outside world.

(to be continued and concluded next month)

Darren Poynton

Leninism v Anarchism (2012)

Book Review from the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anarchism. A Marxist Criticism. by John Molyneux. Bookmarks. £4.

John Molyneux is the SWPer who wrote their 1987 pamphlet on The Future Socialist Society in which he stated that the first thing that would happen on the establishment of such a society would be that wages would be increased and also that engineers would be forced, if they refused to co-operate, to work with a gun at their head. Obviously, he was talking about a future state capitalist society.

His earlier pamphlet is still listed as ‘further reading’ in his new, 80-page booklet in which he criticises anarchists from an SWP viewpoint. His basic argument is that ‘through its rejection of parties in general and the Leninist party in particular anarchism merely contributes to the organisational and political disarmament of the working class’ (p. 29).

We can agree with his criticism of anarchists for their refusal to participate in elections and for their theory that it is the existence of the state rather than of capitalism that is the cause of working-class problems. But that’s about it. On the other hand, we can agree with the anarchist emphasis on the need to establish a stateless society and with their criticism of Leninism as the theory and practice of a would-be new ruling class.

Having said this – and Molyneux notes this too – some anarchists are themselves in effect vanguardists in that they seek as an ‘active minority’ to lead the working class in an assault on capitalism and the state. Molyneux appeals to such anarchists to be consistent and join a properly-structured leadership organisation.

Our appeal is to those anarchists who are committed to the concept of a self-organised majority revolution without leaders to be consistent and abandon their dogmatic opposition to the working class forming a political party to contest elections and eventually win control of political power, not to form a government but to immediately abolish capitalism and usher in the classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society that real socialism will be.

Adam Buick

Who wrote the Communist Manifesto of 1847? (1926)

From the January 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a series of articles contributed to the Socialist Standard in 1911 on anarchism, we referred to the “falsified” Pages of Socialist History by W. Tcherkesoff. This brochure contained an attempt by this anarchist writer to show that the Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto of 1847 was a plagiarism of Victor Considerant’s “ Manifesto of Democracy to the 19th Century.”

The accusation against Marx of stealing other people’s ideas and writings was so often made and the charges regularly exploded that it was not surprising to find that Tcherkesoff’s allegations were groundless. Recently Tcherkesoff died and his anarchist friend Nettlau (the biographer of Bakunin) in an article in “Freedom” (December, 1925) warns the anarchists of the baselessness of Tcherkesoff’s charges against Marx.

We quote the following extract from “ Freedom’s” article by Nettlau :—

   Tcherkesoff had the misfortune to make people doubt the seriousness of his other researches when he jumped to the conclusion that the "Communist Manifesto" of 1847-48 was sheer plagiarism on a “Manifesto” by Victor Considerant, published by the Paris Fourierists in 1841 and 1847. I remember the morning when Tcherkesoff, happy as a lark, just returned from Amsterdam, placed before me copies of the “Communist Manifesto’’ and of Considerant’s “Principles of Socialism: the Manifesto of Democracy to the Nineteenth Century” (Paris, Libr. Phalanstérienne, 1847, 157 pp.) He had discovered the latter among Domela Nieuwenhuis’ store of old pamphlets, and recognised it as a little book which he had read in Russia over thirty years ago, which the “Communist Manifesto” always recalled to his mind, though he had not been able to trace it during all those years. He placed before me many parallels in the descriptive and critical parts referring to capitalist society, and as Considerant’s text, the revised edition of his “Bases of Positive Politics: Manifesto of the Societarian School founded by Fourier” (Paris, La Phalange, 1841, 119 pp.), was the earlier work, Tcherkesoff concluded that Marx and Engels were guilty of outrageous plagiarism, stealing ideas and even the words from Considerant.
   I was not struck by this discovery: on the contrary, I felt that Tcherkesoff made a great mistake, and I told him so from the first moment; but all was in vain. With one single exception I never met a person who believed that Tcherkesoff was right in this supposition, hut it was felt to be painful not to let him enjoy his discovery which made him so happy. So he published what he considered the proofs of this plagiarism, and later on hunted down Engels for a similar matter (Buret), overdoing this case considerably, and in general he was convinced that he had made out Marx and Engels to be literary rogues and scamps—in one word, thieves.
   He had not made out this case; he had only diminished the value put on his other criticism of Marxism which touched very weak spots of that system, but which his Marxist opponents discredited by pointing to the lack of critical judgment shown by the unproven charge of plagiarism.
   Those who had the leisure to examine the original publications of the early French, English and German Socialists need not be told that Victor Considerant was an infinitely able social critic of the 30’s and 40’s, wonderfully apt in describing the effects of capitalism after seeing it at work in that eminently capitalist period, in France and England of that Louis Philippe and early Victorian age. They also know—and can still add to their knowledge by manuscripts of Marx and early writings of Engels which have only quite recently come to light—that these two German Socialists, a decade younger than Considerant, had also since the beginning of the 40’s worked harder than most others at philosophical, political, and economic studies, leading them to the outspoken Socialist conclusions which we know. Both they and Considerant were at their best in 1847, and as thoroughly competent Socialist thinkers both parties necessarily described and criticised capitalist society in similar appropriate terms, in the standard technical language of well-informed Socialist writers of that period. What else were they to do? If to-day two Anarchist authors were to write manifestos summing up Anarchist criticism of the State, their texts would necessarily more or less agree, provided each of them refrained from indulging in too personal a style —and from this personal style both Considerant and Marx and Engels refrained in 1847, the latter writing moreover on the basis of previous material, questions, etc., which are known at present in derail, but were not yet unearthed in Tcherkesoff’s time. So our comrade’s splendid fight against Marxism was somewhat marred by the idiosyncrasy here discussed.

Thus the Anarchists themselves throw overboard one of the most stupid charges ever made against Marx. Those who care to read the pages of George Julian Harney’s “Democratic Review” of 1849 can study the articles written by Considerant for that journal and the Utopian, idealist and unscientific language will easily show the difference between Marx the materialist and Considerant the Utopian idealist.

After Engels death there was discovered the original manuscript of his independent draft of the Communist Manifesto. This was published in Germany under the title of “The Principles of Communism." It has now been translated into English and published in Chicago.

This draft was made by Engels originally for a programme read to the Paris section of the League of Communists in 1847, and was used later as Engels' individual draft submitted to the London meeting in 1847.

One is struck when reading it with the remarkable agreement in the statement of their ideas by Marx and Engels. A study of Engels' pamphlet shows how ridiculous Tcherkesoff’s allegations were.

Apart from Engels’ draft, the magazine and polemical writings of both Marx and Engels prior to 1847 shows every student that the later writings were an application of ideas, outlined and suggested in their earlier work.

Adolph Kohn