A Basic Mistake (2009)

Pamphlet Review from the January 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Basic Kropotkin – Kropotkin and the History of Anarchism. by Brian Morris. Anarchist Communist Editions, 2008. 32 pages. £2

Russian émigré Prince Kropotkin, pioneering advocate of “anarchist-communism”, is probably best known for his work Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. This short pamphlet takes us on a fleeting tour through the many strands of Anarchism as related to his theories.

Firstly we are presented with a sketch of the “libertarian impulse” throughout human history; Lao Tzu, classical Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium, the Diggers and even an Islamic sect, the Najadatam, all possessed an “anarchist sensibility” and were forerunners of Anarchism proper, it is claimed. For Kropotkin it is William Godwin who first stated the basic principles of Anarchism in his 1793 “Enquiry Concerning Political Justice” though he did not use the term – it was first used by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

In the next chapter we meet Bakunin whom, rather confusingly, we are told “was at heart a communist” even though he defended a form of private property where the products of labour are traded between individual – and therefore competing – labour associations or “free communes”.

Finally we come to Kropotkin’s dispute with the mutualists, most notably Proudhon, Warren and Tucker. Kropotkin applauded their “vigorous defence of the rights of the individual” but in defending private property they opened up the way “for reconstituting under the heading of ‘defence’ all the functions of the state.”

The main flaw of the pamphlet is in Morris’s failure to see the distinction between Marx’s thought and the Leninist concept of the vanguard party. Marx is falsely lumped together with the Blanquists of which Engels commented “Blanqui’s assumption, that any revolution may be made by the outbreak of a small revolutionary minority, follows of itself the necessity of a dictatorship after the success of the venture. This is, of course, a dictatorship, not of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small minority that has made the revolution… These conceptions of the march of revolutionary events have long become obsolete.” (The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune).

For Marx and Engels the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ meant a politically organised and conscious working class democratically controlling the transformation of the state; not the totalitarian rule of the vanguard party, as Lenin, the Anarchists and others have claimed. However, circumstances have changed since Marx and Engels put forward this concept, it is not a term the Socialist Party would use today.

 

By still claiming that the theories of Marx are akin to those of Lenin and other vanguardists the Anarchists are doing a disservice to the truth.

DJP