A third force (1996)

Book Review from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays by Nestor Makhno. (AK Press 1996. £7.95.)

The civil war in Russia following the November 1917 revolution involved the Bolshevik-controlled Red Army and the “Whites" (Monarchists and anti-Bolsheviks supported by foreign armies). What is generally less well known is that there was a third force in the struggle—the anarchist Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army. This peasant-based army, led by Nestor Makhno, held much of the Ukraine and briefly larger parts of Russia as the three sides won and lost ground in an increasingly bitter conflict. Eventually the Red Army won out and, by the time of the suppression of the Krondstadt Revolt in 1921, Makhno had fled to the West.

Before his death in exile in 1934 Makhno wrote a series of essays, collected here, defending the anarchist part in the Russian revolution. The anarchists wanted to smash the state; the Bolsheviks wanted to build a state; neither side required majority support for their objective. Both are dictatorial. Democracy requires that a majority understand, approve and participate in bringing about change. And this is the process which will bring about world socialism and sustain it.

Lew Higgins

Communist idea (2025)

Book Review from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Idea. Anarchist Communism Past, Present and Future. By Nick Heath. Published by Just Books Publishing, 2022. ISBN 9781739723712

Suitably enough, The Idea, a book on the history of anarchist communism, is a dense, brick-like volume of nearly 500 pages, detailing the key figures, movements, activities, and publications of Anarchist Communists (AnComs) throughout history.

Anarchist communism, as opposed to anarchist collectivism, is the only anarchist tradition that explicitly calls for the abolition of the market economy and exchange value. Despite its many challenges, it has endured to the present day.

No movement is overlooked, with particularly extensive entries on France and documentation of the significant tendencies in Russia, France, Latin America, Ukraine, and beyond. The AnCom tendencies in China, Japan, and Korea are also covered, drawing in part on the published works of one-time SPGB member and political historian John Crump.

The Idea is a meticulous study that separates the wheat from the chaff, focusing on movements and organisations with a class-struggle perspective. However, as the book itself illustrates, many historical anarchist groups were far less discerning in their alliances. The book can be recommended to anyone with a historical interest in libertarian communism. Heath’s work is admirable in its scope and depth.

Nick Heath’s political journey began with the Labour Party, then the Communist Party, before he ultimately embraced anarchist communism.

It must be noted some key lessons emerge from this volume. Individualist tendencies are a dead end—sometimes literally. A lesser known and striking example being the case of Museifukyosanto, a small AnCom party in Japan that, being structured along Leninist lines, veered into adventurism, leading to the arrest of more than 700 of their comrades. The end fate of active anarchists tends to follow one these paths: imprisonment, exile, murder (often at the hands of the state), or suicide. To paraphrase a certain British prime minister, the problem with anarchism is that eventually, you run out of other anarchists.

It would be remiss not to mention the example of Korean AnComs, who, between 1910 and 1945, actively participated in electoral politics. This made their position similar to ours in that respect. They achieved notable success, serving in the Korean Provisional Government and later securing positions in the cabinet.

Nick Heath’s book is well worth reading and is a solid example of a disciplined work in a sea of anarchist garbage that was previously published and no doubt will come later. The Idea should interest anyone seeking libertarian socialist solutions to the practical problems of organisation and decentralised power.

A.T.

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

Socialism versus anarchism (1987)

From the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is opposed to anarchism. Why? At a superficial level, we seem to have something in common: we both want a stateless society. However, it is precisely on this point that socialism and anarchism differ and more besides. One way of bringing out these differences is to contrast the arguments of Karl Marx and his three main anarchist opponents: the individualist anarchism of Max Stirner, the mutualist anarchism of P. J. Proudhon and the collectivist anarchism of Michael Bakunin. This is not, however, an argument over dead men's bones. Marx's criticisms of anarchism in the nineteenth century are still broadly acceptable today.

Like Marx we accept the conceptual distinction between the state and society. Human existence is necessarily social existence but the state, as the social institutions and relationships of coercion, is not a necessary feature of human life. The state, in fact, is the outcome of a historically specific form of society: private property society. Capitalism is the latest phase of private property society in which the state serves the interests of the dominant social class. Socialists contend that capitalism does not function in workers' interests and that in order to revolutionise society in their interests it is important that a majority of class conscious workers gain control of the state. Democratic socialist control of the state prior to its abolition enables workers to reorganise society in their interests: a classless, moneyless, stateless society based on common ownership. But in so far as anarchists can agree about anything, they all deny that workers should or can gain control of the state.

Stirner

Whereas socialists see the source of oppression and exploitation in the social relationships of capitalism (which includes the state), anarchists tend to see it in authority in general and the state in particular. Max Stirner opposed all authority on egotistical grounds. But he took this line of argument to its logical conclusion. In his claims for absolute egoism he rejects not only the state but society itself. This nihilistic attitude was clearly expressed in his main work, The Ego and His Own (1844):

  I, the egoist, have not at heart the welfare of this "human society". I sacrifice nothing to it. I only utilise it: but to be able to utilise it completely 1 must transform it rather into my property and my creature - i.e., I must annihilate it and form in its place the Union of Egoists.

Most of The German Ideology (1845). by Marx and Engels, is a reply to Stirner's ideas. They ridiculed Stirner's ''rebellious'' egoism and argued for a socialist revolution in which the individual and his class are liberated. Socialism will be a set of social relationships in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all; it is not an attempt to subjugate the individual to some monstrous collectivity, as Marxism is so often portrayed in anarchist caricatures. As for Stirner, his ideas would be impossible to put into practice. The required "Union” undermines his egoist viewpoint. The cooperative nature of the modern productive process is inescapable. But this doesn't stop so-called "libertarians'' today making private property a virtue in the manner of Stirner, though they would rather not spell out his conclusions. By claiming that private property and the pursuit of selfishness are the proper goals of human life they well illustrate the alienating effects of capitalism. For private property is a ''right" against society; it is, in a very real sense, anti-social and anti-human.

Proudhon

The term "anarchism" was first introduced by P. J. Proudhon in his book What is Property? (1840), in which he gave the famous reply, "Property is theft". However, he didn’t mean this phrase to be taken literally; he was in fact in favour of private ownership. Proudhon made a distinction between "property" and "possession”. He rejected property: the capitalist right to draw rent, interest and profit through owning something. He favoured possession: individuals could use land and tools on condition that they didn't live on unearned income. In Proudhon's conception of an anarchist society individuals would have an equal right to possess, based on a "mutualist" system of equivalent exchange between self-governing producers and financed by free credit. Marxian socialism, therefore, is rejected on the grounds that it would violate the right to possess by establishing common ownership.

Marx's initial reaction to Proudhon's work was favourable, calling it a "great scientific advance", making possible for the first time "a real science of political economy" (The Holy Family, 1845). Proudhon's main insight was to subject private property relationships to critical scrutiny. Nevertheless, his analysis was still inadequate; Marx wrote:

  Proudhon does not consider the further creations of private property, e.g.. wages, trade, value, price, money, etc. as forms of private property in themselves . . .

Proudhon had claimed that these forms of private property were an inevitable feature of human society and this was one of the criticisms Marx made in his own contribution to political economy in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). Despite Proudhons insights and his interest in political economy he had failed to understand the workings of capitalism. His scheme for free credit, for example, was a complete non-starter; as Marx said:

 . . . wanting to preserve wage-labour and thus the basis of capital, as Proudhon does, and at the same time to eliminate the "drawbacks" by abolishing a secondary form of capital, reveals the novice. (Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 3).

Proudhon believed his anarchist proposals were anti-capitalist but in reality he only disliked some aspects of capitalism, the state in particular. The contradictory nature of his ideas meant that later anarcho-syndicalists. fascists and advocates of laissez-faire could all claim to derive their ideas from his. And this indicates both a strength and weakness of much anarchist thinking; the strength being its apparent anti-dogmatism and "flexibility" of thought; its weakness being a lack of rigour. A practical socialist society must be preceded by a practical socialist theory. Lacking a plausible explanation of how capitalism functions and what's wrong with it. how can anarchists propose a non-capitalist alternative?

Bakunin

Bakunin opposed authority, not from an individualist point of view, but from that of a peasant and a member of the working class. He thought that a spontaneous uprising would sweep away capitalism and the state; his belief in the "cleansing" benefits of violence was mystical:

  Let us then put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life. The lust of destruction is also a creative lust. (The Reaction in Germany, 1842).

Revolutionary violence, it is claimed, would create a new society organised on federal lines and based on an individual's income being equal to their work. Bakunin's romantic adventurism brought him into conflict with Marx in the First International (The International Working Men's Association). It ended with Bakunin being expelled in 1872. One consequence of this was that, to this day, anarchist criticism of Marxism centres on the alleged authoritarianism Marx displayed in the dispute. But the dispute was much more than a clash of personalities; in reality there were important differences of perspective on the state and society. In the first place. Bakunin shared Proudhon's distaste for all forms of political action; Marx's insistence on the need for a socialist party to gain political power was anathema. Secondly. Bakunin believed that the state must be destroyed by conspiratorial violence; Marx's proposed "dictatorship of the proletariat" was rejected on the grounds that it would result in a new form of tyranny.

Since Marx's day, however, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" has taken on a meaning which he never intended and anarchists have seized on this as proof of the authoritarian nature of Marxian socialism. But this is due to Lenin's distortion of the concept in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. If Lenin's dictatorship over the proletariat has resulted in a new form of tyranny (and it has), this is hardly surprising and doesn't show Marxism to be at fault. For Marx the "dictatorship of the proletariat " didn't mean rule by a vanguard party; it did mean democratic control of the state by a politically organised working class. He put forward this concept in the circumstances prevailing in the nineteenth century which in certain respects no longer apply. In his Conspectus of Bakunin's "Statism and Anarchy" (1874). Marx noted that, so long as a class of capitalists exists, the working class must make use of the state — "the general means of coercion" — to dispossess them of the means of production. This would be the only effective way of changing society because it minimises any violence. With a socialist working class in control of the states through their use of their socialist parties, international capitalism can be replaced by world socialism. It is of course a great irony that anarchists should condemn this proposed course of action as potentially authoritarian, given their recipe for bloody civil war by ignoring the state or waging violence against it. In this respect they are closer to the Leninists than they might realise.

Socialism not anarchism

While Bakunin did want to do away with capitalism and the state it would be incorrect to say that he and Marx agreed about the ends but differed over the means. In fact they disagreed on both the means and ends and many anarchists today would take Bakunin's view. Even with "anarcho-communists" like Kropotkin the apparent similarities between his view of anarchist society and socialism should not blind us to the differences of approach. (He supported the Bolshevik revolution until his death in 1921). For unless anarchists recognise the necessity for democratic revolutionary political action based on socialist understanding, they will never achieve a stateless society.

Lew Higgins

Workers’ Control (1965)

From the January 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The phrase “workers’ control” is today frequently used as if it were some sort of definition of socialism. In fact it is nothing of the kind, implying as it does the continued existence of a working class and control of the productive system by units less than society.

The origin of the idea can be found in the 19th century divisions between socialists and anarchists. These saw society from two completely opposed points of view. Socialists saw society and the individual as reciprocal terms; the one couldn’t exist without the other. The anarchists, on the other hand, as a caricature of bourgeois individualism, saw the individual as the important unit, as an isolated being. For them society was a restriction on the freedom of the individual. While socialists recognised the need for an organisation to arrange the affairs of society as a whole, the anarchists were for a free federation of local communities and as much decentralisation as possible.

Socialists did distinguish between society and the state. In their view the State, as a coercive instrument, only flourished in class societies and was the instrument whereby a ruling class controlled society. In the classless society of the future there would be no coercive government machine, central control would be purely administrative. Unfortunately many people, including some who called themselves socialists, overlooked this distinction between society and the state.

In Germany, for example, this was the period of the “cult of the state.” The state was Truth, Freedom and so on; its mission was to free mankind; to do this it must be made democratic. The anarchists, understandably, rejected this view though their view of the state was equally inadequate: for them it was the enemy and root of all evil, Kropotkin correctly labelled the views of the German Social Democrats of this period as state capitalism.

In opposition, Kropotkin put forward the idea that the basic unit of the future society should be the free commune; where necessary, as for running things like the railways, these communes should be linked in a loose federation. This is the doctrine of Anarcho-Communism; it should be contrasted with the socialist view, that the basic unit of future society can only be society itself.

The real origin of the idea of workers’ control comes from another anarchist trend, anarcho-syndicalism. The commune, of course, is a geographical unit. For the anarcho-syndicalists the basic unit was not to be geographical, but industrial, with industrial unions as the basis of the new society. The workers in a particular industry would own and control that industry through their union. Once again, the various unions were to be linked together in a federation. More elaborate plans envisaged an Industrial Republic, a world Federation of Labour. The syndicalists, who were particularly strong in France (whence their name, from the French word for trade union, syndicat), advocated that the workers should directly own and control the means of production. This was opposed to the socialist view, that under socialism the free producers would own and control the means of production as a whole through society. The slogans Workers’ Control, The Mines for the Miners, The Factories to the Workers, are all syndicalist in origin.

At the turn of the century the idea was taken up by the American Daniel De Leon. He put forward the idea of what he called Socialist Industrial Unionism. Under this scheme the means of production were to be collectively owned, but administered by the workers through Industrial Unions. De Leon, the leader of the Socialist Labor Party, was also one of the founders of the I.W.W., the Industrial Workers of the World.

De Leon’s conception of the future society was criticised because it didn’t recognise that society would be the unit, and because it allowed for conflicts of interest between the producers in different industries. Under Socialism, there could be no permanent conflict groups; society as a whole would exercise democratic control over the means of production.

The Russian Revolution was a further source of theories of workers’ control. It often happens that when the capitalist class temporarily lose control through the breakdown of the government machine and general anarchy is threatened, the workers do the obvious: they take over the factories and try to run them themselves. This happened in Russia in 1917-18, in Italy in 1921, in Spain in 1936 and in Hungary in 1956. In Italy and in Spain the experiments rapidly came to an end as soon as the capitalists had regained control. In Hungary the Red Army performed this task. In Russia the Bolsheviks were faced with a fait accompli: the workers had themselves seized the factories. All the Bolsheviks could do was to pass decrees recognising this.

These experiments in workers’ control failed, not least because of the inexperience of the workers, which was not surprising considering the backwardness of Russia at that time. In order to keep production, going the Bolsheviks had to institute one-man management. The idea of workers’ control and workers’ councils still lived on in the minds of dissident Bolsheviks, and some of these developed a coherent theory. These theories received more support in the general reaction against Stalinism after the second world war, when the bureaucratic State Capitalism of Russia was said to have its origins in the decision to end workers’ control in 1918. This was hardly an adequate explanation, of the excesses of Stalin’s rule, but, it did provide some sort of an answer for disillusioned ex-Stalinists.

Ideas of workers’ control became more popular in periods of disorder of the sort described above. The experiences of these periods have provided the basis for many theories’ of workers’ control and of spontaneous revolution without understanding or organisation. They have become part of a general mythology fostered by loose-thinking and an inadequate understanding of the nature of present-day society. These episodes in Russia, Italy and elsewhere have very little relevance for socialism; they were not socialist in character and could not have led to socialism, even if they hadn’t been suppressed.

A little thought shows them to be exceptional and isolated incidents occurring when the control of the capitalist class had been weakened. But workers imbued with capitalist prejudices before the collapse can be expected to keep them during and after it. Without socialist understanding there was bound to be a rapid return to normal capitalism as soon as order was restored. Unfortunately, clear thinking is uncommon on this whole question of workers’ control. It seems to be a slogan full of meaning. A closer examination discloses its inadequacy.

Basically it reflects the anarchist hostility to society and social control as such; it also reflects their naive insistence that everything should be done through voluntary associations rather than permanent machinery. Basically the demand for workers’ control is a demand that the workers on the shop-floor should control production through a workshop organisation rather than through society. Quite apart from the fact that there won’t be any “workers” under Socialism, this demand is unrealistic and Utopian. The productive system of today is incredibly complicated in its world-wide organisation. It could only be controlled by society as a whole through a fairly complex and permanent administrative apparatus. To suggest otherwise is to ignore the nature of the modern world with its large-scale industry.

Adam Buick

Anarchism and the failure of direct action (1995)

Pamphlet Review from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Anarchist Movement in Japan by John Crump (BM Hurricane, London WC1N 3XX. 1995.)

This is a brief, but informative, account of anarchism in Japan by the author of The Origins of Socialist Thought In Japan.

Crump traces the origins of anarchism in that country to Kotoku Shusui who first edited an anti-war journal, Common People's Newspaper, in 1903 until its forced demise at the beginning of 1905. Kotoku was originally a Social Democrat who, together with Sakai Toshihiko and others, formed a short-lived party of that name. In 1904, Kotoku and Sakai translated Marx's and Engels's Communist Manifesto into Japanese. But shortly after, when in prison, Kotoku read Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops, followed whilst travelling to the United States, by his Memoirs of a Revolutionist. In America, he read Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, and later he came under the influence of the Industrial Workers of the World—the "Wobblies".

On his return to Japan, Kotoku held many meetings and wrote many articles attacking what he called Social Democratic parliamentarianism, and advocating direct action. In an article in 1907, he wrote:

   "I hope that from now on our socialist movement in Japan will abandon its commitment to a parliamentary policy and will adopt as its methods and policy the direct action of the workers as one."

Thus began the anarchist movement in Japan. Crump emphasises that the ideas which Kotoku brought back to Japan from America were a mixture of anarchist-communism, syndicalism and terrorism, although Kotoku was foremost an anarchist-communist. or Kropotkinist; and that anarchist terrorism never really took off in Japan. Before the First World War, both anarchist-communism and anarchist-syndicalism had their advocates and activists: but. together with mounting repression by the state, the anarchist-communists and the anarchist-syndicalists became increasingly antagonistic towards each other. By 1927, there was a complete split between the two factions according to John Crump.

The Japanese anarchists, like many others at the time, were largely sympathetic towards the Bolsheviks following the 1917 coup d'état. Some even joined the Communist Party, only to leave it again soon after. But after the Bolsheviks' suppression of the Kronstadt Revolt in 1921, one prominent Japanese anarchist, Osugi, "concluded that there was nothing to choose between Russian state capitalism and Western private capitalism".

In 1923. both Kotoku and Osugi were murdered by the Japanese state, and some anarchists attempted a number of rather insignificant acts of terrorist revenge which were, of course, counter-productive. Mass arrests inevitably followed. During the 1930s the anarchist movement in Japan went, according to Crump, into rapid decline. There was. however, an attempt by some anarchist-communists to form an Anarchist Communist Party in 1934. It claimed to be committed to bringing about a stateless and free communist society; yet it used Bolshevik (i.e. Leninist) organisational methods. It was founded as a highly secretive organisation, whose existence was not openly proclaimed, and whose membership was a hand-picked ''élite''. Its main tactic was to manoeuvre its members into positions of influence in other organisations—just like the Leninists! Not surprisingly, it was soon destroyed by the Japanese state.

During the Second World War, Japanese anarchists largely went underground, and many were killed in air raids together with hundreds of thousands of other members of the working class. Following the war, attempts were made from time-to-time to revive, or recreate, an anarchist movement in Japan, but as Crump indicates, anarchism in that country (as elsewhere, but not mentioned by the author) has merely existed on a much reduced scale compared with earlier times

Peter E. Newell

Anarchist history (1998)

Book Review from the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Spanish Anarchists. The Heroic years 1868-1936 by Murray Bookchin. AK Press. £13.95.

This is a reprint, with a new introduction, of a history of anarchism Spain until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 that first appeared in 1976.

Spain was the one European country where the organised working-class movement embraced anarchism rather than Social Democracy as its ideology. Bookchin traces the historical reasons for this. One was that everywhere the workers' movement emerged out of the leftwing of the bourgeois radical movement and in Spain the bourgeois radicals were Federalists, i.e. wanted a constitution for Spain similar to that in Switzerland where power would rest with cantons rather than with a central state.

Anarchist ideas were introduced into Spain at the end of the 1860s by the followers of Bakunin within the First International. Contrary to the myth cultivated by anarchists, the dispute between Marx and Bakunin within this organisation was not between an authoritarian Marx and a libertarian Bakunin but between a Marx who saw the workers' movement as an open democratic movement and Bakunin who advocated that it should be directed behind the scenes by a secret society of dedicated revolutionaries. Bakunin was booted out of the First International not for being a libertarian but for being a proto-Leninist vanguardist. Even Bookchin, who writes as an anarchist, is compelled by the facts to concede:

"Bakunin's 'International Brotherhood' has been dealt with derision as a hierarchical, elitist organization which stands in blatant contradiction to his libertarian principles. This contradiction in my view is very real. Bakunin had intended the 'International Brotherhood' to be a secret organization of Anarchist militants, led in tightly disciplined fashion by a highly centralized group of initiates—indeed, by what amounted to a revolutionary general staff" (p. 41).

This idea that revolutionaries should organise as a masonic-type secret society was another bourgeois-revolutionary tradition inherited by Spanish anarchists which lasted right down to the 1930s when the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation) infiltrated and came to control the syndicalist CNT (National Confederation of Labour) which had been set up by militant trade unionists in 1911.

The CNT was not an anarchist body but anarchists had an input in its organisation and ideology. As a result the CNT adopted as its long-term aim "libertarian communism" rather than state-capitalist nationalisation as elsewhere in Europe. This did allow it to avoid the mistakes made by trade unionists elsewhere of supporting and even sponsoring parties that stood for state capitalism, but it was only a long-term aim and in practice the CNT acted as a militant trade union seeking immediate improvements for workers within capitalism.

The FAI—which was essentially a secret anarchist terrorist organisation set up in 1927 under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship—regarded this as reformism and sought to use the CNT in its plans for insurrection. This met resistance from within the ranks of the CNT by trade unionists who, according to Bookchin's account, seem to have had a better grasp of reality:

"Not only did the CNT lack the support of a majority of the Spanish people, they argued, but it lacked the support of the majority of the Spanish working class. Anarchosyndicalists were a minority within a minority. Even within the CNT membership, a large number of workers and peasants shared only a nominal allegiance to libertarian ideals. They were members of the CNT because the union was strong in their localities and work places. If these people, and the Spaniards generally, were not educated in Anarchist principles, warned the moderates, the revolution would simply degenerate into an abhorrent dictatorship of ideologues" (p. 193).

The FAI brushed such objections aside and in 1931 succeeded in capturing the CNT and, applying classic Bakuninist tactics, in Bookchin's words, "dragged" the CNT into a number of "insurrectionary adventures". The results were disastrous. Not only were hundreds of workers' lives sacrificed but the CNT split. In fact, reading Bookchin's account the thought springs to mind that the disaster that was to befall the Spanish working class might have had a chance of being avoided if the anarchist vanguardists of the FAI had left the CNT alone.

Even Bookchin questions whether an "anarchist revolution" could have been sustained in Spain in 1936. Certainly, the workers showed that they could take over and run the factories and the peasants that they could take over and cultivate the land without capitalists and landlords but, Bookchin asks, could it have lasted:

"But what would happen when everyday life began to feel the pinch of economic want of the material problems imposed not only by the Civil War but by Spain's narrow technological base? 'Communism will be the result of abundance,' Santillan had warned in the spring of 1936, 'without which it will remain only an ideal'. Could the ardor of the CNT and FAI surmount the obstacles of scarcity and material want in the basic necessities of life, obstacles that had limited the forward thrust of earlier revolutions?" (p. 284).

Bookchin only hints at a negative answer, but in the event the matter was not tested. The "anarchist revolution" was first stopped by the Republican government with the Stalinist "Communists" in the lead and then savagely crushed by the Franco fascists.

Adam Buick