       Red & Black Revolution
 A magazine of libertarian communism

      Issue 1    October 1994

Produced by Workers Solidarity Movement

       TIME TO BE CONSTRUCTIVE

In "from Ashes to Phoenix?" it was argued 
that the left as it had come to be known  
has collapsed.  The new left that is 
arising from the ashes carries much of the 
baggage and many of the mistakes of its 
predecessors.  It is without clear 
direction, knowing it wants to build 
something new, but not sure what this will 
be or how to do it.  It bases itself on a 
hodgepodge of different traditions or on 
none.  These criticisms are easy to make, 
what is more difficult is to pinpoint a way 
forwards.

This article indicates the direction that 
needs to be taken.  There is a current 
within the left that stands out in its 
opposition to the division of revolutionary 
organisations into leaders and led.  This 
current is anarchism.   However new 
organisation(s) should not be built on the 
basis of a turn to the past.  Rather it 
must be recognised that previous anarchist 
movements have also failed, and not just 
for objective reasons.  None of them are 
adequate as models, so it is not a question 
of constructing international versions of 
the CNT, the Friends of Durruti or any 
other group.  Indeed any project that picks 
an organisation from history and says this 
is what we should be modelled on would seem 
to be more interested in historical re-
enactment than revolution.

Anarchism put forward an accurate critique 
of the problems of Marxism as a whole.  
Anarchism also demonstrated methods of 
organisation based on mass democracy.  This 
is its importance, as not only does it go 
some way to explaining why the left has 
failed but it also points the way to how it 
can succeed.

Anarchism crystallised around opposition to 
the idea that socialism could be introduced 
by a small elite on behalf of the minority.  
There are, were and probably will continue 
to be Marxists that claim Marx also opposed 
this idea but to do this is to deny the 
historical argument that took place at the 
end of the 1860's between the Marxists and 
the anarchists.  It is also to ignore what 
Marxism has meant in the period since then.

To an extent the anarchist critique of 
Marxism can be portrayed as 
unsophisticated, not explaining where the 
authoritarian side of Marxism comes from in 
sufficient depth.  Certainly in the English 
speaking countries, anarchism appears 
theoretically weak when compared to the 
vast body of work calling itself Marxist.  
But complexity or detail does not make an 
analysis correct, sometimes the simplest of 
ideas carry profound truths(1).  And when 
the record of the anarchist organisations 
are compared with those of the Marxists one 
finds on those key issues of 20th century 
socialism, the state and role of the 
revolutionary organisation, the anarchists 
were consistently on the right side.  The 
worst of the anarchist deviations, the 
power sharing with the bourgeois 
republicans in Spain palls into 
insignificance when compared with the 
damage done by social democracy or Stalin.

The strength of anarchism has been its 
belief in the ability of the working class 
to take its destiny into its own hands free 
of intermediaries.  This and its 
uncompromising rejection of the state and 
politics of manipulation has left a legacy 
that can be sharply contrasted with that of 
other left currents.  This makes it very 
different from both Leninism and social 
democracy, whose basic ideas are quite 
closely connected.  Many of the old debates 
and the style they were carried out in are 
now irrelevant, it will take time before 
new, more positive debates become the norm.

For the left today, in  a period where many 
believe social-democracy and the USSR have 
demonstrated that socialism cannot work, 
the demonstrations of self-management by 
anarchist inspired workers are of key 
importance.  The Spanish revolution saw the 
democratic running of a large part of the 
economy and a sizeable military force by 
the working class(2).  This provides us 
with an actual example of the non-utopian 
nature of self-management.  In practice 
such forms also arose spontaneously in 
revolutions where anarchist ideas played no 
major part, including that of Hungary in 
1956(3).  In the future it is to these 
examples we should look to for inspiration.

English speaking 'Anarchism'

What the anarchist movement needs today is 
not a historical re-enactment of past 
glories.  What's more, in the English 
speaking countries at least, the anarchist 
movement, to be polite, leaves a lot to be 
desired.  There is no real mass tradition 
of anarchism outside the pre-WWI USA.  Even 
this was more of an example of anarchist 
ideas playing a major role within a wider 
movement than of an anarchist mass 
movement.  There have been no real 
anarchist syndicalist(4) unions or mass 
organisations.  Individual anarchists like 
Emma Goldman may have been important 
figures but they represented isolated 
examples rather than movements.

In the inter-war years anarchism was nearly 
destroyed internationally by dictatorship, 
fascism and Leninism.  Those countries 
where the tradition was weak, in particular 
the English speaking ones, saw a complete 
death of any understanding of anarchism and 
its re-interpretation by academics, among 
these George Woodcock.  This re-
interpretation attempted to rob anarchism 
of its base in class struggle and instead 
reduce it to a radical liberalism.  This 
had (and continues to have) disastrous 
consequences for the growth of anarchism 
from the 60's on in these countries.

One of the most harmful ideas introduced by 
these academics was the idea of anarchism 
as a code of personal conduct rather than 
one of collective struggle.  This occurred 
partially by their inclusion of all 
pacifists from Tolstoy to Gandhi as 
anarchists and partially from a completely 
false understanding of the anarchist 
movement in Spain.  The Spanish example was 
particularly absurd, anarchists were 
presented as moralists who would not drink 
coffee rather than as members of an 
organisation based on class struggle, over 
one million strong..  It's true that 
anarchists do have a different sense of 
what is 'right or wrong' than that 
instilled in us by capitalist culture but 
this flows from their politics rather than 
the reverse.

Anarchism is different from Leninism and 
social democracy in that it understands 
that the means used to achieve a socialist 
revolution will determine the success or 
failure of that revolution.  This was not 
true for the revolutions that brought 
capitalism to power, there it was possible 
for the new elite to emerge regardless of 
how it had got its backing.  Socialism 
requires mass participation.  As such it 
will not be granted by an elite but will 
have to prevent the emergence of elites.  
This can only be done if the mass of 
society is already acting on the basis that 
no new centres of rule can be allowed to 
emerge, that they themselves must plan, 
create and administer the new society.

The identification of anarchism with 
counter cultural movements (like punk rock 
and increasingly the 'crusty/new age 
traveller' scene) arises from this 
'liberal' interpretation.  In turn this 
image of anarchism as a personal code of 
conduct encourages the counter culture to 
attach the label anarchist to itself.  This 
'anarchism' is an often bizarre set of 
rules ranging from not eating at McDonalds 
to not getting a job.  If anything it 
represents a hopeless rebellion against, 
and alienation from, life under modern 
capitalism.  It is a self-imposed ghetto, 
its adherents see no hope of changing 
society.  In fact the counter culture is 
often hostile to any attempt to address 
anyone outside the ghetto(5), seeing this 
as selling out.  However the counter 
culture is not entirely apolitical. A 
significant minority in Britain for 
instance will turn out for demonstrations 
and where physical confrontation with the 
state occur they often become the cannon 
fodder.

There are also significant areas within 
this counter culture where work is done 
which can give a positive example.  Perhaps 
the best example of this is the squatting 
movement of the last couple of decades 
which saw huge numbers of people using 
direct action to solve homelessness by 
taking over empty buildings.  Of course the 
bulk of these people were outside the 
counter culture, immigrant workers, the 
young homeless and those including young 
married people whose jobs could not cover 
the high rent in London and for whom 
council accommodation was unavailable or 
inadequate.

However the fact that so many of today's 
anarchists came to anarchism through this 
counter culture has repercussions for 
building new movements.  To an extent they 
find it difficult to break with the anti-
organisational parts of the counter 
culture.  This response dovetails with that 
of activists who have had bad experience of 
revolutionary organisations.  The counter 
culture also tends to see the way forward 
in winning over the ghetto rather than 
addressing mainstream society and getting 
involved in its institutions.  Having 
identified the existing left as being only 
interested in theory and building the party 
organisation, they end up rejecting the 
need for both theory and organisation.  In 
short, they attempt to create their own new 
ghetto to which they can win people.

Anarchism today

Whatever about the poor state of the 
anarchist movement in English speaking 
countries, a different, much stronger 
tradition is found almost everywhere else.  
Language limitations restrict our ability 
to comment in depth on many of these but 
there are anarchist organisations in most 
if not all European, Central American and 
Southern American countries.  There are 
also organisations in some Asian and 
African countries.  In some of these 
countries they are the biggest or only 
force on the revolutionary left.

This is an area that is not just holding 
its own but is indeed growing.  This year 
the IWA welcomed its first African section, 
in the form of the Awareness League of 
Nigeria and has entered into discussion 
with two unions in Asia.  Since the mid-
70's anarcho-syndicalist unions have been 
re-built in Spain and the Swedish SAC has 
moved from reformism back to anarchist-
syndicalism.  Anarchists were the first 
sections of the left to resume activity in 
Eastern Europe, the first opposition march 
in Moscow since the late 20's was staged by 
anarchists on 28th May 1988 under the 
banner "Freedom without Socialism is 
Privilege and Injustice.  Socialism without 
Freedom is Slavery and Brutality", a quote 
from Bakunin.  In the last year several 
anarchist groups have emerged in the 
republics of former Yugoslavia and some 
have started a process of co-operation 
against the war there.  Central and 
Southern America have also seen groups re-
emerge into public activity, in some 
countries, like Venezuela, the anarchists 
are the only national force on the left.  

In a period where all other sections of the 
left have been in decline, anarchism has 
re-established itself and started to grow.  
This is all the more remarkable when you 
consider this growth has come about almost 
completely internally, no major resources 
were pumped in from the outside.  Compare 
this with the Trotskyist groups who poured 
huge resources into Eastern Europe for 
relatively little return.  This included 
sending members over to maintain a 
permanent presence in Moscow and the other 
capitals.  Anyone reading the Trotskyist 
press would be aware of their constant 
appeals for funds to help in this work.  
This attempt to import Trotskyism in any of 
its varieties failed to make any 
significant impact.  Anarchist groups, on 
the contrary, emerged from the countries of 
the East to make contact with us in the 
west.  They were based on 'left dissidents' 
rediscovering a banned history, their 
membership coming from sections of society 
as far apart as intellectuals(6) to punk 
fans and independent union activists.

So although the situation can seem very 
much isolated in any of the English 
speaking countries there is a very much 
larger and more together movement 
elsewhere.  It is by no means perfect, it 
is dominated by syndicalism but it is a 
start.  The question for us and the readers 
of this article is how to go about building 
mass anarchist movements in our countries.  
The beginnings of such a movement exist in 
almost all countries, anarchism has 
consistently attracted new blood and new 
influence.

Both the historical legacy of anarchism and 
the (related) fact that it is currently the 
only substantial anti-Leninist but 
revolutionary movement in existence lead to 
the conclusion that the best starting point 
for building a new left is anarchism. But 
what sort of anarchist movement is needed?  
The objective has to be kept in mind, to 
aid in the creation of a revolution that 
will found a future society without classes 
or the rule of a minority.  It also has to 
be recognised that anarchism in the past 
has failed to fulfil this objective, most 
notably in Spain where it could have 
carried the revolution through, at least 
locally.

We must learn from the mistakes of the 
past.  It is not enough to build large 
loose organisations formed on the basis of 
opposition to capitalism and an adherence 
to anarchism as an ideal.  Experience has 
shown that these become paralysed when 
faced with an unforseen set of 
circumstances as with the Spanish CNT, or 
effectively taken over by much smaller but 
more coherent forces as was the fate of 
many of the other syndicalist movements.  
At a key moment they are likely to falter 
and it at this point that authoritarians 
can step in and assume leadership over the 
revolution.

More importantly, the building of local 
groups with only with the intention of 
getting stuck in but no vision of becoming 
a mass movement, has little to offer when 
it comes to creating a libertarian 
revolution.  Such groups and the networks 
that are constructed from time to time may 
start off vibrant but quickly lose a sense 
of purpose and cease to exist over time.  
In Britain in particular a large number of 
these have arisen over the last decade, and 
in Ireland we have had a few.  They leave 
no real legacy, however; who can even 
remember the Dublin Anarchist Collective, 
Dundalk Libertarian Communist Group, 
Scottish Libertarian Federation or the 
Midlands Anarchist Network.

Some anarchists in Russia and Spain after 
the revolutions there attempted to identify 
why their movements were defeated by the 
authoritarian forces.  Their conclusions 
were remarkably similar and apply to 
anarchism today in many countries.

Some of the Russian exiles formed a group 
in Paris that published a pamphlet(7)  
based on their experiences that argued: 

"This contradiction between the positive 
and incontestable substance of libertarian 
ideas, and the miserable state in which the 
anarchist movement vegetates, has its 
explanation in a number of causes, of which 
the most important, the principal, is the 
absence of organisational principles and 
practices in the anarchist movement.

In all countries. the anarchist movement is 
represented by several local organisations 
advocating contradictory theories and 
practices having no perspectives for the 
future, nor of a continuity in militant 
work, and habitually disappearing. hardly 
leaving the slightest trace behind them."

A decade later in 1938 a second group, "the 
Friends of Durruti" composed of several 
thousand members of the Spanish CNT 
published a pamphlet(8) explaining why the 
CNT had failed to complete the Spanish 
revolution. It was part of an attempt even 
at that late stage to turn the situation 
around:

"We [the CNT] did not have a concrete 
program.  We had no idea where we were 
going.  We had lyricism aplenty; but when 
all is said and done, we did not know what 
to do with our masses of workers or how to 
give substance to the popular effusion 
which erupted inside our organisation.  By 
not knowing what to do we handed the 
revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie 
and the Marxists who support the farce of 
yesteryear"

Although the Friends of Durruti were 
talking of the problems faced during an 
actual revolution their criticism is also 
relevant to today's situation.  Lack of 
organisation prevents many anarchist groups 
from being effective and in the event of a 
revolution in the future will prevent them 
from leading it to success.

What is needed is an organisation with 
coherent ideas and a practice of democratic 
debate and decision making.  One capable of 
dealing with crisis and making rapid 
decisions without relying on a 
'leadership'.  This is an easy statement to 
make, in practice it is not easy to create.  
All too often such attempts either succumb 
to authoritarianism or collapse into 
sectarianism and isolation.  They become 
isolated in their own ghetto, interested in 
argument but no longer capable of or even 
interested in intervening in struggle.

Building an effective anarchist 
organisation is not something that can 
happen overnight.  Even the initial 
formation of core politics takes a number 
of years. Then the process of winning 
people over to these politics and giving 
them the skills and knowledge required to 
play a full role in a revolutionary 
organisation takes a considerable amount of 
time.  To maintain coherency and democracy 
the organisation can only grow slowly when 
small, even in ideal circumstances doubling 
perhaps every 6 months to a year.  And in 
the course of that growth it is all too 
easy to lose sight of the goal and lapse 
into isolation, sectarianism and 
irrelevancy.

Even given the right theory, an 
organisation is dependant on the experience 
and commitment of its membership in order 
to put its ideas into practice and arrive 
at new sensible strategies.  The commitment 
needed can only be maintained if the 
internal culture of an organisation is one 
in which debate is favoured and 
sectarianism is discouraged.

Obviously the political positions are also 
important but that discussion is beyond the 
scope of any one article.  However it is 
possible to identify key areas of 
organisational practice that an anarchist 
organisation needs to be committed to in 
order to avoid the mistakes of the past, 
and grow in a consistent, coherent way.  
These are:

Theoretical and tactical unity

An organisation is strong only because it 
represents the collective efforts of many 
individuals.  To maximise on this these 
efforts need to be completely collective, 
all members working towards a common goal 
with common tactics.  This is not just in 
relation to revolution but in every area 
the organisation involves itself in.  This 
has been called tactical unity.

Authoritarian organisations have tactical 
unity because commands are passed down from 
the leadership, unity only breaks down when 
disagreements arise within the leadership.  
These organisations may have a formal 
adherence to theoretical unity but usually 
this comprises of no more than the ability 
of the membership to repeat the utterings 
of the leadership(9).  This is not an 
option for anarchists, in order to achieve 
tactical unity there must be real 
theoretical unity.  This requires 
unrelenting discussion, education and 
debate around all theoretical issues within 
the organisation with the goal of forging a 
set of clearly understood positions and the 
ability of all the membership to argue for 
and present new ones.  Rather than 
parroting a party line there is needed an 
organisational understanding of how to see 
and interact with the rest of the world.

This practice not only gives the 
organisation real strength in its 
activities, but also gives it the ability 
to react in a crisis.  The understanding 
developed and the experience of decision 
making are precisely the tools needed when 
it comes to aiding the creation of 
revolution and the establishment of a 
socialist society based on real democracy.  
The continuous interaction of the members 
with society brings the skills and practice 
of the organisation into the wider 
movement.  We wish our ideas to lead, not 
because we have control of particular 
positions, but because of the superiority 
of our organisation's ideas.

Involvement in everyday life.

Too often revolutionaries see themselves as 
separate from and above everyday life.  The 
working class is often talked of as a 
separate, foreign entity rather than the 
place where we live and interact on a daily 
basis.  Activity is seen as the cart to be 
placed behind the horse of revolutionary 
theory.  Some Marxists refer to this as a 
cornerstone of their organisation.  They 
have expressed it as "No revolutionary 
practice without revolutionary theory".  
Activity is thus seen at best, as the 
method by which new recruits are won(10), 
at worst, something that is not as yet 
necessary.

If building a mass revolutionary 
organisation was simply a matter of having 
a good theory, perhaps there would be 
something in this approach, at least for 
authoritarian socialists. A few learned 
types go up the mountain for some years to 
consult the written word of the gods of 
socialism.  They interpret this as a creed 
for new times, carve it in stone and return 
to the assembled masses on the plains 
below, ready to lead them to the promised 
land.  This is still a popular approach to 
revolutionary organisation at the moment.

But a quick look at the history of the left 
demonstrates that the mass organisations 
have not been those with the best theory 
but those most able to interact with the 
mass of the population.  The strength of 
Maoism or the Sandanistas to name two once 
popular movements, was hardly in their 
theoretical clarity.  Rather it was in 
their ability to interact with a sizeable 
section of the population, despite the 
weakness of their political understanding.

Anarchists need to root their politics 
firmly in actual struggle, at whatever 
level it is occurring.  Through this 
involvement, as serious activists, respect 
can be gained and so an audience won among 
the real 'vanguard', those actually 
involved in fighting at some level against 
the system.  Theory, as far as possible, 
must be taken from experiences of struggle 
and tested by that experience.  It must be 
presented so that it gains a wider and 
wider influence within the major movement.

 Commitment

Too often anarchist groups are composed of 
a small core of people who do the vast bulk 
of the work and financing of the 
organisation and a much larger periphery 
who avoid this commitment.  This is 
unacceptable and a recipe for disaster.  
Revolutionary organisations require a large 
commitment in both money and time if they 
are to grow.  All individuals involved must 
be willing to make this commitment, there 
is little room for hobbyists.

The left is coming through a bleak time, 
one of defeat and retreat stretching back 
over a decade.  It is all too easy to 
become demoralised.  But it is part of a 
price that has to be paid for a century of 
following a variety of dead ends.  The left 
may be largely comatose for the moment but 
the force that created it is as active as 
ever.  Capitalism is incapable of 
fulfilling the needs of the people of the 
world, and so long as it exists it will 
throw up oppositional forces.  In Ireland, 
issues such as the X-case and the service 
charges demonstrate how people will be 
forced to fight back, although these are 
not offensives and should not be portrayed 
as such.  In Mexico the EZLN rising on New 
Years day exposes the same force.

The question for us is how to avoid the 
mistakes of those activists who went before 
us.  Anarchism is weak at the moment, but 
the possibility remains open to build the 
organisations and confidence in the class 
that are required to win change.  
Revolutionary opportunities will arise, the 
task is to build the skills and confidence 
needed to seize them, and that work starts 
today.



1  Indeed if volume and complexity of 
theory alone were the yardstick used 
Christianity or Islam! should be 
considered.

2  by anarchists, these accounted for the 
failure of anarchism to create an 
alternative, however much it could point at 
the possibility of that alternative.

3  It is important to recognise that none 
of these things were complete however, due 
to a situation of dual power with the 
state.  However the period from after the 
revolution in 1936 to May 1937 saw most 
major decisions being made in a democratic 
fashion with the state only interfering at 
the national level.

4  These examples should have ended the 
debate over whether the working class could 
collectively run the economy.  To the 
idealists where the idea is more important 
than the reality however we still receive 
the mantra of 'trade union consciousness' 
and 'need for the state'.

5  The IWW in the USA was indeed a real 
union but it was explicitly not anarchist.  
Its politics although having much in common 
with anarchism (and despite the fact many 
anarchists were members) was more probably 
described as revolutionary syndicalist.

6  A fair part of this view originates with 
a single study by a right wing bourgeoisie 
scholar in Spain based on one village at 
the time of a  minor uprising in 1932.  His 
work has since been shown as completely 
inaccurate.  See "The anarchists of Casas 
Viejas" by Jerome R. Mintz (1982) for a 
fuller discussion of this event and its 
subsequent falsification.

7  An example of this was the recent 
beating up of one of the more political and 
successful punk singers, Jello Biafra the 
lead singer of the Dead Kennedy's for 
'selling out'.  His leg was broken so badly 
that it was so swollen it could not be put 
in a cast.

8  There is an excellent interview with 
activists of KAS (Russian anarchists, using 
the name of the anarcho-syndicalist 
organisation suppressed by the Bolsheviks 
in 1918) in issue #5 of "Independent 
Politics", Winter 1994 that describes the 
origins of these groups in more detail.  
The following quote describes the formation 
of one of the groups that came together 
from 12 cities in the late 80's to re-form 
KAS.

"In Moscow this was a student group called 
Obshchina, community or commune, which 
dates back to 1983. There was a group of 
people, friends, and in 1985-86 they had 
been the organising committee of the All 
Union Revolutionary Marxist Party.  Later 
there was some evolution of ideas and by 
the time the Obshchina group was created in 
1987 the main participants already knew 
that they stood for anarcho-syndicalism. 
This was mainly under the influence of 
Bakunin's critique of state socialism and 
Marxism. These people were mainly 
historians and had the possibility to read 
materials in the archives, which was closed 
to the general public."

9  Although defeat at the hands of Franco's 
better equipped army, or by even stronger 
international intervention would have 
remained a possibility.  There was little 
international support that could be called 
on.  Obviously without spreading 
internationally the revolution could not 
have survived long.

10  Organisational Platform of the 
Libertarian Communists.

11  Towards a Fresh  Revolution.


