Anarchism to-day

This is a copy of an article originally printed in the Irish 
anarchist magazine Workers Solidarity (34).  Workers 
Solidarity can be contacted at WSM, PO Box 1528, Dublin 8, 
Ireland.


AT THE MOMENT the "Socialist Movement" has all
but collapsed.  Despite the fact that high
unemployment, war and mass starvation would
point to the need for a coherent anti-
capitalist alternative most socialists are
confused and demoralised.  The reason is
simple, both the reformist and Leninist
parties are paying for their legacy of
betrayal of socialism in this century.  What
they conceived socialism to be has been
totally discredited.  As anarchists it is
important to realise that their are both
advantages and drawbacks to these
developments.

The vast majority of those that referred to
themselves as socialists saw the Stalinist countries
as being ahead of capitalism, a large amount even
went so far as to refer to these regimes as
"actually existing socialism".  To these people the
collapse of these regimes has resulted in the belief
that socialism itself cannot work.  To anarchists
there is no such problem, we  realised that the USSR
stopped moving towards socialism when the Bolsheviks
destroyed workers democracy between 1918 and 1921.

IS SOCIALISM DEAD?

The fact that most of yesterdays 'socialists' are
now saying socialism is no longer on the agenda is
and will have a major effect on the level of
struggle in society over the next few years.  Most
of those workers who were activists in unions and
campaigns were either members of the various state
socialist groups or were broadly sympathetic to
them.   Many of these people are affected by the
inevitable demoralisation of seeing their parties
disintegrate.

In the ideal situation we anarchists would be in the
position to move in and fill this gap.  We would be
able to get across the argument that it is not
socialism that has collapsed but rather reformism,
Leninism and Stalinism.  We could say that anarchism
demonstrates that there is no authoritarian way to
socialism.  In reality however the anarchist
movement is much too small in most countries to be
able to get across these arguments on a mass basis.
Rather those few small organisations  like ourselves
are trying to make what impact we can.

This means that although it is no easier to put
across anarchist politics to people searching for an
alternative to capitalism there are now far fewer
people looking for such an alternative.  This is the
problem we face in the short term.

LABOUR PARTY BLUES

Those groups who drew their traditions from Lenin
and Stalin are already collapsing or have collapsed.
A few who have the tradition of not being such hard
line Leninists are trying to defend Lenin from
anarchist criticism.  That other large 'socialist'
tradition of Social Democracy (or labourism) is also
in deep trouble.  The reasons for this are not hard
to find.

The labour parties always accommodated that section
of the ruling class  who saw stability as being
insured through policies of co-operation with the
trade union bureaucracy.  The labour parties were
the creation of the trade union bureaucrats and
fought to reduce class antagonism through the
introduction of the welfare state, arbitration
procedures, national plans between the bosses and
the union bureaucrats etc.  In the past the far-left
convinced large numbers of activists to join the
labour parties either to transform them or expose
the party leadership.

Internationally these policies meet with various
degrees of success from the end of the second world
war on as a mixture of expanding capitalism and the
threat of industrial unrest led to most states
taking up many parts of the Labour parties
programme.  By the late 70's however this expansion
had slowed or stopped and the Labour parties where
they remained in power led the offensive on behalf
of the capitalists to drive down wages and living
standards.  In Britain this offensive was continued
by the Thatcher government which held power in
England throughout the eighties. In many other
European countries and in Australia it was the
Social Democrats who carried out the cuts in the
80's.

A DECADE OF DEFEATS

Naturally enough workers resisted this offensive and
won a few initial victories.  The trade union
bureaucracy however turned increasingly to trying to
work out plans which would limit job losses rather
than outright opposition to these cuts.  Strikes
like those in Liverpool, the printers at Wapping,
the P+O workers and the national miners strike of
1984 were isolated, with the bureaucrats doing all
they could to prevent sympathy action.  The left in
the unions was unwilling to fight the bureaucrats so
such strikes lost despite heroic efforts by those on
strike.

The lesson most workers took was that job losses
could not be fought against, the 80's in most of the
western countries was a decade where defeat followed
defeat.  The left rather then seeing these losses as
coming from their reliance on the Labour party and
the union bureaucrats to led the fightback drew
entirely the wrong lesson.  They thought
"Thatcherism" represented some sort of new,
undefeatable phenomenon.  A variety of theories
which sort to explain that the working class no
longer existed or that class politics were no longer
relevant came into being.   There was nothing new in
this, in the mid 60's similar ideas that the western
working class had sold out to consumerism abounded,
these of course were smashed by the events of 1968,
particularly the general strike in France.

Most of those on the left who didn't go along with
this analysis were  Leninists of one sort or another
who looked to the soviet union as some sort of
example.  The collapse of the soviet union had a
similar if not larger effect on these people.  Thus
at the start of 1992 we find the situation where
despite the fact that capitalism is in obvious
trouble there is almost no organised alternative to
it.  The radical alternatives of yesterday have
become to-days jokes.

SOME THINGS CHANGE

The collapse of the confidence of the reformist
labour parties may not be final. A British Social
Attitudes survey reported in the Guardian (Nov 20
'91) revealed  83% supported the "Keynesian policy
of fighting unemployment through investing in
construction planning" and 9 out of 10 people wanted
more investment in the NHS even if taxes had to be
raised to pay for it.  Yet at a time when
Thatcherism has been abandoned as inadequate by the
bosses, many on the left still consider it to have
destroyed the whole socialist project.

In the 80's there were many changes in the
composition of the working class.  In the west at
least the industrial working class dwindled as the
white collar working class grew.  Many of the
largest industrial workplaces were broken up and
dispersed commonly with the aim of weakening the
unions involved.  In Ireland there are only 6 sites
employing over 1000 people in the same company.  For
those who saw socialism as being introduced by
steelworkers and miners wearing cloth caps and clogs
this represented a big blow

In Ireland Irish companies have increasingly come to
replace multinationals.  Of the top 10 companies by
turnover only two (at positions 5 and 10) are
multinationals.  In the top 50 there are a total of
10 multinationals.   This demonstrates how the
southern Irish ruling class has successfully
established itself as a junior partner of
international capitalism.   Those socialists in
Ireland who saw the multi-nationals rather then our
native capitalist class as the main problem in the
south are being forced to reconsider.

 There is nothing new in all this, throughout his
century conditions have changed for socialists.
Similar ideas that socialism was dead were being
thrown around before the struggles of 1968 shook the
world. We have to continually take these changes
into account.  We have to continually elaborate our
ideas, and test them by involving our self where-
ever there is struggle against the bosses.  Any
theory is only as good as the practical guidance it
gives in day to day struggle.  One of the most
important aspect of any socialist organisation is
the ability to throw out all that is irrelevant (or
wrong) in its tradition.


WHY ANARCHISM?

It is becoming clear that the bulk of what has been
referred to as socialism up to now is in fact
nothing of the sort.  The vast bulk of the theory
and practise of the last 70 years needs to be thrown
in the bin. Unfortunately most of the Leninist
groups are avoiding such an exercise preparing
instead to do a botched plastering job over the
appearing cracks.  They have chosen to follow the
same paths as the Communist parties did and will
probably suffer a similar fate.

The vast bulk of those leaving the Leninist and
labour parties are just disappearing from any form
of politics or activism.  The few who are trying to
continue the anti-capitalist fight in a new way are
making old mistakes. For the most part rather then
seeing their version of socialism as flawed they
have come to see capitalism as triumphant.  There is
a tradition however which refused to see socialism
as something being imposed by a minority wielding
state power on behalf of a majority.  The tradition
of anarchism always rejected both the crude
authoritarianism of Leninism and the reformism of
the labour parties.

It is for this reason that we call ourselves
anarchists.  Anarchism as a tradition is no doubt
flawed, at times even badly flawed but it has always
been better than any of the alternatives on offer.
What's more, it has been capable of the sort of
fierce self-criticism needed to continually develop.
Throughout the last 120 years it has always been the
anarchist (or a sub-group of anarchists) that has
developed the best position on the events of the
day.  Most importantly anarchism unlike reformism,
Leninism and Trotskyism has never imposed
dictatorship and massacre on the working class.

THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

Within the first international, in the last century
the anarchists consistently argued against a turn to
reformism and parliamentary elections.  They argued
against the view that the state apparatus could be
seized and used to introduce socialism.  The
introduction of socialism could only be carried out
by the working class itself not by a minority of
revolutionaries acting through the state.  They also
argued against the emerging strain within Marxism
that argued that the revolution could only come
about if the working class was under the
dictatorship of a minority of intellectuals.  With
the advantage of hindsight it is clear that these
arguments explain much of what went wrong with the
socialist movement in the 20th century.

At the same time the anarchists showed they were
capable of organising the scale of struggle needed
to threaten capitalism.  In the USA in the 1880's
the anarchists were organising a huge campaign for
the 8 hour day involving demonstrations of greater
than 100 000 workers.  Here the anarchists showed
their ability to connect building for a socialist
revolution with the winning of reforms from the
bosses.  In 1886 this was to result in 8 anarchists
being sentenced to death in Chicago, an event May
day originated in.

At the end of the century Anarchists in the US, most
notably Emma Goldman were to take up the fight to
unionize women workers and break the ban on
contraception.  At a time when most other socialists
saw women's liberation as a side issue the
anarchists were fighting against those aspects which
most oppressed working class women.

THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL

The anarchist fight against the use of parliament by
socialists continued when the Second international
(labour party) was set up in 1889.  Anarchists
attempted to argue against reformism at the first
three international congresses in 1889, 1891 and
1893.  The 1893 congress passed a motion excluded
all non-trade union bodies which did not recognise
the need for parliamentary action.  The next
congress in 1896 however included anarchists who had
been made delegates by trade unions.  They were
physically assaulted when they attempted to speak
and a motion from the German social-democrats
???????? Liebknecht and August Bebel and Eleanore
Aveling (Marx's daughter) banned all those who were
'anti-parliamentarians' from future congresses. The
anarchists then went on to form their own
international, which still exists in the form of the
IWA-AIT, an international organisation of anarcho-
syndicalist trade unions and groups.

The Russian revolution of 1917 confirmed the
warnings made by the anarchists some 50 years
earlier in the first international. The degeneration
of the revolution was due to the attempt to use the
old state apparatus to introduce socialism and the
Bolsheviks belief that the working class were
incapable of making the decisions required to insure
the revolution survived.  Similarly in 1919 the
massacre of German workers by the German labour
party confirmed the anarchist warnings to the first
and second international of the logical outcome of
parliamentary action.

The Russian revolution was the first real test of
anarchism in a revolution.  The anarchist movement
at the time was comparatively small but it had major
influence particularly in the factory committees and
in the Southern Ukraine.  The anarchist were amongst
its foremost supporters and were the only group to
support the dissolving of the constituent assembly
on the grounds that the Soviets were a more
democratic form of government.  (In contrast the
Bolsheviks were clear that they wished to use the
soviets rather then the constituent assembly because
they had more support in the soviets).

The anarchists fought to push the revolution as far
as it would go, recognising that this would maximise
the willingness of Russian workers and workers
internationally to defend it.  When the Bolsheviks
started to impose their dictatorship the anarchists
fought them through the soviets and factory
committees.  By 1921 the anarchists alone recognised
that the revolution had been destroyed and either
died trying to bring about a third revolution or
fled into exile to warn the worlds workers of what
had happened.

One major (correct) criticism of the anarchist
tradition was that during the Spanish revolution,
four of the 'leaders' of the CNT went into
government.  A sizeable portion of the anarchists in
the CNT formed the only consistent faction pushing
for finishing off the revolution. This group called
the Friends of Durutti are discussed elsewhere in
this issue.

FASCISM AND WAR

After 1936 Anarchism in Europe was wiped out. From
the rise of fascism under Mussolini in Italy in the
early 20's the anarchists had stressed the need for
workers to physically smash fascism.  In Italy at
the time however there attempts to do so were
undermined by the Social-democrats.  In Germany the
anarchists were smashed by Hitler as he came to
power, many of them dying subsequently in
concentration or death camps.  With the fascist
occupation of Europe during the second world war
many of other anarchists were to share their fate.

In Italy, France and Bulgaria at least there were
anarchist resistance groups throughout the war.  In
Italy they were involved in the land seizures after
the war but were defeated by the combined forces of
the Italian communist party and the Allies.  In
Bulgaria the anarchist movement after the war grew
rapidly but was wiped out in 1948 by the Bulgarian
C.P. Again hundreds were executed or sent to
concentration camps.  Anarchists in Poland and other
Eastern European countries shared a similar fate.

Anarchism to-day is growing in all of the Eastern
European countries.  As it was isolated for some 70
years in the soviet union and 40 years in Eastern
Europe it will be a slow and painful process. In the
west the anarchist movement grew slowly throughout
the 80's and is now in the process of re-examining
the anarchist tradition.  Long years of isolation
meant that a lot of rubbish has accumulated so this
re-examination is vitally important

The tradition in which the anarchists stand is one
that socialists need to identify with. For many on
the left this will be a difficult process.  They
were weaned on a diet of slander when it came to
anarchism, either being told that anarchists were
police agents or that they were not real socialists
at all and wanted a return to feudalism.  We must
resist the temptation to avoid this problem by going
"beyond anarchism".  The state has been the Achilles
heel of 20th century socialism, it is not an issue
to be fudged.
