Anarchism is about radically changing the world, not just making the present system less inhuman by encouraging the anarchistic tendencies within it to grow and develop. While no purely anarchist revolution has taken place yet, there have been numerous ones with a highly anarchist character and level of participation. And while these have all been destroyed, in each case it has been at the hands of outside force brought against them (backed either by Communists or Capitalists), not because of any internal problems in anarchism itself. These revolutions, despite their failure to survive in the face of overwhelming force, have been both an inspiration for anarchists and proof that anarchism is a viable social theory and can be practised on a large scale.
What these revolutions share is the fact they are, to use Proudhon's term, a "revolution from below" -- they were examples of "collective activity, of popular spontaneity." It is only a transformation of society from the bottom up by the action of the oppressed themselves that can create a free society. As Proudhon asked, "[w]hat serious and lasting Revolution was not made from below, by the people?" For this reason an anarchist is a "revolutionary from below." Thus the social revolutions and mass movements we discuss in this section are examples of popular self-activity and self-liberation (as Proudhon put it in 1848, "the proletariat must emancipate itself"). [quoted by George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography, p. 143 and p. 125] All anarchists echo Proudhon's idea of revolutionary change from below, the creation of a new society by the actions of the oppressed themselves. Bakunin, for example, argued that anarchists are "foes . . . of all State organisations as such, and believe that the people can only be happy and free, when, organised from below by means of its own autonomous and completely free associations, without the supervision of any guardians, it will create its own life." [Marxism, Freedom and the State, p. 63] In section J.7 we discuss what anarchists think a social revolution is and what it involves.
Many of these revolutions and revolutionary movements are relatively unknown to non-anarchists. Most people will have heard of the Russian revolution but few will know of the popular movements which were its life-blood before the Bolsheviks seized power or the role that the anarchists played in it. Few will have heard of the Paris Commune, the Italian factory occupations or the Spanish collectives. This is unsurprising for, as Hebert Read notes, history "is of two kinds -- a record of events that take place publicly, that make the headlines in the newspapers and get embodied in official records -- we might call this overground history" but "taking place at the same time, preparing for these public events, anticipating them, is another kind of history, that is not embodied in official records, an invisible underground history." [quoted by William R. McKercher, Freedom and Authority, p. 155] Almost by definition, popular movements and revolts are part of "underground history", the social history which gets ignored in favour of elite history, the accounts of the kings, queens, politicians and wealthy whose fame is the product of the crushing of the many.
This means our examples of "anarchy in action" are part of what the Russian anarchist Voline called "The Unknown Revolution." Voline used that expression as the title of his classic account of the Russian revolution he was an active participant of. He used it to refer to the rarely acknowledged independent, creative actions of the people themselves. As Voline put it, "it is not known how to study a revolution" and most historians "mistrust and ignore those developments which occur silently in the depths of the revolution . . . at best, they accord them a few words in passing . . . [Yet] it is precisely these hidden facts which are important, and which throw a true light on the events under consideration and on the period." [The Unknown Revolution, p. 19] Anarchism, based as it is on revolution from below, has contributed considerably to both the "underground history" and the "unknown revolution" of the past few centuries and this section of the FAQ will shed some light on its achievements.
It is important to point out that these examples are of wide-scale social experiments and do not imply that we ignore the undercurrent of anarchist practice which exists in everyday life, even under capitalism. Both Peter Kropotkin (in Mutual Aid) and Colin Ward (in Anarchy in Action) have documented the many ways in which ordinary people, usually unaware of anarchism, have worked together as equals to meet their common interests. As Colin Ward argues, "an anarchist society, a society which organises itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism." [Anarchy in Action, p. 14]
Anarchism is not only about a future society, it is also about the social struggle happening today. It is not a condition but a process, which we create by our self-activity and self-liberation.
By the 1960's, however, many commentators were writing off the anarchist movement as a thing of the past. Not only had fascism finished off European anarchist movements in the years before and during the war, but in the post-war period these movements were prevented from recovering by the capitalist West on one hand and the Leninist East on the other. Over the same period of time, anarchism had been repressed in the US, Latin America, China, Korea (where a social revolution with anarchist content was put down before the Korean War), and Japan. Even in the one or two countries that escaped the worst of the repression, the combination of the Cold War and international isolation saw libertarian unions like the Swedish SAC become reformist.
But the 60's were a decade of new struggle, and all over the world the 'New Left' looked to anarchism as well as elsewhere for its ideas. Many of the prominent figures of the massive explosion of May 1968 in France considered themselves anarchists. Although these movements themselves degenerated, those coming out of them kept the idea alive and began to construct new movements. The death of Franco in 1975 saw a massive rebirth of anarchism in Spain, with up to 500,000 people attending the CNT's first post-Franco rally. The return to a limited democracy in some South American countries in the late 70's and 80's saw a growth in anarchism there. Finally, in the late 80's it was anarchists who struck the first blows against the Leninist USSR, with the first protest march since 1928 being held in Moscow by anarchists in 1987.
Today the anarchist movement, although still weak, organises tens of thousands of revolutionaries in many countries. Spain, Sweden and Italy all have libertarian union movements organising some 250,000 between them. Most other European countries have several thousand active anarchists. Anarchist groups have appeared for the first time in other countries, including Nigeria and Turkey. In South America the movement has recovered massively. A contact sheet circulated by the Venezuelan anarchist group Corrio A lists over 100 organisations in just about every country.
Perhaps the recovery is slowest in North America, but there, too, all the libertarian organisations seem to be undergoing significant growth. As this growth accelerates, many more examples of anarchy in action will be created and more and more people will take part in anarchist organisations and activities, making this part of the FAQ less and less important.
However, it is essential to highlight mass examples of anarchism working on a large scale in order to avoid the specious accusation of "utopianism." As history is written by the winners, these examples of anarchy in action are often hidden from view in obscure books. Rarely are they mentioned in the schools and universities (or if mentioned, they are distorted). Needless to say, the few examples we give are just that, a few.
Anarchism has a long history in many countries, and we cannot attempt to document every example, just those we consider to be important. We are also sorry if the examples seem Eurocentric. We have, due to space and time considerations, had to ignore the syndicalist revolt (1910 to 1914) and the shop steward movement (1917-21) in Britain, Germany (1919-21), Portugal (1974), the Mexican revolution, anarchists in the Cuban revolution, the struggle in Korea against Japanese (then US and Russian) imperialism during and after the Second World War, Hungary (1956), the "the refusal of work" revolt in the late 1960's (particularly in "the hot Autumn" in Italy, 1969), the UK miner's strike (1984-85), the struggle against the Poll Tax in Britain (1988-92), the strikes in France in 1986 and 1995, the Italian COBAS movement in the 80's and 90's, the popular assemblies and self-managed occupied workplaces during the Argentine revolt at the start of the 21st century and numerous other major struggles that have involved anarchist ideas of self-management (ideas that usually develop from the movement themselves, without anarchists necessarily playing a major, or "leading", role).
For anarchists, revolutions and mass struggles are "festivals of the oppressed," when ordinary people start to act for themselves and change both themselves and the world.
The Paris Commune was created after France was defeated by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war. The French government tried to send in troops to regain the Parisian National Guard's cannon to prevent it from falling into the hands of the population. "Learning that the
Versailles soldiers were trying to seize the cannon," recounted
participant Louise Michel, "men and women of Montmarte swarmed up
the Butte in surprise manoeuvre. Those people who were climbing up
the Butte believed they would die, but they were prepared to pay the
price." The soldiers refused to fire on the jeering crowd and turned
their weapons on their officers. This was March 18th; the Commune had
begun and "the people wakened . . . The eighteenth of March could have
belonged to the allies of kings, or to foreigners, or to the people.
It was the people's." [Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, p. 64]
In the free elections called by the Parisian National Guard, the citizens of Paris elected a council made up of a majority of Jacobins and Republicans and a minority of socialists (mostly Blanquists -- authoritarian socialists -- and followers of the anarchist Proudhon). This council proclaimed Paris autonomous and desired to recreate France as a confederation of communes (i.e. communities). Within the Commune, the elected council people were recallable and paid an average wage. In addition, they had to report back to the people who
had elected them and were subject to recall by electors if they did not carry
out their mandates.
Why this development caught the imagination of anarchists is clear -- it has strong similarities with anarchist ideas. In fact, the example of the Paris Commune was in many ways similar to how Bakunin had predicted that a revolution would have to occur -- a major city declaring itself autonomous, organising itself, leading by example, and urging the rest of the planet to follow it. (See "Letter to Albert Richards" in Bakunin on Anarchism). The Paris Commune began the process of creating a new society, one organised from the bottom up. It was "a blow for the
decentralisation of political power." [Voltairine de Cleyre, "The
Paris Commune," Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother
Earth, p. 67]
Many anarchists played a role within the Commune -- for example Louise Michel, the Reclus brothers, and Eugene Varlin (the latter murdered in the repression afterwards). As for the reforms initiated by the Commune, such as the re-opening of workplaces as co-operatives, anarchists can see their ideas of associated labour beginning to be realised. By May, 43 workplaces
were co-operatively run and the Louvre Museum was a munitions factory
run by a workers' council. Echoing Proudhon, a meeting of the Mechanics
Union and the Association of Metal Workers argued that "our economic
emancipation . . . can only be obtained through the formation of workers'
associations, which alone can transform our position from that of wage
earners to that of associates." They instructed their delegates to the
Commune's Commission on Labour Organisation to support the following
objectives:
"The organisation of labour in mutual associations and inalienable
capital."
In this way, they hoped to ensure that "equality must not be an empty
word" in the Commune. [The Paris Commune of 1871: The View from the
Left, Eugene Schulkind (ed.), p. 164] The Engineers Union voted at
a meeting on 23rd of April that since the aim of the Commune should
be "economic emancipation" it should "organise labour through
associations in which there would be joint responsibility" in order
"to suppress the exploitation of man by man." [quoted by Stewart
Edwards, The Paris Commune 1871, pp. 263-4]
As well as self-managed workers' associations, the Communards
practised direct democracy in a network popular clubs, popular
organisations similar to the directly democratic neighbourhood
assemblies ("sections") of the French Revolution. "People,
govern yourselves through your public meetings, through your press"
proclaimed the newspaper of one Club. The commune was seen as an
expression of the assembled people, for (to quote another Club)
"Communal power resides in each arrondissement [neighbourhood]
wherever men are assembled who have a horror of the yoke and of
servitude." Little wonder that Gustave Courbet, artist friend
and follower of Proudhon, proclaimed Paris as "a true paradise
. . . all social groups have established themselves as federations
and are masters of their own fate." [quoted by Martin Phillip
Johnson, The Paradise of Association, p. 5 and p. 6]
In addition the Commune's "Declaration to the French People"
which echoed many key anarchist ideas. It saw
the "political unity" of society as being based on
"the voluntary
association of all local initiatives, the free and spontaneous
concourse of all individual energies for the common aim, the
well-being, the liberty and the security of all." [quoted by
Edwards, Op. Cit., p. 218] The new society envisioned by the
communards was one based on the "absolute autonomy of the
Commune. . . assuring to each its integral rights and to each
Frenchman the full exercise of his aptitudes, as a man, a citizen
and a labourer. The autonomy of the Commune will have for its
limits only the equal autonomy of all other communes adhering to
the contract; their association must ensure the liberty of France."
["Declaration to the French People", quoted by George Woodcock,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography, pp. 276-7] With its vision
of a confederation of communes, Bakunin was correct to assert that
the Paris Commune was "a bold, clearly formulated negation of the
State." [Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 264]
Moreover, the Commune's ideas on federation obviously reflected the
influence of Proudhon on French radical ideas. Indeed,
the Commune's vision of a communal France based on a federation of
delegates bound by imperative mandates issued by their electors and
subject to recall at any moment echoes Proudhon's ideas (Proudhon
had argued in favour of the "implementation of the binding mandate"
in 1848 [No Gods, No Masters, p. 63] and for federation of
communes in his work The Principle of Federation).
Thus both economically and politically the Paris Commune was heavily
influenced by anarchist ideas. Economically, the theory of associated
production expounded by Proudhon and Bakunin became consciously
revolutionary practice. Politically, in the Commune's call for
federalism and autonomy, anarchists see their "future social
organisation. . . [being] carried out from the bottom up, by the
free association or federation of workers, starting with associations,
then going into the communes, the regions, the nations, and, finally,
culminating in a great international and universal federation."
[Bakunin, Op. Cit., p. 270]
However, for anarchists the Commune did not go far enough. It did not abolish the state within the Commune, as it had abolished it beyond it. The Communards organised themselves "in a Jacobin manner" (to use Bakunin's cutting term). As Peter Kropotkin pointed out, while
"proclaiming the free Commune, the people of Paris proclaimed an
essential anarchist principle . . . they stopped mid-course" and
gave "themselves a Communal Council copied from the old municipal
councils." Thus the Paris Commune did not "break with the tradition
of the State, of representative government, and it did not attempt
to achieve within the Commune that organisation from the simple to
the complex it inaugurated by proclaiming the independence and
free federation of the Communes." This lead to disaster as the
Commune council became "immobilised . . . by red tape" and lost
"the sensitivity that comes from continued contact with the
masses . . . Paralysed by their distancing from the revolutionary
centre -- the people -- they themselves paralysed the popular
initiative." [Words of a Rebel, p. 97, p. 93 and p. 97]
In addition, its
attempts at economic
reform did not go far enough, making no attempt to turn all workplaces
into co-operatives (i.e. to expropriate capital) and forming associations
of these co-operatives to co-ordinate and support each other's economic
activities. Paris, stressed Voltairine
de Cleyre, "failed to strike at economic tyranny, and so came of what
it could have achieved" which was a "free community whose economic
affairs shall be arranged by the groups of actual producers and
distributors, eliminating the useless and harmful element now in
possession of the world's capital." [Op. Cit., p. 67] As the city was under constant siege by the French army, it
is understandable that the Communards had other things on their minds.
However, for Kropotkin such a position was a disaster:
Anarchists drew the obvious conclusions, arguing that "if no central government
was needed to rule the independent Communes, if the national Government
is thrown overboard and national unity is obtained by free federation,
then a central municipal Government becomes equally useless and
noxious. The same federative principle would do within the Commune."
[Kropotkin, Evolution and Environment, p. 75] Instead of abolishing the state within the commune by organising federations of directly democratic mass assemblies, like the Parisian "sections" of the revolution of 1789-93 (see Kropotkin's Great French Revolution for more on these), the Paris Commune kept representative government and suffered for it. "Instead of acting for themselves . . .
the people, confiding in their governors, entrusted them the charge of
taking the initiative. This was the first consequence of the inevitable
result of elections." The council soon became "the greatest obstacle
to the revolution" thus proving the "political axiom that a government
cannot be revolutionary." [Anarchism,
p. 240, p. 241 and p. 249]
The council become more and more isolated from the people who elected it, and thus more and more irrelevant. And as its irrelevance grew, so did its authoritarian tendencies, with the Jacobin majority creating a "Committee of Public Safety" to "defend" (by terror) the "revolution." The Committee was opposed by the libertarian socialist minority and was, fortunately, ignored in practice by the people of Paris as they defended their freedom against the French army, which was attacking them in the name of capitalist civilisation and "liberty." On May 21st, government troops entered the city, followed by seven days of bitter street fighting. Squads of soldiers and armed members of the bourgeoisie roamed the streets, killing and maiming at will. Over 25,000 people were killed in the street fighting, many murdered after they had surrendered, and their bodies dumped in mass graves. As a
final insult, Sacré Coeur was built by the bourgeoisie on the birth
place of the Commune, the Butte of Montmarte, to atone for the radical
and atheist revolt which had so terrified them.
For anarchists, the lessons of the Paris Commune were threefold. Firstly,
a decentralised confederation of communities is the necessary political
form of a free society ("This was the form that the social revolution
must take -- the independent commune." [Kropotkin, Op. Cit.,
p. 163]). Secondly, "there is no more reason for a government inside a
Commune than for government above the Commune." This means that an anarchist
community will be based on a confederation of neighbourhood and workplace
assemblies freely co-operating together. Thirdly, it is critically important to
unify political and economic revolutions into a social revolution.
"They tried to consolidate the Commune first and put off the social
revolution until later, whereas the only way to proceed was to consolidate
the Commune by means of the social revolution!" [Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel , p. 97]
For more anarchist perspectives on the Paris Commune see Kropotkin's
essay "The Paris Commune" in Words of a Rebel (and
The Anarchist Reader) and Bakunin's "The Paris Commune
and the Idea of the State" in Bakunin on Anarchism.
The history of Mayday is closely linked with the anarchist movement
and the struggles of working people for a better world. Indeed, it
originated with the execution of four anarchists in Chicago in 1886
for organising workers in the fight for the eight-hour day. Thus
May Day is a product of "anarchy in action"
-- of the struggle of
working people using direct action in labour unions to change the
world.
It began in the 1880s in the USA. In 1884, the Federation of Organised
Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada (created in
1881, it changed its name in 1886 to the American Federation of Labor)
passed a resolution which asserted that "eight hours shall constitute
a legal day's work from and after May 1, 1886, and that we recommend to
labour organisations throughout this district that they so direct their
laws as to conform to this resolution." A call for strikes on May 1st,
1886 was made in support of this demand.
In Chicago the anarchists were the main force in the union movement, and
partially as a result of their presence, the unions translated this call
into strikes on May 1st. The anarchists thought that the eight hour day
could only be won through direct action and solidarity. They considered
that struggles for reforms, like the eight hour day, were not enough in
themselves. They viewed them as only one battle in an ongoing class
war that would only end by social revolution and the creation of a free
society. It was with these ideas that they organised and fought.
In Chicago alone, 400 000 workers went out and the threat of strike
action ensured that more than 45 000 were granted a shorter working
day without striking. On May 3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of
pickets at the McCormick Harvester Machine Company, killing at least
one striker, seriously wounding five or six others, and injuring
an undetermined number. Anarchists called for a mass meeting the
next day in Haymarket Square to protest the brutality. According
to the Mayor, "nothing had occurred yet, or looked likely to occur to
require interference." However, as the meeting was breaking up a column
of 180 police arrived and ordered the meeting to end. At this moment a
bomb was thrown into the police ranks, who opened fire on the crowd.
How many civilians were wounded or killed by the police was never
exactly ascertained.
A reign of terror swept over Chicago. Meeting halls, union offices,
printing shops and private homes were raided (usually without warrants).
Such raids into working-class areas allowed the police to round up all
known anarchists and other socialists. Many suspects were beaten up and
some bribed. "Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards"
was
the public statement of J. Grinnell, the States Attorney, when a question
was raised about search warrants. ["Editor's Introduction", The
Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs, p. 7]
Eight anarchists were put on trial for accessory to murder. No pretence
was made that any of the accused had carried out or even planned the
bomb. Instead the jury were told "Law is on trial. Anarchy is on trial.
These men have been selected, picked out by the Grand Jury, and indicted
because they were leaders. They are no more guilty than the thousands who
follow them. Gentlemen of the jury; convict these men, make examples of
them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society."
[Op. Cit.,
p. 8] The jury was selected by a special bailiff, nominated by the
State's Attorney and was composed of businessmen and a relative of
one of the cops killed. The defence was not allowed to present evidence
that the special bailiff had publicly claimed "I am managing this case
and I know what I am about. These fellows are going to be hanged as
certain as death." [Ibid.] Not surprisingly, the accused were convicted.
Seven were sentenced to death, one to 15 years' imprisonment.
An international campaign resulted in two of the death sentences being
commuted to life, but the world wide protest did not stop the US state.
Of the remaining five, one (Louis Lingg) cheated the executioner and
killed himself on the eve of the execution. The remaining four (Albert
Parsons, August Spies, George Engel and Adolph Fischer) were hanged
on November 11th 1887. They are known in Labour history as the
Haymarket Martyrs. Between 150,000 and 500,000 lined the route taken
by the funeral cortege and between 10,000 to 25,000 were estimated to
have watched the burial.
In 1889, the American delegation attending the International Socialist
congress in Paris proposed that May 1st be adopted as a workers' holiday.
This was to commemorate working class struggle and the "Martyrdom of the
Chicago Eight". Since then Mayday has became a day for international
solidarity. In 1893, the new Governor of Illinois made official what
the working class in Chicago and across the world knew all along and
pardoned the Martyrs because of their obvious innocence and because
"the trial was not fair".
The authorities had believed at the time of the trial that such
persecution would break the back of the labour movement. They were
wrong. In the words of August Spies when he addressed the court after
he had been sentenced to die:
"If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labour movement . . .
the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil
in misery and want, expect salvation -- if this is your opinion, then
hang us! Here you will tread on a spark, but there and there, behind
you -- and in front of you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a
subterranean fire. You cannot put it out." [Op. Cit., pp. 8-9]
At the time and in the years to come, this defiance of the state and
capitalism was to win thousands to anarchism, particularly in the US
itself. Since the Haymarket event, anarchists have celebrated May Day
(on the 1st of May -- the reformist unions and labour parties moved
its marches to the first Sunday of the month). We do so to show our
solidarity with other working class people across the world, to
celebrate past and present struggles, to show our power and remind
the ruling class of their vulnerability. As Nestor Makhno put it:
"The workers of Chicago . . . had gathered to resolve, in common,
the problems of their lives and their struggles. . .
"Today too . . . the toilers . . . regard the first of May as
the occasion of a get-together when they will concern themselves
with their own affairs and consider the matter of their emancipation."
[The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays, pp. 59-60]
Anarchists stay true to the origins of May Day and celebrate its
birth in the direct action of the oppressed. Oppression and exploitation
breed resistance and, for anarchists, May Day is an international symbol
of that resistance and power -- a power expressed in the last words of
August Spies, chiselled in stone on the monument to the Haymarket martyrs
in Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago:
To understand why the state and business class were so determined to hang
the Chicago Anarchists, it is necessary to realise they were considered the "leaders" of a massive radical union movement. In 1884, the Chicago Anarchists produced the world's first daily anarchist newspaper, the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeiting. This was written, read, owned and published by the German immigrant working class movement. The combined circulation of this daily plus a weekly (Vorbote) and a Sunday edition (Fackel) more than doubled, from 13,000 per issues in 1880 to 26,980 in 1886. Anarchist weekly papers existed for other ethnic groups as well (one English, one Bohemian and one Scandinavian).
Anarchists were very active in the Central Labour Union (which included
the eleven largest unions in the city) and aimed to make it, in the words
of Albert Parsons (one of the Martyrs), "the embryonic group of the future 'free society.'" The anarchists were also part of the International
Working People's Association (also called the "Black
International") which had representatives from 26 cities at
its founding convention. The I.W.P.A. soon "made headway among trade
unions, especially in the mid-west" and its ideas of "direct action
of the rank and file" and of trade unions "serv[ing] as the instrument
of the working class for the complete destruction of capitalism and
the nucleus for the formation of a new society" became known as
the "Chicago Idea" (an idea which later inspired the
Industrial Workers of the World which was founded in Chicago in 1905). ["Editor's Introduction," The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs, p. 4]
This
idea was expressed in the manifesto issued at the I.W.P.A.'s Pittsburgh
Congress of 1883:
"Second -- Establishment of a free society based upon co-operative
organisation of production.
"Third -- Free exchange of equivalent products by and between
the productive organisations without commerce and profit-mongery.
"Fourth -- Organisation of education on a secular, scientific
and equal basis for both sexes.
"Fifth -- Equal rights for all without distinction to sex or race.
"Sixth -- Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between
autonomous (independent) communes and associations, resting on
a federalistic basis." [Op. Cit., p. 42]
For more on the Haymarket Martyrs, their lives and their ideas, the
The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs is essential reading.
Albert Parsons, the only American born Martyr, produced a book which
explained what they stood for called Anarchism: Its Philosophy and
Scientific Basis. Historian Paul Avrich's The Haymarket Tragedy is
a useful in depth account of the events.
While the details of syndicalist organisation varied from country
to country, the main lines were the same. Workers should form
themselves into unions (or syndicates, the French for union).
While organisation by industry was generally the preferred form,
craft and trade organisations were also used. These unions were
directly controlled by their members and would federate together
on an industrial and geographical basis. Thus a given union would
be federated with all the local unions in a given town, region
and country as well as with all the unions within its industry
into a national union (of, say, miners or metal workers). Each
union was autonomous and all officials were part-time (and paid
their normal wages if they missed work on union business). The
tactics of syndicalism were direct action and solidarity and its
aim was to replace capitalism by the unions providing the basic
framework of the new, free, society.
Thus, for anarcho-syndicalism, "the trade union is by no means a
mere transitory phenomenon bound up with the duration of capitalist
society, it is the germ of the Socialist economy of the future,
the elementary school of Socialism in general." The "economic
fighting organisation of the workers" gives their members "every
opportunity for direct action in their struggles for daily bread,
it also provides them with the necessary preliminaries for carrying
through the reorganisation of social life on a [libertarian] Socialist
plan by them own strength." [Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism,
p. 59 and p. 62] Anarcho-syndicalism, to use the expression of the
I.W.W., aims to build the new world in the shell of the old.
In the period from the 1890's to the outbreak of World War I,
anarchists built revolutionary unions in most European countries
(particularly in Spain, Italy and France). In addition, anarchists
in South and North America were also successful in organising
syndicalist unions (particularly Cuba, Argentina, Mexico and
Brazil). Almost all industrialised countries had some syndicalist
movement, although Europe and South America had the biggest and
strongest ones. These unions were organised in a confederal manner,
from the bottom up, along anarchist lines. They fought with
capitalists on a day-to-day basis around the issue of better
wages and working conditions and the state for social reforms, but
they also sought to overthrow capitalism through the revolutionary
general strike.
Thus hundreds of thousands of workers around the world were applying
anarchist ideas in everyday life, proving that anarchy was no utopian
dream but a practical method of organising on a wide scale. That
anarchist organisational techniques encouraged member participation,
empowerment and militancy, and that they also successfully fought for
reforms and promoted class consciousness, can be seen in the growth
of anarcho-syndicalist unions and their impact on the labour movement.
The Industrial Workers of the World, for example, still inspires union
activists and has, throughout its long history, provided many union
songs and slogans.
However, as a mass movement, syndicalism effectively ended by the 1930s.
This was due to two factors. Firstly, most of the syndicalist unions
were severely repressed just after World War I. In the immediate
post-war years they reached their height. This wave of militancy was
known as the "red years" in Italy, where it attained its high point
with factory occupations (see section A.5.5). But these years also
saw the destruction of these unions in country after county. In the
USA, for example, the I.W.W. was crushed by a wave of repression backed
whole-heartedly by the media, the state, and the capitalist class.
Europe saw capitalism go on the offensive with a new weapon -- fascism.
Fascism arose (first in Italy and, most infamously, in Germany) as an
attempt by capitalism to physically smash the organisations the working
class had built. This was due to radicalism that had spread across
Europe in the wake of the war ending, inspired by the example of Russia.
Numerous near revolutions had terrified the bourgeoisie, who turned to
fascism to save their system.
In country after country, anarchists were forced to flee into exile,
vanish from sight, or became victims of assassins or concentration
camps after their (often heroic) attempts at fighting fascism failed.
In Portugal, for example, the 100,000 strong anarcho-syndicalist CGT
union launched numerous revolts in the late 1920s and early 1930s
against fascism. In January 1934, the CGT called for a revolutionary
general strike which developed into a five day insurrection. A state
of siege was declared by the state, which used extensive force to crush
the rebellion. The CGT, whose militants had played a prominent and
courageous role in the insurrection, was completely smashed and Portugal
remained a fascist state for the next 40 years. [Phil Mailer, Portugal:
The Impossible Revolution, pp. 72-3] In Spain, the CNT (the most famous
anarcho-syndicalist union) fought a similar battle. By 1936, it claimed
one and a half million members. As in Italy and Portugal, the capitalist
class embraced fascism to save their power from the dispossessed, who
were becoming confident of their power and their right to manage their
own lives (see section A.5.6).
As well as fascism, syndicalism also faced the negative influence of
Leninism. The apparent success of the Russian revolution led many
activists to turn to authoritarian politics, particularly in English
speaking countries and, to a lesser extent, France. Such notable
syndicalist activists as Tom Mann in England, William Gallacher in
Scotland and William Foster in the USA became Communists (the last
two, it should be noted, became Stalinist). Moreover, Communist
parties deliberately undermined the libertarian unions, encouraging
fights and splits (as, for example, in the I.W.W.). After the end of
the Second World War, the Stalinists finished off what fascism had
started in Eastern Europe and destroyed the anarchist and syndicalist
movements in such places as Bulgaria and Poland. In Cuba, Castro
also followed Lenin's example and did what the Batista and Machado
dictatorship's could not, namely smash the influential anarchist
and syndicalist movements (see Frank Fernandez's Cuban Anarchism
for a history of this movement from its origins in the 1860s to
the 21st century).
So by the start of the second world war, the large and powerful anarchist
movements of Italy, Spain, Poland, Bulgaria and Portugal had been crushed
by fascism (but not, we must stress, without a fight). When necessary,
the capitalists supported authoritarian states in order to crush the
labour movement and make their countries safe for capitalism. Only Sweden
escaped this trend, where the syndicalist union the SAC is still organising
workers. It is, in fact, like many other syndicalist unions active today,
growing as workers turn away from bureaucratic unions whose leaders seem
more interested in protecting their privileges and cutting deals with
management than defending their members. In France, Spain and Italy and
elsewhere, syndicalist unions are again on the rise, showing that
anarchist ideas are applicable in everyday life.
Finally, it must be stressed that syndicalism has its roots in the
ideas of the earliest anarchists and, consequently, was not invented in
the 1890s. It is true that development of syndicalism came about, in
part, as a reaction to the disastrous "propaganda by deed" period,
in which individual anarchists assassinated government leaders in
attempts to provoke a popular uprising and in revenge for the mass
murders of the Communards and other rebels (see
section A.2.18 for
details). But in response to this failed and counterproductive campaign,
anarchists went back to their roots and to the ideas of Bakunin. Thus,
as recognised by the likes of Kropotkin and Malatesta, syndicalism was
simply a return to the ideas current in the libertarian wing of the
First International.
Thus we find Bakunin arguing that "it is necessary to organise
the power of the proletariat. But this organisation must be the
work of the proletariat itself . . . Organise, constantly organise
the international militant solidarity of the workers, in every trade
and country, and remember that however weak you are as isolated
individuals or districts, you will constitute a tremendous,
invincible power by means of universal co-operation." As one
American activist commented, this is "the same militant spirit
that breathes now in the best expressions of the Syndicalist and
I.W.W. movements" both of which express "a strong world wide revival
of the ideas for which Bakunin laboured throughout his life." [Max
Baginski, Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth,
p. 71] As with the syndicalists, Bakunin stressed the "organisation
of trade sections, their federation . . . bear in themselves the
living germs of the new social order, which is to replace the
bourgeois world. They are creating not only the ideas but also the
facts of the future itself." [quoted by Rudolf Rocker, Op. Cit.,
p. 50]
Such ideas were repeated by other libertarians. Eugene Varlin, whose
role in the Paris Commune ensured his death, advocated a socialism
of associations, arguing in 1870 that syndicates were the "natural
elements" for the rebuilding of society: "it is they that can easily
be transformed into producer associations; it is they that can
put into practice the retooling of society and the organisation
of production." [quoted by Martin Phillip Johnson, The Paradise of
Association, p. 139] As we discussed in
section A.5.2, the Chicago
Anarchists held similar views, seeing the labour movement as both the
means of achieving anarchy and the framework of the free society.
As Lucy Parsons (the wife of Albert) put it "we hold that the granges,
trade-unions, Knights of Labour assemblies, etc., are the embryonic
groups of the ideal anarchistic society . . ." [contained in Albert R.
Parsons, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis, p. 110]
These ideas fed into the revolutionary unionism of the I.W.W. As one
historian notes, the "proceedings of the I.W.W.'s inaugural convention
indicate that the participants were not only aware of the 'Chicago Idea'
but were conscious of a continuity between their efforts and the struggles
of the Chicago anarchists to initiate industrial unionism." The Chicago
idea represented "the earliest American expression of syndicalism."
[Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November, p. 71]
Thus, syndicalism and anarchism are not differing theories but, rather,
different interpretations of the same ideas (see for a fuller discussion
section H.2.8). While not all syndicalists are anarchists (some Marxists
have proclaimed support for syndicalism) and not all anarchists are
syndicalists (see section J.3.9
for a discussion why), all social
anarchists see the need for taking part in the labour and other
popular movements and encouraging libertarian forms of organisation
and struggle within them. By doing this, inside and outside of syndicalist
unions, anarchists are showing the validity of our ideas. For, as
Kropotkin stressed, the "next revolution must from its inception
bring about the seizure of the entire social wealth by the workers
in order to transform it into common property. This revolution can
succeed only through the workers, only if the urban and rural workers
everywhere carry out this objective themselves. To that end, they
must initiate their own action in the period before the revolution;
this can happen only if there is a strong workers' organisation."
[Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, p. 20] Such popular
self-managed organisations cannot be anything but "anarchy in action."
The Russian Revolution, like most history, is a good example
of the maxim "history is written by those who win." Most
capitalist histories of the period between 1917 and 1921
ignore what the anarchist Voline called "the unknown
revolution" -- the revolution called forth from below
by the actions of ordinary people. Leninist accounts, at
best, praise this autonomous activity of workers so long
as it coincides with their own party line but radically
condemn it (and attribute it with the basest motives) as
soon as it strays from that line. Thus Leninist accounts
will praise the workers when they move ahead of the
Bolsheviks (as in the spring and summer of 1917) but
will condemn them when they oppose Bolshevik policy once
the Bolsheviks are in power. At worse, Leninist accounts
portray the movement and struggles of the masses as little
more than a backdrop to the activities of the vanguard party.
For anarchists, however, the Russian Revolution is seen
as a classic example of a social revolution in which the
self-activity of working people played a key role. In
their soviets, factory committees and other class
organisations, the Russian masses were trying to
transform society from a class-ridden, hierarchical
statist regime into one based on liberty, equality and
solidarity. As such, the initial months of the Revolution
seemed to confirm Bakunin's prediction that the "future
social organisation must be made solely from the bottom
upwards, by the free associations or federations of
workers, firstly in their unions, then in the communes,
regions, nations and finally in a great federation,
international and universal." [Michael Bakunin: Selected
Writings, p. 206] The soviets and factory committees
expressed concretely Bakunin's ideas and Anarchists
played an important role in the struggle.
The initial overthrow of the Tsar came from the direct action of
the masses. In February 1917, the women of Petrograd erupted in
bread riots. On February 18th, the workers of the Putilov Works
in Petrograd went on strike. By February 22nd, the strike had
spread to other factories. Two days later, 200 000 workers
were on strike and by February 25th the strike was virtually
general. The same day also saw the first bloody clashes between
protestors and the army. The turning point came on the 27th, when
some troops went over to the revolutionary masses, sweeping along
other units. This left the government without its means of
coercion, the Tsar abdicated and a provisional government was
formed.
So spontaneous was this movement that all the political parties
were left behind. This included the Bolsheviks, with the
"Petrograd organisation of the Bolsheviks oppos[ing] the
calling of strikes precisely on the eve of the revolution
destined to overthrow the Tsar. Fortunately, the workers ignored
the Bolshevik 'directives' and went on strike anyway . . .
Had the workers followed its guidance, it is doubtful
that the revolution would have occurred when it did."
[Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 194]
The revolution carried on in this vein of direct action from
below until the new, "socialist" state was powerful enough to
stop it.
For the Left, the end of Tsarism was the culmination of
years of effort by socialists and anarchists everywhere. It
represented the progressive wing of human thought overcoming
traditional oppression, and as such was duly praised by
leftists around the world. However, in Russia things
were progressing. In the workplaces and streets and on the
land, more and more people became convinced that abolishing
feudalism politically was not enough. The overthrow of the
Tsar made little real difference if feudal exploitation still
existed in the economy, so workers started to seize their
workplaces and peasants, the land. All across Russia,
ordinary people started to build their own organisations,
unions, co-operatives, factory committees and councils (or
"soviets" in Russian). These organisations were initially
organised in anarchist fashion, with recallable delegates
and being federated with each other.
Needless to say, all the political parties and organisations
played a role in this process. The two wings of the Marxist
social-democrats were active (the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks),
as were the Social Revolutionaries (a populist peasant based
party) and the anarchists. The anarchists participated in this
movement, encouraging all tendencies to self-management and
urging the overthrow of the provisional government. They
argued that it was necessary to transform the revolution
from a purely political one into an economic/social one. Until
the return of Lenin from exile, they were the only political
tendency who thought along those lines.
Lenin convinced his party to adopt the slogan "All Power
to the Soviets" and push the revolution forward. This meant
a sharp break with previous Marxist positions, leading one
ex-Bolshevik turned Menshevik to comment that Lenin had
"made himself a candidate for one European throne that has
been vacant for thirty years -- the throne of Bakunin!"
[quoted by Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution,
p. 40] The Bolsheviks now turned to winning mass support,
championing direct action and supporting the radical actions
of the masses, policies in the past associated with anarchism
("the Bolsheviks launched . . . slogans which until then
had been particularly and insistently been voiced by the
Anarchists." [Voline, The Unknown Revolution, p. 210]).
Soon they were winning more and more votes in the soviet and
factory committee elections. As Alexander Berkman argues, the
"Anarchist mottoes proclaimed by the Bolsheviks did not fail
to bring results. The masses relied to their flag." [What is
Anarchism?, p. 120]
The anarchists were also influential at this time. Anarchists
were particularly active in the movement for workers
self-management of production which existed around the
factory committees (see M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and
Workers Control for details). They were arguing for workers
and peasants to expropriate the owning class, abolish all
forms of government and re-organise society from the bottom
up using their own class organisations -- the soviets, the
factory committees, co-operatives and so on. They could
also influence the direction of struggle. As Alexander
Rabinowitch (in his study of the July uprising of 1917)
notes:
Indeed, one leading Bolshevik stated in June, 1917 (in
response to a rise in anarchist influence), "[b]y fencing
ourselves off from the Anarchists, we may fence ourselves
off from the masses." [quoted by Alexander Rabinowitch,
Op. Cit., p. 102]
The anarchists operated with the Bolsheviks during the
October Revolution which overthrew the provisional
government. But things changed once the authoritarian
socialists of the Bolshevik party had seized power.
While both anarchists and Bolsheviks used many of the
same slogans, there were important differences between
the two. As Voline argued, "[f]rom the lips and pens of
the Anarchists, those slogans were sincere and concrete,
for they corresponded to their principles and called for
action entirely in conformity with such principles. But
with the Bolsheviks, the same slogans meant practical
solutions totally different from those of the libertarians
and did not tally with the ideas which the slogans
appeared to express." [The Unknown Revolution,
p. 210]
Take, for example, the slogan "All power to the Soviets."
For anarchists it meant exactly that -- organs for the
working class to run society directly, based on mandated,
recallable delegates. For the Bolsheviks, that slogan was
simply the means for a Bolshevik government to be formed
over and above the soviets. The difference is important, "for
the Anarchists declared, if 'power' really should belong
to the soviets, it could not belong to the Bolshevik
party, and if it should belong to that Party, as the
Bolsheviks envisaged, it could not belong to the soviets."
[Voline, Op. Cit., p. 213] Reducing the soviets to simply
executing the decrees of the central (Bolshevik)
government and having their All-Russian Congress be
able to recall the government (i.e. those with real
power) does not equal "all power," quite the reverse.
Similarly with the term "workers' control of production."
Before the October Revolution Lenin saw "workers' control"
purely in terms of the "universal, all-embracing workers'
control over the capitalists." [Will the Bolsheviks
Maintain Power?, p. 52] He did not see it in terms of
workers' management of production itself (i.e. the
abolition of wage labour) via federations of factory
committees. Anarchists and the workers' factory committees
did. As S.A. Smith correctly notes, Lenin used "the term
['workers' control'] in a very different sense from that
of the factory committees." In fact Lenin's "proposals . . .
[were] thoroughly statist and centralist in character,
whereas the practice of the factory committees was
essentially local and autonomous." [Red Petrograd,
p. 154] For anarchists, "if the workers' organisations
were capable of exercising effective control [over
their bosses], then they also were capable of
guaranteeing all production. In such an event, private
industry could be eliminated quickly but progressively,
and replaced by collective industry. Consequently,
the Anarchists rejected the vague nebulous slogan of
'control of production.' They advocated expropriation
-- progressive, but immediate -- of private industry
by the organisations of collective production."
[Voline, Op. Cit., p. 221]
Once in power, the Bolsheviks systematically undermined the
popular meaning of workers' control and replaced it with their
own, statist conception. "On three occasions," one historian
notes, "in the first months of Soviet power, the [factory]
committee leaders sought to bring their model into being.
At each point the party leadership overruled them. The
result was to vest both managerial and control powers
in organs of the state which were subordinate to the
central authorities, and formed by them." [Thomas F.
Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia, p. 38]
This process ultimately resulted in Lenin arguing for, and
introducing, "one-man management" armed with "dictatorial"
power (with the manager appointed from above by the state)
in April 1918. This process is documented in Maurice
Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, which
also indicates the clear links between Bolshevik practice
and Bolshevik ideology as well as how both differed from
popular activity and ideas.
Hence the comments by Russian Anarchist Peter Arshinov:
Initially, anarchists had supported the Bolsheviks, since the
Bolshevik leaders had hidden their state-building ideology
behind support for the soviets (as socialist historian Samuel
Farber notes, the anarchists "had actually been an unnamed
coalition partner of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution."
[Before Stalinism, p. 126]). However, this support quickly
"withered away" as the Bolsheviks showed that they were, in
fact, not seeking true socialism but were instead securing power
for themselves and pushing not for collective ownership of land
and productive resources but for government ownership. The
Bolsheviks, as noted, systematically undermined the workers'
control/self-management movement in favour of capitalist-like
forms of workplace management based around "one-man management"
armed with "dictatorial powers."
As regards the soviets, the Bolsheviks systematically undermining
what limited independence and democracy they had. In response to
the "great Bolshevik losses in the soviet elections" during the
spring and summer of 1918 "Bolshevik armed force usually overthrew
the results of these provincial elections." Also, the "government
continually postponed the new general elections to the Petrograd
Soviet, the term of which had ended in March 1918. Apparently,
the government feared that the opposition parties would show
gains." [Samuel Farber, Op. Cit., p. 24 and p. 22] In the
Petrograd elections, the Bolsheviks "lost the absolute majority
in the soviet they had previously enjoyed" but remained the
largest party. However, the results of the Petrograd soviet
elections were irrelevant as a "Bolshevik victory was
assured by the numerically quite significant representation
now given to trade unions, district soviets, factory-shop
committees, district workers conferences, and Red Army and
naval units, in which the Bolsheviks had overwhelming
strength." [Alexander Rabinowitch, "The Evolution of Local
Soviets in Petrograd", pp. 20-37, Slavic Review, Vol. 36,
No. 1, p. 36f] In other words, the Bolsheviks had undermined
the democratic nature of the soviet by swamping it by their
own delegates. Faced with rejection in the soviets, the
Bolsheviks showed that for them "soviet power" equalled party power.
To stay in power, the Bolsheviks had to destroy the soviets,
which they did. The soviet system remained "soviet" in name
only. Indeed, from 1919 onwards Lenin, Trotsky and other
leading Bolsheviks were admitting that they had created a
party dictatorship and, moreover, that such a dictatorship
was essential for any revolution (Trotsky supported party
dictatorship even after the rise of Stalinism).
The Red Army, moreover, no longer was a democratic organisation.
In March of 1918 Trotsky had abolished the election of officers
and soldier committees:
As Maurice Brinton correctly summarises:
Unsurprisingly, Samuel Farber notes that "there is no
evidence indicating that Lenin or any of the mainstream
Bolshevik leaders lamented the loss of workers' control or
of democracy in the soviets, or at least referred to these
losses as a retreat, as Lenin declared with the replacement
of War Communism by NEP in 1921." [Before Stalinism,
p. 44]
Thus after the October Revolution, anarchists started to denounce
the Bolshevik regime and call for a "Third Revolution"
which would finally free the masses from all bosses (capitalist or
socialist). They exposed the fundamental difference between the
rhetoric of Bolshevism (as expressed, for example, in Lenin's
State and Revolution) with its reality. Bolshevism in power
had proved Bakunin's prediction that the "dictatorship of
the proletariat" would become the "dictatorship
over the proletariat" by the leaders of the Communist Party.
The influence of the anarchists started to grow. As Jacques
Sadoul (a French officer) noted in early 1918:
By April 1918, the Bolsheviks began the physical suppression of their
anarchist rivals. On April 12th, 1918, the Cheka (the secret police
formed by Lenin in December, 1917) attacked anarchist centres in
Moscow. Those in other cities were attacked soon after. As well
as repressing their most vocal opponents on the left, the Bolsheviks
were restricting the freedom of the masses they claimed to be
protecting. Democratic soviets, free speech, opposition political
parties and groups, self-management in the workplace and
on the land -- all were destroyed in the name of "socialism."
All this happened, we must stress, before the start of the Civil
War in late May, 1918, which most supporters of Leninism blame
for the Bolsheviks' authoritarianism. During the civil war, this
process accelerated, with the Bolsheviks' systematically repressing
opposition from all quarters -- including the strikes and protests
of the very class who they claimed was exercising its "dictatorship"
while they were in power!
It is important to stress that this process had started
well before the start of the civil war, confirming anarchist
theory that a "workers' state" is a contraction in terms. For
anarchists, the Bolshevik substitution of party power for
workers power (and the conflict between the two) did not
come as a surprise. The state is the delegation of power --
as such, it means that the idea of a "workers' state" expressing
"workers' power" is a logical impossibility. If workers are
running society then power rests in their hands. If a state
exists then power rests in the hands of the handful of people
at the top, not in the hands of all. The state was designed
for minority rule. No state can be an organ of working class
(i.e. majority) self-management due to its basic nature,
structure and design. For this reason anarchists have argued
for a bottom-up federation of workers' councils as the
agent of revolution and the means of managing society
after capitalism and the state have been abolished.
As we discuss in section H,
the degeneration of the Bolsheviks
from a popular working class party into dictators over the
working class did not occur by accident. A combination of
political ideas and the realities of state power (and the
social relationships it generates) could not help but result
in such a degeneration. The political ideas of Bolshevism,
with its vanguardism, fear of spontaneity and identification
of party power with working class power inevitably meant
that the party would clash with those whom it claimed to
represent. After all, if the party is the vanguard then,
automatically, everyone else is a "backward" element. This
meant that if the working class resisted Bolshevik policies
or rejected them in soviet elections, then the working class
was "wavering" and being influenced by "petty-bourgeois" and
"backward" elements. Vanguardism breeds elitism and, when
combined with state power, dictatorship.
State power, as anarchists have always stressed, means the
delegation of power into the hands of a few. This automatically
produces a class division in society -- those with power
and those without. As such, once in power the Bolsheviks were
isolated from the working class. The Russian Revolution
confirmed Malatesta's argument that a "government, that is a
group of people entrusted with making laws and empowered to
use the collective power to oblige each individual to obey
them, is already a privileged class and cut off from the
people. As any constituted body would do, it will instinctively
seek to extend its powers, to be beyond public control, to
impose its own policies and to give priority to its special
interests. Having been put in a privileged position, the
government is already at odds with the people whose strength
it disposes of." [Anarchy, p. 34] A highly centralised state
such as the Bolsheviks built would reduce accountability
to a minimum while at the same time accelerating the isolation
of the rulers from the ruled. The masses were no longer
a source of inspiration and power, but rather an alien
group whose lack of "discipline" (i.e. ability to follow
orders) placed the revolution in danger. As one Russian
Anarchist argued,
For this reason anarchists, while agreeing that there is an
uneven development of political ideas within the working class,
reject the idea that "revolutionaries" should take power on
behalf of working people. Only when working people actually
run society themselves will a revolution be successful. For
anarchists, this meant that "[e]ffective emancipation can
be achieved only by the direct, widespread, and independent
action . . . of the workers themselves, grouped . . . in
their own class organisations . . . on the basis of
concrete action and self-government, helped but not
governed, by revolutionaries working in the very midst
of, and not above the mass and the professional, technical,
defence and other branches." [Voline, Op. Cit.,
p. 197] By
substituting party power for workers power, the Russian
Revolution had made its first fatal step. Little wonder
that the following prediction (from November 1917)
made by anarchists in Russia came true:
The so-called "workers' state" could not be participatory
or empowering for working class people (as the Marxists
claimed) simply because state structures are not designed
for that. Created as instruments of minority rule, they
cannot be transformed into (nor "new" ones created which
are) a means of liberation for the working classes. As
Kropotkin put it, Anarchists "maintain that the State
organisation, having been the force to which minorities
resorted for establishing and organising their power
over the masses, cannot be the force which will
serve to destroy these privileges." [Anarchism, p. 170] In the words of
an anarchist pamphlet written in 1918:
For insiders, the Revolution had died a few months after the
Bolsheviks took over. To the outside world, the Bolsheviks and
the USSR came to represent "socialism" even as they systematically
destroyed the basis of real socialism. By transforming the soviets
into state bodies, substituting party power for soviet power,
undermining the factory committees, eliminating democracy in
the armed forces and workplaces, repressing the political
opposition and workers' protests, the Bolsheviks effectively
marginalised the working class from its own revolution.
Bolshevik ideology and practice were themselves important
and sometimes decisive factors in the degeneration of the
revolution and the ultimate rise of Stalinism.
As anarchists had predicted for decades previously, in the
space of a few months, and before the start of the Civil War,
the Bolshevik's "workers' state" had become, like any state,
an alien power over the working class and an instrument of
minority rule (in this case, the rule of the party). The Civil
War accelerated this process and soon party dictatorship was
introduced (indeed, leading Bolsheviks began arguing that it
was essential in any revolution). The Bolsheviks put down the
libertarian socialist elements within their country, with the
crushing of the uprising at Kronstadt and the Makhnovist
movement in the Ukraine being the final nails in the coffin
of socialism and the subjugation of the soviets.
The Kronstadt uprising of February, 1921, was, for anarchists, of
immense importance (see the appendix "What was the Kronstadt
Rebellion?" for a full discussion of this
uprising). The uprising started when the sailors of Kronstadt
supported the striking workers of Petrograd in February, 1921.
They raised a 15 point resolution, the first point of which
was a call for soviet democracy. The Bolsheviks slandered the
Kronstadt rebels as counter-revolutionaries and crushed the
revolt. For anarchists, this was significant as the repression
could not be justified in terms of the Civil War (which had
ended months before) and because it was a major uprising of
ordinary people for real socialism. As Voline puts it:
In the Ukraine, anarchist ideas were most successfully applied.
In areas under the protection of the Makhnovist movement, working
class people organised their own lives directly, based on their
own ideas and needs -- true social self-determination. Under the
leadership of Nestor Makhno, a self-educated peasant, the movement
not only fought against both Red and White dictatorships but also
resisted the Ukrainian nationalists. In opposition to the call
for "national self-determination," i.e. a new Ukrainian state,
Makhno called instead for working class self-determination in
the Ukraine and across the world. Makhno inspired his fellow
peasants and workers to fight for real freedom:
To ensure this end, the Makhnovists refused to set up
governments in the towns and cities they liberated, instead
urging the creation of free soviets so that the working
people could govern themselves. Taking the example of
Aleksandrovsk, once they had liberated the city the
Makhnovists "immediately invited the working population
to participate in a general conference . . . it was
proposed that the workers organise the life of the city
and the functioning of the factories with their own
forces and their own organisations . . . The first
conference was followed by a second. The problems of
organising life according to principles of self-management
by workers were examined and discussed with animation
by the masses of workers, who all welcomed this ideas
with the greatest enthusiasm . . . Railroad workers
took the first step . . . They formed a committee
charged with organising the railway network of the
region . . . From this point, the proletariat of
Aleksandrovsk began to turn systematically to the problem
of creating organs of self-management."
[Op. Cit., p. 149]
The Makhnovists argued that the "freedom of the workers and
peasants is their own, and not subject to any restriction. It
is up to the workers and peasants themselves to act, to
organise themselves, to agree among themselves in all
aspects of their lives, as they see fit and desire . . .
The Makhnovists can do no more than give aid and counsel . . .
In no circumstances can they, nor do they wish to, govern."
[Peter Arshinov, quoted by Guerin, Op. Cit., p. 99] In Alexandrovsk, the Bolsheviks proposed to the Makhnovists
spheres of action - their Revkom (Revolutionary Committee)
would handle political affairs and the Makhnovists military
ones. Makhno advised them "to go and take up some honest
trade instead of seeking to impose their will on the
workers." [Peter Arshinov in The Anarchist Reader,
p. 141]
They also organised free agricultural communes which
"[a]dmittedly . . . were not numerous, and included only
a minority of the population . . . But what was most
precious was that these communes were formed by the poor
peasants themselves. The Makhnovists never exerted any
pressure on the peasants, confining themselves to propagating
the idea of free communes." [Arshinov, History of the
Makhnovist Movement, p. 87] Makhno played an
important role in abolishing the holdings of the landed
gentry. The local soviet and their district and regional
congresses equalised the use of the land between all
sections of the peasant community. [Op. Cit., pp. 53-4]
Moreover, the Makhnovists took the time and energy to involve
the whole population in discussing the development of the
revolution, the activities of the army and social policy.
They organised numerous conferences of workers', soldiers'
and peasants' delegates to discuss political and social
issues as well as free soviets, unions and communes. They
organised a regional congress of peasants and workers when
they had liberated Aleksandrovsk. When the Makhnovists
tried to convene the third regional congress of peasants,
workers and insurgents in April 1919 and an extraordinary
congress of several regions in June 1919 the Bolsheviks
viewed them as counter-revolutionary, tried to ban them
and declared their organisers and delegates outside the law.
The Makhnovists replied by holding the conferences anyway
and asking "[c]an there exist laws made by a few people
who call themselves revolutionaries, which permit them to
outlaw a whole people who are more revolutionary than they
are themselves?" and "[w]hose interests should the revolution
defend: those of the Party or those of the people who set
the revolution in motion with their blood?" Makhno himself
stated that he "consider[ed] it an inviolable right of the
workers and peasants, a right won by the revolution, to call
conferences on their own account, to discuss their affairs."
[Op. Cit., p. 103 and p. 129]
In addition, the Makhnovists "fully applied the revolutionary
principles of freedom of speech, of thought, of the press,
and of political association. In all cities and towns
occupied by the Makhnovists, they began by lifting all
the prohibitions and repealing all the restrictions
imposed on the press and on political organisations by
one or another power." Indeed, the "only restriction that
the Makhnovists considered necessary to impose on the
Bolsheviks, the left Socialist-Revolutionaries and other
statists was a prohibition on the formation of those
'revolutionary committees' which sought to impose a
dictatorship over the people." [Op. Cit.,
p. 153 and p. 154]
The Makhnovists rejected the Bolshevik corruption of the
soviets and instead proposed "the free and completely
independent soviet system of working people without
authorities and their arbitrary laws." Their
proclamations stated that the "working people
themselves must freely choose their own soviets,
which carry out the will and desires of the working
people themselves, that is to say. ADMINISTRATIVE,
not ruling soviets." Economically, capitalism would
be abolished along with the state - the land and
workshops "must belong to the working people themselves,
to those who work in them, that is to say, they must be
socialised." [Op. Cit., p. 271 and p. 273]
The army itself, in stark contrast to the Red Army, was
fundamentally democratic (although, of course, the horrific
nature of the civil war did result in a few deviations from
the ideal -- however, compared to the regime imposed on the
Red Army by Trotsky, the Makhnovists were much more democratic
movement).
The anarchist experiment of self-management in the Ukraine came
to a bloody end when the Bolsheviks turned on the Makhnovists
(their former allies against the "Whites," or pro-Tsarists)
when they were no longer needed. This important movement is
fully discussed in the appendix "Why does the Makhnovist
movement show there is an alternative to Bolshevism?" of our FAQ. However, we must
stress here the one obvious lesson of the Makhnovist movement,
namely that the dictatorial policies pursued by the Bolsheviks
were not imposed on them by objective circumstances. Rather,
the political ideas of Bolshevism had a clear influence in
the decisions they made. After all, the Makhnovists were active
in the same Civil War and yet did not pursue the same policies
of party power as the Bolsheviks did. Rather, they successfully
encouraged working class freedom, democracy and power in
extremely difficult circumstances (and in the face of strong
Bolshevik opposition to those policies). The received wisdom
on the left is that there was no alternative open to the
Bolsheviks. The experience of the Makhnovists disproves this.
What the masses of people, as well as those in power, do and
think politically is as much part of the process determining
the outcome of history as are the objective obstacles that
limit the choices available. Clearly, ideas do matter and,
as such, the Makhnovists show that there was (and is) a
practical alternative to Bolshevism -- anarchism.
The last anarchist march in Moscow until 1987 took place at the
funeral of Kropotkin in 1921, when over 10,000 marched behind
his coffin. They carried black banners declaring "Where there
is authority, there is no freedom" and "The Liberation of the
working class is the task of the workers themselves." As the
procession passed the Butyrki prison, the inmates sang anarchist
songs and shook the bars of their cells.
Anarchist opposition within Russia to the Bolshevik regime started
in 1918. They were the first left-wing group to be repressed by the
new "revolutionary" regime. Outside of Russia, anarchists continued
to support the Bolsheviks until news came from anarchist sources
about the repressive nature of the Bolshevik regime (until then,
many had discounted negative reports as being from pro-capitalist
sources). Once these reliable reports came in, anarchists across
the globe rejected Bolshevism and its system of party power and
repression. The experience of Bolshevism confirmed Bakunin's
prediction that Marxism meant "the highly despotic government
of the masses by a new and very small aristocracy of real or
pretended scholars. The people are not learned, so they will
be liberated from the cares of government and included in
entirety in the governed herd." [Statism and Anarchy,
pp. 178-9]
From about 1921 on, anarchists outside of Russia started describing
the USSR as a "state-capitalist" nation to indicate that although
individual bosses might have been eliminated, the Soviet state
bureaucracy played the same role as individual bosses do in the
West (anarchists within Russia had been calling it that since
1918). For anarchists, "the Russian revolution . . . is trying
to reach . . . economic equality . . . this effort has been made
in Russia under a strongly centralised party dictatorship . . .
this effort to build a communist republic on the basis of a
strongly centralised state communism under the iron law of a
party dictatorship is bound to end in failure. We are learning
to know in Russia how not to introduce communism."
[Anarchism, p. 254]
For more information on the Russian Revolution and the role
played by anarchists, see the appendix on
"The Russian Revolution"
of the FAQ. As well as covering the Kronstadt uprising and the
Makhnovists, it discusses why the revolution failed, the role of
Bolshevik ideology played in that failure and whether there were
any alternatives to Bolshevism.
The following books are also recommended: The Unknown Revolution
by Voline; The Guillotine at Work by G.P. Maximov; The Bolshevik
Myth and The Russian Tragedy, both by Alexander Berkman; The
Bolsheviks and Workers Control by M. Brinton; The Kronstadt
Uprising by Ida Mett; The History of the Makhnovist Movement
by Peter Arshinov; My Disillusionment in Russia and Living
My Life by Emma Goldman.
Many of these books were written by anarchists active during
the revolution, many imprisoned by the Bolsheviks and deported
to the West due to international pressure exerted by
anarcho-syndicalist delegates to Moscow who the Bolsheviks
were trying to win over to Leninism. The majority of such
delegates stayed true to their libertarian politics and
convinced their unions to reject Bolshevism and break with
Moscow. By the early 1920's all the anarcho-syndicalist union
confederations had joined with the anarchists in rejecting
the "socialism" in Russia as state capitalism and party
dictatorship.
Across Europe, anarchist ideas became more popular and anarcho-syndicalist
unions grew in size. For example, in Britain, the ferment produced the
shop stewards' movement and the strikes on Clydeside; Germany saw the
rise of IWW inspired industrial unionism and a libertarian form of
Marxism called "Council Communism"; Spain saw a massive growth in the
anarcho-syndicalist CNT. In addition, it also, unfortunately, saw the
rise and growth of both social democratic and communist parties. Italy
was no exception.
In Turin, a new rank-and-file movement was developing. This
movement was based around the "internal commissions" (elected
ad hoc grievance committees). These new organisations were
based directly on the group of people who worked together
in a particular work shop, with a mandated and recallable
shop steward elected for each group of 15 to 20 or so
workers. The assembly of all the shop stewards in a given
plant then elected the "internal commission" for that
facility, which was directly and constantly responsible
to the body of shop stewards, which was called the
"factory council."
Between November 1918 and March 1919, the internal commissions
had become a national issue within the trade union movement.
On February 20, 1919, the Italian Federation of Metal Workers
(FIOM) won a contract providing for the election of "internal
commissions" in the factories. The workers subsequently tried to
transform these organs of workers' representation into factory
councils with a managerial function. By May Day 1919, the
internal commissions "were becoming the dominant force within
the metalworking industry and the unions were in danger of
becoming marginal administrative units. Behind these alarming
developments, in the eyes of reformists, lay the libertarians."
[Carl Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists, p. 135] By November
1919 the internal commissions of Turin were transformed into
factory councils.
The movement in Turin is usually associated with the weekly
L'Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), which first appeared on
May 1, 1919. As Daniel Guerin summarises, it was "edited by
a left socialist, Antonio Gramsci, assisted by a professor
of philosophy at Turin University with anarchist ideas,
writing under the pseudonym of Carlo Petri, and also of a
whole nucleus of Turin libertarians. In the factories, the
Ordine Nuovo group was supported by a number of people,
especially the anarcho-syndicalist militants of the metal
trades, Pietro Ferrero and Maurizio Garino. The manifesto
of Ordine Nuovo was signed by socialists and libertarians
together, agreeing to regard the factory councils as
'organs suited to future communist management of both
the individual factory and the whole society.'"
[Anarchism, p. 109]
The developments in Turin should not be taken in isolation.
All across Italy, workers and peasants were taking action.
In late February 1920, a rash of factory occupations
broke out in Liguria, Piedmont and Naples. In Liguria, the
workers occupied the metal and shipbuilding plants in
Sestri Ponente, Cornigliano and Campi after a breakdown
of pay talks. For up to four days, under syndicalist
leadership, they ran the plants through factory councils.
During this period the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) grew
in size to around 800 000 members and the influence of the
Italian Anarchist Union (UAI) with its 20 000 members and
daily paper (Umanita Nova) grew correspondingly. As the
Welsh Marxist historian Gwyn A. Williams points out "Anarchists
and revolutionary syndicalists were the most consistently and
totally revolutionary group on the left . . . the most
obvious feature of the history of syndicalism and anarchism
in 1919-20: rapid and virtually continuous growth . . . The
syndicalists above all captured militant working-class opinion
which the socialist movement was utterly failing to capture."
[Proletarian Order, pp. 194-195] In Turin, libertarians
"worked within FIOM" and had been "heavily involved in the
Ordine Nuovo campaign from the beginning."
[Op. Cit.,
p. 195] Unsurprisingly, Ordone Nuovo was denounced as
"syndicalist" by other socialists.
It was the anarchists and syndicalists who first raised the
idea of occupying workplaces. Malatesta was discussing
this idea in Umanita Nova in March, 1920. In his words,
"General strikes of protest no longer upset anyone . . . One
must seek something else. We put forward an idea: take-over
of factories. . . the method certainly has a future, because
it corresponds to the ultimate ends of the workers' movement
and constitutes an exercise preparing one for the ultimate
act of expropriation." [Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 134] In the
same month, during "a strong syndicalist campaign to establish
councils in Mila, Armando Borghi [anarchist secretary of the
USI] called for mass factory occupations. In Turin, the
re-election of workshop commissars was just ending in a
two-week orgy of passionate discussion and workers caught
the fever. [Factory Council] Commissars began to call for
occupations." Indeed, "the council movement outside Turin
was essentially anarcho-syndicalist." Unsurprisingly,
the secretary of the syndicalist metal-workers "urged
support for the Turin councils because they represented
anti-bureaucratic direct action, aimed at control
of the factory and could be the first cells of syndicalist
industrial unions . . . The syndicalist congress voted
to support the councils. . . . Malatesta . . . supported
them as a form of direct action guaranteed to generate
rebelliousness . . . Umanita Nova and Guerra di Classe
[paper of the USI] became almost as committed to the
councils as L'Ordine Nuovo and the Turin edition of
Avanti." [Williams, Op. Cit., p. 200, p. 193 and
p. 196]
The upsurge in militancy soon provoked an employer
counter-offensive. The bosses organisation denounced
the factory councils and called for a mobilisation
against them. Workers were rebelling and refusing
to follow the bosses orders -- "indiscipline" was
rising in the factories. They won state support for
the enforcement of the existing industrial regulations.
The national contract won by the FIOM in 1919 had
provided that the internal commissions were banned from
the shop floor and restricted to non-working hours.
This meant that the activities of the shop stewards'
movement in Turin -- such as stopping work to hold shop
steward elections -- were in violation of the contract.
The movement was essentially being maintained through
mass insubordination. The bosses used this infringement
of the agreed contract as the means combating the factory
councils in Turin.
The showdown with the employers arrived in April, when a
general assembly of shop stewards at Fiat called for sit-in
strikes to protest the dismissal of several shop stewards.
In response the employers declared a general lockout. The
government supported the lockout with a mass show of force
and troops occupied the factories and mounted machine guns
posts at them. When the shop stewards movement decided to
surrender on the immediate issues in dispute after two
weeks on strike, the employers responded with demands that
the shop stewards councils be limited to non-working hours,
in accordance with the FIOM national contract, and that
managerial control be re-imposed.
These demands were aimed at the heart of the factory council
system and Turin labour movement responded with a massive
general strike in defence of it. In Turin, the strike was
total and it soon spread throughout the region of Piedmont
and involved 500 000 workers at its height. The Turin
strikers called for the strike to be extended nationally
and, being mostly led by socialists, they turned to the
CGL trade union and Socialist Party leaders, who rejected
their call.
The only support for the Turin general strike came from
unions that were mainly under anarcho-syndicalist influence,
such as the independent railway and the maritime workers
unions ("The syndicalists were the only ones to move."). The railway workers in
Pisa and Florence refused to transport troops who were
being sent to Turin. There were strikes all around Genoa,
among dock workers and in workplaces where the USI was a
major influence. So in spite of being "betrayed and abandoned
by the whole socialist movement," the April movement "still
found popular support" with "actions . . . either directly
led or indirectly inspired by anarcho-syndicalists."
In Turin itself, the anarchists and syndicalists were
"threatening to cut the council movement out from
under" Gramsci and the Ordine Nuovo group.
[Williams, Op. Cit., p. 207, p. 193 and p. 194]
Eventually the CGL leadership settled the strike on terms
that accepted the employers' main demand for limiting the
shop stewards' councils to non-working hours. Though the
councils were now much reduced in activity and shop floor
presence, they would yet see a resurgence of their position
during the September factory occupations.
The anarchists "accused the socialists of betrayal.
They criticised what they believed was a false sense
of discipline that had bound socialists to their own
cowardly leadership. They contrasted the discipline
that placed every movement under the 'calculations,
fears, mistakes and possible betrayals of the leaders'
to the other discipline of the workers of Sestri Ponente
who struck in solidarity with Turin, the discipline of
the railway workers who refused to transport security
forces to Turin and the anarchists and members of the
Unione Sindacale who forgot considerations of party
and sect to put themselves at the disposition of the
Torinesi." [Carl Levy, Op. Cit., p. 161] Sadly, this
top-down "discipline" of the socialists and their
unions would be repeated during the factory
occupations, with terrible results.
In September, 1920, there were large-scale stay-in
strikes in Italy in response to an owner wage cut
and lockout. "Central to the climate of the crisis
was the rise of the syndicalists." In mid-August,
the USI metal-workers "called for both unions to
occupy the factories" and called for "a preventive
occupation" against lock-outs. The USI saw this as the
"expropriation of the factories by the metal-workers"
(which must "be defended by all necessary measures") and
saw the need "to call the workers of other industries
into battle." [Williams, Op. Cit., p. 236, pp. 238-9]
Indeed, "[i]f the FIOM had not embraced the syndicalist
idea of an occupation of factories to counter an employer's
lockout, the USI may well have won significant support
from the politically active working class of Turin."
[Carl Levy, Op. Cit., p. 129] These strikes began in
the engineering factories and soon spread to railways,
road transport, and other industries, with peasants seizing
land. The strikers, however, did more than just occupy their
workplaces, they placed them under workers' self-management.
Soon over 500 000 "strikers" were at work, producing for
themselves. Errico Malatesta, who took part in these events,
writes:
Daniel Guerin provides a good summary of the extent of the movement:
Italy was "paralysed, with half a million workers occupying their
factories and raising red and black flags over them." The movement
spread throughout Italy, not only in the industrial heartland
around Milan, Turin and Genoa, but also in Rome, Florence,
Naples and Palermo. The "militants of the USI were certainly in
the forefront of the movement," while Umanita Nova argued that
"the movement is very serious and we must do everything we can
to channel it towards a massive extension." The persistent call
of the USI was for "an extension of the movement to the whole
of industry to institute their 'expropriating general strike.'"
[Williams, Op. Cit., p. 236 and pp. 243-4] Railway workers,
influenced by
the libertarians, refused to transport troops, workers went on
strike against the orders of the reformist unions and
peasants occupied the land. The anarchists whole-heartedly
supported the movement, unsurprisingly as the "occupation of
the factories and the land suited perfectly our programme of
action." [Malatesta, Op. Cit., p. 135] Luigi Fabbri described
the occupations as having "revealed a power in the proletariat
of which it had been unaware hitherto." [quoted by Paolo
Sprinao, The Occupation of the Factories, p. 134]
However, after four weeks of occupation, the workers decided to
leave the factories. This was because of the actions of the
socialist party and the reformist trade unions. They opposed
the movement and negotiated with the state for a return to
"normality" in exchange for a promise to extend workers'
control legally, in association with the bosses. The question
of revolution was decided by a vote of the CGL national
council in Milan on April 10-11th, without consulting the
syndicalist unions, after the Socialist Party leadership
refused to decide one way or the other.
Needless to say, this promise of "workers' control" was not
kept. The lack of independent inter-factory organisation made
workers dependent on trade union bureaucrats for information
on what was going on in other cities, and they used that power
to isolate factories, cities, and factories from each other.
This lead to a return to work, "in spite of the opposition of
individual anarchists dispersed among the factories."
[Malatesta, Op. Cit., p. 136] The local syndicalist union
confederations could not provide the necessary framework
for a fully co-ordinated occupation movement as the
reformist unions refused to work with them; and although
the anarchists were a large minority, they were still a
minority:
Malatesta addressed the workers of one of the factories at Milan.
He argued that "[t]hose who celebrate the agreement signed at
Rome [between the Confederazione and the capitalists] as a great
victory of yours are deceiving you. The victory in reality belongs
to Giolitti, to the government and the bourgeoisie who are saved
from the precipice over which they were hanging." During the
occupation the "bourgeoisie trembled, the government was powerless
to face the situation." Therefore:
Malatesta was proven correct. With the end of the occupations,
the only victors were the bourgeoisie and the government. Soon
the workers would face Fascism, but first, in October 1920,
"after the factories were evacuated," the government (obviously
knowing who the real threat was) "arrested the entire leadership
of the USI and UAI. The socialists did not respond" and
"more-or-less ignored the persecution of the libertarians
until the spring of 1921 when the aged Malatesta and other
imprisoned anarchists mounted a hunger strike from their
cells in Milan." [Carl Levy, Op. Cit., pp. 221-2] They were
acquitted after a four day trial.
The events of 1920 show four things. Firstly, that workers can
manage their own workplaces successfully by themselves, without
bosses. Secondly, on the need for anarchists to be involved in
the labour movement. Without the support of the USI, the Turin
movement would have been even more isolated than it was. Thirdly,
anarchists need to be organised to influence the class struggle.
The growth of the UAI and USI in terms of both influence and
size indicates the importance of this. Without the anarchists
and syndicalists raising the idea of factory occupations and
supporting the movement, it is doubtful that it would have
been as successful and widespread as it was. Lastly, that
socialist organisations, structured in a hierarchical fashion,
do not produce a revolutionary membership. By continually
looking to leaders, the movement was crippled and could not
develop to its full potential.
This period of Italian history explains the growth of Fascism in Italy. As
Tobias Abse points out, "the rise of fascism in Italy cannot be detached
from the events of the biennio rosso, the two red years of 1919 and
1920, that preceded it. Fascism was a preventive counter-revolution . . . launched as a result of the failed revolution" ["The Rise of Fascism in
an Industrial City", p. 54, in Rethinking Italian Fascism, David Forgacs
(ed.), pp. 52-81] The term "preventive counter-revolution" was originally
coined by the leading anarchist Luigi Fabbri.
As Malatesta argued at the time of the factory occupations, "[i]f we do
not carry on to the end, we will pay with tears of blood for the fear we
now instil in the bourgeoisie." [quoted by Tobias Abse, Op.
Cit., p. 66]
Later events proved him right, as the capitalists and rich landowners
backed the fascists in order to teach the working class their place. In
the words of Tobias Abse:
The fascist squads attacked and destroyed anarchist and socialist meeting
places, social centres, radical presses and Camera del Lavoro (local trade
union councils). However, even in the dark days of fascist terror, the
anarchists resisted the forces of totalitarianism. "It is no coincidence
that the strongest working-class resistance to Fascism was in . . . towns
or cities in which there was quite a strong anarchist, syndicalist or
anarcho-syndicalist tradition." [Tobias Abse, Op. Cit., p. 56]
The anarchists participated in, and often organised sections of,
the Arditi del Popolo, a working-class organisation devoted to the
self-defence of workers' interests. The Arditi del Popolo organised and
encouraged working-class resistance to fascist squads, often defeating
larger fascist forces (for example, "the total humiliation of thousands
of Italo Balbo's squadristi by a couple of hundred Arditi del Popolo
backed by the inhabitants of the working class districts" in the
anarchist stronghold of Parma in August 1922 [Tobias Abse, Op. Cit.,
p. 56]).
The Arditi del Popolo was the closest Italy got to the idea of a
united, revolutionary working-class front against fascism, as had
been suggested by Malatesta and the UAI. This movement "developed
along anti-bourgeois and anti-fascist lines, and was marked by the
independence of its local sections." [Red Years, Black Years:
Anarchist Resistance to Fascism in Italy, p. 2] Rather than being
just an "anti-fascist" organisation, the Arditi "were not a movement
in defence of 'democracy' in the abstract, but an essentially
working-class organisation devoted to the defence of the interests
of industrial workers, the dockers and large numbers of artisans
and craftsmen." [Tobias Abse, Op. Cit., p. 75] Unsurprisingly, the Arditi del Popolo "appear to have been
strongest and most successful in areas where traditional working-class
political culture was less exclusively socialist and had strong
anarchist or syndicalist traditions, for example, Bari, Livorno,
Parma and Rome." [Antonio Sonnessa, "Working Class Defence Organisation,
Anri-Fascist Resistances and the Arditi del Popolo in Turin, 1919-22,"
pp. 183-218, European History Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 2, p. 184]
However, both the socialist and communist parties withdrew from the
organisation. The socialists signed a "Pact of Pacification" with
the Fascists in August 1921. The communists "preferred to withdraw
their members from the Arditi del Popolo rather than let them work
with the anarchists." [Red Years, Black Years, p. 17]
Indeed, "[o]n
the same day as the Pact was signed, Ordine Nuovo published a
PCd'I [Communist Party of Italy] communication warning communists
against involvement" in the Arditi del Popolo. Four days later,
the Communist leadership "officially abandoned the movement. Severe
disciplinary measures were threatened against those communists who
continued to participate in, or liase with," the organisation.
Thus
by "the end of the first week of August 1921 the PSI, CGL and the
PCd'I had officially denounced" the organisation. "Only the anarchist
leaders, if not always sympathetic to the programme of the [Arditi
del Popolo], did not abandon the movement." Indeed, Umanita Nova
"strongly supported" it "on the grounds it represented a popular
expression of anti-fascist resistance and in defence of freedom
to organise." [Antonio Sonnessa, Op. Cit., p. 195 and p. 194]
However, in spite of the decisions by their leaders, many rank and
file socialists and communists took part in the movement. The latter
took part in open "defiance of the PCd'I leadership's growing abandonment"
of it. In Turin, for example, communists who took part in the Arditi
del Polopo did so "less as communists and more as part of a wider,
working-class self-identification . . . This dynamic was re-enforced
by an important socialist and anarchist presence" there. The failure
of the Communist leadership to support the movement shows the
bankruptcy of Bolshevik organisational forms which were unresponsive
to the needs of the popular movement. Indeed, these events show the
"libertarian custom of autonomy from, and resistance to, authority was
also operated against the leaders of the workers' movement, particularly
when they were held to have misunderstood the situation at grass roots
level." [Sonnessa, Op. Cit., p. 200, p. 198 and p. 193]
Thus the Communist Party failed to support the popular resistance to
fascism. The Communist
leader Antonio Gramsci explained why, arguing that "the party
leadership's attitude on the question of the Arditi del Popolo . . .
corresponded to a need to prevent the party members from being
controlled by a leadership that was not the party's leadership."
Gramsci added that this policy "served to disqualify a mass movement
which had started from below and which could instead have been
exploited by us politically." [Selections from Political Writings
(1921-1926), p. 333] While being less sectarian towards the Arditi del Popolo than other
Communist leaders, "[i]n common with all communist leaders, Gramsci
awaited the formation of the PCd'I-led military squads." [Sonnessa,
Op. Cit., p. 196] In other words, the
struggle against fascism was seen by the Communist leadership as a
means of gaining more members and, when the opposite was a possibility,
they preferred defeat and fascism rather than risk their followers becoming
influenced by anarchism.
As Abse notes,
"it was the withdrawal of support by the Socialist and Communist parties
at the national level that crippled" the Arditi. [Op. Cit., p. 74] Thus "social
reformist defeatism and communist sectarianism made impossible an armed
opposition that was widespread and therefore effective; and the isolated
instances of popular resistance were unable to unite in a successful
strategy." And fascism could have been defeated: "Insurrections at
Sarzanna, in July 1921, and at Parma, in August 1922, are examples of the
correctness of the policies which the anarchists urged in action and
propaganda." [Red Years, Black Years, p. 3 and p. 2] Historian
Tobias
Abse confirms this analysis, arguing that "[w]hat happened in Parma in
August 1922 . . . could have happened elsewhere, if only the leadership
of the Socialist and Communist parties thrown their weight behind the
call of the anarchist Malatesta for a united revolutionary front
against Fascism." [Op. Cit., p. 56]
In the end, fascist violence was successful and capitalist power
maintained:
After helping to defeat the revolution, the Marxists helped ensure the
victory of fascism.
Even after the fascist state was created, anarchists resisted both
inside and outside Italy. Many Italians, both anarchist and non-anarchist,
travelled to Spain to resist Franco in 1936 (see Umberto Marzochhi's
Remembering Spain: Italian Anarchist Volunteers in the Spanish Civil
War for details). During the Second World War, anarchists played a
major part in the Italian Partisan movement. It was the fact that the
anti-fascist movement was dominated by anti-capitalist elements that
led the USA and the UK to place known fascists in governmental positions
in the places they "liberated" (often where the town had already been
taken by the Partisans, resulting in the Allied troops "liberating"
the town from its own inhabitants!).
Given this history of resisting fascism in Italy, it is surprising
that some claim Italian fascism was a product or form of syndicalism.
This is even claimed by some anarchists. According to Bob Black the
"Italian syndicalists mostly went over to Fascism" and references
David D. Roberts 1979 study The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian
Fascism to support his claim. [Anarchy after Leftism, p. 64]
Peter Sabatini in a review in Social Anarchism makes a similar statement,
saying that syndicalism's "ultimate failure" was "its transformation
into a vehicle of fascism." [Social Anarchism, no. 23, p. 99] What
is the truth behind these claims?
Looking at Black's reference we discover that, in fact, most of the
Italian syndicalists did not go over to fascism, if by syndicalists
we mean members of the USI (the Italian Syndicalist Union). Roberts
states that:
However, if we take "syndicalist" to mean some of the intellectuals
and "leaders" of the pre-war movement, it was a case that the "leading
syndicalists came out for intervention quickly and almost unanimously"
[Roberts, Op. Cit., p. 106] after the First World War started. Many
of these pro-war "leading syndicalists" did become fascists. However,
to concentrate on a handful of "leaders" (which the majority did
not even follow!) and state that this shows that the "Italian
syndicalists mostly went over to Fascism" staggers belief. What is
even worse, as seen above, the Italian anarchists and syndicalists
were the most dedicated and successful fighters against fascism. In
effect, Black and Sabatini have slandered a whole movement.
What is also interesting is that these "leading syndicalists" were
not anarchists and so not anarcho-syndicalists. As Roberts notes
"[i]n Italy, the syndicalist doctrine was more clearly the
product of a group of intellectuals, operating within the Socialist
party and seeking an alternative to reformism." They "explicitly
denounced anarchism" and "insisted on a variety of Marxist orthodoxy."
The "syndicalists genuinely desired -- and tried -- to work within
the Marxist tradition." [Op. Cit., p. 66, p. 72, p. 57 and p. 79] According to Carl Levy, in his
account of Italian anarchism, "[u]nlike other syndicalist movements,
the Italian variation coalesced inside a Second International party.
Supporter were partially drawn from socialist intransigents . . .
the southern syndicalist intellectuals pronounced republicanism . . .
Another component . . . was the remnant of the Partito Operaio."
["Italian Anarchism: 1870-1926" in For Anarchism: History, Theory,
and Practice, David Goodway (Ed.), p. 51]
In other words, the Italian syndicalists who turned to fascism were,
firstly, a small minority of intellectuals who could not convince the
majority within the syndicalist union to follow them, and, secondly,
Marxists and republicans rather than anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists
or even revolutionary syndicalists.
According to Carl Levy, Roberts' book "concentrates on the syndicalist intelligentsia" and that "some syndicalist intellectuals . . . helped
generate, or sympathetically endorsed, the new Nationalist movement . . .
which bore similarities to the populist and republican rhetoric of the
southern syndicalist intellectuals." He argues that there "has been far
too much emphasis on syndicalist intellectuals and national organisers"
and that syndicalism "relied little on its national leadership for its
long-term vitality." [Op. Cit., p. 77, p. 53 and p. 51] If we do look
at the membership of the USI, rather than finding a group which "mostly
went over to fascism," we discover a group of people who fought fascism
tooth and nail and were subject to extensive fascist violence.
To summarise, Italian Fascism had nothing to do with syndicalism
and, as seen above, the USI fought the Fascists and was destroyed
by them along with the UAI, Socialist Party and other radicals. That
a handful of pre-war Marxist-syndicalists later became Fascists and
called for a "National-Syndicalism" does not mean that syndicalism
and fascism are related (any more than some anarchists later becoming
Marxists makes anarchism "a vehicle" for Marxism!).
It is hardly surprising that anarchists were the most consistent and
successful opponents of Fascism. The two movements could not be further
apart, one standing for total statism in the service of capitalism while
the other for a free, non-capitalist society. Neither is it surprising
that when their privileges and power were in danger, the capitalists and
the landowners turned to fascism to save them. This process is a common
feature in history (to list just four examples, Italy, Germany, Spain
and Chile).
Due to this anarchist organising and agitation, Spain in the 1930's had the largest anarchist movement in the world. At the start of the Spanish "Civil" war, over one and one half million workers and peasants were members of the CNT (the National Confederation of Labour), an anarcho-syndicalist union federation, and 30,000 were members of the FAI (the Anarchist Federation of Iberia). The total population of Spain at this time was 24 million.
The social revolution which met the Fascist coup on July 18th, 1936, is the greatest experiment in libertarian socialism to date. Here the last mass syndicalist union, the CNT, not only held off the fascist rising but encouraged the widespread take-over of land and factories. Over seven million people, including about two million CNT members, put self-management into practise in the most difficult of circumstances and actually improved both working conditions and output.
In the heady days after the 19th of July, the initiative and power truly rested in the hands of the rank-and-file members of the CNT and FAI. It was ordinary people, undoubtedly under the influence of Faistas (members of the FAI) and CNT militants, who, after defeating the fascist uprising, got production, distribution and consumption started again (under more egalitarian arrangements, of course), as well as organising and volunteering (in their tens of thousands) to join the militias, which were to be sent to free those parts of Spain that were under Franco. In every possible way the working class of Spain were creating by their own actions a new world based on their own ideas of social justice and freedom -- ideas inspired, of course, by anarchism and anarchosyndicalism.
George Orwell's eye-witness account of revolutionary Barcelona in late December, 1936, gives a vivid picture of the social transformation that had begun:
The full extent of this historic revolution cannot be covered here. It will be discussed in more detail in Section I.8 of the FAQ. All that can be done is to highlight a few points of special interest in the hope that these will give some indication of the importance of these events and encourage people to find out more about it.
All industry in Catalonia was placed either under workers' self-management or workers' control (that is, either totally taking over all aspects of management, in the first case, or, in the second, controlling the old management). In some cases, whole town and regional economies were transformed into federations of collectives. The example of the Railway Federation (which was set up to manage the railway lines in Catalonia, Aragon and Valencia) can be given as a typical example. The base of the federation was the local assemblies:
The delegates on the committee could be removed by an assembly at any time and the highest co-ordinating body of the Railway Federation was the "Revolutionary Committee," whose members were elected by union assemblies in the various divisions. The control over the rail lines, according to Gaston Leval, "did not operate from above downwards, as in a statist and centralised system. The Revolutionary Committee had no such powers. . . The members of the. . . committee being content to supervise the general activity and to co-ordinate that of the different routes that made up the network." [Gaston Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, p. 255]
On the land, tens of thousands of peasants and rural day workers created voluntary, self-managed collectives. The quality of life improved as
co-operation allowed the introduction of health care, education, machinery and investment in the social infrastructure. As well as increasing production, the collectives increased freedom. As one member puts it, "it was marvelous. . . to live in a collective, a free society where one could say what one thought, where if the village committee seemed unsatisfactory one could say. The committee took no big decisions without calling the whole village together in a general assembly. All this was wonderful." [Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain, p. 360]
We discuss the revolution in more detail in
section I.8. For
example, sections I.8.3 and
I.8.4 discuss in more depth how the
industrial collectives. The rural collectives are
discussed in sections I.8.5 and
I.8.6. We must stress
that these sections are summaries of a vast social movement,
and more information can be gathered from such works
as Gaston Leval's Collectives in the Spanish Revolution,
Sam Dolfgoff's The Anarchist Collectives, Jose Peirats'
The CNT in the Spanish Revolution and a host of other
anarchist accounts of the revolution.
On the social front, anarchist organisations created rational schools,
a libertarian health service, social centres, and so on. The
Mujeres Libres (free women) combated the traditional role of women in Spanish society, empowering thousands both inside and outside the anarchist movement (see The Free Women of Spain by Martha A. Ackelsberg for more information on this very important organisation). This activity on the social front only built on the work started long before the outbreak of the war; for example, the unions often funded rational schools, workers centres, and so on.
The voluntary militias that went to free the rest of Spain from Franco were organised on anarchist principles and included both men and women. There was no rank, no saluting and no officer class. Everybody was equal. George Orwell, a member of the POUM militia (the POUM was a dissident Marxist party, influenced
by Leninism but not, as the Communists asserted, Trotskyist) makes this clear:
In Spain, however, as elsewhere, the anarchist movement was smashed
between Stalinism (the Communist Party) on the one hand and Capitalism (Franco) on
the other. Unfortunately, the anarchists placed anti-fascist unity
before the revolution, thus helping their enemies to defeat both
them and the revolution. Whether they were forced by circumstances
into this position or could have avoided it is still being debated
(see section I.8.10
for a discussion of why the CNT-FAI collaborated and
section I.8.11
on why this decision was not a product of anarchist theory).
Orwell's account of his experiences in the militia's indicates why the Spanish Revolution is so important to anarchists:
A.5.1 The Paris Commune
The Paris Commune of 1871 played an important role in the development of both anarchist ideas and the movement. As Bakunin commented at the time,
"revolutionary socialism [i.e. anarchism] has just attempted its first
striking and practical demonstration in the Paris Commune . . . [It]
show[ed] to all enslaved peoples (and
are there any masses that are not slaves?) the only road to emancipation
and health; Paris inflict[ed] a mortal blow upon the political traditions
of bourgeois radicalism and [gave] a real basis to revolutionary socialism." [Bakunin on Anarchism, pp. 263-4]
"The abolition of the exploitation of man by man, the last vestige
of slavery;
"They treated the economic question as a secondary one, which would be
attended to later on, after the triumph of the Commune . . . But
the crushing defeat which soon followed, and the blood-thirsty
revenge taken by the middle class, proved once more that the triumph
of a popular Commune was materially impossible without a parallel
triumph of the people in the economic field." [Op. Cit., p. 74]
A.5.2 The Haymarket Martyrs
May 1st is a day of special significance for the labour movement. While
it has been hijacked in the past by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the
Soviet Union and elsewhere, the labour movement festival of May Day
is a day of world-wide solidarity. A time to remember past struggles
and demonstrate our hope for a better future. A day to remember that
an injury to one is an injury to all.
"That day those American workers attempted, by organising themselves,
to give expression to their protest against the iniquitous order
of the State and Capital of the propertied . . .
"The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the
voices you are throttling today."
"First -- Destruction of the existing class rule, by all means,
i.e. by energetic, relentless, revolutionary and international
action.
In addition to their union organising, the Chicago anarchist movement also organised social societies, picnics, lectures, dances, libraries and a host of other activities. These all helped to forge a distinctly working-class revolutionary culture in the heart of the "American Dream." The threat
to the ruling class and their system was too great to allow it to continue (particularly with memories of the vast uprising of labour in 1877 still
fresh. As in 1886, that revolt was also meet by state
violence -- see Strike! by J. Brecher for details of this strike movement as well as the Haymarket events). Hence the repression, kangaroo court, and the state murder of those the state and capitalist class considered "leaders" of the movement.
A.5.3 Building the Syndicalist Unions
Just before the turn of the century in Europe, the anarchist
movement began to create one of the most successful attempts
to apply anarchist organisational ideas in everyday life.
This was the building of mass revolutionary unions (also known
as syndicalism or anarcho-syndicalism). The syndicalist movement,
in the words of a leading French syndicalist militant, was
"a practical schooling in anarchism" for it was "a laboratory
of economic struggles" and organised "along anarchic lines."
By organising workers into "libertarian organisations," the
syndicalist unions were creating the "free associations of
free producers" within capitalism to combat it and, ultimately,
replace it. [Fernand Pelloutier, No Gods, No Masters, vol. 2,
p. 57, p. 55 and p. 56]
A.5.4 Anarchists in the Russian Revolution.
The Russian revolution of 1917 saw a huge growth in anarchism
in that country and many experiments in anarchist ideas. However,
in popular culture the Russian Revolution is seen not as a mass
movement by ordinary people struggling towards freedom but as
the means by which Lenin imposed his dictatorship on Russia.
The truth is radically different. The Russian Revolution was
a mass movement from below in which many different currents
of ideas existed and in which millions of working people
(workers in the cities and towns as well as peasants) tried
to transform their world into a better place. Sadly, those
hopes and dreams were crushed under the dictatorship of the
Bolshevik party -- first under Lenin, later under Stalin.
"At the rank-and-file level, particularly within the
[Petrograd] garrison and at the Kronstadt naval base,
there was in fact very little to distinguish Bolshevik
from Anarchist. . . The Anarchist-Communists and the
Bolsheviks competed for the support of the same
uneducated, depressed, and dissatisfied elements of
the population, and the fact is that in the summer of
1917, the Anarchist-Communists, with the support they
enjoyed in a few important factories and regiments,
possessed an undeniable capacity to influence the
course of events. Indeed, the Anarchist appeal was
great enough in some factories and military units
to influence the actions of the Bolsheviks themselves."
[Op. Cit., p. 64]
"Another no less important peculiarity is that [the] October
[revolution of 1917] has two meanings -- that which the working'
masses who participated in the social revolution gave it, and
with them the Anarchist-Communists, and that which was given
it by the political party [the Marxist-Communists] that captured
power from this aspiration to social revolution, and which
betrayed and stifled all further development. An enormous gulf
exists between these two interpretations of October. The October
of the workers and peasants is the suppression of the power of
the parasite classes in the name of equality and self-management.
The Bolshevik October is the conquest of power by the party of
the revolutionary intelligentsia, the installation of its 'State
Socialism' and of its 'socialist' methods of governing the masses."
[The Two Octobers]
"the principle of election is politically purposeless and
technically inexpedient, and it has been, in practice,
abolished by decree." [Work, Discipline, Order]
"Trotsky, appointed Commissar of Military Affairs after
Brest-Litovsk, had rapidly been reorganising the Red Army.
The death penalty for disobedience under fire had been
restored. So, more gradually, had saluting, special forms
of address, separate living quarters and other privileges
for officers. Democratic forms of organisation, including
the election of officers, had been quickly dispensed with."
[The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, p. 37]
"The anarchist party is the most active, the most militant
of the opposition groups and probably the most popular . . .
The Bolsheviks are anxious." [quoted by Daniel Guerin,
Anarchism, pp. 95-6]
"The proletariat is being gradually enserfed by the state. The
people are being transformed into servants over whom there has
arisen a new class of administrators -- a new class born mainly
form the womb of the so-called intelligentsia . . . We do not
mean to say . . . that the Bolshevik party set out to create a
new class system. But we do say that even the best intentions
and aspirations must inevitably be smashed against the evils
inherent in any system of centralised power. The separation of
management from labour, the division between administrators and
workers flows logically from centralisation. It cannot be
otherwise." [The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution,
pp. 123-4]
"Once their power is consolidated and 'legalised', the Bolsheviks
who are . . . men of centralist and authoritarian action will
begin to rearrange the life of the country and of the people by
governmental and dictatorial methods, imposed by the centre.
The[y] . . . will dictate the will of the party to all Russia,
and command the whole nation. Your Soviets and your other local
organisations will become little by little, simply executive organs
of the will of the central government. In the place of healthy,
constructive work by the labouring masses, in place of free
unification from the bottom, we will see the installation of
an authoritarian and statist apparatus which would act from
above and set about wiping out everything that stood in its
way with an iron hand." [quoted by Voline, Op. Cit., p. 235]
"Bolshevism, day by day and step by step, proves that state
power possesses inalienable characteristics; it can change
its label, its 'theory', and its servitors, but in essence
it merely remains power and despotism in new forms." [quoted
by Paul Avrich, "The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution,"
pp. 341-350, Russian Review, vol. 26, issue no. 4, p. 347]
"Kronstadt was the first entirely independent attempt of the
people to liberate themselves of all yokes and carry out the
Social Revolution: this attempt was made directly . . . by
the working masses themselves, without political shepherds,
without leaders or tutors. It was the first step towards the
third and social revolution." [Voline, Op. Cit.,
pp. 537-8]
"Conquer or die -- such is the dilemma that faces the Ukrainian
peasants and workers at this historic moment . . . But we will
not conquer in order to repeat the errors of the past years,
the error of putting our fate into the hands of new masters;
we will conquer in order to take our destinies into our own
hands, to conduct our lives according to our own will and
our own conception of the truth." [quoted by Peter Arshinov,
History of the Makhnovist Movement, p. 58]
A.5.5 Anarchists in the Italian Factory Occupations
After the end of the First World War there was a massive radicalisation
across Europe and the world. Union membership exploded, with strikes,
demonstrations and agitation reaching massive levels. This was partly
due to the war, partly to the apparent success of the Russian Revolution.
This enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution even reached Individualist
Anarchists like Joseph Labadie, who like many other anti-capitalists,
saw "the red in the east [giving] hope of a brighter day" and the
Bolsheviks as making "laudable efforts to at least try some way out
of the hell of industrial slavery." [quoted by Carlotta R. Anderson,
All-American Anarchist p. 225 and p. 241]
"The metal workers started the movement over wage rates. It was
a strike of a new kind. Instead of abandoning the factories, the
idea was to remain inside without working . . . Throughout Italy
there was a revolutionary fervour among the workers and soon the
demands changed their characters. Workers thought that the moment
was ripe to take possession once [and] for all the means of
production. They armed for defence . . . and began to organise
production on their own . . . It was the right of property
abolished in fact . . .; it was a new regime, a new form of
social life that was being ushered in. And the government
stood by because it felt impotent to offer opposition."
[Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 134]
"The management of the factories . . . [was] conducted by technical
and administrative workers' committees. Self-management went quite a
long way: in the early period assistance was obtained from the banks,
but when it was withdrawn the self-management system issued its own
money to pay the workers' wages. Very strict self-discipline was
required, the use of alcoholic beverages forbidden, and armed
patrols were organised for self-defence. Very close solidarity
was established between the factories under self-management. Ores
and coal were put into a common pool, and shared out equitably."
[Anarchism, p. 109]
"At the 'interproletarian' convention held on 12 September
(in which the Unione Anarchia, the railwaymen's and maritime
workers union participated) the syndicalist union decided
that 'we cannot do it ourselves' without the socialist
party and the CGL, protested against the 'counter-revolutionary
vote' of Milan, declared it minoritarian, arbitrary and
null, and ended by launching new, vague, but ardent calls
to action." [Paolo Spriano, Op. Cit., p. 94]
"To speak of victory when the Roman agreement throws you back under
bourgeois exploitation which you could have got rid of is a lie. If
you give up the factories, do this with the conviction [of] hav[ing]
lost a great battle and with the firm intention to resume the struggle
on the first occasion and to carry it on in a thorough way. . .
Nothing is lost if you have no illusion [about] the deceiving
character of the victory. The famous decree on the control of
factories is a mockery . . . because it tends to harmonise your
interests and those of the bourgeois which is like harmonising
the interests of the wolf and the sheep. Don't believe those of
your leaders who make fools of you by adjourning the revolution
from day to day. You yourselves must make the revolution when
an occasion will offer itself, without waiting for orders which
never come, or which come only to enjoin you to abandon action.
Have confidence in yourselves, have faith in your future and you
will win." [quoted by Max Nettlau, Errico Malatesta: The
Biography of an Anarchist]
"The aims of the Fascists and their backers amongst the industrialists
and agrarians in 1921-22 were simple: to break the power of the organised
workers and peasants as completely as possible, to wipe out, with the
bullet and the club, not only the gains of the biennio rosso, but
everything that the lower classes had gained . . . between the turn
of the century and the outbreak of the First World War." [Op. Cit.,
p. 54]
"The anarchists' will and courage were not enough to counter the
fascist gangs, powerfully aided with material and arms, backed by
the repressive organs of the state. Anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists
were decisive in some areas and in some industries, but only a similar
choice of direct action on the parts of the Socialist Party and the
General Confederation of Labour [the reformist trade union] could
have halted fascism." [Red Years, Black Years, pp. 1-2]
"The vast majority of the organised workers failed to respond
to the syndicalists' appeals and continued to oppose [Italian]
intervention [in the First World War], shunning what seemed to
be a futile capitalist war. The syndicalists failed to convince
even a majority within the USI . . . the majority opted for the
neutralism of Armando Borghi, leader of the anarchists within
the USI. Schism followed as De Ambris led the interventionist
minority out of the confederation." [The Syndicalist Tradition
and Italian Fascism, p. 113]
A.5.6 Anarchism and the Spanish Revolution.
As Noam Chomsky notes, "a good example of a really large-scale
anarchist revolution -- in fact the best example to my knowledge
-- is the Spanish revolution in 1936, in which over most of
Republican Spain there was a quite inspiring anarchist revolution
that involved both industry and agriculture over substantial
areas . . . And that again was, by both human measures and
indeed anyone's economic measures, quite successful. That is,
production continued effectively; workers in farms and factories
proved quite capable of managing their affairs without coercion
from above, contrary to what lots of socialists, communists,
liberals and other wanted to believe." The revolution of 1936
was "based on three generations of experiment and thought and
work which extended anarchist ideas to very large parts of the
population." [Radical Priorities, p. 212]
"The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. . . Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine." [Homage to Catalonia, pp. 2-3]
"All the workers of each locality would meet twice a week to examine all that pertained to the work to be done... The local general assembly named a committee to manage the general activity in each station and its annexes. At [these] meetings, the decisions (direccion) of this committee, whose members continued to work [at their previous jobs], would be subjected to the approval or disapproval of the workers, after giving reports and answering questions."
"The essential point of the [militia] system was the social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.s, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was not perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or that I would have though conceivable in time of war. . . " [Op. Cit., p. 26]
"I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilised life -- snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. -- had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class- division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. . . One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all . . . In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. . ." [Op. Cit., pp. 83-84]