From: x551_003@ccvax.ucd.ie
Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy
Subject: Why is anarchism relevant
Date: 14 Dec 92 11:40:16 GMT
Organization: University College Dublin

Anarchism to-day

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

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

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

IS SOCIALISM DEAD?

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

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

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

LABOUR PARTY BLUES

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

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

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

A DECADE OF DEFEATS

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

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

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

SOME THINGS CHANGE

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

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

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

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

 
WHY ANARCHISM?

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

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

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

THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

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

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

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

THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL

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

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

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

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

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

FASCISM AND WAR

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

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

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

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