Anarchism: From Theory To Practice
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1970

People :
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Author : Daniel Guérin

Author : Noam Chomsky

Tags :
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diego abad de santillan, marx and engels, social and political,
agricultural and industrial, workers and peasants, supreme economic
council, trade unions, social revolution, russian revolution, trade
unionism.

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    * Preface
        1,420 Words; 8,960 Characters

    * Introduction by Noam Chomsky
        6,760 Words; 44,480 Characters

    * Chapter 1 : The Basic Ideas of Anarchism
        9,560 Words; 60,647 Characters

    * Chapter 2 : In Search of a New Society
        9,492 Words; 61,300 Characters

    * Chapter 3, Section A : Anarchism in Revolutionary Practice 1880-1914
        3,020 Words; 19,656 Characters

    * Chapter 3, Section B : Anarchism in the Russian Revolution
        9,406 Words; 60,065 Characters

    * Chapter 3, Section C : Anarchism in the Italian Factory Councils
        1,393 Words; 9,155 Characters

    * Chapter 3, Section D : Anarchism in the Spanish Revolution
        9,936 Words; 64,277 Characters

    * By Way of Conclusion
        3,693 Words; 23,798 Characters

    * Footnotes
        1,191 Words; 8,433 Characters

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* Preface


There has recently been a renewal of interest in anarchism. Books,
pamphlets, and anthologies are being devoted to it. It is doubtful whether
this literary effort is really very effective. It is difficult to trace the
outlines of anarchism. Its master thinkers rarely condensed their ideas
into systematic works. If, on occasion, they tried to do so, it was only in
thin pamphlets designed for propaganda and popularization in which only
fragments of their ideas can be observed. Moreover, there are several kinds
of anarchism and many variations within the thought of each of the great
libertarians.

Rejection of authority and stress on the priority of individual judgment
make it natural for libertarians to "profess the faith of anti dogmatism."
"Let us not become the leaders of a new religion," Proudhon wrote to Marx,
"even were it to be the religion of logic and reason." It follows that the
views of the libertarians are more varied, more fluid, and harder to
apprehend than those of the authoritarian socialists [1] whose rival
churches at least try to impose a set of beliefs on their faithful.

Just before he was sent to the guillotine, the terrorist Emile Henry wrote
a letter to the governor of the prison where he was awaiting execution
explaining: "Beware of believing anarchy to be a dogma, a doctrine above
question or debate, to be venerated by Its adepts as is the Koran by devout
Moslems. No! the absolute freedom which we demand constantly develops our
thinking and raises it toward new horizons (according to the turn of mind
of various individuals ), takes it out of the narrow framework of
regulation and codification. We are not 'believers'!" The condemned man
went on to reject the "blind faith" of the French Marxists of his period:
"They believe something because Guesde [2] has said one must believe it,
they have a catechism and it would be sacrilege to question any of its
clauses."

In spite of the variety and richness of anarchist thinking, in spite of
contradictions and doctrinal disputes which were often centered on false
problems, anarchism presents a fairly homogeneous body of ideas. At first
sight it is true that there may seem to be a vast difference between the
individualist anarchism of Stirner (1806-1856) and social anarchism. When
one looks more deeply into the matter, however, the partisans of total
freedom and those of social organization do not appear as far apart as they
may have thought themselves, or as others might at first glance suppose.
The anarchist societaire [3] is also an individualist and the individualist
anarchist may well be a partisan of the societaire approach who fears to
declare himself.

The relative unity of social anarchism arises from the fact that it was
developed during a single period by two masters, one of whom was the
disciple and follower of the other: the Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
(1809-1865) and the Russian exile Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876). The latter
defined anarchism as "Proudhonism greatly developed and pushed to its
furthest conclusion." This type of anarchism called itself collectivist.

Its successors, however, rejected the term and proclaimed themselves to be
communists ("libertarian communists," of course). One of them, another
Russian exile, Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), bent the doctrine in a more
rigidly utopian and optimistic direction but his "scientific" approach
failed to conceal its weaknesses. The Italian Errico Malatesta (1853-1932),
on the other hand, turned to audacious and sometimes puerile activism
although he enriched anarchist thinking with his intransigent and often
lucid polemics. Later the experience of the Russian Revolution produced one
of the most remarkable anarchist works, that of Voline (1882-1945). [4]

The anarchist terrorism of the end of the nineteenth century had dramatic
and anecdotal features and an aura of blood which appeal to the taste of
the general public. In its time it was a school for individual energy and
courage, which command respect, and it had the merit of drawing social
injustice to public attention; but today it seems to have been a temporary
and sterile deviation in the history of anarchism. It seems out-of-date. To
fix one's attention on the "stewpot" of Ravachol [4a] is to ignore or
underestimate the fundamental characteristics of a definite concept of
social reorganization. When this concept is properly studied it appears
highly constructive and not destructive, as its opponents pretend. It is
this constructive aspect of anarchism that will be presented to the reader
in this study. By what right and upon what basis? Because the material
studied is not antiquated but relevant to life, and because it poses
problems which are more acute than ever. It appears that libertarian
thinkers anticipated the needs of our time to a considerable extent.

This small book does not seek to duplicate the histories and bibliographies
of anarchism already published. Their authors were scholars, mainly
concerned with omitting no names and, fascinated by superficial
similarities, they discovered numerous forerunners of anarchism. They gave
almost equal weight to the genius and to his most minor follower, and
presented an excess of biographical details rather than making a profound
study of ideas. Their learned tomes leave the reader with a feeling of
diffusion, almost incoherence, still asking himself what anarchism really
is. I have tried a somewhat different approach. I assume that the lives of
the masters of libertarian thought are known. In any case' they are often
much less illuminating for our purpose than some writers imagine. Many of
these masters were not anarchists throughout their lives and their complete
works include passages which have nothing to do with anarchism.

To take an example: in the second part of his career Proudhon's thinking
took a conservative turn. His verbose and monumental De la Justice dans la
Revolution et dans l'Eglise (1858) was mainly concerned with the problem of
religion and its conclusion was far from libertarian. In the end, in spite
of passionate anti-clericalism, he accepted all the categories of
Catholicism, subject to his own interpretations, proclaimed that the
instruction and moral training of the people would benefit from the
preservation of Christian symbolism, and in his final words seemed almost
ready to say a prayer. Respect for his memory inhibits all but a passing
reference to his "salute to war," his diatribes against women, or his fits
of racism.

The opposite happened to Bakunin. His wild early career as a revolutionary
conspirator was unconnected with anarchism. He embraced libertarian ideas
only in 1864 after the failure of the Polish insurrection in which he
played a part. His earlier writings have no place in an anarchist
anthology. As for Kropotkin, his purely scientific work, for which he is
today celebrated in the U.S.S.R. as a shining light in the study of
national geography, has no more connection with anarchism than had his
prowar attitude during the First World War.

In place of a historical and chronological sequence an unusual method has
been adopted in this book: the reader will be presented in turn with the
main constructive themes of anarchism, and not with personalities. I have
intentionally omitted only elements which are not specifically libertarian,
such as the critique of capitalism, atheism, anti-militarism, free love,
etc. Rather than give secondhand and therefore faded paraphrases
unsupported by evidence, I have allowed quotations to speak directly as far
as possible. This gives the reader access to the ideas of the masters in
their warm and living form, as they were originally penned.

Secondly, the doctrine is examined from a different angle: it is shown in
the great periods when it was put to the test by events - the Russian
Revolution of 1917, Italy after 1918, the Spanish Revolution of 1936. The
final chapter treats what is undoubtedly the most original creation of
anarchism: workers' self-management as it has been developed in the grip of
contemporary reality, in Yugoslavia and Algeria - and soon, perhaps, who
knows, in the U.S.S.R.

Throughout this little book the reader will see two conceptions of
socialism contrasted and sometimes related to one another, one
authoritarian, the other libertarian. By the end of the analysis it is
hoped that the reader will be led to ask himself which is the conception of
the future.

(Source: Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, first published in French in
1965, the 1970 English translation is Guérin's best-known work,
describing the intellectual substance and actual practice of anarchism. The
English translation by Mary Klopper includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky,
who describes it as an attempt "to extract from the history of libertarian
thought a living, evolving tradition".)


* Introduction by Noam Chomsky


A French writer, sympathetic to anarchism, wrote in the 1890s that
"anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything"---including,
he noted those whose acts are such that "a mortal enemy of anarchism could
not have done better."[1] There have been many styles of thought and action
that have been referred to as "anarchist." It would be hopeless to try to
encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory or
ideology. And even if we proceed to extract from the history of libertarian
thought a living, evolving tradition, as Daniel Guérin does in
Anarchism, it remains difficult to formulate its doctrines as a specific
and determinate theory of society and social change. The anarchist
historian Rudolph Rocker, who presents a systematic conception of the
development of anarchist thought towards anarchosyndicalism, along lines
that bear comparison to Guérins work, puts the matter well when he
writes that anarchism is not

a fixed, self-enclosed social system but rather a definite trend in the
historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual
guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the
free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life.
Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends
constantly to become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold
ways. For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept,
but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full
development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has
endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural
development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political
guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality
become, the more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of
the society in which it has grown.[2]

One might ask what value there is in studying a "definite trend in the
historic development of mankind" that does not articulate a specific and
detailed social theory. Indeed, many commentators dismiss anarchism as
utopian, formless, primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the realities
of a complex society. One might, however, argue rather differently: that at
every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of
authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been
justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic
development, but that now contribute to---rather than alleviate---material
and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no doctrine of social change
fixed for the present and future, nor even, necessarily, a specific and
unchanging concept of the goals towards which social change should tend.
Surely our understanding of the nature of man or of the range of viable
social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching doctrine must be
treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in order when we hear
that "human nature" or "the demands of efficiency" or "the complexity of
modern life" requires this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule.

Nevertheless, at a particular time there is every reason to develop,
insofar as our understanding permits, a specific realization of this
definite trend in the historic development of mankind, appropriate to the
tasks of the moment. For Rocker, "the problem that is set for our time is
that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political
and social enslavement"; and the method is not the conquest and exercise of
state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but rather "to reconstruct
the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and build it up in the
spirit of Socialism."

But only the producers themselves are fitted for this task, since they are
the only value-creating element in society out of which a new future can
arise. Theirs must be the task of freeing labor from all the fetters which
economic exploitation has fastened on it, of freeing society from all the
institutions and procedure of political power, and of opening the way to an
alliance of free groups of men and women based on cooperative labor and a
planned administration of things in the interest of the community. To
prepare the toiling masses in the city and country for this great goal and
to bind them together as a militant force is the objective of modern
Anarcho-syndicalism, and in this its whole purpose is exhausted. [P. 108]

As a socialist, Rocker would take for granted "that the serious, final,
complete liberation of the workers is possible only upon one condition:
that of the appropriation of capital, that is, of raw material and all the
tools of labor, including land, by the whole body of the workers."[3] As an
anarchosyndicalist, he insists, further, that the workers' organizations
create "not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future itself" in the
prerevolutionary period, that they embody in themselves the structure of
the future society---and he looks forward to a social revolution that will
dismantle the state apparatus as well as expropriate the expropriators.
"What we put in place of the government is industrial organization."

Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic order cannot
be created by the decrees and statutes of a government, but only by the
solidaric collaboration of the workers with hand and brain in each special
branch of production; that is, through the taking over of the management of
all plants by the producers themselves under such form that the separate
groups, plants, and branches of industry are independent members of the
general economic organism and systematically carry on production and the
distribution of the products in the interest of the community on the basis
of free mutual agreements. [p. 94]

Rocker was writing at a moment when such ideas had been put into practice
in a dramatic way in the Spanish Revolution. Just prior to the outbreak of
the revolution, the anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad de Santillan
had written:

...in facing the problem of social transformation, the Revolution cannot
consider the state as a medium, but must depend on the organization of
producers.

We have followed this norm and we find no need for the hypothesis of a
superior power to organized labor, in order to establish a new order of
things. We would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the
State can have in an economic organization, where private property has been
abolished and in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The
suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of
the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the Revolution gives social
wealth to the producers in which case the producers organize themselves for
due collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the
Revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the
Revolution has been a lie and the State would continue.

Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an economic and
administrative regulating power. It receives its orientation from below and
operates in accordance with the resolutions of the regional and national
assemblies. It is a liaison corps and nothing else.[4]

Engels, in a letter of 1883, expressed his disagreement with this
conception as follows:

The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian
revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the
state....But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only
organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its
newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out
that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must
end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those
after the Paris commune.[5]

In contrast, the anarchists---most eloquently Bakunin---warned of the
dangers of the "red bureaucracy," which would prove to be "the most vile
and terrible lie that our century has created."[6] The anarchosyndicalist
Fernand Pelloutier asked: "Must even the transitory state to which we have
to submit necessarily and fatally be a collectivist jail? Can't it consist
in a free organization limited exclusively by the needs of production and
consumption, all political institutions having disappeared?"[7]

I do not pretend to know the answers to this question. But it seems clear
that unless there is, in some form, a positive answer, the chances for a
truly democratic revolution that will achieve the humanistic ideals of the
left are not great. Martin Buber put the problem succinctly when he wrote:
"One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been
turned into a club to put forth leaves."[8] The question of conquest or
destruction of state power is what Bakunin regarded as the primary issue
dividing him from Marx.[9] In one form or another, the problem has arisen
repeatedly in the century since, dividing "libertarian" from
"authoritarian" socialists.

Despite Bakunin's warnings about the red bureaucracy, and their fulfillment
under Stalin's dictatorship, it would obviously be a gross error in
interpreting the debates of a century ago to rely on the claims of
contemporary social movements as to their historical origins. In
particular, it is perverse to regard Bolshevism as "Marxism in practice."
Rather, the left-wing critique of Bolshevism, taking account of the
historical circumstances surrounding the Russian Revolution, is far more to
the point.[10]

The anti-Bolshevik, left-wing labor movement opposed the Leninists because
they did not go far enough in exploiting the Russian upheavals for strictly
proletarian ends. They became prisoners of their environment and used the
international radical movement to satisfy specifically Russian needs, which
soon became synonymous with the needs of the Bolshevik Party-State. The
"bourgeois" aspects of the Russian Revolution were now discovered in
Bolshevism itself: Leninism was adjudged a part of international
social-democracy, differing from the latter only on tactical issues.[11]

If one were to seek a single leading idea within the anarchist tradition,
it should, I believe, be that expressed by Bakunin when, in writing on the
Paris Commune, he identified himself as follows:

I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition
under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow;
not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the
State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the
privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the
individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the
School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which
considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which
limits the rights of each---an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction
of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is
worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all
the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person;
liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the
laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as
restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator
beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis
of our material, intellectual and moral being---they do not limit us but
are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.[12]

These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's
Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt's Limits of State Action, Kant's
insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the
precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be
granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial
capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian
socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of
the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into
an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same
assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the
state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable.
This is clear, for example, from the classic work of Humboldt, The Limits
of State Action, which anticipated and perhaps inspired Mill. This classic
of liberal thought, completed in 1792, is in its essence profoundly, though
prematurely, anticapitalist. Its ideas must be attenuated beyond
recognition to be transmuted into an ideology of industrial capitalism.

Humboldt's vision of a society in which social fetters are replaced by
social bonds and labor is freely undertaken suggests the early Marx., with
his discussion of the "alienation of labor when work is external to the
worker...not part of his nature...[so that] he does not fulfill himself in
his work but denies himself...[and is] physically exhausted and mentally
debased," alienated labor that "casts some of the workers back into a
barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines," thus depriving man
of his "species character" of "free conscious activity" and "productive
life." Similarly, Marx conceives of "a new type of human being who needs
his fellow men....[The workers' association becomes] the real constructive
effort to create the social texture of future human relations."[13] It is
true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in
social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need
for liberty, diversity, and free association. On the same assumptions,
capitalist relations of production, wage labor, competitiveness, the
ideology of "possessive individualism"---all must be regarded as
fundamentally antihuman. Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded
as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

Rudolf Rocker describes modern anarchism as "the confluence of the two
great currents which during and since the French revolution have found such
characteristic expression in the intellectual life of Europe: Socialism and
Liberalism." The classical liberal ideals, he argues, were wrecked on the
realities of capitalist economic forms. Anarchism is necessarily
anticapitalist in that it "opposes the exploitation of man by man." But
anarchism also opposes "the dominion of man over man." It insists that
"socialism will be free or it will not be at all. In its recognition of
this lies the genuine and profound justification for the existence of
anarchism."[14] From this point of view, anarchism may be regarded as the
libertarian wing of socialism. It is in this spirit that Daniel
Guérin has approached the study of anarchism in Anarchism and other
works.[15] Guérin quotes Adolph Fischer, who said that "every
anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an
anarchist." Similarly Bakunin, in his "anarchist manifesto" of 1865, the
program of his projected international revolutionary fraternity, laid down
the principle that each member must be, to begin with, a socialist.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of
production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as
incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and
under the control of the producer. As Marx put it, socialists look forward
to a society in which labor will "become not only a means of life, but also
the highest want in life,"[16] an impossibility when the worker is driven
by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: "no form of
wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious that another, can do away
with the misery of wage-labor itself."[17] A consistent anarchist must
oppose not only alienated labor but also the stupefying specialization of
labor that takes place when the means for developing production

mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him to become
a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such a torment that its
essential meaning is destroyed; estrange from him the intellectual
potentialities of the labor process in very proportion to the extent to
which science is incorporated into it as an independent power...[18]

Marx saw this not as an inevitable concomitant of industrialization, but
rather as a feature of capitalist relations of production. The society of
the future must be concerned to "replace the detail-worker of
today...reduced to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed
individual, fit for a variety of labors...to whom the different social
functions...are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural
powers."[19] The prerequisite is the abolition of capital and wage labor as
social categories (not to speak of the industrial armies of the "labor
state" or the various modern forms of totalitarianism since capitalism).
The reduction of man to an appurtenance of the machine, a specialized tool
of production, might in principle be overcome, rather than enhanced, with
the proper development and use of technology, but not under the conditions
of autocratic control of production by those who make man an instrument to
serve their ends, overlooking his individual purposes, in Humboldt's
phrase.

Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under capitalism, to create "free
associations of free producers" that would engage in militant struggle and
prepare to take over the organization of production on a democratic basis.
These associations would serve as "a practical school of anarchism."[20] If
private ownership of the means of production is, in Proudhon's often quoted
phrase, merely a form of "theft"---"the exploitation of the weak by the
strong"[21]---control of production by a state bureaucracy, no matter how
benevolent its intentions, also does not create the conditions under which
labor, manual and intellectual, can become the highest want in life. Both,
then, must be overcome.

In his attack on the right of private or bureaucratic control over the
means of production,, the anarchist takes his stand with those who struggle
to bring about "the third and last emancipatory phase of history," the
first having made serfs out of slaves, the second having made wage earners
out of serfs, and the third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act
of liberation that places control over the economy in the hands of free and
voluntary associations of producers (Fourier, 1848).[22] The imminent
danger to "civilization" was noted by de Tocqueville, also in 1848:

As long as the right of property was the origin and groundwork of many
other rights, it was easily defended---or rather it was not attacked; it
was then the citadel of society while all the other rights were its
outworks; it did not bear the brunt of attack and, indeed, there was no
serious attempt to assail it. but today, when the right of property is
regarded as the last undestroyed remnant of the aristocratic world, when it
alone is left standing, the sole privilege in an equalized society, it is a
different matter. Consider what is happening in the hearts of the
working-classes, although I admit they are quiet as yet. It is true that
they are less inflamed than formerly by political passions properly
speaking; but do you not see that their passions, far from being political,
have become social? Do you not see that, little by little, ideas and
opinions are spreading among them which aim not merely at removing such and
such laws, such a ministry or such a government, but at breaking up the
very foundations of society itself?[23]

The workers of Paris, in 1871, broke the silence, and proceeded

to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the
Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of
the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the
expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by
transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the
means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and
associated labor.[24]

The Commune, of course, was drowned in blood. The nature of the
"civilization" that the workers of Paris sought to overcome in their attack
on "the very foundations of society itself" was revealed, once again, when
the troops of the Versailles government reconquered Paris from its
population. As Marx wrote, bitterly but accurately:

The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid
light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their
masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised
savagery and lawless revenge...the infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect
the innate spirit of that civilization of which they are the mercenary
vindicators....The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently
upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the
destruction of brick and mortar. [Ibid., pp. 74, 77]

Despite the violent destruction of the Commune, Bakunin wrote that Paris
opens a new era, "that of the definitive and complete emancipation of the
popular masses and their future true solidarity, across and despite state
boundaries...the next revolution of man, international in solidarity, will
be the resurrection of Paris"---a revolution that the world still awaits.

The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a
particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor
and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of
workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not
exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. He
will, in short, oppose

the organization of production by the Government. It means State-socialism,
the command of the State officials over production and the command of
managers, scientists, shop-officials in the shop....The goal of the working
class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot
be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for
the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves being master
over production.

These remarks are taken from "Five Theses on the Class Struggle" by the
left-wing Marxist Anton Pannekoek, one of the outstanding left theorists of
the council communist movement. And in fact, radical Marxism merges with
anarchist currents.

As a further illustration, consider the following characterization of
"revolutionary Socialism":

The revolutionary Socialist denies that State ownership can end in anything
other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen why the State cannot
democratically control industry. Industry can only be democratically owned
and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks
industrial administrative committees. Socialism will be fundamentally an
industrial system; its constituencies will be of an industrial character.
Thus those carrying on the social activities and industries of society will
be directly represented in the local and central councils of social
administration. In this way the powers of such delegates will flow upwards
from those carrying on the work and conversant with the needs of the
community. When the central administrative industrial committee meets it
will represent every phase of social activity. Hence the capitalist
political or geographical state will be replaced by the industrial
administrative committee of Socialism. The transition from the one social
system to the other will be the social revolution. The political State
throughout history has meant the government of men by ruling classes; the
Republic of Socialism will be the government of industry administered on
behalf of the whole community. The former meant the economic and political
subjection of the many; the latter will mean the economic freedom of
all---it will be, therefore, a true democracy.

This programmatic statement appears in William Paul's The State, its
Origins and Functions, written in early 1917---shortly before Lenin's State
and Revolution, perhaps his most libertarian work (see note 9). Paul was a
member of the Marxist-De Leonist Socialist Labor Party and later one of the
founders of the British Communist Party.[25] His critique of state
socialism resembles the libertarian doctrine of the anarchists in its
principle that since state ownership and management will lead to
bureaucratic despotism, the social revolution must replace it by the
industrial organization of society with direct workers' control. Many
similar statements can be cited.

What is far more important is that these ideas have been realized in
spontaneous revolutionary action, for example in Germany and Italy after
World War I and in Spain (not only in the agricultural countryside, but
also in industrial Barcelona) in 1936. One might argue that some form of
council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an
industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy
is severely limited when the industrial system is controlled by any form of
autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers and technocrats, a "vanguard"
party, or a state bureaucracy. Under these conditions of authoritarian
domination the classical libertarian ideals developed further by Marx and
Bakunin and all true revolutionaries cannot be realized; man will not be
free to develop his own potentialities to their fullest, and the producer
will remain "a fragment of a human being," degraded, a tool in the
productive process directed from above.

The phrase "spontaneous revolutionary action" can be misleading. The
anarchosyndicalists, at least, took very seriously Bakunin's remark that
the workers' organizations must create "not only the ideas but also the
facts of the future itself" in the prerevolutionary period. The
accomplishments of the popular revolution in Spain, in particular, were
based on the patient work of many years of organization and education, one
component of a long tradition of commitment and militancy. The resolutions
of the Madrid Congress of June 1931 and the Saragossa Congress in May 1936
foreshadowed in many ways the acts of the revolution, as did the somewhat
different ideas sketched by Santillan (see note 4) in his fairly specific
account of the social and economic organization to be instituted by the
revolution. Guérin writes "The Spanish revolution was relatively
mature in the minds of libertarian thinkers, as in the popular
consciousness." And workers' organizations existed with the structure, the
experience, and the understanding to undertake the task of social
reconstruction when, with the Franco coup, the turmoil of early 1936
exploded into social revolution. In his introduction to a collection of
documents on collectivization in Spain, the anarchist Augustin Souchy
writes:

For many years, the anarchists and the syndicalists of Spain considered
their supreme task to be the social transformation of the society. In their
assemblies of Syndicates and groups, in their journals, their brochures and
books, the problem of the social revolution was discussed incessantly and
in a systematic fashion.[26]

All of this lies behind the spontaneous achievements, the constructive work
of the Spanish Revolution.

The ideas of libertarian socialism, in the sense described, have been
submerged in the industrial societies of the past half-century. The
dominant ideologies have been those of state socialism or state capitalism
(of increasingly militarized character in the United States, for reasons
that are not obscure).[27] But there has been a rekindling of interest in
the past few years. The theses I quoted by Anton Pannekoek were taken from
a recent pamphlet of a radical French workers' group (Informations
Correspondance Ouvrière). The remarks by William Paul on
revolutionary socialism are cited in a paper by Walter Kendall given at the
National Conference on Workers' Control in Sheffield, England, in March
1969. The workers' control movement has become a significant force in
England in the past few years. It has organized several conferences and has
produced a substantial pamphlet literature, and counts among its active
adherents representatives of some of the most important trade unions. The
Amalgamated Engineering and Foundry Workers' Union, for example, has
adopted, as official policy, the program of nationalization of basic
industries under "workers' control at all levels."[28] On the Continent,
there are similar developments. May 1968 of course accelerated the growing
interest in council communism and related ideas in France and Germany, as
it did in England.

Given the highly conservative cast of our highly ideological society, it is
not too surprising that the United States has been relatively untouched by
these developments. But that too may change. The erosion of cold-war
mythology at least makes it possible to raise these questions in fairly
broad circles. If the present wave of repression can be beaten back, if the
left can overcome its more suicidal tendencies and build upon what has been
accomplished in the past decade, then the problem of how to organize
industrial society on truly democratic lines, with democratic control in
the workplace and in the community, should become a dominant intellectual
issue for those who are alive to the problems of contemporary society, and,
as a mass movement for libertarian socialism develops, speculation should
proceed to action.

In his manifesto of 1865, Bakunin predicted that one element in the social
revolution will be "that intelligent and truly noble part of youth which,
though belonging by birth to the privileged classes, in its generous
convictions and ardent aspirations, adopts the cause of the people."
Perhaps in the rise of the student movement of the 1960s one sees steps
towards a fulfillment of this prophecy.

Daniel Guérin has undertaken what he has described as a "process of
rehabilitation" of anarchism. He argues, convincingly I believe, that "the
constructive ideas of anarchism retain their vitality, that they may, when
reexamined and sifted, assist contemporary socialist thought to undertake a
new departure...[and] contribute to enriching Marxism."[29]

From the "broad back" of anarchism he has selected for more intensive
scrutiny those ideas and actions that can be described as libertarian
socialist. This is natural and proper. This framework accommodates the
major anarchist spokesmen as well as the mass actions that have been
animated by anarchist sentiments and ideals. Guérin is concerned not
only with anarchist thought but also with the spontaneous actions of
popular revolutionary struggle. He is concerned with social as well as
intellectual creativity. Furthermore, he attempts to draw from the
constructive achievements of the past lessons that will enrich the theory
of social liberation. For those who wish not only to understand the world,
but also to change it, this is the proper way to study the history of
anarchism.

Guérin describes the anarchism of the nineteenth century as
essentially doctrinal, while the twentieth century, for the anarchists, has
been a time of "revolutionary practice."[30] Anarchism reflects that
judgment. His interpretation of anarchism consciously points toward the
future. Arthur Rosenberg once pointed out that popular revolutions
characteristically seek to replace "a feudal or centralized authority
ruling by force" with some form of communal system which "implies the
destruction and disappearance of the old form of State." Such a system will
be either socialist or an "extreme form of democracy...[which is] the
preliminary condition for Socialism inasmuch as Socialism can only be
realized in a world enjoying the highest possible measure of individual
freedom." This ideal, he notes, was common to Marx and the anarchists.[31]
This natural struggle for liberation runs counter to the prevailing
tendency towards centralization in economic and political life.

A century ago Marx wrote that the workers of Paris "felt there was but one
alternative---the Commune, or the empire---under whatever name it might
reappear."

The empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of public
wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered, by the props it
lent to the artificially accelerated centralization of capital, and the
concomitant expropriation of their own ranks. It had suppressed them
politically, it had shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted
their Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to the
frères Ignorantins, it had revolted their national feeling as
Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war which left only one
equivalent for the ruins it made---the disappearance of the empire.[32]

The miserable Second Empire "was the only form of government possible at a
time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not
yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation."

It is not very difficult to rephrase these remarks so that they become
appropriate to the imperial systems of 1970. The problem of "freeing man
from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social
enslavement" remains the problem of our time. As long as this is so, the
doctrines and the revolutionary practice of libertarian socialism will
serve as an inspiration and guide.
******************NOTES***************

This essay is a revised version of the introduction to Daniel
Guérin's Anarchism: From Theory to Practice. In a slightly different
version, it appeared in the New York Review of Books, May 21, 1970.

[1] Octave Mirbeau, quoted in James Joll, The Anarchists, pp. 145--6.

[2] Rudolf Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 31.

[3] Cited by Rocker, ibid., p. 77. This quotation and that in the next
sentence are from Michael Bakunin, "The Program of the Alliance," in Sam
Dolgoff, ed. and trans., Bakunin on Anarchy, p. 255.

[4] Diego Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, p. 86. In the last
chapter, written several months after the revolution had begun, he
expresses his dissatisfaction with what had so far been achieved along
these lines. On the accomplishments of the social revolution in Spain, see
my American Power and the New Mandarins, chap. 1, and references cited
there; the important study by Broué and Témime has since been
translated into English. Several other important studies have appeared
since, in particular: Frank Mintz, L'Autogestion dans l'Espagne
révolutionaire (Paris: Editions Bélibaste, 1971);
César M. Lorenzo, Les Anarchistes espagnols et le pouvoir,
1868--1969 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969); Gaston Leval, Espagne
libertaire, 1936--1939: L'Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution
espagnole (Paris: Editions du Cercle, 1971). See also Vernon Richards,
Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, enlarged 1972 edition.

[5] Cited by Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, in his
discussion of Marxism and anarchism.

[6] Bakunin, in a letter to Herzen and Ogareff, 1866. Cited by Daniel
Guérin, Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire, p. 119.

[7] Fernand Pelloutier, cited in Joll, Anarchists. The source is
"L'Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers," Les Temps nouveaux, 1895. The
full text appears in Daniel Guérin, ed., Ni Dieu, ni
Maítre, an excellent historical anthology of anarchism.

[8] Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia, p. 127.

[9] "No state, however democratic," Bakunin wrote, "not even the reddest
republic---can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free
self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom
upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every
state, even the pseudo-People's State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence
only a machine ruling the masses from above, from a privileged minority of
conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need
and want better than do the people themselves...." "But the people will
feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled
'the people's stick' " (Statism and Anarchy [1873], in Dolgoff, Bakunin on
Anarchy, p. 338)---"the people's stick" being the democratic Republic.

Marx, of course, saw the matter differently.

For discussion of the impact of the Paris Commune on this dispute, see
Daniel Guérin's comments in Ni Dieu, ni Maítre; these
also appear, slightly extended, in his Pour un marxisme libertaire. See
also note 24.

[10] On Lenin's "intellectual deviation" to the left during 1917, see
Robert Vincent Daniels, "The State and Revolution: a Case Study in the
Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology," American Slavic and East
European Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).

[11] Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 295.

[12] Michael Bakunin, "La Commune de Paris et la notion de l'état,"
reprinted in Guérin, Ni Dieu, ni Maítre. Bakunin's final
remark on the laws of individual nature as the condition of freedom can be
compared to the creative thought developed in the rationalist and romantic
traditions. See my Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind.

[13] Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, p. 142,
referring to comments in The Holy Family. Avineri states that within the
socialist movement only the Israeli kibbutzim "have perceived that the
modes and forms of present social organization will determine the structure
of future society." This, however, was a characteristic position of
anarchosyndicalism, as noted earlier.

[14] Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism, p. 28.

[15] See Guérin's works cited earlier.

[16] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program.

[17] Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen
Ökonomie, cited by Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p. 306. In this
connection, see also Mattick's essay "Workers' Control," in Priscilla Long,
ed., The New Left; and Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Marx.

[18] Karl Marx, Capital, quoted by Robert Tucker, who rightly emphasizes
that Marx sees the revolutionary more as a "frustrated producer" than a
"dissatisfied consumer" (The Marxian Revolutionary Idea). This more radical
critique of capitalist relations of production is a direct outgrowth of the
libertarian thought of the Enlightenment.

[19] Marx, Capital, cited by Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Marx,
p. 83.

[20] Pelloutier, "L'Anarchisme."

[21] "Qu'est-ce que la propriété?" The phrase "property is
theft" displeased Marx, who saw in its use a logical problem, theft
presupposing the legitimate existence of property. See Avineri, Social and
Political Thought of Marx.

[22] Cited in Buber's Paths in Utopia, p. 19.

[23] Cited in J. Hampden Jackson, Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism, p.
60.

[24] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, p. 24. Avineri observes that this
and other comments of Marx about the Commune refer pointedly to intentions
and plans. As Marx made plain elsewhere, his considered assessment was more
critical than in this address.

[25] For some background, see Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in
Britain.

[26] Collectivizations: L'Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution
espagnole, p. 8.

[27] For discussion, see Mattick, Marx and Keynes, and Michael Kidron,
Western Capitalism Since the War. See also discussion and references cited
in my At War With Asia, chap. 1, pp. 23--6.

[28] See Hugh Scanlon, The Way Forward for Workers' Control. Scanlon is the
president of the AEF, one of Britain's largest trade unions. The institute
was established as a result of the sixth Conference on Workers' Control,
March 1968, and serves as a center for disseminating information and
encouraging research.

[29] Guérin, Ni Dieu, ni Maítre, introduction.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism, p. 88.

[32] Marx, Civil War in France, pp. 62--3.
*************BIBLIOGRAPHY*************

Avineri, Shlomo. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. London:
Cambridge University Press, 1968.

Bakunin, Michael. Bakunin on Anarchy. Edited and translated by Sam Dolgoff.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Buber, Martin. Paths in Utopia. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.

Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

------. American Power and the New Mandarins. New York: Pantheon Books,
1969.

------. At War with Asia. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.

Collectivizations: L'Oeuvre constructive de la Révolution espagnole.
2nd ed. Toulouse: Editions C.N.T., 1965. First edition, Barcelona, 1937.

Daniels, Robert Vincent. "The State and Revolution: a Case Study in the
Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology." American Slavic and East
European Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).

Guérin, Daniel. Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire. Paris: Librairie
Marcel Rivière, 1959.

------. Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, translated by Mary Klopper. New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.

------. Pour un marxisme libertaire. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1969.

------, ed. Ni Dieu, ni Maítre. Lausanne: La Cité
Editeur, n.d.

Jackson, J. Hampden. Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism. New York:
Collier Books, 1962.

Joll, James. The Anarchists. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1964.

Kendall, Walter. The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900--1921. London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.

Kidron, Michael Western Capitalism Since the War. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1968.

Mattick, Paul. Marx and Keynes: The Limits of Mixed Economy. Extending
Horizons Series. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969.

------. "Workers' Control." In The New Left: A Collection of Essays, edited
by Priscilla Long. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969.

Marx, Karl. The Civil War in France, 1871. New York: International
Publishers, 1941.

Pelloutier, Fernand. "L'Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers." Les Temps
nouveaux, 1895. Reprinted in Ni Dieu, ni Maítre, edited by
Daniel Guérin. Lausanne: La Cité Editeur, n.d.

Richards, Vernon. Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (1936--1939). Enlarged
ed. London: Freedom Press, 1972.

Rocker, Rudolf. Anarchosyndicalism. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.

Rosenberg, Arthur. A History of Bolshevism from Marx to the First Five
Years' Plan. Translated by Ian F. Morrow. New York: Russell & Russell,
1965.

Santillan, Diego Abad de. After the Revolution. New York: Greenberg
Publishers, 1937.

Scanlon, Hugh. The Way Forward for Workers' Control. Institute for Workers'
Control Pamphlet Series, no. 1, Nottingham, England, 1968.

Tucker, Robert C. The Marxian Revolutionary Idea. New York: W. W. Norton
& Co., 1969.

(Source: Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, first published in French in
1965, the 1970 English translation is Guérin's best-known work,
describing the intellectual substance and actual practice of anarchism. The
English translation by Mary Klopper includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky,
who describes it as an attempt "to extract from the history of libertarian
thought a living, evolving tradition".)


* Chapter 1 : The Basic Ideas of Anarchism


A MATTER OF WORDS

The word anarchy is as old as the world. It is derived from two ancient
Greek words, av (an), apxn (arkhe), and means something like the absence of
authority or government. However, for millennia the presumption has been
accepted that man cannot dispense with one or the other, and anarchy has
been understood in a pejorative sense, as a synonym for disorder, chaos,
and disorganization.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was famous for his quips (such as "property is
theft") and took to himself the word anarchy. As if his purpose were to
shock as much as possible, in 1840 he engaged in the following dialogue
with the "Philistine."

"You are a republican."
 "Republican, yes; but that means nothing. Res publica is 'the State.'
Kings, too, are republicans."
 "Ah well! You are a democrat?"
 "No."
 "What! Perhaps you are a monarchist?"
 "No."
 "Constitutionalist then?"
 "God forbid."
 "Then you are an aristocrat?"
 "Not at all!"
 "You want a mixed form of government?"
 "Even less."
 "Then what are you?"
 "An anarchist."

He sometimes made the concession of spelling anarchy "an-archy" to put the
packs of adversaries off the scent. By this term he understood anything but
disorder. Appearances notwithstanding, he was more constructive than
destructive, as we shall see. He held government responsible for disorder
and believed that only a society without government could restore the
natural order and re-create social harmony. He argued that the language
could furnish no other term and chose to restore to the old word anarchy
its strict etymological meaning. In the heat of his polemics, however, he
obstinately and paradoxically also used the word anarchy in its pejorative
sense of disorder, thus making confusion worse confounded. His disciple
Mikhail Bakunin followed him in this respect.

Proudhon and Bakunin carried this even further, taking malicious pleasure
in playing with the confusion created by the use of the two opposite
meanings of the word: for them, anarchy was both the most colossal
disorder, the most complete disorganization of society and, beyond this
gigantic revolutionary change, the construction of a new, stable, and
rational order based on freedom and solidarity.

The immediate followers of the two fathers of anarchy hesitated to use a
word so deplorably elastic, conveying only a negative idea to the
uninitiated, and lending itself to ambiguities which could be annoying to
say the least. Even Proudhon became more cautious toward the end of his
brief career and was happy to call himself a "federalist." His
petty-bourgeois descendants preferred the term mutuellisme to anarchisme
and the socialist line adopted collectivisme, soon to be displaced by
communisme. At the end of the century in France, Sebastien Faure took up a
word originated in 1858 by one Joseph Dejacque to make it the title of a
journal, Le Libertaire. Today the terms "anarchist" and "libertarian" have
become interchangeable.

Most of these terms have a major disadvantage: they fail to express the
basic characteristics of the doctrines they are supposed to describe.
Anarchism is really a synonym for socialism. The anarchist is primarily a
socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man. Anarchism
is only one of the streams of socialist thought, that stream whose main
components are concern for liberty and haste to abolish the State. Adolph
Fischer, one of the Chicago martyrs [5], claimed that "every anarchist is a
socialist, but every socialist is not necessarily an anarchist."

Some anarchists consider themselves to be the best and most logical
socialists, but they have adopted a label also attached to the terrorists,
or have allowed others to hang it around their necks. This has often caused
them to be mistaken for a sort of "foreign body" in the socialist family
and has led to a long string of misunderstandings and verbal battles -
usually quite purposeless. Some contemporary anarchists have tried to clear
up the misunderstanding by adopting a more explicit term: they align
themselves with libertarian socialism or communism.

A VISCERAL REVOLT

Anarchism can be described first and foremost as a visceral revolt. The
anarchist is above all a man in revolt. He reieets c~ri~t~ ~c a whole along
with its guardians. Max Stirner declared that the anarchist frees himself
of all that is sacred, and carries out a vast operation of deconsecration.
These "vagabonds of the intellect," these "bad characters," "refuse to
treat as intangible truths things that give respite and consolation to
thousands and instead leap over the barriers of tradition to indulge
without restraint the fantasies of their impudent critique." [6]

Proudhon rejected all and any "official persons" - philosophers, priests,
magistrates, academicians, journalists, parliamentarians, etc. - for whom
"the people is always a monster to be fought, muzzled, and chained down;
which must be led by trickery like the elephant or the rhinoceros; or cowed
by famine; and which is bled by colonization and war." Elisee Reclus [7]
explained why society seems, to these well-heeled gentlemen, worth
preserving: "Since there are rich and poor, rulers and subjects, masters
and servants, Caesars who give orders for combat and gladiators who go and
die, the prudent need only place themselves on the side of the rich and the
masters, and make themselves into courtiers to the emperors."

His permanent state of revolt makes the anarchist sympathetic to
nonconformists and outlaws, and leads him to embrace the cause of the
convict and the outcast. Bakunin thought that Marx and Engels spoke most
unfairly of the lumpenproletariat, of the "proletariat in rags": "For the
spirit and force of the future social revolution is with it and it alone,
and not with the stratum of the working class which has become like the
bourgeoisie."

Explosive statements which an anarchist would not disavow were voiced by
Balzac through the character of Vautrin, a powerful incarnation of social
protest - half rebel, half criminal.

HORROR OF THE STATE

The anarchist regards the State as the most deadly of the preconceptions
which have blinded men through the ages. Stirner denounced him who
"throughout eternity. . is obsessed by the State."

Proudhon was especially fierce against "this fantasy of our minds that the
first duty of a free and rational being is to refer to museums and
libraries," and he laid bare the mechanism whereby "this mental
predisposition has been maintained and its fascination made to seem
invincible: government has always presented itself to men's minds as the
natural organ of justice and the protector of the weak." He mocked the
inveterate authoritarians who "bow before power like church wardens before
the sacrament" and reproached "all parties without exception" for turning
their gaze "unceasingly toward authority as if to the polestar." He longed
for the day when "renunciation of authority shall have replaced faith in
authority and the political catechism."

Kropotkin jeered at the bourgeois who "regarded the people as a horde of
savages who would be useless as soon as government ceased to function."
Malatesta anticipated psychoanalysis when he uncovered the fear of freedom
in the subconscious of authoritarians.

What is wrong with the State in the eyes of the anarchists?

Stirner expressed it thus: "We two are enemies, the State and I." "Every
State is a tyranny, be it the tyranny of a single man or a group." Every
State is necessarily what we now call totalitarian: "The State has always
one purpose: to limit, control, subordinate the individual and subject him
to the general purpose.... Through its censorship, its supervision, and its
police the State tries to obstruct all free activity and sees this
repression as its duty, because the instinct of self-preservation demands
it." "The State does not permit me to use my thoughts to their full value
and communicate them to other men . . . unless they are its own....
Otherwise it shuts me up."

Proudhon wrote in the same vein: "The government of man by man is
servitude." "Whoever lays a hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a
tyrant. I declare him to be my enemy." He launched into a tirade worthy of
a Moliere or a Beaumarchais:

"To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed,
legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, con-
trolled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that
have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue.... To be governed means
that at every move, operation, or transaction one is noted, registered,
entered in a census, taxed, stamped, priced, assessed, patented, licensed,
authorized, recommended, admonished, prevented, reformed, set right,
corrected. Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed,
exploited, monopolized, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in the
name of public utility and the general good. Then, at the first sign of
resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, fined, despised, vexed,
pursued, hustled, beaten up, garroted, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned,
judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all,
ridiculed, mocked, outraged, and dishonored. That is government, that is
its justice and its morality! . . . O human personality! How can it be that
you have cowered in such subjection for sixty centuries?"

Bakunin sees the State as an "abstraction devouring the life of the
people," an "immense cemetery where all the real aspirations and living
forces of a country generously and blissfully allow themselves to be buried
in the name of that abstraction."

According to Malatesta, "far from creating energy, government by its
methods wastes, paralyzes, and destroys enormous potential." As the powers
of the State and its bureaucracy widen, the danger grows more acute.
Proudhon foresaw the greatest evil of the twentieth century:
"Fonctionnairisme [legalistic rule by civil servants] . . . leads toward
state communism, the absorption of all local and individual life into the
administrative machinery, and the destruction of all free thought. Everyone
wants to take refuge under the wing of power, to live in common." It is
high time to call a halt: "Centralization has grown stronger and stronger .
. ., things have reached . . . the point where society and government can
no longer coexist." "From the top of the hierarchy to the bottom there is
nothing in the State which is not an abuse to be reformed, a form of
parasitism to be suppressed, or an instrument of tyranny to be destroyed.
And you speak to us of preserving the State, and increasing the power of
the State! Away with you - you are no revolutionary!"

Bakunin had an equally clear and painful vision of an increasingly
totalitarian State. He saw the forces of world counter-revolution, "based
on enormous budgets, permanent armies, and a formidable bureaucracy" and
endowed "with all the terrible means of action given to them by modern
centralization," as becoming "an immense, crushing, threatening reality."

HOSTILITY TO BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY

The anarchist denounces the deception of bourgeois democracy even more
bitterly than does the authoritarian socialist. The bourgeois democratic
State, christened "the nation," does not seem to Stirner any less to be
feared than the old absolutist State. "The monarch . . . was a very poor
man compared with the new one, the 'sovereign nation.' In liberalism we
have only the continuation of the ancient contempt for the Self."
"Certainly many privileges have been eliminated through time but only for
the benefit of the State . . . and not at all to strengthen my Self."

In Proudhon's view "democracy is nothing but a constitutional tyrant." The
people were declared sovereign by a "trick" of our forefathers. In reality
they are a monkey king which has kept only the title of sovereign without
the magnificence and grandeur. The people rule but do not govern, and
delegate their sovereignty through the periodic exercise of universal
suffrage, abdicating their power anew every three or five years. The
dynasts have been driven from the throne but the royal prerogative has been
preserved intact. In the hands of a people whose education has been
willfully neglected the ballot is a cunning swindle benefiting only the
united barons of industry, trade, and property.

The very theory of the sovereignty of the people contains its own negation.
If the entire people were truly sovereign there would no longer be either
government or governed; the sovereign would be reduced to nothing; the
State would have no raison d'etre, would be identical with society and
disappear into industrial organization.

Bakunin saw that the "representative system, far from being a guarantee for
the people, on the contrary, creates and safeguards the continued existence
of a governmental aristocracy against the people." Universal suffrage is a
sleight of hand, a bait, a safety valve, and a mask behind which "hides the
really despotic power of the State based on the police, the banks, and the
army," "an excellent way of oppressing and ruining a people in the name of
the so-called popular will which serves to camouflage it."

The anarchist does not believe in emancipation by the ballot. Proudhon was
an abstentionist, at least in theory, thinking that "the social revolution
is seriously compromised if it comes about through the political
revolution." To vote would be a contradiction, an act of weakness and
complicity with the corrupt regime: "We must make war on all the old
parties together, using parliament as a legal battlefield, but staying
outside it." "Universal suffrage is the counter-revolution," and to
constitute itself a class the proletariat must first "secede from"
bourgeois democracy.

However, the militant Proudhon frequently departed from this position of
principle. In June 1848 he let himself be elected to parliament and was
briefly stuck in the parliamentary glue. On two occasions, during the
partial elections of September 1848 and the presidential elections of
December 10 of the same year, he supported the candidacy of Raspail, a
spokesman of the extreme Left. He even went so far as to allow himself to
be blinded by the tactic of the "the lesser evil," expressing a preference
for General Cavaignac, persecutor of the Paris proletariat, over the
apprentice dictator Louis Napoleon. Much later, in 1863 and 1864, he did
advocate returning blank ballot papers, but as a demonstration against the
imperial dictatorship, not in opposition to universal suffrage, which he
now christened "the democratic principle par excellence."

Bakunin and his supporters in the First International objected to the
epithet "abstentionist" hurled at them by the Marxists. For them,
boycotting the ballot box was a simple tactical question and not an article
of faith. Although they gave priority to the class struggle in the economic
field, they would not agree that they ignored "politics." They were not
rejecting "politics," but only bourgeois politics. They did not disapprove
of a political revolution unless it was to come before the social
revolution. They steered clear of other movements only if these were not
directed to the immediate and complete emancipation of the workers. What
they feared and denounced were ambiguous electoral alliances with radical
bourgeois parties of the 1848 type, or "popular fronts," as they would be
called today. They also feared that when workers were elected to parliament
and translated into bourgeois living conditions, they would cease to be
workers and turn into Statesmen, becoming bourgeois, perhaps even more
bourgeois than the bourgeoisie itself.

However, the anarchist attitude toward universal suffrage is far from
logical or consistent. Some considered the ballot as a last expedient.
Others, more uncompromising, regarded its use as damnable in any
circumstances and made it a matter of doctrinal purity. Thus, at the time
of the Cartel des Gauches (Alliance of the Left) elections in May 1924,
Malatesta refused to make any concession. He admitted that in certain
circumstances the outcome of an election might have "good" or "bad"
consequences and that the result would sometimes depend on anarchist votes,
especially if the forces of the opposing political groupings were fairly
evenly balanced. "But no matter! Even if some minimal progress were to be
the direct result of an electoral victory, the anarchist should not rush to
the polling stations." He concluded: "Anarchists have always kept
themselves pure, and remain the revolutionary party par excellence, the
party of the future, because they have been able to resist the siren song
of elections."

The inconsistency of anarchist doctrine on this matter was to be especially
well illustrated in Spain. In 1930 the anarchists joined in a common front
with bourgeois democrats to overthrow the dictator, Primo de Rivera. The
following year, despite their official abstention, many went to the polls
in the municipal elections which led to the overthrow of the monarchy. In
the general election of November 1933 they strongly recommended abstention
from voting, and this returned a violently anti-labor Right to power for
more than two years. The anarchists had taken care to announce in advance
that if their abstention led to a victory for reaction they would launch
the social revolution. They soon attempted to do so but in vain and at the
cost of heavy losses (dead, wounded, and imprisoned).

When the parties of the Left came together in the Popular Front in 1936,
the central anarcho-syndicalist organization was hard pressed to know what
attitude to adopt. Finally it declared itself, very halfheartedly, for
abstention, but its campaign was so tepid as to go unheard by the masses
who were in any case already committed to participation in the elections.
By going to the polls the mass of voters insured the triumph of the Popular
Front (263 left-wing deputies, as against 181 others).

It should be noted that in spite of their savage attacks on bourgeois
democracy, the anarchists admitted that it is relatively progressive. Even
Stirner, the most intransigent, occasionally let slip the word "progress."
Proudhon conceded: "When a people passes from the monarchical to the
democratic State, some progress is made." And Bakunin said: "It should not
be thought that we want . . . to criticize the bourgeois government in
favor of monarchy.... The most imperfect republic is a thousand times
better than the most enlightened monarchy.... The democratic system
gradually educates the masses to public life." This disproves Lenin's view
that "some anarchists" proclaim "that the form of oppression is a matter of
indifference to the proletariat." This also dispels the fear expressed by
Henri Arvon in his little book L'Anarchisme that anarchist opposition to
democracy could be confused with counter-revolutionary opposition.

CRITIQUE OF AUTHORITARIAN SOCIALISM

The anarchists were unanimous in subjecting authoritarian socialism to a
barrage of severe criticism. At the time when they made violent and
satirical attacks these were not entirely well founded, for those to whom
they were addressed were either primitive or "vulgar" communists, whose
thought had not yet been fertilized by Marxist humanism, or else, in the
case of Marx and Engels themselves, were not as set on authority and state
control as the anarchists made out.

Although in the nineteenth century authoritarian tendencies in socialist
thought were still embryonic and undeveloped, they have proliferated in our
time. In the face of these excrescences, the anarchist critique seems less
tendentious, less unjust; sometimes it even seems to have a prophetic ring.

Stirner accepted many of the premises of communism but with the following
qualification: the profession of communist faith is a first step toward
total emancipation of the victims of our society, but they will become
completely "disalienated," and truly able to develop their individuality,
only by advancing beyond communism.

As Stirner saw it, in a communist system the worker remains subject to the
rule of a society of workers. His work is imposed on him by society, and
remains for him a task. Did not the communist Weitling [8] write:
"Faculties can only be developed in so far as they do not disrupt the
harmony of society"? To which Stirner replied: "Whether I were to be
'loyal' to a tyrant or to Weitling's 'society' I would suffer the same
absence of rights."

According to Stirner, the communist does not think of the man behind the
worker. He overlooks the most important issue: to give man the opportunity
to enjoy himself as an individual after he has fulfilled his task as a
producer. Above all, Stirner glimpsed the danger that in a communist
society the collective appropriation of the means of production would give
the State more exorbitant powers than it has at present:

"By abolishing all private property communism makes me even more dependent
on others, on the generality or totality [of society], and, in spite of its
attacks on the State, it intends to establish its own State, . . . a state
of affairs which paralyzes my freedom to act and exerts sovereign authority
over me. Communism is rightly indignant about the wrongs which I suffer at
the hands of individual proprietors, but the power which it will put into
the hands of the total society is even more terrible."

Proudhon was just as dissatisfied with the "governmental, dictatorial,
authoritarian, doctrinaire communist system" which "starts from the
principle that the individual is entirely subordinate to the collectivity."
The communist idea of the State is exactly the same as that of the former
masters and much less liberal: "Like an army that has captured the enemy's
guns, communism has simply turned property's artillery against the army of
property. The slave always apes his master." And Proudhon describes in the
following terms the political system which he attributes to the communists:

"A compact democracy - apparently based on the dictatorship of the masses,
but in which the masses have only power enough to insure universal
servitude, according to the following prescription borrowed from the old
absolutism:

The indivisibility of power;

All-absorbing centralism;

The systematic destruction of all individual, corporate, or local thought
believed to be subversive;

An inquisitorial police force."

The authoritarian socialists call for a "revolution from above." They
"believe that the State must continue after the Revolution. They preserve
the State, power, authority, and government, increasing their scope still
further. All they do is to change the titles . . . as though changing the
names were enough to transform things!" And Proudhon concludes by saying:
"Government is by its nature counter-revolutionary . . . give power to a
Saint Vincent de Paul and he will be a Guizot [9] or a Talleyrand." Bakunin
extended this criticism of authoritarian socialism:

I detest communism because it is the negation of liberty and I cannot
conceive anything human without liberty. I am not a communist because
communism concentrates all the powers of society and absorbs them into the
State, because it leads inevitably to the centralization of property in the
hands of the State, while I want to see the State abolished. I want the
complete elimination of the authoritarian principle of state tutelage which
has always subjected, oppressed, exploited, and depraved men while claiming
to moralize and civilize them. I want society, and collective or social
property, to be organized from the bottom up through free association and
not from the top down by authority of any kind.... In that sense I am a
collectivist and not at all a communist.

Soon after making the above speech Bakunin joined the First International
And there he and his supporters came into conflict not only with Marx and
Engels but with others far more vulnerable to his attacks than the two
founders of scientific socialism: on the one hand, the German social
democrats for whom the State was a fetish and who proposed the use of the
ballot and electoral alliances to introduce an ambiguous "People's State"
(Volkstaat); on the other hand, the Blanquists [10] who sang the virtues of
a transitional dictatorship by a revolutionary minority. Bakunin fought
these divergent but equally authoritarian concepts tooth and nail, while
Marx and Engels oscillated between them for tactical reasons but finally
decided to disavow both under the harassment of anarchist criticism.

However, the friction between Bakunin and Marx arose mainly from the
sectarian and personal way in which the latter tried to control the
International, especially after 1870. There is no doubt that there were
wrongs on both sides in this quarrel, in which the stake was the control of
the organization and thus of the whole movement of the international
working class. Bakunin was not without fault and his case against Marx
often lacked fairness and even good faith. What is important for the modern
reader, however, is that as early as 1870 Bakunin had the merit of raising
the alarm against certain ideas of organization of the working-class
movement and of proletarian power which were much later to distort the
Russian Revolution. Sometimes unjustly, and sometimes with reason, Bakunin
claimed to see in Marxism the embryo of what was to become Leninism and
then the malignant growth of Stalinism.

Bakunin maliciously attributed to Marx and Engels ideas which these two men
never expressed openly, if indeed they harbored them at all:

"But, it will be said all the workers . . . cannot become scholars; and is
it not enough that with this organization [International] there is a group
of men who have mastered the science, philosophy, and politics of socialism
as completely as is possible in our day, so that the majority . . . can be
certain of remaining on the right road to the final emancipation of the
proletariat . . . simply by faithfully obeying their directions? . . . Vie
have heard this line of reasoning developed by innuendo with all sorts of
subtle and skillful qualifications but never openly expressed - they are
not brave enough or frank enough for that. "

Bakunin continued his diatribe:

"Beginning from the basic principle . . . that thought takes precedence
over life, and abstract theory over social practice, and inferring that
sociological science must became the starting point of social upheaval and
reconstruction, they were forced to the conclusion that since thought,
theory, and science are, for the present at any rate, the exclusive
possessions of a very small number of persons, that minority must direct
social life.

The supposed Popular State would be nothing but the despotic government of
the popular masses by a new and very narrow aristocracy of knowledge, real
or pretended. "

Bakunin translated Marx's major work, Das Kapital, into Russian, had a
lively admiration for his intellectual capacity, fully accepted the
materialist conception of history, and appreciated better than anyone
Marx's theoretical contribution to the emancipation of the working class.
What he would not concede was that intellectual superiority can confer upon
anyone the right to lead the working-class movement:

"One asks oneself how a man as intelligent as Marx could conceive of such a
heresy against common sense and historical experience as the notion that a
group of individuals, however intelligent and well-intentioned, could
become the soul and the unifying and directing will of a revolutionary
movement and of the economic organization of the proletariat of all
countries.... The creation of a universal dictatorship . . ., a
dictatorship which would somehow perform the task of chief engineer of the
world revolution, regulating and steering the insurrectionary movements of
the masses of all nations as one steers a machine . . ., the creation of
such a dictatorship would in itself suffice to kill the revolution and
paralyze and distort all popular movements.... And what is one to think of
an international congress which, in the supposed interest of this
revolution, imposes on the proletariat of the civilized world a government
invested with dictatorial powers?"

No doubt Bakunin was distorting the thoughts of Marx quite severely in
attributing to him such a universally authoritarian concept, but the
experience of the Third International has since shown that the danger of
which he warned did eventually materialize.

The Russian exile showed himself equally clear-sighted about the danger of
state control under a communist regime. According to him, the aspirations
of "doctrinaire" socialists would "put the people into a new harness." They
doubtless profess, as do the libertarians, to see any State as oppressive,
but maintain that only dictatorship - their own, of course - can create
freedom for the people; to which the reply is that every dictatorship must
seek to last as long as possible. Instead of leaving it to the people to
destroy the State, they want to "transfer it . . . into the hands of the
benefactors, guardians, and teachers, the leaders of the Communist Party."
They see quite well that such a government, "however democratic its forms,
will be a real dictatorship," and "console themselves with the idea that it
will be temporary and short-lived." But no! Bakunin retorted. This
supposedly interim dictatorship will inevitably lead to "the reconstruction
of the State, its privileges, its inequalities, and all its oppressions,"
to the formation of a governmental aristocracy "which again begins to
exploit and rule in the name of common happiness or to save the State." And
this State will be "the more absolute because its despotism is carefully
concealed under obsequious respect... for the will of the people."

Bakunin, always particularly lucid, believed in the Russian Revolution: "If
the workers of the West wait too long, Russian peasants will set them an
example." In Russia, the revolution will be basically "anarchistic." But he
was fearful of the outcome: the revolutionaries might well simply carry on
the State of Peter the Great which was "based on . . . suspension of all
expressions of the life of the people," for "one can change the label of a
State and its form . . . but the foundation will remain unchanged." Either
the State must be destroyed or one must "reconcile oneself to the vilest
and most dangerous lie of our century . . .: Red Bureaucracy." Bakunin
summed it up as follows: "Take the most radical of revolutionaries and
place him on the throne of all the Russias or give him dictatorial powers .
. . and before the year is out he will be worse than the Czar himself."

In Russia Voline was participant, witness, and historian of the Revolution,
and afterwards recorded that events had taught the same lesson as the
masters. Yes, indeed, socialist power and social revolution "are
contradictory factors"; they cannot be reconciled:

"A revolution which is inspired by state socialism and adopts this form,
even 'provisionally' and 'temporarily,' is lost: it takes a wrong road down
an ever steeper slope.... All political power inevitably creates a
privileged position for those who exercise it.... Having taken over the
Revolution, mastered it, and harnessed it, those in power are obliged to
create the bureaucratic and repressive apparatus which is indispensable for
any authority that wants to maintain itself, to command, to give orders, in
a word. to govern. . . . All authority seeks to some extent to control
social life. Its existence predisposes the masses to passivity, its very
presence suffocates any spirit of initiative.... 'Communist' power is ... a
real bludgeon. Swollen with 'authority' . . . it fears every independent
action. Any autonomous action is immediately seen as suspect, threatening,
. . . for such authority wants sole control of the tiller. Initiative from
any other source is seen as an intrusion upon its domain and an
infringement of its prerogatives and, therefore, unacceptable. "

Further, anarchists categorically deny the need for "provisional" and
"temporary" stages. In 1936, on the eve of the Spanish Revolution, Diego
Abad de Santillan placed authoritarian socialism on the horns of a dilemma:
"Either the revolution gives social wealth to the producers, or it does
not. If it does, the producers organize themselves for collective
production and distribution and there is nothing left for the State to do.
If it does not give social wealth to the producers, the revolution is
nothing but a deception and the State goes on." One can say that the
dilemma is oversimplified here; it would be less so if it were translated
into terms of intent: the anarchists are not so naive as to dream that all
the remnants of the State would disappear overnight, but they have the will
to make them wither away as quickly as possible; while the authoritarians,
on the other hand, are satisfied with the perspective of the indefinite
survival of a "temporary" State, arbitrarily termed a "Workers' State."

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION:
THE INDIVIDUAL

The anarchist sets two sources of revolutionary energy against the
constraints and hierarchies of authoritarian socialism: the individual, and
the spontaneity of the masses. Some anarchists are more individualistic
than social, some more social than individualistic. However, one cannot
conceive of a libertarian who is not an individualist. The observations
made by Augustin Hamon from the survey mentioned earlier confirm this
analysis.

Max Stirner [11] rehabilitated the individual at a time when the
philosophical field was dominated by Hegelian anti-individualism and most
reformers in the social field had been led by the misdeeds of bourgeois
egotism to stress its opposite: was not the very word "socialism" created
as antonym to "individualism"?

Stirner exalted the intrinsic value of the unique individual, that is to
say, one cast in a single unrepeatable mold (an idea which has been
confirmed by recent biological research). For a long time this thinker
remained isolated in anarchist circles, an eccentric followed by only a
tiny sect of intelligent individualists. Today, the boldness and scope of
his thought appear in a new light. The contemporary world seems to have set
itself the task of rescuing the individual from all the forms of alienation
which crush him' those of individual slavery and those of totalitarian
conformism. In a famous article written in 1933, Simone Weil complained of
not finding in Marxist writings any answer to questions arising from the
need to defend the individual against the new forms of oppression coming
after classical capitalist oppression. Stirner set out to fill this serious
gap as early as the mid-nineteenth century.

He wrote in a lively style, crackling with aphorisms: "Do not seek in
self-renunciation a freedom which denies your very selves, but seek your
own selves.... Let each of you be an all-powerful I." There is no freedom
but that which the individual conquers for himself. Freedom given or
conceded is not freedom but "stolen goods." "There is no judge but myself
who can decide whether I am right or wrong." "The only things I have no
right to do are those I do not do with a free mind." "You have the right to
be whatever you have the strength to be." Whatever you accomplish you
accomplish as a unique individual: "Neither the State, society, nor
humanity can master this devil."

In order to emancipate himself, the individual must begin by putting under
the microscope the intellectual baggage with which his parents and teachers
have saddled him. He must undertake a vast operation of "desanctification,"
beginning with the so-called morality of the bourgeoisie: "Like the
bourgeoisie itself, its native soil, it is still far too close to the
heaven of religion, is still not free enough, and uncritically borrows
bourgeois laws to transplant them to its own ground instead of working out
new and independent doctrines."

Stirner was especially incensed by sexual morality. The "machinations" of
Christianity "against passion" have simply been taken over by the
secularists. They refused to listen to the appeal of the flesh and display
their zeal against it. They "spit in the face of immorality." The moral
prejudices inculcated by Christianity have an especially strong hold on the
masses of the people. "The people furiously urge the police on against
anything which seems to them immoral or even improper, and this public
passion for morality protects the police as an institution far more
effectively than a government could ever do."

Stirner foreshadowed modern psychoanalysis by observing and denouncing the
internalization of parental moral values. From childhood we are consumed
with moral prejudices. Morality has become "an internal force from which I
cannot free myself," "its despotism is ten times worse than before, because
it now scolds away from within my conscience." "The young are sent to
school in herds to learn the old saws and when they know the verbiage of
the old by heart they are said to have come of age." Stirner declared
himself an iconoclast: "God, conscience, duties, and laws are all errors
which have been stuffed into our minds and hearts." The real seducers and
corrupters of youth are the priests and parents who "muddy young hearts and
stupefy young minds." If there is anything that "comes from the devil" it
is surely this false divine voice which has been interpolated into the
conscience.

In the process of rehabilitating the individual, Stirner also discovered
the Freudian subconscious. The Self cannot be apprehended. Against it "the
empire of thought, mind, and ratiocination crumbles"; it is inexpressible,
inconceivable, incomprehensible, and through Stirner's lively aphorisms one
seems to hear the first echoes of existentialist philosophy: "I start from
a hypothesis by taking myself as hypothesis.... I use it solely for my
enjoyment and satisfaction.... I exist only because I nourish my Self....
The fact that I am of absorbing interest to myself means that I exist."

Of course the white heat of imagination in which Stirner wrote sometimes
misled him into paradoxical statements. He let slip some antisocial
aphorisms and arrived at the position that life in society is impossible:
"We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart." "The people is
dead! Good-day, Self!" "The people's good fortune is my misfortune!" "If it
is right for me, it is right. It is possible that it is wrong for others:
let them take care of themselves!"

However, these occasional outbursts are probably not a fundamental part of
his thinking and, in spite of his hermit's bluster, he aspired to communal
life. Like most people who are introverted, isolated, shut in, he suffered
acute nostalgia for it. To those who asked how he could live in society
with his exclusiveness he replied that only the man who has comprehended
his own "oneness" can have relations with his fellows. The individual needs
help and friends; for example, if he writes books he needs readers. He
joins with his fellow man in order to increase his strength and fulfill
himself more completely through their combined strength than either could
in isolation. "If you have several million others behind you to protect
you, together you will become a great force and will easily be victorious"
- but on one condition: these relations with others must be free and
voluntary and always subject to repudiation. Stirner distinguishes a
society already established, which is a constraint, from association, which
is a voluntary act. "Society uses you, but you use association."
Admittedly, association implies a sacrifice, a restriction upon freedom,
but this sacrifice is not made for the common good: "It is my own personal
interest that brings me to it."

Stirner was dealing with very contemporary problems, especially when he
treated the question of political parties with special reference to the
communists. He was severely critical of the conformism of parties: "One
must follow one's party everywhere and anywhere, absolutely approving and
defending its basic principles." "Members . . . bow to the slightest wishes
of the party." The party's program must "be for them certain, above
question.... One must belong to the party body and soul.... Anyone who goes
from one party to another is immediately treated as a renegade." In
Stirner's view, a monolithic party ceases to be an association and only a
corpse remains. He rejected such a party but did not give up hope of
joining a political association: "I shall always find enough people who
want to associate with me without having to swear allegiance to my flag."
He felt he could only rejoin the party if there was "nothing compulsory
about it," and his sole condition was that he could be sure "of not letting
himself be taken over by the party." "The party is nothing other than a
party in which he takes part." "He associates freely and takes back his
freedom in the same way."

There is only one weakness in Stirner's argument, though it more or less
underlies all his writings: his concept of the unity of the individual is
not only "egotistical," profitable for the "Self" but is also valid for the
collectivity. The human association is only fruitful if it does not crush
the individual but, on the contrary, develops initiative and creative
energy. Is not the strength of a party the sum of all the strengths of the
individuals who compose it? This lacuna in his argument is due to the fact
that Stirner's synthesis of the individual and society remained halting and
incomplete. In the thought of this rebel the social and the antisocial
clash and are not always resolved. The social anarchists were to reproach
him for this, quite rightly.

These reproaches were the more bitter because Stirner, presumably through
ignorance, made the mistake of including Proudhon among the authoritarian
communists who condemn individualist aspirations in the name of "social
duty." It is true that Proudhon had mocked Stirner-like "adoration" of the
individual, [12] but his entire work was a search for a synthesis, or
rather an "equilibrium" between concern for the individual and the
interests of society, between individual power and collective power. "Just
as individualism is a primordial human trait, so association is its
complement."

"Some think that man has value only through society . . . and tend to
absorb the individual into the collectivity. Thus . . . the communist
system is a devaluation of the personality in the name of society.... That
is tyranny, a mystical and anonymous tyranny, it is not association....
When the human personality is divested of its prerogatives, society is
found to be without its vital principle."

On the other hand, Proudhon rejected the individualistic utopianism that
agglomerates unrelated individualities with no organic connection, no
collective power, and thus betrays its inability to resolve the problem of
common interests. In conclusion: neither communism nor unlimited freedom.
"We have too many joint interests, too many things in common."

Bakunin, also, was both an individualist and a socialist. He kept
reiterating that a society could only reach a higher level by starting from
the free individual. Whenever he enunciated rights which must be guaranteed
to groups, such as the right to self-determination or secession, he was
careful to state that the individual should be the first to benefit from
them. The individual owes duties to society only in so far as he has freely
consented to become part of it. Everyone is free to associate or not to
associate, and, if he so desires, "to go and live in the deserts or the
forests among the wild beasts." "Freedom is the absolute right of every
human being to seek no other sanction for his actions but his own
conscience, to determine these actions solely by his own will, and
consequently to owe his first responsibility to himself alone." The society
which the individual has freely chosen to join as a member appears only as
a secondary factor in the above list of responsibilities. It has more
duties to the individual than rights over him, and, provided he has reached
his majority, should exercise "neither surveillance nor authority" over
him, but owe him "the protection of his liberty."

Bakunin pushed the practice of "absolute and complete liberty" very far: I
am entitled to dispose of my person as I please, to be idle or active, to
live either honestly by my own labor or even by shamefully exploiting
charity or private confidence. All this on one condition only: that this
charity or confidence is voluntary and given to me only by individuals who
have attained their majority. I even have the right to enter into
associations whose objects make them "immoral" or apparently so. In his
concern for liberty Bakunin went so far as to allow one to join
associations designed to corrupt and destroy individual or public liberty:
"Liberty can and must defend itself only through liberty; to try to
restrict it on the specious pretext of defending it is a dangerous
contradiction."

As for ethical problems, Bakunin was sure "immorality" was a consequence of
a viciously organized society. This latter must, therefore, be destroyed
from top to bottom. Liberty alone can bring moral improvement. Restrictions
imposed on the pretext of improving morals have always proved detrimental
to them. Far from checking the spread of immorality, repression has always
extended and deepened it. Thus it is futile to oppose it by rigorous
legislation which trespasses on individual liberty. Bakunin allowed only
one sanction against the idle, parasitic, or wicked: the loss of political
rights, that is, of the safeguards accorded the individual by society. It
follows that each individual has the right to alienate his own freedom by
his own acts but, in this case, is denied the enjoyment of his political
rights for the duration of his voluntary servitude.

If crimes are committed they must be seen as a disease, and punishment as
treatment rather than as social vengeance. Moreover, the convicted
individual must retain the right not to submit to the sentence imposed if
he declares that he no longer wishes to be a member of the society
concerned. The latter, in return, has the right to expel such an individual
and declare him to be outside its protection.

Bakunin, however, was far from being a nihilist. His proclamation of
absolute individual freedom did not lead him to repudiate all social
obligations. I become free only through the freedom of others: "Man can
fulfill his free individuality only by complementing it through all the
individuals around him, and only through work and the collective force of
society." Membership in the society is voluntary but Bakunin had no doubt
that because of its enormous advantages "membership will be chosen by all."
Man is both "the most individual and the most social of the animals."

Bakunin showed no softness for egoism in its vulgar sense - for bourgeois
individualism "which drives the individual to conquest and the
establishment of his own well-being . . . in spite of everyone, on the
backs of others, to their detriment." "Such a solitary and abstract human
being is as much a fiction as God." "Total isolation is intellectual,
moral, and material death."

A broad and synthesizing intellect, Bakunin attempts to create a bridge
between individuals and mass movements: "All social life is simply this
continual mutual dependence of individuals and the masses. Even the
strongest and most intelligent individuals . . . are at every moment of
their lives both promoters and products of the desires and actions of the
masses." The anarchist sees the revolutionary movement as the product of
this interaction; thus he regards individual action and autonomous
collective action by the masses as equally fruitful and militant.

The Spanish anarchists were the intellectual heirs of Bakunin. Although
enamored of socialization, on the very eve of the 1936 Revolution they did
not fail to make a solemn pledge to protect the sacred autonomy of the
individual: "The eternal aspiration to be unique," wrote Diego Abad de
Santillan, "will be expressed in a thousand ways: the individual will not
be suffocated by levering down .... Individualism, personal taste, and
originality will have adequate scope to express themselves."

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION:
THE MASSES

From the Revolution of 1848 Proudhon learned that the masses are the source
of power of revolutions. At the end of 1849 he wrote: "Revolutions have no
instigators; they come when fate beckons, and end with the exhaustion of
the mysterious power that makes them flourish." "All revolutions have been
carried through by the spontaneous action of the people; if occasionally
governments have responded to the initiative of the people it was only
because they were forced or constrained to do so. Almost always they
blocked, repressed, struck." "When left to their own instincts the people
almost always see better than when guided by the policy of leaders." "A
social revolution . . . does not occur at the behest of a master with a
ready-made theory, or at the dictate of a prophet. A truly organic
revolution is a product of universal life, and although it has its
messengers and executors it is really not the work of any one person." The
revolution must be conducted from below and not from above. Once the
revolutionary crisis is over social reconstruction should be the task of
the popular masses themselves. Proudhon affirmed the "personality and
autonomy of the masses."

Bakunin also repeated tirelessly that a social revolution can be neither
decreed nor organized from above and can only be made and fully developed
by spontaneous and continuous mass action. Revolutions come "like a thief
in the night." They are "produced by the force of events." "They are long
in preparation in the depths of the instinctive consciousness of the masses
- then they explode, often precipitated by apparently trivial causes." "One
can foresee them, have presentiments of their approach . . .. but one can
never accelerate their outbreak." "The anarchist social revolution . . .
arises spontaneously in the hearts of the people, destroying all that
hinders the generous upsurge of the life of the people in order thereafter
to create new forms of free social life which will arise from the very
depths of the soul of the people." Bakunin saw in the Commune of 1871
striking confirmation of his views. The Communards believed that "the
action of individuals was almost nothing" in the social revolution and the
"spontaneous action of the masses should be everything."

Like his predecessors, Kropotkin praised "this admirable sense of
spontaneous organization which the people . . . has in such a high degree,
but is so rarely permitted to apply." He added, playfully, that "only he
who has always lived with his nose buried in official papers and red tape
could doubt it."

Having made all these generous and optimistic affirmations, both the
anarchist and his brother and enemy the Marxist confront a grave
contradiction. The spontaneity of the masses is essential, an absolute
priority, but not sufficient in itself. The assistance of a revolutionary
minority capable of thinking out the revolution has proved to be necessary
to raise mass consciousness. How is this elite to be prevented from
exploiting its intellectual superiority to usurp the role of the masses,
paralyze their initiative, and even impose a new domination upon them?

After his idyllic exaltation of spontaneity, Proudhon came to admit the
inertia of the masses, to deplore the prejudice in favor of governments,
the deferential instinct and the inferiority complex which inhibit an
upsurge of the people. Thus the collective action of the people must be
stimulated, and if no revelation were to come to them from outside, the
servitude of the lower classes might go on indefinitely. And he admitted
that "in every epoch the ideas which stirred the masses had first been
germinated in the minds of a few thinkers.... The multitude never took the
initiative.... Individuality has priority in every movement of the human
spirit." It would be ideal if these conscious minorities were to pass on to
the people their science, the science of revolution. But in practice
Proudhon seemed to be skeptical about such a synthesis: to expect it would
be to underestimate the intrusive nature of authority. At best, it might be
possible to "balance" the two elements.

Before his conversion to anarchism in 1864, Bakunin was involved in
conspiracies and secret societies and became familiar with the typically
Blanquist idea that minority action must precede the awakening of the broad
masses and combine with their most advanced elements after dragging them
out of their lethargy. The problem appeared different in the workers'
International, when that vast movement was at last established. Although he
had become an anarchist, Bakunin remained convinced of the need for a
conscious vanguard: "For revolution to triumph over reaction the unity of
revolutionary thought and action must have an organ in the midst of the
popular anarchy which will be the very life and the source of all the
energy of the revolution." A group, small or large, of individuals inspired
by the same idea, and sharing a common purpose, will produce "a natural
effect on the masses." "Ten, twenty, or thirty men with a clear
understanding and good organization, knowing what they want and where they
are going, can easily carry with them a hundred, two hundred, three hundred
or even more." "We must create the well-organized and rightly inspired
general staffs of the leaders of the mass movement."

The methods advocated by Bakunin are very similar to what is nowadays
termed "infiltration." It consists of working clandestinely upon the most
intelligent and influential individuals in each locality "so that [each]
organization should conform to our ideas as far as possible. That is the
whole secret of our influence." The anarchists must be like "invisible
pilots" in the midst of the stormy masses. They must direct them not by
"ostensible power," but by "a dictatorship without insignia, title, or
official rights, all the more powerful because it will have none of the
marks of power." Bakunin was quite aware how little his terminology
("leaders," "dictatorship," etc.) differed from that of the opponents of
anarchism, and replied in advance "to anyone who alleges that action
organized in this way is yet another assault upon the liberty of the
masses, an attempt to create a new authoritarian power": No! the vanguard
must be neither the benefactor nor the dictatorial leader of the people but
simply the midwife to its self-liberation. It can achieve nothing more than
to spread among the masses ideas which correspond with their instincts. The
rest can and must be done by the people themselves. The "revolutionary
authorities" (Bakunin did not draw back from using this term but excused it
by expressing the hope that they would be "as few as possible") were not to
impose the revolution on the masses but arouse it in their midst; were not
to subject them to any form of organization, but stimulate their autonomous
organization from below to the top.

Much later, Rosa Luxemburg was to elucidate what Bakunin had surmised: that
the contradiction between libertarian spontaneity and the need for action
by conscious vanguards would only be fully resolved when science and the
working class became fuzed, and the masses became fully conscious, needing
no more "leaders," but only "executive organs" of their "conscious action."
After emphasizing that the proletariat still lacked science and
organization, the Russian anarchist reached the conclusion that the
International could only become an instrument of emancipation "when it had
caused the science, philosophy, and politics of socialism to penetrate the
reflective consciousness of each of its members."

However theoretically satisfying this synthesis might be, it was a draft
drawn on a very distant future. Until historical evolution made it possible
to accomplish it, the anarchists remained, like the Marxists, more or less
imprisoned by contradiction. It was to rend the Russian Revolution, torn
between the spontaneous power of the soviets and the claim of the Bolshevik
Party to a "directing role." It was to show itself in the Spanish
Revolution, where the libertarians were to swing from one extreme to the
other, from the mass movement to the conscious anarchist elite.

Two historical examples will suffice to illustrate this contradiction.

The anarchists were to draw one categorical conclusion from the experience
of the Russian Revolution: a condemnation of the "leading role" of the
Party. Voline formulated it in this way:

"The key idea of anarchism is simple: no party, or political or ideological
group, even if it sincerely desires to do so, will ever succeed in
emancipating the working masses by placing itself above or outside them in
order to 'govern' or 'guide' them. True emancipation can only be brought
about by the direct action . . . of those concerned, the workers
themselves, through their own class organizations (production syndicates,
factory committees, cooperatives, etc.) and not under the banner of any
political party or ideological body. Their emancipation must be based on
concrete action and 'self-administration,' aided but not controlled by
revolutionaries working from within the masses and not from above them....
The anarchist idea and the true emancipatory revolution can never be
brought to fruition by anarchists as such but only by the vast masses . .
., anarchists, or other revolutionaries in general, are required only to
enlighten or aid them in certain situations. If anarchists maintained that
they could bring about a social revolution by "guiding" the masses, such a
pretension would be as illusory as that of the Bolsheviks and for the same
reasons."

However, the Spanish anarchists, in their turn, were to experience the need
to organize an ideologically conscious minority, the Iberian Anarchist
Federation (FAI), within their vast trade union organization, the National
Confederation of Labor (CNT). This was to combat the reformist tendencies
of some "pure" syndicalists and the maneuvers of the agents of the
"dictatorship of the proletariat." The FAI drew its inspiration from the
ideas of Bakunin, and so tried to enlighten rather than to direct. The
relatively high libertarian consciousness of many of the rank-and file
members of the CNT also helped it to avoid the excesses of the
authoritarian revolutionary parties. It did not, however, perform its part
as guide very well, being clumsy and hesitant about its tutelage over the
trade unions, irresolute in its strategy, and more richly endowed with
activists and demagogues than with revolutionaries as clear-thinking on the
level of theory as on that of practice.

Relations between the masses and the conscious minority constitute a
problem to which no full solution has been found by the Marxists or even by
the anarchists, and one on which it seems that the last word has not yet
been said.

(Source: Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, first published in French in
1965, the 1970 English translation is Guérin's best-known work,
describing the intellectual substance and actual practice of anarchism. The
English translation by Mary Klopper includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky,
who describes it as an attempt "to extract from the history of libertarian
thought a living, evolving tradition".)


* Chapter 2 : In Search of a New Society


ANARCHISM IS NOT UTOPIAN

Because anarchism is constructive, anarchist theory emphatically rejects
the charge of utopianism. It uses the historical method in an attempt to
prove that the society of the future is not an anarchist invention, but the
actual product of the hidden effects of past events. Proudhon affirmed that
for 6,000 years humanity had been crushed by an inexorable system of
authority but had been sustained by a "secret virtue": "Beneath the
apparatus of government, under the shadow of its political institutions,
society was slowly and silently producing its own organization, making for
itself a new order which expressed its vitality and autonomy."

However harmful government may have been, it contained its own negation. It
was always "a phenomenon of collective life, the public exercise of the
powers of our law, an expression of social spontaneity, all serving to
prepare humanity for a higher state. What humanity seeks in religion and
calls 'God' is itself. What the citizen seeks in government . . . is
likewise himself - it is liberty." The French Revolution hastened this
inexorable advance toward anarchy: "The day that our fathers . . . stated
the principle of the free exercise of all his faculties by man as a
citizen, on that day authority was repudiated in heaven and on earth, and
government, even by delegation, became impossible."

The Industrial Revolution did the rest. From then on politics was overtaken
by the economy and subordinated to it. Government could no longer escape
the direct competition of producers and became in reality no more than the
relation between different interests. This revolution was completed by the
growth of the proletariat. In spite of its protestations, authority now
expressed only socialism: "The Napoleonic code is as useless to the new
society as the Platonic republic: within a few years the absolute law of
property will have everywhere been replaced by the relative and mobile law
of industrial cooperation, and it will then be necessary to reconstruct
this cardboard castle from top to bottom." Bakunin, in turn, recognized
"the immense and undeniable service rendered to humanity by the French
Revolution which is father to us all." The principle of authority has been
eliminated from the people's consciousness forever and order imposed from
above has henceforth become impossible. All that remains is to "organize
society so that it can live without government." Bakunin relied on popular
tradition to achieve this. "In spite of the oppressive and harmful tutelage
of the State," the masses have, through the centuries, "spontaneously
developed within themselves many, if not all, of the essential elements of
the material and moral order of real human unity."

THE NEED FOR ORGANIZATION

Anarchist theory does not see itself as a synonym for disorganization.
Proudhon was the first to proclaim that anarchism is not disorder but
order, is the natural order in contrast to the artificial order imposed
from above, is true unity as against the false unity brought about by
constraint. Such a society "thinks, speaks, and acts like a man, precisely
because it is no longer represented by a man, no longer recognizes personal
authorities; because, like every organized living being, like the infinite
of Pascal, it has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere."
Anarchy is "organized, living society," "the highest degree of liberty and
order to which humanity can aspire." Perhaps some anarchists thought
otherwise but the Italian Errico Malatesta called them to order:

"Under the influence of the authoritarian education given to them, they
think that authority is the soul of social organization and repudiate the
latter in order to combat the former .... Those anarchists opposed to
organization make the fundamental error of believing that organization is
impossible without authority. Having accepted this hypothesis they reject
any kind of organization rather than accept the minimum of authority ....
If we believed that organization could not exist without authority we would
be authoritarians, because we would still prefer the authority which
imprisons and saddens life to the disorganization which makes it
impossible."

The twentieth-century anarchist Voline developed and clarified this idea:

"A mistaken - or, more often, deliberately inaccurate - interpretation
alleges that the libertarian concept means the absence of all organization.
This is entirely false: it is not a matter of "organization" or
"nonorganization," but of two different principles of organization .... Of
course, say the anarchists, society must be organized. However, the new
organization . . . must be established freely, socially, and, above all,
from below. The principle of organization must not issue from a center
created in advance to capture the whole and impose itself upon it but, on
the contrary, it must come from all sides to create nodes of coordination,
natural centers to serve all these points .... On the other hand, the other
kind of "organization," copied from that of the old oppressive and
exploitative society, . . . would exaggerate all the blemishes of the old
society . . . . It could then only be maintained by means of a new
artifice."

In effect, the anarchists would be not only protagonists of true
organization but "first-class organizers," as Henri Lefebvre admitted in
his book on the Commune. But this philosopher thought he saw a
contradiction here - "a rather surprising contradiction which we find
repeatedly in the history of the working-class movement up to present
times, especially in Spain." It can only "astonish" those for whom
libertarians are a priori disorganizers.

SELF-MANAGEMENT

When Marx and Engels drafted the Communist Manifesto of 1848, on the eve of
the February Revolution, they foresaw, at any rate for a long transitional
period, all the means of production centralized in the hands of an
all-embracing State. They took over Louis Blanc's authoritarian idea of
conscripting both agricultural and industrial workers into "armies of
labor." Proudhon was the first to propound an anti-statist form of economic
management.

During the February Revolution workers' associations for production sprang
up spontaneously in Paris and in Lyon. In 1848 this beginning of
self-management seemed to Proudhon far more the revolutionary event than
did the political revolution. It had not been invented by a theoretician or
preached by doctrinaires, it was not the State which provided the original
stimulus, but the people. Proudhon urged the workers to organize in this
way in every part of the Republic, to draw in small property, trade, and
industry, then large property and establishments, and, finally, the
greatest enterprises of all ( mines, canals, railways, etc. ), and thus
"become masters of all."

The present tendency is to remember only Proudhon's naive and passing idea
of preserving small-scale trade and artisans' workshops. This was certainly
naive, and doubtless uneconomic, but his thinking on this point was
ambivalent. Proudhon was a living contradiction: he castigated property as
a source of injustice and exploitation and had a weakness for it, although
only to the extent that he saw in it a guarantee of the independence of the
individual Moreover, Proudhon is too often confused with what Bakunin
called "the little so-called Proudhonian coterie" which gathered around him
in his last years. This rather reactionary group was stillborn. In the
First International it tried in vain to put across private ownership of the
means of production against collectivism. The chief reason this group was
short-lived was that most of its adherents were all too easily convinced by
Bakunin's arguments and abandoned their so-called Proudhonian ideas to
support collectivism.

In the last analysis, this group, who called themselves mutuellistes, were
only partly opposed to collectivism: they rejected it for agriculture
because of the individualism of the French peasant, but accepted it for
transport, and in matters of industrial self-management actually demanded
it while rejecting its name. Their fear of the word was largely due to
their uneasiness in the face of the temporary united front set up against
them by Bakunin's collectivist disciples and certain authoritarian Marxists
who were almost open supporters of state control of the economy.

Proudhon really moved with the times and realized that it is impossible to
turn back the clock. He was realistic enough to understand that "small
industry is as stupid as petty culture" and recorded this view in his
Carnets. With regard to large-scale modern industry requiring a large labor
force, he was resolutely collectivist: "In future, large-scale industry and
wide culture must be the fruit of association." "We have no choice in the
matter," he concluded, and waxed indignant that anyone had dared to suggest
that he was opposed to technical progress.

In his collectivism he was, however, as categorically opposed to statism.
Property must be abolished. The community (as it is understood by
authoritarian communism) is oppression and servitude. Thus Proudhon sought
a combination of property and community: this was association. The means of
production and exchange must be controlled neither by capitalist companies
nor by the State. Since they are to the men who work in them "what the hive
is to the bee," they must be managed by associations of workers, and only
thus will collective powers cease to be "alienated" for the benefit of a
few exploiters. "We, the workers, associated or about to be associated,"
wrote Proudhon in the style of a manifesto,

"do not need the State .... Exploitation by the State always means rulers
and wage slaves. We want the government of man by man no more than the
exploitation of man by man. Socialism is the opposite of governmentalism
.... We want these associations to be . . . the first components of a vast
federation of associations and groups united in the common bond of the
democratic and social republic.

Proudhon went into detail and enumerated precisely the essential features
of workers' serf-management:

# very associated individual to have an indivisible share in the property
of the company.

# Each worker to take his share of the heavy and repugnant tasks.

# Each to go through the gamut of operations and instruction, of grades and
activities, to insure that he has the widest training. Proudhon was
insistent on the point that "the worker must go through all the operations
of the industry he is attached to."

# Office-holders to be elected and regulations submitted to the associates
for approval.

# Remuneration to be proportionate to the nature of the position held, the
degree of skill, and the responsibility carried. Every associate to share
in the profits in proportion to the service he has given.

# Each to be free to set his own hours, carry on his duties, and to leave
the association at will.

# The associated workers to choose their leaders, engineers, architects,
and accountants. Proudhon stressed the fact that the proletariat still
lacks technicians: hence the need to bring into workers' self-management
programs "industrial and commercial persons of distinction" who would teach
the workers business methods and receive fixed salaries in return: there is
"room for all in the sunshine of the revolution."

This libertarian concept of self-management is at the opposite pole from
the paternalistic, statist form of self-management set out by Louis Blanc
in a draft law of September 15, 1849. The author of The Organization of
Labor wanted to create workers' associations sponsored and financed by the
State. He proposed an arbitrary division of the profits as follows: 25
percent to a capital amortization fund; 25 percent to a social security
fund; 25 percent to a reserve fund; 25 percent to be divided among the
workers. [13]

Proudhon would have none of self-management of this kind. In his view the
associated workers must not "submit to the State," but "be the State
itself." "Association . . . can do everything and reform everything without
interference from authority, can encroach upon authority and subjugate it."
Proudhon wanted "to go toward government through association, not to
association through government." He issued a warning against the illusion,
cherished in the dreams of authoritarian socialists, that the State could
tolerate free self-management. How could it endure "the formation of enemy
enclaves alongside a centralized authority"? Proudhon prophetically warned:
"While centralization continues to endow the State with colossal force,
nothing can be achieved by spontaneous initiative or by the independent
actions of groups and individuals."

It should be stressed that in the congresses of the First International the
libertarian idea of self-management prevailed over the statist concept. At
the Lausanne Congress in 1867 the committee reporter, a Belgian called
Cesar de Paepe, proposed that the State should become the owner of
undertakings that were to be nationalized. At that time Charles Longuet was
a libertarian, and he replied: "All right, on condition that it is
understood that we define the State as 'the collective of the citizens' . .
., also that these services will be administered not by state functionaries
. . . but by groupings of workers." The debate continued the following year
(1868) at the Brussels Congress and this time the same committee reporter
took care to be precise on this point: "Collective property would belong to
society as a whole, but would be conceded to associations of workers. The
State would be no more than a federation of various groups of workers."
Thus clarified, the resolution was passed.

However, the optimism which Proudhon had expressed in 1848 with regard to
self-management was to prove unjustified. Not many years later, in 1857, he
severely criticized the existing workers' associations; inspired by naive,
utopian illusions, they had paid the price of their lack of experience.
They had become narrow and exclusive, had functioned as collective
employers, and had been carried away by hierarchical and managerial
concepts. All the abuses of capitalist companies "were exaggerated further
in these so-called brotherhoods." They had been tom by discord, rivalry'
defections, and betrayals. Once their managers had learned the business
concerned, they retired to "set up as bourgeois employers on their own
account." In other instances, the members had insisted on dividing up the
resources. In 1848 several hundred workers' associations had been set up;
nine years later only twenty remained.

As opposed to this narrow and particularist attitude, Proudhon advocated a
"universal" and "synthetic" concept of self-management. The task of the
future was far more than just "getting a few hundred workers into
associations"; it was "the economic transformation of a nation of
thirty-six million souls." The workers' associations of the future should
work for all and not "operate for the benefit of a few." Self-management,
therefore, required the members to have some education: "A man is not born
a member of an association, he becomes one." The hardest task before the
association is to "educate the members." It is more important to create a
"fund of men" than to form a "mass of capital."

With regard to the legal aspect, it had been Proudhon's first idea to vest
the ownership of their undertaking in the workers' associations but now he
rejected this narrow solution. In order to do this he distinguished between
possession and ownership. Ownership is absolute, aristocratic, feudal;
possession is democratic, republican, egalitarian: it consists of the
enjoyment of an usufruct which can neither be alienated, nor given away,
nor sold. The workers should hold their means of production in alleu like
the ancient Germains, [14] but would not be the outright owners. Property
would be replaced by federal, cooperative ownership vested not in the State
but in the producers as a whole, united in a vast agricultural and
industrial federation.

Proudhon waxed enthusiastic about the future of such a revised and
corrected form of self-management: "It is not false rhetoric that states
this, it is an economic and social necessity: the time is near when we
shall be unable to progress on any but these new conditions .... Social
classes ... must merge into one single producers' association." Would
self-management succeed? "On the reply to this . . . depends the whole
future of the workers. If it is affirmative an entire new world will open
up for humanity; if it is negative the proletarian can take it as
settled.... There is no hope for him in this wicked world."

THE BASES OF EXCHANGE

How were dealings between the different workers' associations to be
organized? At first Proudhon maintained that the exchange value of all
goods could be measured by the amount of labor necessary to produce them.
The workers were to be paid in "work vouchers"; trading agencies or social
shops were to be set up where they would buy goods at retail prices
calculated in hours of work. Large-scale trade would be carried on through
a compensatory clearinghouse or People's Bank which would accept payment in
work vouchers. This bank would also serve as a credit establishment lending
to workers' associations the sums needed for effective operation. The loans
would be interest free.

This so-called mutuelliste scheme was rather utopian and certainly
difficult to operate in a capitalist system. Early in 1849 Proudhon set up
the People's Bank and in six weeks some 20,000 people joined, but it was
short-lived. It was certainly farfetched to believe that mutuellisme would
spread like a patch of oil and to exclaim, as Proudhon did then: "It really
is the new world, the promised society which is being grafted on to the old
and gradually transforming it!"

The idea of wages based on the number of hours worked is debatable on many
grounds. The libertarian communists of the Kropotkin school - Malatesta,
Elise Reclus, Carlo Cafiero - did not fail to criticize it. In the first
place, they thought it unjust. Cafiero argued that "three hours of Peter's
work may be worth five of Paul's." Other factors than duration must be
considered in determining the value of labor: intensity, professional and
intellectual training, etc. The family commitments of the workers must also
be taken into account. [15] Moreover, in a collectivist regime the worker
remains a wage slave of the community that buys and supervises his labor.
Payment by hours of work performed cannot be an ideal solution; at best it
would be a temporary expedient. We must put an end to the morality of
account books, to the philosophy of "credit and debit." This method of
remuneration, derived from modified individualism, is in contradiction to
collective ownership of the means of production, and cannot bring about a
profound revolutionary change in man. It is incompatible with anarchism; a
new form of ownership requires a new form of remuneration. Service to the
community cannot be measured in units of money. Needs will have to be given
precedence over services, and all the products of the labor of all must
belong to all, each to take his share of them freely. To each according to
his need should be the motto of libertarian communism.

Kropotkin, Malatesta, and their followers seem to have overlooked the fact
that Proudhon had anticipated their objections and revised his earlier
ideas. In his Theorie de la Propriete, published after his death, he
explained that he had only supported the idea of equal pay for equal work
in his "First Memorandum on Property" of 1840: "I had forgotten to say two
things: first, that labor is measured by combining its duration with its
intensity; second, that one must not include in the worker's wages the
amortization of the cost of his education and the work he did on his own
account as an unpaid apprentice, nor the premiums to insure him against the
risks he runs, all of which vary in different occupations." Proudhon
claimed to have "repaired" this "omission" in his later writings in which
he proposed that mutual insurance cooperative associations should
compensate for unequal costs and risks. Furthermore, Proudhon did not
regard the remuneration of the members of a workers' association as "wages"
but as a share of profits freely determined by associated and equally
responsible workers. In an as yet unpublished thesis, Pierre Haubtman, one
of Proudhon's most recent exponents, comments that workers' self-management
would have no meaning if it were not interpreted in this way.

The libertarian communists saw fit to criticize Proudhon's mutuellisme and
the more logical collectivism of Bakunin for not having determined the way
in which labor would be remunerated in a socialist system. These critics
seemed to have overlooked the fact that the two founders of anarchism were
anxious not to lay down a rigid pattern of society prematurely. They wanted
to leave the self-management associations the widest choice in this matter.
The libertarian communists themselves were to provide the justification for
this flexibility and refusal to jump to conclusions, so different from
their own impatient forecasts: they stressed that in the ideal system of
their choice "labor would produce more than enough for all" and that
"bourgeois" norms of remuneration could only be replaced by specifically
"communist" norms when the era of abundance had set in, and not before. In
1884 Malatesta, drafting the program for a projected anarchist
international, admitted that communism could be brought about immediately
only in a very limited number of areas and, "for the rest," collectivism
would have to be accepted "for a transitional period."

For communism to be possible, a high stage of moral development is required
of the members of society, a sense of solidarity both elevated and
profound, which the upsurge of the revolution may not suffice to induce.
This doubt is the more justified in that material conditions favorable to
this development will not exist at the beginning.

Anarchism was about to face the test of experience, on the eve of the
Spanish Revolution of 1936, when Diego Abad de Santillan demonstrated the
immediate impracticability of libertarian communism in very similar terms.
He held that the capitalist system had not prepared human beings for
communism: far from developing their social instincts and sense of
solidarity it tends in every way to suppress and penalize such feelings.

Santillan recalled the experience of the Russian and other revolutions to
persuade the anarchists to be more realistic. He charged them with
receiving the most recent lessons of experience with suspicion or
superiority. He maintained that it is doubtful whether a revolution would
lead directly to the realization of our ideal of communist anarchism. The
collectivist watchword, "to each the product of his labor," would be more
appropriate than communism to the requirements of the real situation in the
first phase of a revolution' when the economy would be disorganized,
production at a low ebb, and food supplies a priority. The economic models
to be tried would, at best, evolve slowly toward communism. To put human
beings brutally behind bars by imprisoning them in rigid forms of social
life would be an authoritarian approach which would hinder the revolution.
Mutuellisme, communism, collectivism are only different means to the same
end. Santillan turned back to the wise empiricism of Proudhon and Bakunin,
claiming for the coming Spanish Revolution the right to experiment freely:
"The degree of mutuellisme, collectivism, or communism which can be
achieved will be determined freely in each locality and each social
sphere." In fact, as will be seen later, the experience of the Spanish
"collectives" of 1936 illustrated the difficulties arising from the
premature implementation of integral communism [16].

COMPETITION

Competition is one of the norms inherited from the bourgeois economy which
raises thorny problems when preserved in a collectivist or self-management
economy. Proudhon saw it as an "expression of social spontaneity" and the
guarantee of the "freedom" of the association. Moreover, it would for a
long time to come provide an "irreplaceable stimulus" without which an
"immense slackening off" would follow the high tension of industry. He went
into detail:

"The working brotherhood is pledged to supply society with the goods and
services asked from it at prices as near as possible to the cost of
production .... Thus the workers' association denies itself any
amalgamation [of a monopolistic type], subjects itself to the law of
competition, and keeps its books and records open to society, which
reserves the power to dissolve the association as the ultimate sanction of
society's right of supervision." "Competition and association are
interdependent .... The most deplorable error of socialism is to have
considered it [competition] as the disorder of society. There can . . . be
... no question of destroying competition .... It is a matter of finding an
equilibrium, one could say a policing agent."

Proudhon's attachment to the principle of competition drew the sarcasm of
Louis Blanc: "We cannot understand those who have advocated the strange
linking of two contrary principles. To graft brotherhood onto competition
is a wretched idea: it is like replacing eunuchs by hermaphrodites." The
pre-Marxian Louis Blanc wanted to "reach a uniform price" determined by the
State, and prevent all competition between establishments within an
industry. Proudhon retorted that prices "can only be fixed by competition,
that is, by the power of the consumer . . . to dispense with the services
of those who overcharge ...." "Remove competition . . . and you deprive
society of its motive force, so that it runs down like a clock with a
broken spring."

Proudhon, however, did not hide from himself the evils of competition,
which he described very fully in his treatise on political economy. He knew
it to be a source of inequality and admitted that "in competition, victory
goes to the big battalions." It is so "anarchic" (in the pejorative sense
of the term) that it operates always to the benefit of private interests,
necessarily engenders civil strife and, in the long run, creates
oligarchies. "Competition kills competition."

In Proudhon's view, however, the absence of competition would be no less
pernicious. Taking the tobacco administration, [17] he found that its
products were too dear and its supplies inadequate simply because it had
long been a monopoly free from competition. If all industries were subject
to such a system, the nation would never be able to balance its income and
expenditures. The competition Proudhon dreamed of was not to be the
laissez-faire competition of the capitalist economic system, but
competition endowed with a higher principle to "socialize" it, competition
which would function on the basis of fair exchange, in a spirit of
solidarity, competition which would both protect individual initiative and
bring back to society the wealth which is at present diverted from it by
capitalist appropriation.

It is obvious that there was something utopian in this idea. Competition
and the so-called market economy inevitably produce inequality and
exploitation, and would do so even if one started from complete equality.
They could not be combined with workers' self-management unless it were on
a temporary basis, as a necessary evil, until (1) a psychology of "honest
exchange" had developed among the workers; (2) most important, society as a
whole had passed from conditions of shortage to the stage of abundance,
when competition would lose its purpose.

Even in such a transitional period, however, it seems desirable that
competition should be limited, as in Yugoslavia today, to the
consumer-goods sector where it has at least the one advantage of protecting
the interests of the consumer.

The libertarian communist would condemn Proudhon's version of a collective
economy as being based on a principle of conflict; competitors would be in
a position of equality at the start, only to be hurled into a struggle
which would inevitably produce victors and vanquished, and where goods
would end up by being exchanged according to the principles of supply and
demand; "which would be to fall right back into competition and the
bourgeois world." Some critics of the Yugoslav experiment from other
communist countries use much the same terms to attack it. They feel that
self-management in any form merits the same hostility they harbor toward a
competitive market economy, as if the two ideas were basically and
permanently inseparable.

CENTRALIZATION AND PLANNING

At all events, Proudhon was aware that management by workers' associations
would have to cover large units. He stressed the "need for centralization
and large units" and asked: "Do not workers' associations for the operation
of heavy industry mean large units?" "We put economic centralization in the
place of political centralization." However, his fear of authoritarian
planning made him instinctively prefer competition inspired by solidarity.
Since then, anarchist thinkers have become advocates of a libertarian and
democratic form of planning, worked out from the bottom up by the
federation of self-managing enterprises.

Bakunin foresaw that self-management would open perspectives for planning
on a world-wide scale:

"Workers' cooperative associations are a new historical phenomenon; today
as we witness their birth we cannot foresee their future, but only guess at
the immense development which surely awaits them and the new political and
social conditions they will generate. It is not only possible but probable
that they will, in time, outgrow the limits of today's counties, provinces,
and even states to transform the whole structure of human society, which
will no longer be divided into nations but into industrial units."

These would then "form a vast economic federation" with a supreme assembly
at its head. With the help of "world-wide statistics, giving data as
comprehensive as they are detailed and precise," it would balance supply
and demand, direct, distribute, and share out world industrial production
among the different countries so that crises in trade and employment,
enforced stagnation, economic disaster, and loss of capital would almost
certainly entirely disappear.

COMPLETE SOCIALIZATION?

There was an ambiguity in Proudhon's idea of management by the workers'
associations. It was not always clear whether the self-management groups
would continue to compete with capitalist undertakings - in other words,
whether a socialist sector would coexist with a private sector, as is said
to be the present situation in Algeria and other newly independent
countries - or whether, on the other hand, production as a whole would be
socialized and made subject to self-management.

Bakunin was a consistent collectivist and clearly saw the dangers of the
coexistence of the two sectors. Even in association the workers cannot
accumulate the necessary capital to stand up to large-scale bourgeois
capital. There would also be a danger that the capitalist environment would
contaminate the workers' associations so that "a new class of exploiters of
the labor of the proletariat" would arise within them. Self-management
contains the seeds of the full economic emancipation of the working masses,
but these seeds can only germinate and grow when "capital itself,
industrial establishments, raw materials, and capital equipment . . .
become the collective property of workers' associations for both
agricultural and industrial production, and these are freely organized and
federated among themselves." "Radical, conclusive social change will only
be brought about by means affecting the whole society," that is, by a
social revolution which transforms private property into collective
property. In such a social organization the workers would be their own
collective capitalists, their own employers. Only "those things which are
truly for personal use" would remain private property.

Bakunin admitted that producers' cooperatives served to accustom the
workers to organizing themselves, and managing their own affairs, and were
the first steps in collective working-class action, but he held that until
the social revolution had been achieved such islands in the midst of the
capitalist system would have only a limited effect, and he urged the
workers "to think more of strikes than of cooperatives."

TRADE UNIONS

Bakunin also valued the part played by trade unions, "the natural
organizations of the masses," "the only really effective weapon" the
workers could use against the bourgeoisie. He thought the trade-union
movement could contribute more than the ideologists to organizing the
forces of the proletariat independently of bourgeois radicalism. He saw the
future as the national and international organization of the workers by
trade.

Trade unionism was not specially mentioned at the first congresses of the
International. From the Basel Congress in 1869 onward, it became a prime
issue, owing to the influence of the anarchists: after the abolition of the
wage system, trade unions would become the embryo of the administration of
the future; government would be replaced by councils of workers'
organizations.

In 1876 James Guillaume, a disciple of Bakunin, wrote his Ide'es sur
l`Organization Sociale, in which he made self-management incorporate trade
unionism. He advocated the creation of corporate federations of workers, in
particular trades which would be united "not, as before, to protect their
wages against the greed of the employers, but . . . to provide mutual
guarantees for access to the tools of their trade, which would become the
collective property of the whole corporate federation as the result of
reciprocal contracts." Bakunin's view was that these federations would act
as planning agencies, thus filling one of the gaps in Proudhon's plan for
self-management. One thing had been lacking in his proposals: the link
which would unite the various producers' associations and prevent them from
running their affairs egotistically, in a parochial spirit, without care
for the general good or the other workers' associations. Trade unionism was
to fill the gap and articulate self-management. It was presented as the
agent of planning and unity among producers.

THE COMMUNES

During his early career Proudhon was entirely concerned with economic
organization. His suspicion of anything political led him to neglect the
problem of territorial administration. It was enough for him to say that
the workers must take the place of the State without saying precisely how
this would come about. In the latter years of his life he paid more
attention to the political problem, which he approached from the bottom up
in true anarchist style. On a local basis men were to combine among
themselves into what he called a "natural group" which "constitutes itself
into a city or political unit, asserting itself in unity, independence, and
autonomy." "Similar groups, some distance apart, may have interests in
common; it is conceivable that they may associate together and form a
higher group for mutual security." At this point the anarchist thinker saw
the specter of the hated State: never, never should the local groups "as
they unite to safeguard their interests and develop their wealth . . . go
so far as to abdicate in a sort of self-immolation at the feet of the new
Moloch." Proudhon defined the autonomous commune with some precision: it is
essentially a "sovereign being" and, as such, "has the right to govern and
administer itself, to impose taxes, to dispose of its property and revenue,
to set up schools for its youth and appoint teachers," etc. "That is what a
commune is, for that is what collective political life is .... It denies
all restrictions, is self-limiting; all external coercion is alien to it
and a menace to its survival." It has been shown that Proudhon thought
self-management incompatible with an authoritarian State; similarly, the
commune could not coexist with authority centralized from above:

"There is no halfway house. The commune will be sovereign or subject, all
or nothing. Cast it in the best role you can; as soon as it is no longer
subject to its own law, recognizes a higher authority, [and] the larger
grouping . . . of which it is a member is declared to be superior . . ., it
is inevitable that they will at some time disagree and come into conflict.
As soon as there is a conflict the logic of power insures victory for the
central authority, and this without discussion, negotiation, or trial,
debate between authority and subordinate being impermissible, scandalous,
and absurd."

Bakunin slotted the commune into the social organization of the future more
logically than Proudhon. The associations of productive workers were to be
freely allied within the communes and the communes, in their turn, freely
federated among themselves. "Spontaneous life and action have been held in
abeyance for centuries by the all-absorbing and monopolistic power of the
State; its abdication will return them to the communes."

How would trade unionism relate to the communes? In 1880 the Courtelary
district of the Jura Federation [18] was sure of its answer: "The organ of
this local life will be a federation of trades, and this local federation
will become the commune." However, those drafting the report, not fully
decided on this point, raised the question: "Is it to be a general assembly
of all the inhabitants, or delegations from the trades . . . which will
draw up the constitution of the commune?" The conclusion was that there
were two possible systems to be considered. Should the trade union or the
commune have priority? Later, especially in Russia and Spain, this question
divided the "anarcho-communists" from the "anarcho-syndicalists."

Bakunin saw the commune as the ideal vehicle for the expropriation of the
instruments of production for the benefit of self-management. In the first
stage of social reorganization it is the commune which will give the
essential minimum to each "dispossessed" person as compensation for the
goods confiscated. He described its internal organization with some
precision. It will be administered by a council of elected delegates with
express positive mandates; these will always be responsible to the
electorate and subject to recall. The council of the commune may elect from
among its number executive committees for each branch of the revolutionary
administration of the commune. Dividing responsibility among so many has
the advantage of involving the greatest number of the rank and file in
management. It curtails the disadvantages of a system of representation in
which a small number of elected delegates could take over all the duties,
while the people remained almost passive in rarely convoked general
assemblies. Bakunin instinctively grasped that elected councils must be
"working bodies," with both regulatory and executive duties - what Lenin
was later to call "democracy without parliamentarianism" in one of his
libertarian moods. Again the Courtelary district made this idea more
explicit:

"In order to avoid falling back into the errors of centralized and
bureaucratic administration, we think that the general interests of the
commune should be administered by different special commissions for each
branch of activity and not by a single local administrative body .... This
arrangement would prevent administration from taking on the character of
government."

The followers of Bakunin showed no such balanced judgment of the necessary
stages of historical development. In the 1880s they took the collectivist
anarchists to task. In a critique of the precedent set by the Paris Commune
of 1871, Kropotkin scolded the people for having "once more made use of the
representative system within the Commune," for having "abdicated their own
initiative in favor of an assembly of people elected more or less by
chance," and he lamented that some reformers "always try to preserve this
government by proxy at any price." He held that the representative system
had had its day. It was the organized domination of the bourgeoisie and
must disappear with it. "For the new economic era which is coming, we must
seek a new form of political organization based on a principle quite
different from representation." Society must kind forms of political
relations closer to the people than representative government, "nearer to
self-government, to government of oneself by oneself."

For authoritarian or libertarian socialists, the ideal to be pursued must
surely be this direct democracy which, if pressed to the limits in both
economic self-management and territorial administration, would destroy the
last vestiges of any kind of authority. It is certain, however, that the
necessary condition for its operation is a stage of social evolution in
which all workers would possess learning and skills as well as
consciousness, while at the same time abundance would have taken the place
of shortage. In 1880, long before Lenin, the district of Courtelary
proclaimed: "The more or less democratic practice of universal suffrage
will become decreasingly important in a scientifically organized society."
But not before its advent.

THE DISPUTED TERM "STATE"

The reader knows by now that the anarchists refused to use the term "State"
even for a transitional situation. The gap between authoritarians and
libertarians has not always been very wide on this score. In the First
International the collectivists, whose spokesman was Bakunin, allowed the
terms "regenerate State," "new and revolutionary State," or even "socialist
State" to be accepted as synonyms for "social collective." The anarchists
soon saw, however, that it was rather dangerous for them to use the same
word as the authoritarians while giving it a quite different meaning.

They felt that a new concept called for a new word and that the use of the
old term could be dangerously ambiguous; so they ceased to give the name
"State" to the social collective of the future.

The Marxists, for their part, were anxious to obtain the cooperation of the
anarchists to make the principle of collective ownership triumph in the
International over the last remnant of neo-Proudhonian individualism. So
they were willing to make verbal concessions and agreed halfheartedly to
the anarchists' proposal to substitute for the word "State" either
federation or solidarisation of communes. In the same spirit, Engels
attacked his friend and compatriot August Bebel about the Gotha Program of
the German social democrats, and thought it wise to suggest that he
"suppress the term 'State' throughout, using instead Gemeinwesen, a good
old German word meaning the same as the French word 'Commune.'" At the
Basel Congress of 1869, the collectivist anarchists and the Marxists had
united to decide that once property had been socialized it would be
developed by communes solidarisees. In his speech Bakunin dotted the i's:

"I am voting for collectivization of social wealth, and in particular of
the land, in the sense of social liquidation. By social liquidation I mean
the expropriation of all who are now proprietors, by the abolition of the
juridical and political State which is the sanction and sole guarantor of
property as it now is. As to subsequent forms of organization . . . I favor
the solidarisation of communes . . . with all the greater satisfaction
because such solidarisation entails the organization of society from the
bottom up."

HOW SHOULD THE PUBLIC SERVICES BE MANAGED?

The compromise which had been worked out was a long way from eliminating
ambiguity, the more so since at the very same Basel Congress the
authoritarian socialists had not felt shy about applauding the management
of the economy by the State. The problem subsequently proved especially
thorny when discussion turned to the management of large-scale public
services like railways, postal services, etc. By the Hague Congress of
1872, the followers of Marx and those of Bakunin had parted company. Thus
the debate on public services arose in the misnamed "anti-authoritarian"
International which had survived the split. This question created fresh
discord between the anarchists and those more or less "statist" socialists
who had chosen to detach themselves from Marx and remain with the
anarchists in the International.

Since such public services are national in scale, it is obvious that they
cannot be managed by the workers' associations alone, nor by the communes
alone. Proudhon tried to solve the problem by "balancing" workers'
management by some form of "public initiative," which he did not explain
fully. Who was to administer the public services? The federation of the
communes, answered the libertarians; the State, the authoritarians were
tempted to reply.

At the Brussels Congress of the International in 1874, the Belgian
socialist Cesar de Paepe tried to bring about a compromise between the two
conflicting views. Local public services would go to the communes to be run
under the direction of the local administrative body itself, nominated by
the trade unions. Public services on a larger scale would be managed by a
regional administration consisting of nominees of the federation of
communes and supervised by a regional chamber of labor, while those on a
national scale would come under the "Workers' State," that is, a State
"based on a combination of free workers' communes." The anarchists were
suspicious of this ambiguous organization but de Paepe preferred to take
this suspicion as a misunderstanding: was it not after all a verbal
quarrel? If that was so he would be content to put the word "State" aside
while keeping and even extending the actual thing "under the more pleasant
disguise of some other term."

Most of the libertarians thought that the report from the Brussels Congress
amounted to a restoration of the State: they saw the "Workers' State"
turning inevitably into an "authoritarian State." If it was only a verbal
quarrel they could not see why they should christen the new society without
government by the very name used to describe the organization which was to
be abolished. At a subsequent congress at Berne, in 1876, Malatesta
admitted that the public services required a unique, centralized form of
organization; but he refused to have them administered from above by a
State. His adversaries seemed to him to confuse the State with society,
that "living organic body." In the following year, 1877, at the Universal
Socialist Congress in Ghent, Cesar de Paepe admitted that his precious
Workers' State or People's State "might for a period be no more than a
State of wage earners," but that "must be no more than a transitional phase
imposed by circumstances," after which the nameless, urgent masses would
not fail to take over the means of production and put them in the hands of
the workers' associations. The anarchists were not appeased by this
uncertain and distant perspective: what the State took over it would never
give up.

FEDERALISM

To sum up: the future libertarian society was to be endowed with a dual
structure: economic, in the form of a federation of self-managing workers'
associations; administrative, in the form of a federation of the communes.
The final requirement was to crown and articulate this edifice with a
concept of wider scope, which might be extended to apply to the whole
world: federalism.

As Proudhon's thought matured, the federalist idea was clarified and became
predominant. One of his last writings bore the title Du Principe Federatif
et de la Necessite de Reconstituer de Parti de la Revolution (1863) and, as
previously mentioned, toward the end of his life he was more inclined to
call himself a federalist than an anarchist. We no longer live in the age
of small, ancient cities which, moreover, even in their time, sometimes
came together on a federal basis. The problem of our time is that of
administering large countries. Proudhon commented: "If the State were never
to extend beyond the area of a city or commune I would leave everyone to
make his own judgment, and say no more. But we must not forget that it is a
matter of vast conglomerations of territory within which cities, towns, and
villages can be counted by the thousand." No question of fragmenting
society into microcosms. Unity is essential.

It was, however, the intention of the authoritarians to rule these local
groups by the laws of "conquest," to which Proudhon retorted: "I declare to
them that this is completely impossible, by virtue of the very law of
unity."

"All these groups . . . are indestructible organisms . . . which can no
more divest themselves of their sovereign independence than a member of the
city can lose his citizenship or prerogatives as a free man .... All that
would be achieved ... would be the creation of an irreconcilable antagonism
between the general sovereignty and each of the separate sovereignties,
setting authority against authority; in other words, while supposedly
developing unity one would be organizing division."

In such a system of "unitary absorption" the cities or natural groups
"would always be condemned to lose their identity in the superior
agglomeration, which one might call artificial." Centralization means
"retaining in governmental relationship groups which are autonomous by
their nature"; ". . . that is, for modem society, the true tyranny." It is
a system of imperialism, communism, absolutism, thundered Proudhon, adding
in one of those amalgamations of which he was a master: "All these words
are synonyms."

On the other hand, unity, real unity, centralization, real centralization,
would be indestructible if a bond of law, a contract of mutuality, a pact
of federation were concluded between the various territorial units:

"What really centralizes a society of free men . . . is the contract.
Social unity ... is the product of the free union of citizens .... For a
nation to n~anifest itself in unity, this unity must be centralized . . .
in all its functions and faculties; centralization must be created from the
bottom up, from the periphery to the center, and all functions must be
independent and self-governing. The more numerous its foci, the stronger
the centralization will be."

The federal system is the opposite of governmental centralization. The two
principles of libertarianism and authoritarianism which are in perpetual
conflict are destined to come to terms: "Federation resolves all the
problems which arise from the need to combine liberty and authority. The
French Revolution provided the foundations for a new order, the secret of
which lies with its heir, the working class. This is the new order: to
unite all the people in a 'federation of federations."' This expression was
not used carelessly: a universal federation would be too big; the large
units must be federated between themselves. In his favorite prophetic style
Proudhon declared: "The twentieth century will open the era of
federations."

Bakunin merely developed and strengthened the federalist ideas of Proudhon.
Like Proudhon, he acclaimed the superiority of federal unity over
authoritarian unity: "When the accursed power of the State is no longer
there to constrain individuals, associations, communes, provinces, or
regions to live together, they will be much more closely bound, will
constitute a far more viable, real, and powerful whole than what they are
at present forced into by the power of the State, equally oppressive to
them all." The authoritarians "are always confusing . . . formal, dogmatic,
and governmental unity with a real and living unity which can only derive
from the freest development of all individuals and groups, and from a
federal and absolutely voluntary alliance . . . of the workers"
associations in the communes and, beyond the communes, in the regions,
beyond the regions, in the nations."

Bakunin stressed the need for an intermediate body between the commune and
the national federal organ: the province or region, a free federation of
autonomous communes. It must not, however, be thought that federalism would
lead to egoism or isolation. Solidarity is inseparable from freedom: "While
the communes remain absolutely autonomous, they feel . . . solidarity among
themselves and unite closely without losing any of their freedom." In the
modem world, moral, material, and intellectual interests have created real
and powerful unity between the different parts of one nation, and between
the different nations; that unity will outlive the State.

Federalism, however, is a two-edged weapon. During the French Revolution
the "federalism" of the Girondins was reactionary, and the royalist school
of Charles Maurras advocated it under the name of "regionalism." In some
countries, like the United States, the federal constitution is exploited by
those who deprive men of color of their civil rights. Bakunin thought that
socialism alone could give federalism a revolutionary content. For this
reason his Spanish followers showed little enthusiasm for the bourgeois
federalist party of Pi y Margall, which called itself Proudhonist, and even
for its "cantonalist" left wing during the brief, and abortive, episode of
the republic of 1873. [19]

INTERNATIONALISM

The federalist idea leads logically to internationalism, that is to say,
the organization of nations on a federal basis into the "large, fraternal
union of mankind." Here again Bakunin showed up the bourgeois utopianism of
a federal idea not based on international and revolutionary socialism. Far
ahead of his time, he was a "European," as people say today; he called for
and desired a United States of Europe, the only way "of making a civil war
between the different peoples in the European family impossible." He was
careful, however, to issue a warning against any European federation based
on states "as they are at present constituted."

"No centralized, bureaucratic, and hence military State, albeit called a
republic, could enter seriously and sincerely into an international
federation By its very constitution, such a State will always be an overt
or covert denial of internal liberty, and hence, necessarily, a permanent
declaration of war, a menace to the existence of neighboring countries."
Any alliance with a reactionary State would be a "Betrayal of the
revolution." The United States of Europe, first, and later, of the world,
can only be set up after the overthrow of the old order which rests from
top to bottom on violence and the principle of authority. On the other
hand, if the social revolution takes place in any one country, any foreign
country which has made a revolution on the same principles should be
received into a revolutionary federation regardless of existing state
frontiers.

True internationalism rests on self-determination, which implies the right
of secession. Following Proudhon, Bakunin propounded that "each individual,
each association, commune, or province, each region and nation, has the
absolute right to determine its own fate, to associate with others or not,
to ally itself with whomever it will, or break any alliance, without regard
to so-called historical claims or the convenience of its neighbors." "The
right to unite freely and separate with the same freedom is the most
important of all political rights, without which confederation win always
be disguised centralization."

Anarchists, however, did not regard this principle as leading to secession
or isolation. On the contrary, they held "the conviction that once the
right to secede is recognized, secession will, in fact, become impossible
because national units will be freely established and no longer the product
of violence and historical falsehood." Then, and then only, will they
become "truly strong, fruitful, and permanent."

Later, Lenin, and the early congresses of the Third International, adopted
this concept from Bakunin, and the Bolsheviks made it the foundation of
their policy on nationalities and of their anti-colonialist strategy -
until they eventually belied it to turn to authoritarian centralization and
disguised imperialism.

DECOLONIZATION

It is noteworthy that logical deduction led the originators of federalism
to a prophetic anticipation of the problems of decolonization. Proudhon
distinguished the unit "based on conquest" from the "rational" unit and saw
that "every organization that exceeds its true limits and tends to invade
or annex other organizations loses in strength what it gains in size, and
moves toward dissolution." The more a city (i.e., a nation) extends its
population or its territory, the nearer it comes to tyranny and, finally,
disruption:

"If it sets up subsidiaries or colonies some distance away, these
subsidiaries or colonies will, sooner or later, change into new cities
which will remain linked to the mother city only by federation, or not at
all ....

When the new city is ready to support itself it will itself declare its
independence: by what right should the parent city presume to treat it as a
vassal, as property to be exploited?

Thus in our time we have seen the United States emancipate itself from
England; and Canada likewise in fact, if not in name; Australia set out on
the road to separation by the consent, and with the approval, of the mother
country. In the same way Algeria will, sooner or later, constitute itself
an African France unless for abominable, selfish motives we keep it as a
single unit by means of force and poverty."

Bakunin had an eye on the underdeveloped countries and doubted whether
"imperialist Europe" could keep 800 million Asiatics in servitude.
"Two-thirds of humanity, 800 million Asians asleep in their servitude will
necessarily awaken and begin to move. But in what direction and to what
end?" He declared "strong sympathy for any national uprising against any
form of oppression" and commended to the subject peoples the fascinating
example of the Spanish uprising against Napoleon. In spite of the fantastic
disproportion between the native guerrillas and the imperial troops, the
occupying power failed to put them down, and the French were driven out of
Spain after a five-year struggle.

Every people "has the right to be itself and no one is entitled to impose
its costume, its customs, its language, its opinions, or its laws."
However, Bakunin also believed that there could be no true federalism
without socialism and wished that national liberation could be achieved "as
much in the economic as in the political interests of the masses" and "not
with ambitious intent to set up a powerful State." Any revolution for
national independence "will necessarily be against the people . . . if it
is carried out without the people and must therefore depend for success on
a privileged class," and will thus become "a retrogressive, disastrous,
counter-revolutionary movement."

It would be regrettable if the decolonized countries were to cast off the
foreign yoke only to fall into indigenous political or religious servitude.
Their emancipation requires that "all faith in any divine or human
authority be eradicated among the masses." The national question is
historically secondary to the social question and salvation depends on the
social revolution. An isolated national revolution cannot succeed. The
social revolution inevitably becomes a world revolution.

Bakunin foresaw that decolonization would be followed by an ever expanding
federation of revolutionary peoples: "The future lies initially with the
creation of a European-American international unit. Later, much later, this
great European-American nation will merge with the African and Asiatic
units."

This analysis brings us straight into the middle of the twentieth century.

(Source: Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, first published in French in
1965, the 1970 English translation is Guérin's best-known work,
describing the intellectual substance and actual practice of anarchism. The
English translation by Mary Klopper includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky,
who describes it as an attempt "to extract from the history of libertarian
thought a living, evolving tradition".)


* Chapter 3, Section A : Anarchism in Revolutionary Practice 1880-1914


ANARCHISM BECOMES ISOLATED FROM THE WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT

It is now time to examine anarchism in action. Which brings us to the eve
of the twentieth century. Libertarian ideas certainly played some part in
the revolutions of the nineteenth century but not an independent one.
Proudhon had taken a negative attitude to the 1848 Revolution even before
its outbreak. He attacked it as a political revolution, a bourgeois booby
trap, and, indeed, much of this was true. Moreover, according to Proudhon,
it was inopportune and its use of barricades and street battles was
outdated, for he himself dreamed of a quite different road to victory for
his panacea: mutuelliste collectivism. As for the Paris Commune, while it
is true that it spontaneously broke away from "traditional statist
centralization," it was the product of a "compromise," as Henri Lefebvre
has noted, a sort of "united front" between the Proudhonists and
Bakuninites on the one hand and the Jacobins and Blanquists on the other.
It "boldly repudiated" the State, but Bakunin had to admit that the
internationalist anarchists were a "tiny minority" in its ranks.

As a result of Bakunin's impetus, anarchism had, however, succeeded in
grafting itself onto the First International - a proletarian,
internationalist, apolitical, mass movement. But sometime around 1880 the
anarchists began to deride "the timid International of the first period,"
and sought to set up in its place what Malatesta in 1884 described as the
"redoubtable International," which was to be anarchist, communist,
anti-religious, anti-parliamentary, and revolutionary, all at the same
time. This scarecrow was very flimsy: anarchism cut itself off from the
working-class movement, with the result that it deteriorated and lost its
way in sectarianism and minority activism.

What caused this decline? One reason was the swiftness of industrial
development and the rapid conquest of political rights by workers who then
became more receptive to parliamentary reformism. It followed that the
international working-class movement was taken over by politically minded,
electoralist, reformist social democrats whose purpose was not the social
revolution but the legal conquest of the bourgeois State and the
satisfaction of short-term demands.

When they found themselves a small minority, the anarchists abandoned the
idea of militancy within large popular movements. Free rein was given to
utopian doctrines, combining premature anticipations and nostalgic
evocations of a golden age; Kropotkin, Malatesta, and their friends turned
their backs on the road opened up by Bakunin on the pretext of keeping
their doctrine pure. They accused Bakunin, and anarchist literature in
general, of having been "too much colored by Marxism." The anarchists
turned in on themselves, organized themselves for direct action in small
clandestine groups which were easily infiltrated by police informers.

Bakunin's retirement was soon followed by his death and, from 1876 on,
anarchism caught the bug of adventurism and wild fantasy. The Berne
Congress launched the slogan of "propaganda by the deed." Cafiero and
Malatesta handed out the first lesson of action. On April 5, 1877, they
directed a band of some thirty armed militants who suddenly appeared in the
mountains of the Italian province of Benevento, burned the parish records
of a small village, distributed the funds in the tax collector's safe to
the poor, and tried to install libertarian communism on a miniature, rural,
infantile scale. In the end they were tracked down, numb with cold, and
yielded without resistance.

Three years later, on December 25, 1880, Kropotkin was declaiming in his
journal Le Revolte: "Permanent revolt in speech, writing, by the dagger and
the gun, or by dynamite . . . anything suits us that is alien to legality."
Between "propaganda by the deed" and attacks on individuals, only a step
remained. It was soon taken.

The defection of the mass of the working class had been one of the reasons
for the recourse to terrorism, and "propaganda by the deed" did indeed make
some contribution to awakening the workers from their apathy. Writing in La
Revolution Proletarienne, November 1937, Robert Lonzon [20] maintained that
"it was like the stroke of a gong bringing the French proletariat to its
feet after the prostration into which it had been plunged by the massacres
of the Commune [by the right] . . ., [and was] the prelude to the
foundation of the CGT [Confederation General du Travail] and the mass
trade-union movement of the years 1900-1910." This rather optimistic view
is corrected or supplemented [21] by the views of Fernand Pelloutier, a
young anarchist who later went over to revolutionary syndicalism: he
believed the use of dynamite had deterred the workers from professing
libertarian socialism, however disillusioned they might have been with
parliamentary socialism; none of them dared call himself an anarchist lest
he seem to opt for isolated revolt as against collective action.

The social democrats were not slow to use the weapons against the
anarchists furnished by the combination of bombs and Kropotkinist utopias.

SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC CONDEMNATION OF ANARCHISM

For many years the socialist working-class movement was divided into
irreconcilable segments: while anarchism slid into terrorism combined with
passive waiting for the millennium, the political movement, more or less
dishonestly claiming to be Marxist, became bogged down in "parliamentary
cretinism." Pierre Monatte, an anarchist who turned syndicalist, later
recalled: "The revolutionary spirit in France was dying out . . . year by
year. The revolutionary ideas of Guesde were now only verbal or, worse,
electoral and parliamentary; those of Jaures simply, and very frankly,
ministerial and governmental." In France, the divorce between anarchists
and socialists was completed at the Le Havre Congress of 1880, when the
newborn workers' party threw itself into electoral politics.

In Paris in 1889 the social democrats from various countries decided to
revive the long-neglected practice of holding international socialist
congresses. This opened the way for the creation of the Second
International and some anarchists thought it necessary to attend the
meeting. Their presence gave rise to violent incidents, since the social
democrats used their superior numbers to suppress all argument from their
opponents. At the Brussels Congress of 1891 the libertarians were booed and
expelled. However, many working-class delegates from England, Italy, and
Holland, though they were indeed reformists, withdrew in protest. The next
congress was held in Zurich in 1893, and the social democrats claimed that
in the future they could exclude all non-trade union organizations which
did not recognize the necessity for "political action," that is to say, the
conquest of bourgeois power by the ballot.

At the London Congress of 1896, a few French and Italian anarchists
circumvented this exclusionary condition by getting trade unions to appoint
them as delegates. This was not simply a subterfuge, for, as we shall see
below, the anarchists had once more found the path of reality - they had
entered the trade-union movement. But when one of them, Paul Delesalle,
tried to mount the rostrum, he was thrown violently to the bottom of the
steps and injured. Jaures accused the anarchists of having transformed the
trade unions into revolutionary anarchist groups and of disrupting them,
just as they had come to the congress only to disrupt it, "to the great
benefit of bourgeois reaction."

The German social-democratic leaders at the congress, the inveterate
electoralists Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, showed themselves as
savage to the anarchists as they had been in the First International.
Supported by Marx's daughter, Eleanor Aveling, who regarded the anarchists
as "madmen," they had their own way with the meeting and got it to pass a
resolution excluding from future congresses all "anti-parliamentarians" in
whatever guise they might appear.

Later, in State and Revolution, Lenin presented the anarchists with a
bouquet which concealed some thorns. He stood up for them in relation to
the social democrats, accusing the latter of having "left to the anarchists
a monopoly of criticism of parliamentarianism" and of having "labeled" such
criticism as "anarchist." It was hardly surprising that the proletariat of
the parliamentary countries became disgusted with such socialists and more
and more sympathetic to the anarchists. The social democrats had termed any
effort to destroy the bourgeois State as anarchist. The anarchists
"correctly described the opportunist character of the ideas of most
socialist parties on the State."

According to Lenin, Marx and Proudhon were as one in desiring "the
demolition of the existing machine of the State." "The opportunists are
unwilling to admit the similarity between Marxism and the anarchism of
Proudhon and Bakunin." The social democrats entered into debate with the
anarchists in an "unMarxist" manner. Their critique of anarchism boiled
down to pure bourgeois banality: "We recognize the State, the anarchists
don't." The anarchists are in a strong position to retort that this kind of
social democracy is failing in its duty of providing for the revolutionary
education of the workers. Lenin castigated an anti-anarchist pamphlet by
the Russian social democrat Plekhanov as "very unjust to the anarchists,"
"sophistical," "full of vulgar argument, insinuating that there is no
difference between an anarchist and a bandit."

ANARCHISTS IN THE TRADE UNIONS

In the 1890s the anarchists had reached a dead end and they were cut off
from the world of the workers which had become the monopoly of the social
democrats. They snuggled into little sects, barricaded themselves into
ivory towers where they polished up increasingly unrealistic dogmas; or
else they performed and applauded acts of individual terrorism, and let
themselves be caught in a net of repression and reprisal.

Kropotkin deserves credit for being one of the first to confess his errors
and to recognize the sterility of "propaganda by the deed." In a series of
articles which appeared in 1890 he affirmed "that one must be with the
people, who no longer want isolated acts, but want men of action inside
their ranks." He warned his readers against "the illusion that one can
defeat the coalition of exploiters with a few pounds of explosives." He
proposed a return to mass trade unionism like that of which the First
International had been the embryo and propagator: "Monster unions embracing
millions of proletarians."

It was the imperative duty of the anarchists to penetrate into the trade
unions in order to detach the working masses from the false socialists who
were deceiving them. In 1895 an anarchist weekly, Les Temps Nouveaux,
published an article by Fernand Pelloutier entitled "Anarchism and the
Trade Unions" which expounded the new tactic. Anarchism could do very well
without dynamite and must approach the masses, both to propagate anarchist
ideas as widely as possible and to save the trade-union movement from the
narrow corporatism in which it had become bogged down. The trade union must
be a "practical school of anarchism." As a laboratory of economic struggle,
detached from electoral competition and administered on anarchist lines,
was not the trade union the only libertarian and revolutionary organization
which could counterbalance and destroy the evil influence of the
social-democratic politicians? Pelloutier linked the trade unions to the
libertarian communist society which remained the ultimate objective of the
anarchist: on the day when the revolution breaks out, he asked, "would they
not be an almost libertarian organization, ready to succeed the existing
order, thus effectively abolishing all political authority; each of its
parts controlling the means of production, managing its own affairs,
sovereign over itself by the free consent of its members?"

Later, at the International Anarchist Congress of 1907, Pierre Monatte
declared: "Trade unionism . . . opens up new perspectives for anarchism,
too long fumed in on itself." On the one hand, "trade unionism . . . has
renewed anarchism's awareness of its working-class roots; on the other, the
anarchists have made no small contribution to setting the working-class
movement on the road to revolution and to popularizing the idea of direct
action." After a lively debate, this congress adopted a compromise
resolution which opened with the following statement of principle: "This
International Anarchist Congress sees the trade unions both as combat units
in the class struggle for better working conditions, and as associations of
producers which can serve to transform capitalist society into an
anarcho-communist society."

The syndicalist anarchists met with some difficulties in their efforts to
draw the whole libertarian movement onto the new road they had chosen. The
"pure ones" of anarchism cherished insurmountable suspicions with regard to
the trade-union movement. They resented it for having its feet too firmly
on the ground. They accused it of a complacent attitude toward capitalist
society, of being an integral part of it, of limiting itself to short-term
demands. They disputed its claim to be able to resolve the social problem
single-handed. At the 1907 congress Malatesta replied sharply to Monatte,
maintaining that the industrial movement was for the anarchist a means and
not an end: "Trade unionism is not, and never will be, anything but a
legalistic and conservative movement, unable to aim beyond - if that far! -
the improvement of working conditions." The trade-union movement is made
short-sighted by the pursuit of immediate gains and turns the workers away
from the final struggle: "One should not ask workers to strike; but rather
to continue working, for their own advantage." Malatesta ended by warning
his hearers against the conservatism of trade-union bureaucracies: "In the
industrial movement the official is a danger comparable only to
parliamentarianism. Any anarchist who has agreed to become a permanent and
salaried official of a trade union is lost to anarchism."

To this Monatte replied that the trade-union movement was certainly no more
perfect than any other human institution: "Far from hiding its faults, I
think it is wise to have them always in mind so as to react against them."
He recognized that trade union officialdom aroused sharp criticism, often
justified. But he protested against the charge of wishing to sacrifice
anarchism and the revolution to trade unionism: "As with everyone else
here, anarchy is our final aim. However, because times have changed we have
changed our conception of the movement and of the revolution .... If,
instead of criticizing the past, present, or even future mistakes of trade
unionism from above, the anarchists would concern themselves more
intimately with its work, the dangers that lurk in trade unionism would be
averted forever."

The anger of the sectarian anarchists was not entirely without cause.
However, the kind of trade union of which they disapproved belonged to a
past period: that which was at first purely and simply corporative, and
later, the blind follower of those social democratic politicians who had
multiplied in France during the long years following the repression of the
Commune. The trade unionism of class struggle, on the other hand, had been
regenerated by the anarcho-syndicalists who had entered it, and it gave the
"pure" anarchists the opposite cause for complaint: it claimed to produce
its own ideology, to "be sufficient unto itself." Its most effective
spokesman, Emile Pouget, maintained: "The trade union is superior to any
other form of cohesion between individuals because the task of partial
amelioration and the more decisive one of social transformation can be
carried on side by side within its framework. It is precisely because the
trade union answers this twofold need, . . . no longer sacrificing the
present to the future or the future to the present, that the trade union
stands out as the best kind of group."

The concern of the new trade unionism to emphasize and preserve its
"independence" was proclaimed in a famous charter adopted by the CGT
congress in Amiens in 1906. The statement was not inspired so much by
opposition to anarchism as by the desire to get rid of the tutelage of
bourgeois democracy and its extension in the working-class movement, social
democracy. It was also felt important to preserve the cohesion of the trade
union movement when confronted with a proliferation of rival political
sects, such as existed in France before "socialist unity" was established.
Proudhon's work De la Capacite Politique des Classes Ouvrieres (1865) was
taken by the revolutionary syndicalists as their bible; from it they had
selected for particular attention the idea of "separation": being a
distinct class, the proletariat must refuse all support from the opposing
class.

Some anarchists, however, were shocked by the claim of trade unionism to do
without their patronage. Malatesta exclaimed that it was a radically false
doctrine which threatened the very existence of anarchism. Jean Grave, his
faithful follower, echoed: "Trade unionism can - and must - be
self-sufficient in its struggle against exploitation by the employers, but
it cannot pretend to be able to solve the social problem by itself." It "is
so little sufficient unto itself that the very idea of what it is, of what
it should be, and of what it should do, had to come to it from outside."

In spite of these recriminations, the revolutionary ferment brought with
them by the anarchist converts to trade unionism made the trade-union
movement in France and the other Latin countries a power to be reckoned
with in the years before the Great War. This affected not only the
bourgeoisie and government, but also the social-democratic politicians who
thenceforth lost most of their control over the working-class movement. The
philosopher Georges Sorel considered the entry of the anarchists into the
trade unions as one of the major events of his time. Anarchist doctrine had
been diluted in a mass movement, only to emerge renewed and freshly
tempered.

The libertarian movement was to remain impregnated with this fusion between
the anarchist idea and the trade-union idea. Until 1914 the French CGT was
the ephemeral product of this synthesis, but its most complete and durable
product was to be the Spanish CNT (Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo). It
was formed in 1910, taking advantage of the disintegration of the radical
party of the politician Alexandre Lerroux. One of the spokesmen of Spanish
anarcho-syndicalism, Diego Abad de Santillan, did not forget to give credit
to Fernand Pelloutier, to Emile Pouget, and to the other anarchists who had
understood how necessary it was to begin by implanting their ideas in the
economic organizations of the proletariat.

(Source: Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, first published in French in
1965, the 1970 English translation is Guérin's best-known work,
describing the intellectual substance and actual practice of anarchism. The
English translation by Mary Klopper includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky,
who describes it as an attempt "to extract from the history of libertarian
thought a living, evolving tradition".)


* Chapter 3, Section B : Anarchism in the Russian Revolution


Anarchism had found its second wind in revolutionary syndicalism; the
Russian Revolution gave it its third. This statement may at first surprise
the reader, accustomed to think of the great revolutionary movement of
October 1917 as the work and domain of the Bolsheviks alone. The Russian
Revolution was, in fact, a great mass movement, a wave rising from the
people which passed over and submerged ideological formations. It belonged
to no one, unless to the people. In so far as it was an authentic
revolution, taking its impulse from the bottom upward and spontaneously
producing the organs of direct democracy, it presented all the
characteristics of a social revolution with libertarian tendencies.
However, the relative weakness of the Russian anarchists prevented them
from exploiting situations which were exceptionally favorable to the
triumph of their ideas.

The Revolution was ultimately confiscated and distorted by the mastery,
according to some - the cunning, according to others - of the professional
revolutionary team grouped around Lenin. But this defeat of both anarchism
and the authentic popular revolution was not entirely sterile for the
libertarian idea. In the first place, the collective appropriation of the
means of production has not again been put in question, and this safeguards
the ground upon which, one day perhaps, socialism from below may prevail
over state regimentation; moreover, the Russian experience has provided the
occasion for some Russian and some non-Russian anarchists to learn the
complex lessons of a temporary defeat - lessons of which Lenin himself
seemed to have become aware on the eve of his death. In this context they
could rethink the whole problem of revolution and anarchism. According to
Kropotkin, echoed by Voline, it taught them, should they ever need to know,
how not to make a revolution. Far from proving that libertarian socialism
is impracticable, the Soviet experience, on the contrary, broadly confirmed
the prophetic correctness of the views of the founders of anarchism and, in
particular, their critique of authoritarian socialism.

A LIBERTARIAN REVOLUTION

The point of departure of the Revolution of 1917 was that of 1905, during
which a new kind of revolutionary organ had come into being: the soviets.
They were born in the factories of St. Petersburg during a spontaneous
general strike. In the almost complete absence of a trade-union movement
and tradition, the soviets filled a vacuum by coordinating the struggle of
the factories on strike. The anarchist Voline was one of the small group
which had the idea of setting up the first soviet, in close liaison with
the workers and at their suggestion. His evidence coincides with that of
Trotsky, who became president of the soviet a few months later. In his
account of 1905 he wrote, without any pejorative intent - quite the
contrary: "The activity of the soviet represented the organization of
anarchy. Its existence and its subsequent development marked the
consolidation of anarchy."

This experience had made a permanent mark upon working-class consciousness
and, when the second Russian Revolution broke out in February 1917, its
leaders did not have to invent anything. The workers took over the
factories spontaneously. The soviets revived on their own initiative. Once
again, they took the professional revolutionaries by surprise. On Lenin's
own admission, the masses of peasants and workers were "a hundred times
further to the left" than the Bolsheviks. The prestige of the soviets was
such that it was only in their name and at their behest that the October
insurrection could be launched.

In spite of their vigor, however, they were lacking in homogeneity,
revolutionary experience, and ideological preparation. This made them easy
prey to political parties with uncertain revolutionary ideas. Although it
was a minority organization, the Bolshevik Party was the only really
organized revolutionary force which knew where it was going. It had no
rivals on the extreme left in either the political or the trade-union
field. It had first-class cadres at its disposal, and set in motion, as
Voline admitted, "a feverish, overwhelming, fierce activity."

The party machine, however - of which Stalin was at that time an obscure
ornament - had always regarded the soviets with suspicion as embarrassing
competitors. Immediately after the seizure of power, the spontaneous and
irresistible tendency toward the socialization of production was, at first,
channeled through workers' control. A decree of November 14, 1917,
legalized the participation of workers in the management of enterprises and
the fixing of prices; it abolished trade secrets, and compelled the
employers to publish their correspondence and their accounts. According to
Victor Serge, "the leaders of the Revolution did not intend to go beyond
this." In April 1918 they "still intended . . . to set up mixed companies
with shares, in which the Soviet State and Russian and foreign capital
would all participate." "The initiative for measures of expropriation came
from the masses and not from authority."

As early as October 20, 1917, at the first Congress of Factory Councils, a
motion inspired by anarchism was presented. It proposed "control over
production, and that control commissions should not be simply investigative
bodies, but . . . from this moment on cells of the future preparing to
transfer production to the hands of the workers." "In the very early days
of the October Revolution," Anna Pankratova [22] reported, "anarchist
tendencies were the more easily and successfully manifested, because the
capitalists put up the liveliest resistance to the enforcement of the
decree on workers' control and actually refused workers' participation in
production."

Workers' control in effect soon showed itself to be a half measure, halting
and inefficient. The employers sabotaged it, concealed their stocks,
removed tools, challenged or locked out the workers; sometimes they used
the factory committees as simple agents or aides to management; they even
thought it profitable to try to have their firms nationalized. The workers
responded to these maneuvers by seizing the factories and running them for
their own benefit. "We ourselves will not send the owners away," the
workers said in their resolutions, "but we will take charge of production
if they will not insure that the factories function." Anna Pankratova adds
that, in this first period of "chaotic" and "primitive" socialization, the
factory councils "frequently took over the management of factories whose
owners had been dismissed or had fled."

Workers' control soon had to give place to socialization. Lenin literally
did violence to his more timorous lieutenants by throwing them into the
"crucible of living popular creativity," by obliging them to speak in
authentic libertarian language. The basis of revolutionary reconstruction
was to be workers' self-management. It alone could arouse in the masses
such revolutionary enthusiasm that the impossible would become possible.
When the last manual worker, any unemployed person, any cook, could see the
factories, the land, the administration in the hands of associations of
workers, of employes, of officials, of peasants; rationing in the hands of
democratic committees, etc.; all created spontaneously by the people -
"when the poor see and feel that, there will be no force able to defeat the
social revolution." The future seemed to be opening up for a republic of
the type of the Commune of 1871, a republic of soviets.

According to Voline's account, "in order to catch the imagination of the
masses, gain their confidence and their sympathy, the Bolshevik Party
announced . . . slogans which had up tin then been characteristic . . . of
anarchism." All power to the soviets was a slogan which the masses
intuitively understood in the libertarian sense. Peter Archinoff reported
that "the workers interpreted the idea of soviet power as that of their own
right to dispose of themselves socially and economically." At the Third
Congress of Soviets, at the beginning of 1918, Lenin declared: "Anarchist
ideas have now taken on living form." Soon after, at the Seventh Party
Congress, March ~8, he proposed for adoption theses which dealt among other
things with the socialization of production administered by workers'
organizations (trade unions, factory committees, etc.); the abolition of
officials in charge of manual trades, of the police and the army; the
equality of salaries and remuneration; the participation of all members of
the soviets in management and administration of the State; the complete
elimination by stages of the said State and of the use of money. At the
Trade-Union Congress (spring 1918), Lenin described the factories as
"self-governing communes of producers and consumers." The
anarcho-syndicalist Maximoff goes so far as to maintain that "the
Bolsheviks had not only abandoned the theory of the gradual withering away
of the State, but Marxist ideology in general. They had become some kind of
anarchists."

AN AUTHORITARIAN REVOLUTION

This audacious alignment with the instinct of the masses and their
revolutionary temper may have succeeded in giving the Bolsheviks command
over the revolution, but had nothing to do with their traditional ideology
or their real intentions. They had been authoritarians for a long time, and
were imbued with ideas of the State, of dictatorship, of : ':__': , of a
ruling party, of management of the economy from above, of all things which
were in flagrant contradiction with a really libertarian conception of
soviet democracy.

State and Revolution was written on the eve of the October insurrection and
mirrors the ambivalence of Lenin's thoughts. Some pages might have been
written by a libertarian and, as we have seen above [23], some credit at
least is given to the anarchists. However, this call for a revolution from
below runs parallel to a statement of the case for a revolution from above.
Concepts of a hierarchical, centralized state system are not half concealed
afterthoughts but, on the contrary, are frankly expressed: the State will
survive the conquest of power by the proletariat and will wither away only
after a transitional period. How long is this purgatory to last? This is
not concealed; we are told rather with relief than with regret that the
process will be "slow," and "of long duration." Under the guise of soviet
power, the revolution will bring forth the "proletarian State," or
"dictatorship of the proletariat"; the writer even lets slip the expression
"bourgeois State without the bourgeoisie," just when he is revealing his
inmost thoughts. This omnivorous State surely intends to take everything
over.

Lenin took a lesson from contemporary German state capitalism, the
Kriegswirtschaft (war economy). Another of his models was the organization
of modern large-scale industry by capitalism, with its "iron discipline."
He was particularly entranced by a state monopoly such as the posts and
telegraphs and exclaimed: "What an admirably perfected mechanism! The whole
of economic life organized like the postal services, . . . that is the
State, that is the economic base which we need." To seek to do without
"authority" and "subordination" is an "anarchist dream," he concluded. At
one time he had waxed enthusiastic over the idea of entrusting production
and exchange to workers' associations and to self-management. But that was
a misdeal. Now he did not hide his magic prescription: all citizens
becoming "employes and workers of one universal single state trust," the
whole of society converted into "one great office and one great factory."
There would be soviets, to be sure, but under the control of the workers'
party, a party whose historic task it is to "direct" the proletariat. The
most clear-minded Russian anarchists were not misled by this view. At the
peak of Lenin's libertarian period they were already warning the workers to
be on their guard: in their journal, Golos Truda (The Voice of Labor), in
the last months of 1917 and early in 1918 Voline wrote the following
prophetic warning:

"Once they have consolidated and legalized their power, the Bolsheviks -
who are socialists, politicians, and believers in the State, that is to
say, centralist and authoritarian men of action - will begin to arrange the
life of the country and the people by governmental and dictatorial means
imposed from the centers .... Your soviets . . . will gradually become
simply executive organs of the will of the central government.... An
authoritarian political state apparatus will be set up and, acting from
above, it will seek to crush everything with its iron fist . . . Woe betide
anyone who is not in agreement with the central authority.

"All power to the soviets will become in effect the authority of the party
leaders."

It was Voline's view that it was the increasingly anarchist tendencies of
the masses which obliged Lenin to turn away from his original path for a
time. He would allow the State, authority, the dictatorship, to remain only
for an hour, for a short moment. And then would come "anarchism." "But,
good God, do you not foresee . . . what citizen Lenin will say when real
power has been consolidated and it has become possible not to listen any
more to the voice of the masses?'' Then he will come back to the beaten
path. He will create "a Marxist State," of the most complete type.

It would, of course, be risky to maintain that Lenin and his team
consciously set a trap for the masses. There was more doctrinal dualism in
them than deliberate duplicity. The contradiction between the two poles of
their thought was so obvious, so flagrant, that it was to be foreseen that
it would soon impinge upon events. Either the anarchist trend and the
pressure of the masses would oblige the Bolsheviks to forget the
authoritarian aspect of their concepts, or, on the contrary, the
consolidation of their power, coinciding with the exhaustion of the
people's revolutionary upsurge, would lead them to put aside their
transitory anarchist thoughts.

A new factor then made its appearance, disturbing the balance of the issues
in question: the terrible circumstances of the civil war and the foreign
intervention, the disorganization of transport, the shortage of
technicians. These things drove the Bolshevik leaders to emergency
measures, to dictatorship, to centralization, and to recourse to the "iron
fist." The anarchists, however, denied that these were the result simply of
objective causes external to the Revolution. In their opinion they were due
in part to the internal logic of the authoritarian ideas of Bolshevism, to
the weakness of an overcentralized and excessively bureaucratic authority.
According to Voline, it was, among other things, the incompetence of the
State, and its desire to direct and control everything, that made it
incapable of reorganizing the economic life of the country and led to a
real "breakdown"; that is, to the paralyzes of industry, the ruin of
agriculture, and the destruction of all connections between the various
branches of the economy.

As an example, Voline told the story of the former Nobel oil refinery at
Petrograd. It had been abandoned by its owners and its 4,000 workers
decided to operate it collectively. They addressed themselves to the
Bolshevik government in vain. Then they tried to make the plant work on
their own initiative. They divided themselves into mobile groups and tried
to find fuel, raw materials, outlets, and means of transport. With regard
to the latter they had actually begun discussions with their comrades among
the railwaymen. The government became angry, feeling that its
responsibility to the country prevented it from allowing each factory to
act independently. The workers' council persisted and called a general
assembly of the workers. The People's Commissar of Labor took the trouble
to give a personal warning to the workers against a "serious act of
insubordination." He castigated their attitude as "anarchistic and
egotistical." He threatened them with dismissal without compensation. The
workers retorted that they were not asking for any privileges: the
government should let the workers and peasants all over the country act in
the same way. All in vain, the government stuck to its point of view and
the factory was closed.

One Communist confirms Voline's analysis: Alexandra Kollontay. In 1921 she
complained that numerous examples of workers' initiative had come to grief
amid endless paperwork and useless administrative discussions: "How much
bitterness there is among the workers . . . when they see what they could
have achieved if they had been given the right and the freedom to act....
Initiative becomes weak and the desire for action dies down."

In fact the power of the soviets only lasted a few months, from October
1917 to the spring of 1918. The factory councils were very soon deprived of
their power, on the pretext that self-management did not take account of
the "rational" needs of the economy, that it involved an egoism of
enterprises competing one with the other, grasping for scarce resources,
wanting to survive at any price even if other factories were more important
"for the State" and better equipped. In brief, according to Anna
Pankratova, the situation was moving toward a fragmentation of the economy
into "autonomous producers' federations of the kind dreamed of by the
anarchists." No doubt the budding workers' self-management was not above
reproach. It had tried, painfully and tentatively, to create new forms of
production which had no precedent in world history. It had certainly made
mistakes and taken wrong turns. That was the price of apprenticeship. As
Alexandra Kollontay maintained, communism could not be "born except by a
process of practical research, with mistakes perhaps, but starting from the
creative forces of the working class itself."

The leaders of the Party did not hold this view. They were only too pleased
to take back from the factory committees the power which they had not in
their heart of hearts been happy to hand over. As early as 1918, Lenin
stated his preference for the "single will" in the management of
enterprises. The workers must obey "unconditionally" the single will of the
directors of the work process. All the Bolshevik leaders, Kollontay tells
us, were "skeptical with regard to the creative abilities of workers'
collectives." Moreover, the administration was invaded by large numbers of
petty bourgeois, left over from old Russian capitalism, who had adapted
themselves all too quickly to institutions of the soviet type, and had got
themselves into responsible positions in the various commissariats,
insisting that economic management should be entrusted to them and not to
workers' organizations.

The state bureaucracy played an increasing role in the economy. From
December 5, 1917, on, industry was put under a Supreme Economic Council,
responsible for the authoritarian coordination of the activity of all
organs of production. From May 26 to June 4, 1918, the Congress of Economic
Councils met and decided that the directorate of each enterprise should be
composed of members two-thirds of whom would be nominated by the regional
councils or the Supreme Economic Council and only one third elected by
workers on the spot. A decree of May 28, 1918, extended collectivization to
industry as a whole but, by the same token, transformed the spontaneous
socializations of the first months of the revolution into nationalizations.
The Supreme Economic Council was made responsible for the administration of
the nationalized industries. The directors and technical staff were to
remain at their posts as appointees of the State. At the Second Congress of
the Supreme Economic Council at the end of 1918, the factory councils were
roundly trounced by the committee reporter for trying to direct the
factories in the place of the board of directors.

For the sake of appearances, elections to factory committees continued to
take place, but a member of the Communist cell read out a list of
candidates drawn up in advance and voting was by show of hands in the
presence of the armed "Communist guards" of the enterprise. Anyone who
declared his opposition to the proposed candidates became subject to
economic sanctions (wage cuts, etc.). As Peter Archinoff reported, there
remained a single omnipresent master - the State. Relations between the
workers and this new master became similar to those which had previously
existed between labor and capital.

The functions of the soviets had become purely nominal. They were
transformed into institutions of government power. "You must become basic
cells of the State," Lenin told the Congress of Factory Councils on June
27, 1918. As Voline expressed it, they were reduced to the role of "purely
administrative and executive organs responsible for small, unimportant
local matters and entirely subject to 'directives' from the central
authorities: government and the leading organs of the Party." They no
longer had "even the shadow of power." At the Third Trades-Union Congress
(April 1920), the committee reporter, Lozovosky, admitted: "We have
abandoned the old methods of workers' control and we have preserved only
the principle of state control." From now on this "control" was to be
exercised by an organ of the State: the Workers' and Peasants'
Inspectorate.

The industrial federations which were centralist in structure had, in the
first place, helped the Bolsheviks to absorb and subjugate the factory
councils which were federalist and libertarian in their nature. From April
1, 1918, the fusion between the two types of organization was an
accomplished fact. From then on the trade unions played a disciplinary role
under the supervision of the Party. The union of workers in the heavy metal
industries of Petrograd forbade "disruptive initiatives" from the factory
councils and objected to their "most dangerous" tendency to put this or
that enterprise into the hands of the workers. This was said to be the
worst way of imitating production cooperatives, "the idea of which had long
since been bankrupt" and which would "not fail to transform themselves into
capitalist undertakings." "Any enterprise abandoned or sabotaged by an
industrialist, the product of which was necessary to the national economy,
was to be placed under the control of the State." It was "not permissible"
that the workers should take over such enterprises without the approval of
the trade-union organization.

After this preliminary take-over operation the trade unions were, in their
turn, tamed, deprived of any autonomy, purged; their congresses were
postponed, their members arrested, their organizations disbanded or merged
into larger units. At the end of this process any anarcho-syndicalist
tendency had been wiped out, and the trade-union movement was completely
subordinated to the State and the single party.

The same thing happened with regard to consumers' cooperatives. In the
early stages of the Revolution they had arisen everywhere, increased in
numbers, and federated with each other. Their offense, however, was that
they were outside the control of the Party and a certain number of social
democrats (Mensheviks) had infiltrated them. First, local shops were
deprived of their supplies and means of transport on the pretext of
"private trade" and "speculation," or even without any pretext at all.
Then, all free cooperatives were closed at one stroke and state
cooperatives set up bureaucratically in their place. The decree of March
20, 1919, absorbed the consumer cooperatives into the Commissariat of Food
Supplies and the industrial producer cooperatives into the Supreme Economic
Council. Many members of cooperatives were thrown into prison.

The working class did not react either quickly or vigorously enough. It was
dispersed, isolated in an immense, backward, and for the most part rural
country exhausted by privation and revolutionary struggle, and, still
worse, demoralized. Finally, its best members had left for the fronts of
the civil war or had been absorbed into the party and government apparatus.
Nevertheless, quite a number of workers felt themselves more or less done
out of the fruits of their revolutionary victories, deprived of their
rights, subjected to tutelage, humiliated by the arrogance and arbitrary
power of the new masters; and these became aware of the real nature of the
supposed "proletarian State." Thus, during the summer of 1918, dissatisfied
workers in the Moscow and Petrograd factories elected delegates from among
their number, trying in this way to oppose their authentic "delegate
councils" to the soviets of enterprises already captured by authority.
Kollontay bears witness that the worker felt sore and understood that he
had been pushed aside. He could compare the life style of the soviet
functionaries with the way in which he lived - he upon whom the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" was based, at least in theory.

By the time the workers really saw the light it was too late. Power had had
the time to organize itself solidly and had at its disposal repressive
forces fully able to break any attempted autonomous action on the part of
the masses. According to Voline, a bitter but unequal struggle lasted some
three years, and was entirely unknown outside Russia. In this a
working-class vanguard opposed a state apparatus determined to deny the
division which had developed between itself and the masses. From 1919 to
1921, strikes increased in the large cities, in Petrograd especially, and
even in Moscow. They were severely repressed, as we shall see further on.

Within the directing Party itself a "Workers' Opposition" arose which
demanded a return to the democracy of the soviets and self-management. At
the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, one of its spokesmen, Alexandra
Kollontay, distributed a pamphlet asking for freedom of initiative and
organization for the trade unions and for a "congress of producers" to
elect a central administrative organ for the national economy. The brochure
was confiscated and banned. Lenin persuaded almost the whole congress to
vote for a resolution identifying the theses of the Workers' Opposition
with "petty-bourgeois and anarchist deviations": the "syndicalism," the
"semi-anarchism" of the oppositionists was in his eyes a "direct danger" to
the monopoly of power exercised by the Party in the name of the
proletariat. From then on all opposition within the Party was forbidden and
the way was open to "totalitarianism," as was admitted by Trotsky years
later.

The struggle continued within the central leadership of the trade unions.
Tomsky and Riazanov were excluded from the Presidium and sent into exile,
because they had stood for trade unions independent of the Party. The
leader of the workers' opposition, Shlyapaikov, met the same fate, and was
soon followed by the prime mover of another opposition group: G. I.
Miasnikov, a genuine worker who had put the Grand Duke Michael to death in
1917. He had been a party member for fifteen years and, before the
revolution, spent more than seven years in prison and seventy-five days on
a hunger strike. In November 1921, he dared to state in a pamphlet that the
workers had lost confidence in the Communists, because the Party no longer
had a common language with the rank and file and was now using against the
working class the repressive measures brought in against the bourgeoisie
between 1918 and 1920.

THE PART PLAYED BY THE ANARCHISTS

What part did the Russian anarchists play in this drama in which a
libertarian-style revolution was transmuted into its opposite? Russia had
no libertarian traditions and it was in foreign lands that Bakunin and
Kropotkin became anarchists. Neither played a militant anarchist role
inside Russia at any time. Up to the time of the 1917 Revolution, only a
few copies of short extracts from their writings had appeared in Russia,
clandestinely and with great difficulty. There was nothing anarchist in the
social, socialist, and revolutionary education of the Russians. On the
contrary, as Voline told us, "advanced Russian youth were reading
literature which always presented socialism in a statist form." People's
minds were soaked in ideas of government, having been contaminated by
German social democracy.

The anarchists "were a tiny handful of men without influence," at the most
a few thousand. Voline reported that their movement was "still far too
small to have any immediate, concrete effect on events." Moreover, most of
them were individualist intellectuals not much involved in the
working-class movement. Voline was an exception, as was Nestor Makhno, who
could move the hearts of the masses in his native Ukraine. In Makhno's
memoirs he passed the severe judgment that "Russian anarchism lagged behind
events or even functioned completely outside them."

However, this judgment seems to be less than fair. The anarchists played a
far from negligible part in events between the February and October
revolutions. Trotsky admitted this more than once in his History of the
Russian Revolution. "Brave" and "active," though few in numbers, they were
a principled opposition in the Constituent Assembly at a time when the
Bolsheviks had not yet turned anti-parliamentary. They put out the call
"all power to the soviets" long before Lenin's party did so. They inspired
the movement for the spontaneous socialization of housing, often against
the will of the Bolsheviks. Anarcho-syndicalist activists played a part in
inducing workers to take over the factories, even before October.

During the revolutionary days that brought Kerensky's bourgeois republic to
an end, the anarchists were in the forefront of the military struggle,
especially in the Dvinsk regiment commanded by old libertarians like
Grachoff and Fedotoff. This force dislodged the counter-revolutionary
"cadets." Aided by his detachment, the anarchist Gelezniakov disbanded the
Constituent Assembly: the Bolsheviks only ratified the accomplished fact.
Many partisan detachments were formed or led by anarchists (Mokrooussoff,
Cherniak, and others), and fought unremittingly against the White armies
between 1918 and 1920.

Scarcely a major city was without an anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist
group, spreading a relatively large amount of printed matter - papers,
periodicals, leaflets, pamphlets, and books. There were two weeklies in
Petrograd and a daily in Moscow, each appearing in 25,000 copies. Anarchist
sympathizers increased as the Revolution deepened and then moved away from
the masses. The French captain Jacques Sadoul, on a mission in Russia,
wrote in a report dated April 6, 1918: "The anarchist party is the most
active, the most militant of the opposition groups and probably the most
popular .... The Bolsheviks are anxious." At the end of 1918, according to
Voline, "this influence became so great that the Bolsheviks, who could not
accept criticism, still less opposition, became seriously disturbed."
Voline reports that for the Bolshevik authorities "it was equivalent . . .
to suicide to tolerate anarchist propaganda. They did their best first to
prevent, and then to forbid, any manifestation of libertarian ideas and
finally suppressed them by brute force."

The Bolshevik government "began by forcibly closing the offices of
libertarian organizations, and forbidding the anarchists from taking part
in any propaganda or activity." In Moscow on the night of April 12, 1918,
detachments of Red Guards, armed to the teeth, took over by surprise
twenty-five houses occupied by the anarchists. The latter, thinking that
they were being attacked by White Guards, replied with gunfire. According
to Voline, the authorities soon went on to "more violent measures:
imprisonment, outlawing, and execution." "For four years this conflict was
to keep the Bolshevik authorities on their toes . . . until the libertarian
trend was finally crushed by military measures (at the end of 1921)."

The liquidation of the anarchists was all the easier since they had divided
into two factions, one of which refused to be tamed while the other allowed
itself to be domesticated. The latter regarded "historical necessity" as
justification for making a gesture of loyalty to the regime and, at last
temporarily, approving its dictatorial actions. They considered a
victorious end to the civil war and the crushing of the counter-revolution
to be the first necessities.

The more intransigent anarchists regarded this as a short-sighted tactic.
For the counter-revolutionary movements were being fed by the bureaucratic
impotence of the government apparatus and the disillusionment and
discontent of the people. Moreover, the authorities ended up by making no
distinction between the active wing of the libertarian revolution which was
disputing its methods of control, and the criminal activities of its
right-wing adversaries. To accept dictatorship and terror was a suicidal
policy for the anarchists who were themselves to become its victims.
Finally, the conversion of the so-called soviet anarchists made the
crushing of those other, irreconcilable, ones easier, for they were treated
as "false" anarchists, irresponsible and unrealistic dreamers, stupid
muddlers, madmen, sowers of division, and, finally, counterrevolutionary
bandits.

Victor Serge was the most brilliant, and therefore considered the most
authoritative, of the converted anarchists. He worked for the regime and
published a pamphlet in French which attempted to defend it against
anarchist criticism. The book he wrote later, L'An I de la Revolution
Russe, is largely a justification of the liquidation of the soviets by
Bolshevism. The Party - or rather its elite leadership - is presented as
the brains of the working class. It is up to the duly selected leader of
the vanguard to discover what the proletariat can and must do. Without
them, the masses organized in soviets would be no more than "a sprinkling
of men with confused aspirations shot through with gleams of intelligence."

Victor Serge was certainly too clear-minded to have any illusions about the
real nature of the central Soviet power. But this power was still haloed
with the prestige of the first victorious proletarian revolution; it was
loathed by world counter-revolution; and that was one of the reasons - the
most honorable - why Serge and many other revolutionaries saw fit to put a
padlock on their tongues. In the summer of 1921 the anarchist Gaston Leval
came to Moscow in the Spanish delegation to the Third Congress of the
Communist International. In private, Serge confided to him that "the
Communist Party no longer practices the dictatorship of the proletariat but
dictatorship over the proletariat." Returning to France, Leval published
articles in Le Libertaire using well documented facts, and placing side by
side what Victor Serge had told him confidentially and his public
statements, which he described as "conscious lies." In Living My Life, the
great American anarchist Emma Goldman was no kinder to Victor Serge, whom
she had seen in action in Moscow.

THE MAKHNOVTCHINA

It had been relatively easy to liquidate the small, weak nuclei of
anarchists in the cities, but things were different in the Ukraine, where
the peasant Nestor Makhno had built up a strong rural anarchist
organization, both economic and military. Makhno was born of poor Ukrainian
peasants and was twenty years old in 1919. As a child, he had seen the 1905
Revolution and later became an anarchist. The Czarist regime sentenced him
to death, commuted to eight years' imprisonment, which was spent, more
often than not in irons, in Boutirki prison, the only school he was ever to
attend. He filled at least some of the gaps in his education with the help
of a fellow-prisoner, Peter Archinoff.

Immediately after the October Revolution, Makhno took the initiative in
organizing masses of peasants into an autonomous region, a roughly circular
area 480 by 400 miles, with seven million inhabitants. Its southern end
reached the Sea of Azov at the port of Berdiansk, and it was centered in
Gulyai-Polye, a large town of 20,000 to 30,000 people. This was a
traditionally rebellious region which had seen violent disturbances in
1905.

The story began when the German and Austrian armies of occupation imposed a
right-wing regime which hastened to return to their former owners the lands
which had been seized by revolutionary peasants. The land workers put up an
armed defense of their new conquests. They resisted reaction but also the
untimely intrusion of Bolshevik commissars, and their excessive levies.
This vast jacquerie [24] was inspired by a "lover of justice," a sort of
anarchist Robin Hood called "Father" Makhno by the peasants. His first feat
of arms was the capture of Gulyai-Polye in mid-September 1918. The
armistice of November 11, however, led to the withdrawal of the
Austro-German occupation forces, and gave Makhno a unique opportunity to
build up reserves of arms and supplies.

For the first time in history, the principles of libertarian communism were
applied in the liberated Ukraine, and self-management was put into force as
far as possible in the circumstances of the civil war. Peasants united in
"communes" or "free-work soviets," and communally tilled the land for which
they had fought with the former owners. These groups respected the
principles of equality and fraternity. Each man, woman, or child had to
work in proportion to his or her strength, and comrades elected to
temporary managerial functions subsequently returned to their regular work
alongside the other members of the communes.

Each soviet was simply the executive of the will of the peasants in the
locality from which it had been elected. Production units were federated
into districts, and districts into regions. The soviets were integrated
into a general economic system based on social equality; they were to be
independent of any political party. No politician was to dictate his will
to them under cover of soviet power. Members had to be authentic workers at
the service of the laboring masses.

When the Makhnovist partisans moved into an area they put up posters
reading: "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 organize themselves, to agree among themselves in all aspects of
their lives, as they themselves 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."

When, in 1920, Makhno's men were brought to negotiate with the Bolsheviks,
they did so as their equals, and concluded an ephemeral agreement with
them, to which they insisted that the following appendix be added: "In the
area where the Makhnovist army is operating the worker and peasant
population shall create its own free institutions for economic and
political self-administration; these institutions shall be autonomous and
linked federally by agreements with the governing organs of the Soviet
Republics." The Bolshevik negotiators were staggered and separated the
appendix from the agreement in order to refer it to Moscow where of course,
it was, considered "absolutely inadmissible."

One of the relative weaknesses of the Makhnovist movement was its lack of
libertarian intellectuals, but it did receive some intermittent aid from
outside. This came first from Kharkov and Kursk where the anarchists,
inspired by Voline, had in 1918 formed a union called Nabat (the tocsin).
In 1919 they held a congress at which they declared themselves
"categorically and definitely opposed to any form of participation in the
soviets, which have become purely political bodies, organized on an
authoritarian, centralized, statist basis." The Bolshevik government
regarded this statement as a declaration of war and the Nabat was forced to
give up all its activities. Later, in July, Voline got through to Makhno's
headquarters and joined with Peter Archinoff to take charge of the cultural
and educational side of the movement. He presided at the congress held in
October at Alexandrovsk, where the "General Theses" setting out the
doctrine of the "free soviets" were adopted.

Peasant and partisan delegates took part in these congresses. In fact, the
civil organization was an extension of a peasant army of insurrection,
practicing guerrilla tactics. This army was remarkably mobile, covering as
much as 160 miles in a day, thanks not only to its cavalry but also to its
infantry, which traveled in light horse-drawn carts with springs. This army
was organized on a specifically libertarian, voluntary basis. The elective
principle was applied at all levels and discipline freely agreed to: the
rules of the latter were drawn up by commissions of partisans, then
validated by general assemblies, and were strictly observed by all.

Makhno's franc-tireurs gave the White armies of intervention plenty of
trouble. The units of Bolshevik Red Guards, for their part, were not very
effective. They fought only along the railways and never went far from
their armored trains, to which they withdrew at the first reverse,
sometimes without taking on board all their own combatants. This did not
give much confidence to the peasants who were short of arms and isolated in
their villages and so would have been at the mercy of the
counter-revolutionaries. Archinoff, the historian of the Makhnovtchina,
wrote that "the honor of destroying Denikin's counter-revolution in the
autumn of 1919 is principally due to the anarchist insurgents."

But after the units of Red Guards had been absorbed into the Red Army,
Makhno persisted in refusing to place his army under the supreme command of
the Red Army chief, Trotsky. That great revolutionary therefore believed it
necessary to turn upon the insurrectionary movement. On June 4, 1919, he
drafted an order banning the forthcoming Makhnovist congress, accusing them
of standing out against Soviet power in the Ukraine. He characterized
participation in the congress as an act of "high treason" and called for
the arrest of the delegates. He refused to give arms to Makhno's partisans,
failing in his duty of assisting them, and subsequently accused them of
"betrayal" and of allowing themselves to be beaten by the White troupe. The
same procedure was followed eighteen years later by the Spanish Stalinists
against the anarchist brigades.

The two armies, however, came to an agreement again, on two occasions, when
the extreme danger caused by the intervention required them to act
together. This occurred first in March 1919, against Denikin, the second
during the summer and autumn of 1920, before the menace of the White forces
of Wrangel which were finally destroyed by Makhno. But as soon as the
supreme danger was past the Red Army returned to military operations
against the partisans of Makhno, who returned blow for blow.

At the end of November 1920 those in power went so far as to prepare an
ambush. The Bolsheviks invited the officers of the Crimean Makhnovist army
to take part in a military council. There they were immediately arrested by
the Cheka, the political police, and shot while their partisans were
disarmed. At the same time a regular offensive was launched against
Gulyai-Polye. The increasingly unequal struggle between libertarians and
authoritarians continued for another nine months. In the end, however,
overcome by more numerous and better equipped forces, Makhno had to give up
the struggle. He managed to take refuge in Rumania in August 1921, and
later reached Paris, where he died much later of disease and poverty. This
was the end of the epic story of the Makhnovtchina. According to Peter
Archinoff, it was the prototype of an independent movement of the working
masses and hence a source of future inspiration for the workers of the
world.

KRONSTADT

In February-March 1921, the Petrograd workers and the sailors of the
Kronstadt fortress were driven to revolt, the aspirations which inspired
them being very similar to those of the Makhnovist revolutionary peasants.

The material conditions of urban workers had become intolerable through
lack of foodstuffs, fuel, and transport, and any expression of discontent
was being crushed by a more and more dictatorial and totalitarian regime.
At the end of February strikes broke out in Petrograd, Moscow, and several
other large industrial centers. The workers demanded bread and liberty;
they marched from one factory to another, closing them down, attracting new
contingents of workers into their demonstrations. The authorities replied
with gunfire, and the Petrograd workers in turn by a protest meeting
attended by 10,000 workers. Kronstadt was an island naval base forty-eight
miles from Petrograd in the Gulf of Finland which was frozen during the
winter. It was populated by sailors and several thousand workers employed
in the naval arsenals. The Kronstadt sailors had been in the vanguard of
the revolutionary events of 1905 and 1917. As Trotsky put it, they had been
the "pride and glory of the Russian Revolution." The civilian inhabitants
of Kronstadt had formed a free commune, relatively independent of the
authorities. In the center of the fortress an enormous public square served
as a popular forum holding as many as 30,000 persons.

In 1921 the sailors certainly did not have the same revolutionary makeup
and the same personnel as in 1917; they had been drawn from the peasantry
far more than their predecessors; but the militant spirit had remained and
as a result of their earlier performance they retained the right to take an
active part in workers' meetings in Petrograd. When the workers of the
former capital went on strike they sent emissaries who were driven back by
the forces of order. During two mass meetings held in the main square they
took up as their own the demands of the strikers. Sixteen thousand sailors,
workers, and soldiers attended the second meeting held on March 1, as did
the head of state, Kalinin, president of the central executive. In spite of
his presence they passed a resolution demanding that the workers, Red
soldiers, and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt, and the Petrograd province
be called together during the next ten days in a conference independent of
the political parties. They also called for the abolition of "political
officers," asked that no political party should have privileges, and that
the Communist shock detachments in the army and "Communist guards" in the
factories should be disbanded.

It was indeed the monopoly of power of the governing party which they were
attacking. The Kronstadt rebels dared to call this monopoly an
"usurpation." Let the angry sailors speak for themselves, as we skim
through the pages of the official journal of this new commune, the Izvestia
of Kronstadt. According to them, once it had seized power the Communist
Party had only one concern: to keep it by fair means or foul. It had lost
contact with the masses, and proved its inability to get the country out of
a state of general collapse. It had become bureaucratic and lost the
confidence of the workers. The soviets, having lost their real power, had
been meddled with, taken over, and manipulated, the trade unions were being
made instruments of the State. An omnipotent police apparatus weighed on
the people, enforcing its laws by gunfire and the use of terror. Economic
life had become not the promised socialism, based on free labor, but a
harsh state capitalism. The workers were simply wage earners under this
national trust, exploited just as before. The irreverent men of Kronstadt
went so far as to express doubt about the infallibility of the supreme
leaders of the revolution. They mocked Trotsky, and even Lenin,
irreverently. Their immediate demands were the restoration of all freedoms
and free elections to all the organs of soviet democracy, but beyond this
they were looking to a more distant objective with a clearly anarchist
content: a "third revolution."

The rebels did, however, intend to keep within the framework of the
Revolution and undertook to watch over the achievements of the social
revolution. They proclaimed that they had nothing in common with those who
would have wished to "return to the knout of Czarism," and though they did
not conceal their intention of depriving the "Communists" of power, this
was not to be for the purpose of "returning the workers and peasants to
slavery." Moreover, they did not cut off all possibility of cooperation
with the regime, still hoping "to be able to find a common language."
Finally, the freedom of expression they were demanding was not to be for
just anybody, but only for sincere believers in the Revolution: anarchists
and "left socialists" (a formula which would exclude social democrats or
Mensheviks).

The audacity of Kronstadt was much more than a Lenin or a Trotsky could
endure. The Bolshevik leaders had once and for all identified the
Revolution with the Communist Party, and anything which went against this
myth must, in their eyes, appear as "counter-revolutionary." They saw the
whole of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy in danger. Kronstadt frightened them
the more, since they were governing in the name of the proletariat and,
suddenly, their authority was being disputed by a movement which they knew
to be authentically proletarian. Lenin, moreover, held the rather
simplistic idea that a Czarist restoration was the only alternative to the
dictatorship of his own party. The statesmen of the Kremlin in 1921 argued
in the same way as those, much later, in the autumn of 1956: Kronstadt was
the forerunner of Budapest.

Trotsky, the man with the "iron fist," undertook to be personally
responsible for the repression. "If you persist, you will be shot down from
cover like partridges," he announced to the "mutineers." The sailors were
treated as "White Guardists," accomplices of the interventionist Western
powers, and of the "Paris Bourse." They were to be reduced to submission by
force of arms. It was in vain that the anarchists Emma Goldman and
Alexander Berkman, who had found asylum in the fatherland of the workers
after being deported from the United States, sent a pathetic letter to
Zinoviev, insisting that the use of force would do "incalculable damage to
the social revolution" and adjuring the "Bolshevik comrades" to settle the
conflict through fraternal negotiation. The Petrograd workers could not
come to the aid of Kronstadt because they were already terrorized, and
subject to martial law.

An expeditionary force was set up composed of carefully hand-picked troops,
for many Red soldiers were unwilling to fire on their class brothers. This
force was put under the command of a former Czarist officer, the future
Marshall Tukachevsky. The bombardment of the fortress began on March 7.
Under the heading "Let the world know!" the besieged inhabitants launched a
last appeal: "May the blood of the innocent be on the head of the
Communists, mad, drunk and enraged with power. Long live the power of the
soviets!" The attacking force moved across the frozen Gulf of Finland on
March 18 and quelled the "rebellion" in an orgy of killing.

The anarchists had played no part in this affair. However, the
revolutionary committee of Kronstadt had invited two libertarians to join
it: Yarchouk (the founder of the Kronstadt soviet of 1917) and Voline; in
vain, for they were at the time imprisoned by the Bolsheviks. Ida Mett,
historian of the Kronstadt revolt (in La Commune de Cronstadt), commented
that "the anarchist influence was brought to bear only to the extent to
which anarchism itself propagated the idea of workers' democracy." The
anarchists did not play any direct part in events, but they associated
themselves with them. Voline later wrote: "Kronstadt was the first entirely
independent attempt of the people to free themselves of all control and
carry out the social revolution: this attempt was made directly, . . . by
the working masses themselves, without 'political shepherds,' without
'leaders,' or 'tutors.' Alexander Berkman added: "Kronstadt blew sky high
the myth of the proletarian State; it proved that the dictatorship of the
Communist Party and the Revolution were really incompatible."

ANARCHISM LIVING AND DEAD

Although the anarchists played no direct part in the Kronstadt rising, the
regime took advantage of crushing it to make an end of an ideology which
continued to frighten them. A few weeks earlier, on February 8, the aged
Kropotkin had died on Russian soil, and his remains had been given an
imposing funeral, which was followed by an immense convoy of about 100,000
people. Over the heads of the crowd, among the red flags, one could see the
black banners of the anarchist groups inscribed in letters of fire: "Where
there is authority there is no freedom." According to Kropotkin's
biographers, this was "the last great demonstration against Bolshevik
tyranny, and many took part more to demand freedom than to praise the great
anarchist."

Hundreds of anarchists were arrested after Kronstadt, and only a few months
later, the libertarian Fanny Baron and eight of her comrades were shot in
the cellars of the Cheka prison in Moscow. Militant anarchism had received
a fatal blow. But outside Russia, the anarchists who had lived through the
Russian Revolution undertook an enormous labor of criticism and doctrinal
revision which reinvigorated libertarian thought and made it more concrete.
As early as September 1920, the congress of the Confederation of Anarchist
Organizations of the Ukraine, Nabat, had categorically rejected the
expression "dictatorship of the proletariat," seeing that it led inevitably
to dictatorship over the masses by that fraction of the proletariat
entrenched in the Party, by officials, and a handful of leaders. Just
before he died Kropotkin had issued a "Message to the Workers of the West"
in which he sorrowfully denounced the rise of a "formidable bureaucracy":
"It seems to me that this attempt to build a communist republic on the
basis of a strongly centralized state, under the iron law of the
dictatorship of one party, has ended in a terrible fiasco. Russia teaches
us how not to impose communism."

A pathetic appeal from the Russian anarcho-syndicalists to the world
proletariat was published in the January 7-14, 1921, issue of the French
journal Le Libertaire: "Comrades, put an end to the domination of your
bourgeoisie just as we have done here. But do not repeat our errors; do not
let state communism establish itself in your countries!" In 1920 the German
anarchist, Rudolf Rocker, who later lived and died in the United States,
wrote Die Bankrotte des Russischen Stautskommunismus (The Bankruptcy of
State Communism), which appeared in 1921. This was the first analysis to be
made of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. In his view the famous
"dictatorship of the proletariat" was not the expression of the will of a
single class, but the dictatorship of a party pretending to speak in the
name of a class and kept in power by force of bayonets. "Under the
dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia a new class has developed, the
'commissarocracy,' which oppresses the broad masses just as much as the old
regime used to do." By systematically subordinating all the factors in
social life to an all-powerful government endowed with every prerogative,
"one could not fail to end up with the hierarchy of officials which proved
fatal to the development of the Russian Revolution." "Not only did the
Bolsheviks borrow the state apparatus from the previous society, but they
have given it an all-embracing power which no other government arrogates to
itself."

In June 1922 the group of Russian anarchists exiled in Germany published a
revealing little book under the names of A. Gorielik, A. Komoff, and
Voline: Repression de l'Anarchisme en Russie Sovietique(The Repression of
Anarchism in Soviet Russia). Voline made a French translation which
appeared at the beginning of 1923. It contained an alphabetical list of the
martyrs of Russian anarchism. In 1921-1922, Alexander Berkman, and in
1922-1923, Emma Goldman published a succession of pamphlets on the dramatic
events which they had witnessed in Russia.

In their turn, Peter Archinoff and Nestor Makhno himself, escaped
Makhnovites who had taken refuge in the West, published their evidence.

The two great libertarian classics on the Russian Revolution, The
Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia by G. P. Maximoff and
The Unknown Revolution by Voline, came much later, during the Second World
War, and were written with the maturity of thought made possible by the
passage of the years.

For Maximoff, whose account appeared in America, the lessons of the past
brought to him a sure expectation of a better future. The new ruling class
in the U.S.S.R. cannot and will not be permanent, and it will be succeeded
by libertarian socialism. Objective conditions are driving this development
forward: "Is it conceivable . . . that the workers might desire the return
of the capitalists to their enterprises? Never! for they are rebelling
specifically against exploitation by the State and its bureaucrats." What
the workers desire is to replace this authoritarian management of
production with their own factory councils, and to unite these councils
into one vast national federation. What they desire is workers'
self-management. In the same way, the peasants have understood that there
can be no question of returning to an individualist economy. Collective
agriculture is the only solution, together with the collaboration of the
rural collectives with the factory councils and trade unions: in short, the
further development of the program of the October Revolution in complete
freedom.

Voline strongly asserted that any experiment on the Russian model could
only lead to "state capitalism based on an odious exploitation of the
masses," the "worst form of capitalism and one which has absolutely nothing
to do with the progress of humanity toward a socialist society." It could
do nothing but promote "the dictatorship of a single party which leads
unavoidably to the repression of all freedom of speech, press,
organization, and action, even for revolutionary tendencies, with the sole
exception of the party in power," and to a "social inquisition" which
suffocates "the very breath of the Revolution." Voline went on to maintain
that Stalin "did not fall from the moon." Stalin and Stalinism are, in his
view, the logical consequence of the authoritarian system founded and
established between 1918 and 1921. "This is the lesson the world must learn
from the tremendous and decisive Bolshevik experiment: a lesson which gives
powerful support to the libertarian thesis and which events will soon make
clear to the understanding of all those who grieve, suffer, think, and
struggle."

(Source: Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, first published in French in
1965, the 1970 English translation is Guérin's best-known work,
describing the intellectual substance and actual practice of anarchism. The
English translation by Mary Klopper includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky,
who describes it as an attempt "to extract from the history of libertarian
thought a living, evolving tradition".)


* Chapter 3, Section C : Anarchism in the Italian Factory Councils


The Italian anarchists followed the example of events in Russia, and went
along with the partisans of soviet power in the period immediately after
the Great War. The Russian Revolution had been received with deep sympathy
by the Italian workers, especially by their vanguard, the metal workers of
the northern part of the country. On February 20, 1919, the Italian
Federation of Metal Workers (FIOM) won a contract providing for the
election of "internal commissions" in the factories. They subsequently
tried to transform these organs of workers' representation into factory
councils with a managerial function, by conducting a series of strikes and
occupations of the factories.

The last of these, at the end of August 1920, originated in a lockout by
employers. 1 ll~ metal workers as a whole decided to continue production on
their own. They tried persuasion and constraint alternately, but failed to
win the cooperation of the engineers and supervisory personnel. The
management of the factories had, therefore, to be 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 organized for
self-defense. Very close solidarity was established between the factories
under self-management. Ores and coal were put into a common pool, and
shared out equitably.

The reformist wing of the trade unions opted for compromise with the
employers. After a few weeks of managerial occupation, the workers had to
leave the factories in exchange for a promise to extend workers' control, a
promise which was not kept. The revolutionary left wing, composed of
anarchists and left socialists, cried treason, in vain.

This left wing had a theory, a spokesman, and a publication. The weekly
L'Ordine Nuovo (The New Order) first appeared in Turin on May 1, 1919. 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."

Ordine Nuovo tended to replace traditional trade unionism by the structure
of factory councils. It was not entirely hostile to trade unions, which it
regarded as the "strong backbone of the great proletarian body." However,
in the style of Malatesta in 1907, it was critical of the decadence of a
bureaucratic and reformist trade-union movement, which had become an
integral part of capitalist society; it denounced the inability of the
trade unions to act as instruments of the proletarian revolution.

On the other hand, Ordine Nuovo attributed every virtue to the factory
councils. It regarded them as the means of unifying the working class, the
only organ which could raise the workers above the special interests of the
different trades and link the "organized" with the "unorganized." It gave
the councils credit for generating a producers' psychology, preparing the
workers for self-management. Thanks to them the conquest of the factory
became a concrete prospect for the lowliest worker, within his reach. The
councils were regarded as a prefiguration of socialist society.

The Italian anarchists were of a more realistic and less verbose turn of
mind than Antonio Gramsci, and sometimes indulged in ironic comment on the
"thaumaturgical" excesses of the sermons in favor of factor': councils. Of
course they were aware of their merits, but stopped short of hyperbole.
Gramsci denounced the reformism of the trade unions, not without reason,
but the anarchosyndicalists pointed out that in a non-revolutionary period
the factory councils, too, could degenerate into organs of class
collaboration. Those most concerned with trade unionism also thought it
unjust that Ordine Nuovo indiscriminately condemned not only reformist
trade unionism but the revolutionary trade unionism of their center, the
Italian Syndicalist Union. [25]

Lastly, and most important, the anarchists were somewhat uneasy about the
ambiguous and contradictory interpretation which Ordine Nuovo put on the
prototype of the factory councils, the soviets. Certainly Gramsci often
used the term "libertarian" in his writings, and had crossed swords with
the inveterate authoritarian Angelo Tasca, who propounded an undemocratic
concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" which would reduce the
factory councils to mere instruments of the Communist Party, and who even
attacked Gramsci's thinking as "Proudhonian." Gramsci did not know enough
about events in Russia to distinguish between the free soviets of the early
months of the revolution and the tamed soviets of the Bolshevik State. This
led him to use ambiguous formulations. He saw the factory council as the
"model of the proletarian State," which he expected to be incorporated into
a world system: the Communist International. He thought he could reconcile
Bolshevism with the withering away of the State and a democratic
interpretation of the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

The Italian anarchists had begun by welcoming the Russian soviets with
uncritical enthusiasm. On June 1, 1919, Camillo Berneri, one of their
number, had published an article entitled "Auto-Democracy" hailing the
Bolshevik regime as "the most practical experiment in integral democracy on
the largest scale yet attempted," and "the antithesis of centralizing state
socialism."

However, a year later, at the congress of the Italian Anarchist Union,
Maurizio Garino was talking quite differently: the soviets which had been
set up in Russia by the Bolsheviks were materially different from workers'
self-management as conceived by the anarchists. They formed the "basis of a
new State, inevitably centralized and authoritarian."

The Italian anarchists and the friends of Gramsci were subsequently to
follow divergent paths. The latter at first maintained that the Socialist
Party, like the trade unions, was an organization integrated into the
bourgeois system and that it was, consequently, neither necessary nor
desirable to support it. They then made an "exception" for the communist
groups within the Socialist Party. After the split at Livorno on January
21, 1921, these groups formed the Italian Communist Party, affiliated with
the Communist International.

The Italian libertarians, for their part, had to abandon some of their
illusions and pay more attention to a prophetic letter written to them by
Malatesta as early as the summer of 1919. This warned them against "a new
government which has set itself up [in Russia] above the Revolution in
order to bridle it and subject it to the purposes of a particular party . .
. or rather the leaders of a party." The old revolutionary argued
prophetically that it was a dictatorship, with its decrees, its penal
sanctions, its executive agents, and, above all, its armed forces which
have served to defend the Revolution against its external enemies, but
tomorrow will serve to impose the will of the dictators on the workers, to
check the course of the Revolution, to consolidate newly established
interests, and to defend a newly privileged class against the masses.
Lenin, Trotsky, and their companions are certainly sincere revolutionaries,
but they are preparing the governmental cadres which will enable their
successors to profit by the Revolution and kill it. They will be the first
victims of their own methods.

Two years later, the Italian Anarchist Union met in congress at Ancona on
November 2-4, 1921, and refused to recognize the Russian government as a
representative of the Revolution, instead denouncing it as "the main enemy
of the Revolution," "the oppressor and exploiter of the proletariat in
whose name it pretends to exercise authority." And the libertarian writer
Luigi Fabbri in the same year concluded that "a critical study of the
Russian Revolution is of immense importance . . . because the Western
revolutionaries can direct their actions in such a way as to avoid the
errors which have been brought to light by the Russian experience."

(Source: Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, first published in French in
1965, the 1970 English translation is Guérin's best-known work,
describing the intellectual substance and actual practice of anarchism. The
English translation by Mary Klopper includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky,
who describes it as an attempt "to extract from the history of libertarian
thought a living, evolving tradition".)


* Chapter 3, Section D : Anarchism in the Spanish Revolution


THE SOVIET MIRAGE

The time lag between subjective awareness and objective reality is a
constant in history. The Russian anarchists and those who witnessed the
Russian drama drew a lesson as early as 1920 which only became known,
admitted, and shared years later. The first proletarian revolution in
triumph over a sixth of the globe had such prestige and glitter that the
working-class movement long remained hypnotized by so imposing an example.
"Councils" in the image of the Russian soviets sprang up all over the
place, not only in Italy, as we have seen, but in Germany, Austria, and
Hungary. In Germany the system of councils was the essential item in the
program of the Spartacus League of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

In 1919 the president of the Bavarian Republic, Kurt Eisner, was
assassinated in Munich. A Soviet Republic was then proclaimed under the
leadership of the libertarian writer Gustav Landauer, who was in turn
assassinated by the counter-revolution. His friend and companion in arms,
the anarchist poet Erich Muhsam, composed a "Rate-Marseillaise" (
Marseillaise of the Councils ), in which the workers were called to arms
not to form battalions but councils on the model of those of Russia and
Hungary, and thus to make an end of the centuries-old world of slavery.

However, in the spring of 1920 a German opposition group advocating
Rate-Kommunismus (Communism of the councils) left the Communist Party to
form a German Communist Workers Party (KAPD). [26] The idea of councils
inspired a similar group in Holland led by Hermann Gorter and Anton
Pannekoek. During a lively polemic with Lenin, the former was not afraid to
reply, in pure libertarian style, to the infallible leader of the Russian
Revolution: "We are still looking for real leaders who will not seek to
dominate the masses and will not betray them. As long as we do not have
them we want everything to be done from the bottom upward and by the
dictatorship of the masses over themselves. If I have a mountain guide and
he leads me over a precipice, I prefer to do without." Pannekoek proclaimed
that the councils were a form of self-government which would replace the
forms of government of the old world; just like Gramsci he could see no
difference between the latter and "Bolshevik dictatorship."

In many places, especially Bavaria, Germany, and Holland, the anarchists
played a positive part in the practical and theoretical development of the
system of councils.

Similarly, in Spain the anarcho-syndicalists were dazzled by the October
Revolution. The Madrid congress of the CNT [27] (December 10-20, 1919),
adopted a statement which stated that "the epic of the Russian people has
electrified the world proletariat." By acclamation, "without reticence, as
a beauty gives herself to the man she loves," the congress voted
provisionally to join the Communist International because of its
revolutionary character, expressing the hope, however, that a universal
workers' congress would be called to determine the basis upon which a true
workers' international could be built. A few timid voices of dissent were
heard, however: the Russian Revolution was a "political" revolution and did
not incorporate the libertarian ideal. The congress took no notice and
decided to send a delegation to the Second Congress of the Third
International which opened in Moscow on July 15, 1920.

By then, however, the love match was already on the way to breaking up. The
delegate representing Spanish anarcho-syndicalism was pressed to take part
in establishing an international revolutionary trade-union center, but he
jibed when presented with a text which referred to the "conquest of
political power," "the dictatorship of the proletariat," and proposed an
organic relation ship between the trade unions and the communist parties
which thinly disguised a relationship of subordination of the former to the
latter. In the forthcoming meetings of the Communist Inter national the
trade-union organizations of the different nations would be represented by
the delegates of the communist parties of their respective countries; and
the projected Red Trade-Union International would be openly controlled by
the Communist Inter national and its national sections. Angel Pestana, the
Spanish spokesman, set forth the libertarian conception of the social
revolution and exclaimed: "The revolution is not, and cannot be, the work
of a party. The most a party can do is to foment a coup d'etat. But a coup
d'etat is not a revolution." He concluded: "You tell us that the revolution
cannot take place without a communist party and that without the conquest
of political power emancipation is not possible, and that without
dictatorship one cannot destroy the bourgeoisie: all these assertions are
absolutely gratuitous."

In view of the doubts expressed by the CNT delegate, the communists made a
show of adjusting the resolution with regard to the "dictatorship of the
proletariat." The Russian trade-union leader Lozovsky nevertheless
ultimately published the text in its original form without the
modifications introduced by Pestana, but bearing his signature. From the
rostrum Trotsky had laid into the Spanish delegate for nearly an hour but
the president declared the debate closed when Pestana asked for time to
reply to these attacks.

Pestana spent several months in Moscow and left Russia on September 6,
1920, profoundly disillusioned by all that he had observed during that
time. In an account of a subsequent visit to Berlin, Rudolf Rocker
described Pestana as being like a man "saved from a shipwreck." He had not
the heart to tell his Spanish comrades the truth. It seemed to him like
"murder" to destroy the immense hope which the Russian Revolution had
raised in them. As soon as he crossed the Spanish border he was thrown into
prison and was thus spared the painful duty of being the first to speak.

During the summer of 1921 a different delegation from the CNT took part in
the founding congress of the Red Trade-Union InternationaL Among the CNT
delegates there were young disciples of Russian Bolshevism, such as Joaquin
Maurin and Andres Nin, but there was also a French anarchist, Gaston Leval,
who had a coo] head. He took the risk of being accused of "playing the game
of the bourgeoisie" and "helping the counter-revolution" rather than keep
silent Not to tell the masses that what had failed in Russia was not the
Revolution, but the State, and not "to show them behind the living
Revolution, the State which was paralyzing and killing it," would have been
worse than silence. He used these terms, in Le Libertaire in November 1921.
He thought that "any honest and loyal collaboration" with the Bolsheviks
had become impossible and, on his return to Spain, recommended to the CNT
that it withdraw from the Third International and its bogus trade union
affiliate.

Having been given this lead, Pestana decided to publish his first report
and, subsequently, extend it by a second in which he would reveal the
entire truth about Bolshevism:

The principles of the Communist Party are exactly the opposite of those
which it was affirming and proclaiming during the first hours of the
Revolution. The principles, methods, and final objectives of the Communist
Party are diametrically opposed to those of the Russian Revolution .... As
soon as the Communist Party had obtained absolute power, it decreed that
anyone who did not think as a communist (that is, according to its own
definition) had no right to think at all .... The Communist Party has
denied to the Russian proletariat all the sacred rights which the
Revolution had conferred upon it.

Pestana, further, cast doubt on the validity of the Communist
International: a simple extension of the Russian Communist Party, it could
not represent the Revolution in the eyes of the world proletariat.

The national congress of the CNT held at Saragossa in June 1922 received
this report and decided to withdraw from the trade union front, the Red
Trade-Union International. It was also decided to send delegates to an
international anarcho-syndicalist conference held in Berlin in December,
from which resulted a "Workers' International Association." This was not a
real international, since aside from the important Spanish group, it had
the support of very small numbers in other countries. [28]

From the time of this breach Moscow bore an inveterate hatred for Spanish
anarchism. Joaquin Maurin and Andres Nin were disowned by the CNT and left
it to found the Spanish Communist Party. In May 1924 Maurin published a
pamphlet declaring war to the death on his former comrades: "The complete
elimination of anarchism is a difficult task in a country in which the
workers' movement bears the mark of fifty years of anarchist propaganda.
But we shall get them." A threat which was later carried out.

THE ANARCHIST TRADITION IN SPAIN

The Spanish anarchists had thus reamed the lesson of the Russian Revolution
very early, and this played a part in inspiring them to prepare an
antinomian revolution. The degeneration of authoritarian communism
increased their determination to bring about the victory of a libertarian
form of communism. They had been cruelly disappointed in the Soviet mirage
and, in the words of Diego Abad de Santillan, saw in anarchism "the last
hope of renewal during this somber period."

The basis for a libertarian revolution was pretty well laid in the
consciousness of the popular masses and in the thinking of libertarian
theoreticians. According to Jose Peirats, anarcho-syndicalism was, "because
of its psychology, its temperament, and its reactions, the most Spanish
thing in all Spain." It was the double product of a compound development.
It suited both the backward state of a poorly developed country, in which
rural living conditions remained archaic, and also the growth of a modem
proletariat born of industrialization in certain areas. The unique feature
of Spanish anarchism was a strange mixture of past and future. The
symbiosis between these two tendencies was far from perfect.

In 1918, the CNT had more than a million trade-union members. In the
industrial field it was strong in Catalonia, and rather less so in Madrid
and Valencia; [29] but it also had deep roots in the countryside, among the
poor peasants who preserved a tradition of village communalism, tinged with
local patriotism and a cooperative spirit. In 1898 the author Joaquin Costa
had described the survivals of this agrarian collectivism. Many villages
still had common property from which they allocated plots to the landless,
or which they used together with other villages for pasturage or other
communal purposes. In the region of large-scale landownership, in the
south, the agricultural day laborers preferred socialization to the
division of the land.

Moreover, many decades of anarchist propaganda in the countryside, in the
form of small popular pamphlets, had prepared the basis for agrarian
collectivism. The CNT was especially powerful among the peasants of the
south (Andalusia), of the east (area of the Levant around Valencia), and of
the northeast (Aragon, around Saragossa).

This double base, both industrial and rural, had turned the libertarian
communism of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism in somewhat divergent directions,
the one communalist, the other syndicalist. The communalism was expressed
in a more local, more rural spirit, one might almost say: more southern,
for one of its principal bastions was in Andalusia. Syndicalism, on the
other hand, was more urban and unitarian in spirit - more northerly, too,
since its main center was Catalonia. Libertarian theoreticians were
somewhat torn and divided on this subject.

Some had given their hearts to Kropotkin and his erudite but simplistic
idealization of the communes of the Middle Ages which they identified with
the Spanish tradition of the primitive peasant community. Their favorite
slogan was the "free commune." Various practical experiments in libertarian
communism took place during the peasant insurrections which followed the
foundation of the Republic in 1931. By free mutual agreement some groups of
small-peasant proprietors decided to work together, to divide the profits
into equal parts, and to provide for their own consumption by "drawing from
the common pool." They dismissed the municipal administrations and replaced
them by elected committees, naively believing that they could free
themselves from the surrounding society, taxation, and military service.

Bakunin was the founder of the Spanish collectivist, syndicalist, and
internationalist workers' movement. Those anarchists who were more
realistic, more concerned with the present than the golden age, tended to
follow him and his disciple Ricardo Mella. They were concerned with
economic unification and believed that a long transitional period would be
necessary during which it would be wiser to reward labor according to the
hours worked and not according to need. They envisaged the economic
structure of the future as a combination of local trade-union groupings and
federations of branches of industry.

For a long time the syndicatos unicos (local unions) predominated within
the CNT. These groups, close to the workers, free from all corporate
egoism, served as a physical and spiritual home for the proletariat. [30]
Training in these local unions had fuzed the ideas of the trade union and
the commune in the minds of rank-and-file militants.

The theoretical debate in which the syndicalists opposed the anarchists at
the International Anarchist Congress of 1907 [31] was revived in practice
to divide the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists. The struggle for day-to-day
demands within the CNT had created a reformist tendency in the face of
which the FAI (Federacion Anarquista Iberica), founded in 1927, undertook
the defense of the integrity of anarchist doctrines. In 1931 a "Manifesto
of the Thirty" was put out by the syndicalist tendency condemning the
"dictatorship" of minorities within the trade-union movement, and declaring
the independence of trade unionism and its claim to be sufficient unto
itself. Some trade unions left the CNT and a reformist element persisted
within that trade-union center even after the breach had been healed on the
eve of the July 1936 Revolution.

THEORY

The Spanish anarchists continuously published the major and even minor
works of international anarchism in the Spanish language. They thus
preserved from neglect, and even perhaps absolute destruction, the
traditions of a socialism both revolutionary and free. Augustin Souchy was
a German anarcho-syndicalist writer who put himself at the service of
Spanish anarchism. According to him, "the problem of the social revolution
was continuously and systematically discussed in their trade-union and
group meetings, in their papers, their pamphlets, and their books."

The proclamation of the Spanish Republic, in 1931, led to an outburst of
"anticipatory" writings: Peirats lists about fifty titles, stressing that
there were many more, and emphasizes that this "obsession with
revolutionary construction" led to a proliferation of writings which
contributed greatly to preparing the people for a revolutionary road. James
Guillaume's pamphlet of 1876, Ide'es sur L'Organization Sociale, was known
to the Spanish anarchists because it had been largely quoted in Pierre
Besnard's book, Les Syndicats Ouvriers et la Revolution Sociale, which
appeared in Paris in 1930. Gaston Leval had emigrated to the Argentine and
in 1931 published Social Reconstruction in Spain, which gave direct
inspiration to the important work of Diego Abad de Santillan, to be
discussed below.

In 1932, the country doctor Isaac Puente published a rather naive and
idealistic outline of libertarian communism; its ideas were taken up by the
Saragossa congress of the CNT in May 1936. Puente himself had become the
moving spirit of an insurrectionary committee in Aragon in 1933.

The Saragossa program of 1936 defined the operation of a direct village
democracy with some precision. A communal council was to be elected by a
general assembly of the inhabitants and formed of representatives of
various technical committees. The general assembly was to meet whenever the
interests of the commune required it, on the request of members of the
communal council or on the direct demand of the inhabitants. The various
responsible positions would have no executive or bureaucratic character.
The incumbents (with the exception of a few technicians and statisticians)
would carry out their duties as producers, like everybody else, meeting at
the end of the day's work to discuss matters of detail which did not
require decisions by the general assembly.

Active workers were to receive a producer's card on which would be recorded
the amount of labor performed, evaluated in daily units, which could be
exchanged for goods. The inactive members of the population would receive
simply a consumer's card. There was to be no general norm: the autonomy of
the communes was to be respected. If they thought fit, they could establish
a different system of internal exchange, on the sole condition that it did
not injure the interests of the other communes. The right to communal
autonomy would, however, not obviate the duty of collective solidarity
within the provincial and regional federations of communes.

One of the major concerns of the members of the Saragossa congress was the
cultivation of the mind. Throughout their lives all men were to be assured
of access to science, art, and research of all kinds, provided only that
these activities remained compatible with production of material resources.
Society was no longer to be divided into manual workers and intellectuals:
all were to be, simultaneously, both one and the other. The practice of
such parallel activities would insure a healthy balance in human nature.
Once his day's work as a producer was finished the individual was to be the
absolute master of his own time. The CNT foresaw that spiritual needs would
begin to be expressed in a far more pressing way as soon as the emancipated
society had satisfied material needs.

Spanish anarcho-syndicalism had long been concerned to safeguard the
autonomy of what it called "affinity groups." There were many adepts of
naturism and vegetarianism among its members, especially among the poor
peasants of the south. Both these ways of living were considered suitable
for the transformation of the human being in preparation for a libertarian
society. At the Saragossa congress the members did not forget to consider
the fate of groups of naturists and nudists, "unsuited to
industrialization." As these groups would be unable to supply all their own
needs, the congress anticipated that their delegates to the meetings of the
confederation of communes would be able to negotiate special economic
agreements with the other agricultural and industrial communes. Does this
make us smile? On the eve of a vast, bloody, social transformation, the CNT
did not think it foolish to try to meet the infinitely varied aspirations
of individual human beings.

With regard to crime and punishment the Saragossa congress followed the
teachings of Bakunin, stating that social injustice is the main cause of
crime and, consequently, once this has been removed offenses will rarely be
committed. The congress affirmed that man is not naturally evil. The
shortcomings of the individual, in the moral field as well as in his role
as producer, were to be investigated by popular assemblies which would make
every effort to find a just solution in each separate case.

Libertarian communism was unwilling to recognize the need for any penal
methods other than medical treatment and reeducation. If, as the result of
some pathological condition, an individual were to damage the harmony which
should reign among his equals he would be treated for his unbalanced
condition, at the same time that his ethical and social sense would be
stimulated. If erotic passions were to go beyond the bounds imposed by
respect for the freedom of others, the Saragossa congress recommended a
"change of air," believing it to be as good for physical illness as for
lovesickness. The trade-union federation really doubted that such extreme
behavior would still occur in surroundings of sexual freedom.

When the CNT congress adopted the Saragossa program in May 1936, no one
really expected that the time to apply it would come only two months later.
In practice the socialization of the land and of industry which was to
follow the revolutionary victory of July 19 differed considerably from this
idyllic program. While the word "commune" occurred in every line, the term
actually used for socialist production units was to be collectividades.
This was not simply a change of terminology: the creators of Spanish
self-management looked to other sources for their inspiration.

Two months before the Saragossa congress Diego Abad de Santillan had
published a book, El Organismo Economico de la Revolucion (The Economic
Organization of the Revolution). This outline of an economic structure drew
a somewhat different inspiration from the Saragossa program.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Santillan was not a rigid and sterile
disciple of the great anarchists of the nineteenth century. He regretted
that anarchist literature of the previous twenty-five or thirty years
should have paid so little attention to the concrete problems of a new
economy, and that it had not opened up original perspectives on the future.
On the other hand, anarchism had produced a superabundance of works, in
every language, going over and over an entirely abstract conception of
liberty. Santillan compared this indigestible body of work with the reports
presented to the national and international congresses of the First
International, and the latter seemed to him the more brilliant for the
comparison. He thought they had shown a very much better understanding of
economic problems than had appeared in subsequent periods.

Santillan was not backward, but a true man of his times. He was aware that
"the tremendous development of modern industry has created a whole series
of new problems, which it was impossible to foresee at an earlier time."
There is no question of going back to the Roman chariot or to primitive
forms of artisan production. Economic insularity, a parochial way of
thinking, the patria chica (little fatherland) dear to the hearts of rural
Spaniards nostalgic for a golden age, the small-scale and medieval "free
commune" of Kropotkin - all these must be relegated to a museum of
antiquities. They are the vestiges of out-of-date communalist conceptions.
No "free communes" can exist from the economic point of view: "Our ideal is
the commune which is associated, federated, integrated into the total
economy of the country, and of other countries in a state of revolution."
To replace the single owner by a hydra-headed owner is not collectivism, is
not self-management. The land, the factories, the mines, the means of
transport are the product of the work of all and must be at the service of
all. Nowadays the economy is neither local, nor even national, but
world-wide. The characteristic feature of modern life is the cohesion of
all the productive and distributive forces. "A socialized economy, directed
and planned, is an imperative necessity and corresponds to the trend of
development of the modern economic world."

Santillan foresaw the function of coordinating and planning as being
carried out by a federal economic council, which would not be a political
authority, but simply an organ of coordination, an economic and
administrative regulator. Its directives would come from below, from the
factory councils federated into trade union councils for different branches
of industry, and into local economic councils. The federal council is thus
at the receiving end of two chains of authority, one based on locality and
the other on occupation. The organizations at the base provide it with
statistics so that it will be aware of the real economic situation at any
given moment. In this way it can spot major deficiencies, and determine the
sectors in which new industries or crops are most urgently required. "The
policemen will no longer be necessary when the supreme authority lies in
figures and statistics." In such a system state coercion has no utility, is
sterile, even impossible. The federal council sees to the propagation of
new norms, the growth of interdependence between the regions and the
formation of national solidarity. It stimulates research into new methods
of work, new manufacturing processes, new agricultural techniques. It
distributes labor from one region to another, from one branch of the
economy to another.

There is no doubt that Santillan learned a great deal from the Russian
Revolution. On the one hand, it taught him to beware of the danger of a
resurgence of the state and bureaucratic apparatus; but, on the other, it
taught him that a victorious revolution can not avoid passing through
intermediate economic forms, [32] in which there survives for a time what
Marx and Lenin call "bourgeois law." For instance, there could be no
question of abolishing the banking and monetary system at one fell swoop.
These institutions must be transformed and used as a temporary means of
exchange to keep social life moving and prepare the way to new economic
forms.

Santillan was to play an important part in the Spanish Revolution: he
became, in turn, a member of the central committee of the anti-fascist
militia (end of July 1936), a member of the Catalonian Economic Council
(August 11), and Economics Minister of the Catalonian government
(mid-December).

AN "APOLITICAL" REVOLUTION

The Spanish Revolution was, thus, relatively well prepared, both in the
minds of libertarian thinkers and in the consciousness of the people. It is
therefore not surprising that the Spanish Right regarded the electoral
victory of the Popular Front in February 1936 as the beginning of a
revolution.

In fact, the masses soon broke out of the narrow framework of their success
at the ballot box. They ignored the rules of the parliamentary game and did
not even wait for a government to be formed to set the prisoners free. The
farmers ceased to pay rent to the landlords, the agricultural day laborers
occupied land and began to cultivate it, the villagers got rid of their
municipal councils and hastened to administer themselves, the railwaymen
went on strike to enforce a demand for the nationalization of the railways.
The building workers of Madrid called for workers' control, the first step
toward socialization.

The military chiefs, under the leadership of Colonel Franco, responded to
the symptoms of revolution by a putsch. But they only succeeded in
accelerating the progress of a revolution which had, in fact, already
begun. In Madrid, in Barcelona, in Valencia particularly, in almost every
big city but Seville, the people took the offensive, besieged barracks, set
up barricades in the streets and occupied strategic positions. The workers
rushed from all sides to answer the call of their trade unions. They
assaulted the strongholds of the Franco forces, with no concern for their
own lives, with naked hands and uncovered breasts. They succeeded in taking
guns from the enemy and persuading soldiers to join their ranks.

Thanks to this popular fury the military putsch was checked within the
first twenty-four hours; and then the social revolution began quite
spontaneously. It went forward unevenly, of course, in different regions
and cities, but with the greatest impetuosity in Catalonia and, especially,
Barcelona. When the established authorities recovered from their
astonishment, they found that they simply no longer existed. The State, the
police, the army, the administration, all seemed to have lost their raison
d'etre. The Civil Guard had been driven off or liquidated and the
victorious workers were maintaining order. The most urgent task was to
organize food supplies: committees distributed foodstuffs from barricades
transformed into canteens, and then opened communal restaurants. Local
administration was organized by neighborhood committees, and war committees
saw to the departure of the workers' militia to the front. The trade-union
center had become the real town hall. This was no longer the "defense of
the republic" against fascism, it was the Revolution - a Revolution which,
unlike the Russian one, did not have to create all its organs of authority
from scratch: the election of soviets was made unnecessary by the
omnipresent anarcho-syndicalist organization with its various committees at
the base. In Catalonia the CNT and its conscious minority, the FAI, were
more powerful than the authorities, which had become mere phantoms.

In Barcelona especially, there was nothing to prevent the workers'
committees from seizing de jure the power which they were already
exercising de facto. But they did not do so. For decades, Spanish anarchism
had been warning the people against the deceptions of "politics" and
emphasizing the primacy of the "economic." It had constantly sought to
divert the people from a bourgeois democratic revolution in order to lead
them to the social revolution through direct action. On the brink of the
Revolution, the anarchists argued something like this: let the politicians
do what they will; we, the "apolitical," will lay hands on the economy. On
September 3, 1936, the CNT-FAI Information Bulletin published an article
entitled "The Futility of Government," suggesting that the economic
expropriation which was taking place would lead ipso facto to the
"liquidation of the bourgeois State, which would die of asphyxiation."

ANARCHISTS IN GOVERNMENT

This underestimation of government, however, was very rapidly reversed and
the Spanish anarchists suddenly became governmentalists. Soon after the
Revolution of July 19 in Barcelona, an interview took place between the
anarchist activist Garcia Oliver and the president of the Catalonian
government, the bourgeois liberal Companys. He was ready to resign but was
kept in office. The CNT and the FAI refused to exercise an anarchist
"dictatorship," and declared their willingness to collaborate with other
left groupings. By mid-September, the CNT was calling on the prime minister
of the central government, Largo Caballero, to set up a fifteen-member
"Defense Council" in which they would be satisfied with five places. This
was as good as accepting the idea of participating in a cabinet under
another name.

The anarchists ended up by accepting portfolios in two governments: first
in Catalonia and subsequently in Madrid. The Italian anarchist, Camillo
Berneri, was in Barcelona and, on April 14, 1937, wrote an open letter to
his comrade, minister Federica Montseny, reproaching the anarchists with
being in the government only as hostages and fronts "for politicians who
flirt with the [class] enemy." [33] It is true that the State with which
the Spanish anarchists had agreed to become integrated remained a bourgeois
State whose officials and political personnel often had but little loyalty
to the republic. What was the reason for this change of heart?

The Spanish Revolution had taken place as the consequence of a proletarian
counterattack against a counter-revolutionary coup d'etat. From the
beginning the Revolution took on the character of self-defense, a military
character, because of the necessity to oppose the cohorts of Colonel Franco
with anti-fascist militia. Faced by a common danger, the anarchists thought
that they had no choice but to join with all the other trade-union forces,
and even political parties, which were ready to stand against the Franco
rebellion. As the fascist powers increased their support for Franco, the
anti-fascist struggle degenerated into a real war, a total war of the
classical type. The libertarians could only take part in it by abandoning
more and more of their principles, both political and military. They
reasoned, falsely, that the victory of the Revolution could only be assured
by first winning the war and, as Santillan was to admit, they "sacrificed
everything" to the war. Berneri argued in vain against the priority of the
war as such, and maintained that the defeat of Franco could only be insured
by a revolutionary war. To put a brake on the Revolution was, in fact, to
weaken the strongest arm of the Republic: the active participation of the
masses. An even more serious aspect of the matter was that Republican
Spain, blockaded by the Western democracies and in grave danger from the
advancing fascist troupe, needed Russian military aid in order to survive.
This aid was given on a two-fold condition: 1 ) the Communist Party must
profit from it as much as possible, and the anarchists as little as
possible; 2) Stalin wanted at any price to prevent the victory of a social
revolution in Spain, not only because it would have been libertarian, but
because it would have expropriated capital investments belonging to Britain
which was presumed to be an ally of the U.S.S.R. in the "democratic
alliance" against Hitler. The Spanish Communists went so far as to deny
that a revolution had taken place: a legal government was simply trying to
overcome a military mutiny. In May 1937, there was a bloody struggle in
Barcelona and the workers were disarmed by the forces of order under
Stalinist command. In the name of united action against the fascists the
anarchists forbade the workers to retaliate. The sad persistence with which
they threw themselves into the error of the Popular Front, until the final
defeat of the Republic, cannot be dealt with in this short book.

SELF-MANAGEMENT IN AGRICULTURE

Nevertheless, in the field to which they attached the greatest importance,
the economic field, the Spanish anarchists showed themselves much more
intransigent and compromised to a much lesser degree. Agricultural and
industrial self-management was very largely self-propelled. But as the
State grew stronger and the war more and more totalitarian, an increasingly
sharp contradiction developed between a bourgeois republic at war and an
experiment in communism or rather in libertarian collectivism. In the end,
it was self-management which had to retreat, sacrificed on the altar of
"antifascism." According to Peirats, a methodical study of this experiment
in self-management has yet to be made; it will be a difficult task, since
self-management presented so many variants in different places and at
different times. This matter deserves all the more attention, because
relatively little is known about it. Even within the Republican ranks it
was either passed over or under-rated. The civil war submerged it and even
today overshadows it in human memory. For example, there is no reference to
it in the film To Die in Madrid, and yet it is probably the most creative
legacy of Spanish anarchism.

The Revolution of July 19, 1936, was a lightning defensive action by the
people to counter the pronunciamento of Franco. The industrialists and
large landowners immediately abandoned their property and took refuge
abroad. The workers and peasants took over this abandoned property, the
agricultural day laborers decided to continue cultivating the soil on their
own. They associated together in "collectives" quite spontaneously. In
Catalonia a regional congress of peasants was called together by the CNT on
September 5 and agreed to the collectivization of land under trade union
management and control. Large estates and the property of fascists were to
be socialized, while small landowners would have free choice between
individual property and collective property. Legal sanction came later: on
October 7, 1936, the Republican central government confiscated without
indemnity the property of "persons compromised in the fascist rebellion."
This measure was incomplete from a legal point of view, since it only
sanctioned a very small part of the take-overs already carried out
spontaneously by the people; the peasants had carried out expropriation
without distinguishing between those who had taken part in the military
putsch and those who had not.

In underdeveloped countries where the technical resources necessary for
large-scale agriculture are absent, the poor peasant is more attracted by
private property, which he has not yet enjoyed, than by socialized
agriculture. In Spain, however, libertarian education and a collectivist
tradition compensated for technical underdevelopment, countered the
individualistic tendencies of the peasants, and turned them directly toward
socialism. The latter was the choice of the poorer peasants, while those
who were slightly better off, as in Catalonia, clung to individualism. A
great majority (90 percent) of land workers chose to join collectives from
the very beginning. This decision created a close alliance between the
peasants and the city workers, the latter being supporters of the
socialization of the means of production by the very nature of their
function. It seems that social consciousness was even higher in the country
than in the cities.

The agricultural collectives set themselves up with a twofold management,
economic and geographical. The two functions were distinct, but in most
cases it was the trade unions which assumed them or controlled them. A
general assembly of working peasants in each village elected a management
committee which was to be responsible for economic administration. Apart
from the secretary, all the members continued their manual labor. Work was
obligatory for all healthy men between eighteen and sixty. The peasants
were divided into groups of ten or more, each led by a delegate, and each
being allocated an area to cultivate, or an operation to perform,
appropriate to the age of its members and the nature of the work concerned.
The management committee received the delegates from the groups every
evening. With regard to local administration, the commune frequently called
the inhabitants together in general assembly to receive reports of
activities undertaken. Everything was put into the common pool with the
exception of clothing, furniture, personal savings, small domestic animals,
garden plots, and poultry kept for family use. Artisans, hairdressers,
shoemakers, etc., were grouped in collectives; the sheep belonging to the
community were divided into flocks of several hundreds, put in the charge
of shepherds, and methodically distributed in the mountain pastures.

With regard to the distribution of products, various systems were tried
out, some based on collectivism and others on more or less total communism,
and still others resulting from a combination of the two. Most commonly,
payment was based on family needs. Each head of a family received a daily
wage of specially marked pesetas which could only be exchanged for consumer
goods in the communal shops, which were often set up in the church or its
buildings. Any balance not consumed was placed in a peseta credit account
for the benefit of the individual. It was possible to draw a limited amount
of pocket money from this balance. Rent, electricity, medical care,
pharmaceuticals, old-age assistance, etc., were all free. Education was
also free and often given in schools set up in former convents; it was
compulsory for all children under fourteen, who were forbidden to perform
manual labor.

Membership in the collective continued to be voluntary, as was required by
the basic concern of the anarchist for freedom. No pressure was brought to
bear on the small farmers. Choosing to remain outside the community, they
could not expect to receive its services and benefits since they claimed to
be sufficient unto themselves. However, they could opt to participate as
they wished in communal work and they could bring their produce to the
communal shops. They were admitted to general assemblies and the enjoyment
of some collective benefits. They were forbidden only to take over more
land than they could cultivate, and subject to only one restriction: that
their presence or their property should not disturb the socialist order. In
some places socialized areas were reconstituted into larger units by
voluntary exchange of plots with individual peasants. In most villages
individualists, whether peasants or traders, decreased in number as time
went on. They felt isolated and preferred to join the collectives.

It appears that the units which applied the collectivist principle of day
wages were more solid than the comparatively few which tried to establish
complete communism too quickly, taking no account of the egoism still
deeply rooted in human nature, especially among the women. In some villages
where currency had been suppressed and the population helped itself from
the common pool, producing and consuming within the narrow limits of the
collectives, the disadvantages of this paralyzing self-sufficiency made
themselves felt, and individualism soon returned to the fore, causing the
breakup of the community by the withdrawal of many former small farmers who
had joined but did not have a really communist way of thinking.

The communes were united into cantonal federations, above which were
regional federations. In theory all the lands belonging to a cantonal
federation were treated as a single unit without intermediate boundaries.
[34] Solidarity between villages was pushed to the limit, and equalization
funds made it possible to give assistance to the poorest collectives.
Tools, raw materials, and surplus labor were all made available to
communities in need.

The extent of rural socialization was different in different provinces. As
already said, Catalonia was an area of small- and medium sized farms, and
the peasantry had a strong individualistic tradition, so that here there
were no more than a few pilot collectives. In Aragon, on the other hand,
more than three-quarters of the land was socialized. The creative
initiative of the agricultural workers in this region had been stimulated
by a libertarian militia unit, the Durruti Column, passing through on its
way to the northern front to fight the Franco troops, and by the subsequent
establishment of a revolutionary authority created at the base, which was
unique of its kind in Republican Spain. About 450 collectives were set up,
with some half a million members. In the Levant region (five provinces,
capital Valencia), the richest in Spain, some 900 collectives were
established, covering 43 percent of the geographical area, 50 percent of
citrus production, and 70 percent of the citrus trade. In Castile, about
300 collectives were created, with around 100,000 members. Socialization
also made headway in Estremadura and part of Andalusia, while a few early
attempts were quickly repressed in the Asturias.

It should be remembered that grass-roots socialism was not the work of the
anarcho-syndicalists alone, as many people have supposed. According to
Gaston Leval, the supporters of self-management were often "libertarians
without knowing it." In Estremadura and Andalusia, the social-democratic,
Catholic, and in the Asturias even communist, peasants took the initiative
in collectivization. However, in the southern areas not controlled by the
anarchists, where municipalities took over large estates in an
authoritarian manner, the day laborers unfortunately did not feel this to
be a revolutionary transformation: their wages and conditions were not
changed; there was no self-management.

Agricultural self-management was an indisputable success except where it
was sabotaged by its opponents or interrupted by the war. It was not
difficult to beat the record of large-scale private ownership, for it had
been deplorable. Some 10,000 feudal landowners had been in possession of
half the territory of the Spanish Peninsula. It had suited them to let a
large part of their land lie fallow rather than to permit the development
of a stratum of independent farmers, or to give their day laborers decent
wages; to do either of these would have undermined their medieval feudal
authority. Thus their existence had retarded the full development of the
natural wealth of the Spanish land.

After the Revolution the land was brought together into rational units,
cultivated on a large scale and according to the general plan and
directives of agronomists. The studies of agricultural technicians brought
about yields 30 to 50 percent higher than before. The cultivated areas
increased, human, animal, and mechanical energy was used in a more rational
way, and working methods perfected. Crops were diversified, irrigation
extended, reforestation initiated, and tree nurseries started. Piggeries
were constructed, rural technical schools built, and demonstration farms
set up, selective cattle breeding was developed, and auxiliary agricultural
industries put into operation. Socialized agriculture showed itself
superior on the one hand to large-scale absentee ownership, which left part
of the land fallow; and on the other to small farms cultivated by primitive
techniques, with poor seed and no fertilizers.

A first attempt at agricultural planning was made, based on production and
consumption statistics produced by the collectives, brought together by the
respective cantonal committees and then by the regional committee which
controlled the quantity and quality of production within its area. Trade
outside the region was handled by a regional committee which collected the
goods to be sold and in exchange for them bought the goods required by the
region as a whole. Rural anarcho-syndicalism showed its organizational
ability and capacity for coordination to best advantage in the Levant. The
export of citrus required methodical modern commercial techniques; they
were brilliantly put into play, in spite of a few lively disputes with rich
producers.

Cultural development went hand in hand with material prosperity: a campaign
was undertaken to bring literacy to adults; regional federations set up a
program of lectures, films, and theatrical performances in all the
villages. These successes were due not only to the strength of the
trade-union organization but, to a considerable degree, also to the
intelligence and initiative of the people. Although the majority of them
were illiterate, the peasants showed a degree of socialist consciousness,
practical good sense, and spirit of solidarity and sacrifice which drew the
admiration of foreign observers. Fenner Brockway, then of the British
Independent Labor Party, now Lord Brockway, visited the collective of
Segorbe and reported: "The spirit of the peasants' their enthusiasm, and
the way they contribute to the common effort and the pride which they take
in it, are all admirable."

SELF-MANAGEMENT IN INDUSTRY

Self-management was also tried out in industry, especially in Catalonia,
the most industrialized area in Spain. Workers whose employers had fled
spontaneously undertook to keep the factories going. For more than four
months, the factories of Barcelona, over which waved the red and black flag
of the CNT, were managed by revolutionary workers' committees without help
or interference from the State, sometimes even without experienced
managerial help. The proletariat had one piece of good fortune in being
aided by technicians. In Russia in 1917-1918, and in Italy in 1920, during
those brief experiments in the occupation of the factories, the engineers
had refused to help the new experiment of socialization; in Spain many of
them collaborated closely with the workers from the very beginning.

A trade-union conference representing 600,000 workers was held in Barcelona
in October 1936, with the object of developing the socialization of
industry. The initiative of the workers was institutionalized by a decree
of the Catalan government dated October 24, 1936. This ratified the fait
accompli, but introduced an element of government control alongside
self-management. Two sectors were created, one socialist, the other
private. All factories with more than a hundred workers were to be
socialized (and those with between fifty and a hundred could be, on the
request of three-quarters of the workers), as were those whose proprietors
either had been declared "subversive" by a people's court or had stopped
production, and those whose importance justified taking them out of the
private sector. (In fact many enterprises were socialized because they were
heavily in debt.)

A factory under self-management was directed by a managerial committee of
five to fifteen members representing the various trades and services. They
were nominated by the workers in general assembly and served for two years,
half being changed each year. The committee appointed a manager to whom it
delegated all or part of its own powers. In very large factories the
selection of a manager required the approval of the supervisory
organization. Moreover, a government controller was appointed to each
management committee. In effect it was not complete self-management but a
sort of joint management in very close liaison with the Catalonian
government.

The management committee could be recalled, either by the general meeting
of the workers or by the general council of the particular branch of the
industry (composed of four representatives of management committees, eight
of the trade unions, and four technicians appointed by the supervisory
organization). This general council planned the work and determined the
division of the profits, and its decisions were mandatory. In those
enterprises which remained in private hands an elected workers' committee
was to control the production process and conditions of work "in close
collaboration with the employer." The wage system was maintained intact in
the socialized factories. Each worker continued to be paid a fixed wage.
Profits were not divided on the factory level and wages rose very little
after socialization, in fact even less than in the sector which remained
private.

The decree of October 24, 1936, was a compromise between aspirations to
self-management and the tendency to tutelage by the leftist government, as
well as a compromise between capitalism and socialism. It was drafted by a
libertarian minister, and ratified by the CNT, because anarchist leaders
were in the government. How could they object to the intervention of
government in self-management when they themselves had their hands on the
levers of power? Once the wolf is allowed into the sheepfold he always ends
up by acting as its master.

In spite of the considerable powers which had been given to the general
councils of branches of industry, it appeared in practice that workers'
self-management tended to produce a sort of parochial egoism, a species of
"bourgeois cooperativism," as Peirats called it, each production unit
concerning itself only with its own interests. There were rich collectives
and poor collectives. Some could pay relatively high wages while others
could not even manage to maintain the wage level which had prevailed before
the Revolution. Some had plenty of raw materials, others were very short,
etc. This imbalance was fairly soon remedied by the creation of a central
equalization fund, which made it possible to distribute resources fairly.
In December 1936, a trade-union assembly was held in Valencia, where it was
decided to coordinate the various sectors of production into a general
organic plan, which would make it possible to avoid harmful competition and
the dissipation of effort.

At this point the trade unions undertook the systematic reorganization of
whole trades, closing down hundreds of small enterprises and concentrating
production in those that had the bat equipment. For instance: in Catalonia
foundries were reduced from over 70 to 24, tanneries from 71 to 40, glass
works from about 100 to about 30. However, industrial centralization under
trade-union control could not be developed as rapidly and completely as the
anarcho-syndicalist planners would have wished. Why was this? Because the
Stalinists and reformists opposed the appropriation of the property of the
middle class and showed scrupulous respect for the private sector.

In the other industrial centers of Republican Spain the Catalonian
socialization decree was not in force and collectivizations were not so
frequent as in Catalonia; however, private enterprises were often endowed
with workers' control committees, as was the case in the Asturias.

Industrial self-management was, on the whole, as successful as agricultural
self-management had been. Observers at first hand were full of praise,
especially with regard to the excellent working of urban public services
under self-management. Some factories, if not all, were managed in a
remarkable fashion. Socialized industry made a major contribution to the
war against fascism. The few arms factories built in Spain before 1936 had
been set up outside Catalonia: the employers, in fact, were afraid of the
Catalonian proletariat. In the Barcelona region, therefore, it was
necessary to convert factories in great haste so that they might serve the
defense of the Republic. Workers and technicians competed with each other
in enthusiasm and initiative, and very soon war materiel made mainly in
Catalonia was arriving at the front. No less effort was put into the
manufacture of chemical products essential for war purposes. Socialized
industry went ahead equally fast in the field of civilian requirements; for
the first time the conversion of textile fibers was undertaken in Spain,
and hemp, esparto, rice straw, and cellulose were processed.

SELF-MANAGEMENT UNDERMINED

In the meanwhile, credit and foreign trade had remained in the hands of the
private sector because the bourgeois Republican government wished it so. It
is true that the State controlled the banks, but it took care not to place
them under self-management. Many collectives were short of working capital
and had to live on the available funds taken over at the time of the July
1936 Revolution. Consequently they had to meet their day-to-day needs by
chance acquisitions such as the seizure of jewelry and precious objects
belonging to churches, convents, or Franco supporters who had fled. The CNT
had proposed the creation of a "confederal bank" to finance
self-management. But it was utopian to try to compete with private finance
capital which had not been socialized. The only solution would have been to
put all finance capital into the hands of the organized proletariat; but
the CNT was imprisoned in the Popular Front, and dared not go as far as
that.

The major obstacle, however, was the increasingly open hostility to
self-management manifested by the various political general staffs of
Republican Spain. It was charged with breaking the "united front" between
the working class and the small bourgeoisie, and hence "playing the game"
of the fascist enemy. (Its detractors went so far as to refuse arms to the
libertarian vanguard which, on the Aragon front, was reduced to facing the
fascist machine guns with naked hands - and then being reproached for its
"inactivity." )

It was the Stalinist minister of agriculture, Vicente Uribe, who had
established the decree of October 7, 1936, which legalized part of the
rural collectivizations. Appearances to the contrary, he was imbued with an
anti-collectivist spirit and hoped to demoralize the peasants living in
socialized groups. The validation of collectivizations was subjected to
very rigid and complicated juridical regulations. The collectives were
obliged to adhere to an extremely strict time limit, and those which had
not been legalized on the due date were automatically placed outside the
law and their land made liable to being restored to the previous owners.

Uribe discouraged the peasants from joining the collectives and fomented
discontent against them. In December 1936 he made a speech directed to the
individualist small proprietors, declaring that the guns of the Communist
Party and the government were at their disposal. He gave them imported
fertilizer which he was refusing to the collectives. Together with his
Stalinist colleague, Juan Comorera, in charge of the economy of Catalonia,
he brought the small- and medium-scale landowners together into a
reactionary union, subsequently adding the traders and even some owners of
large estates disguised as smallholders. They took the organization of food
supplies for Barcelona away from the workers' unions and handed it over to
private trade.

Finally, when the advance guard of the Revolution in Barcelona had been
crushed in May 1937, [35] the coalition government went so far as to
liquidate agricultural self-management by military means. On the pretext
that it had remained "outside the current of centralization," the Aragon
"regional defense council" was dissolved by a decree of August 10, 1937.
Its founder, Joaquin Ascaso, was charged with "selling ; .. 1,7~~ which was
actually an attempt to get funds for the collectives. Soon after this, the
11th Mobile Division of Commander Lister (a Stalinist), supported by tanks,
went into action against the collectives. Aragon was invaded like an enemy
country, those in charge of socialized enterprises were arrested, their
premises occupied, then closed; management committees were dissolved,
communal shops emptied, furniture broken up, and flocks disbanded. The
Communist press denounced "the crimes of forced collectivization." Thirty
percent of the Aragon collectives were completely destroyed.

Even by this brutality, however, Stalinism was not generally successful in
forcing the peasants of Aragon to become private owners. Peasants had been
forced at pistol point to sign deeds of ownership, but as soon as the
Lister Division had gone, these were destroyed and the collectives rebuilt.
As G. Munis, the Spanish Trotskyist, wrote: "This was one of the most
inspiring episodes of the Spanish Revolution. The peasants reaffirmed their
socialist beliefs in spite of governmental terror and the economic boycott
to which they were subjected."

There was another, less heroic, reason for the restoration of the Aragon
collectives: the Communist Party had realized, after the event, that it had
injured the life force of the rural economy, endangered the crops from lack
of manpower, demoralized the fighters on the Aragon front, and dangerously
reinforced the middle class of landed proprietors. The Party, therefore,
tried to repair the damage it had itself done, and to revive some of the
collectives. The new collectives, however, never regained the extent or
quality of land of their predecessors, nor the original manpower, since
many militants had been imprisoned or had sought shelter from persecution
in the anarchist divisions at the front.

Republicans carried out armed attacks of the same kind against agricultural
self-management in the Levant, in Castile, and in the provinces of Huesca
and Teruel. However, it survived, by hook or by crook, in many areas which
had not yet fallen into the hands of the Franco troops, especially in the
Levant.

The ambiguous attitude, to put it mildly, of the Valencia government to
rural socialism contributed to the defeat of the Spanish Republic: the poor
peasants were not always clearly aware that it was in their interests to
fight for the Republic.

In spite of its successes, industrial self-management was sabotaged by the
administrative bureaucracy and the authoritarian socialists. The radio and
press launched a formidable preparatory campaign of denigration and
calumny, questioning the honesty of the factory management councils. The
Republican central government refused to grant any credit to Catalonian
self-management even when the libertarian minister of the Catalonian
economy, Fabregas, offered the billion pesetas of savings bank deposits as
security. In June 1937, the Stalinist Comorera took over the portfolio of
the economy, and deprived the self-managed factories of raw materials which
he lavished on the private sector. He also failed to deliver to the
socialist enterprises supplies which had been ordered for them by the
Catalan administration.

The central government had a stranglehold over the collectives; the
nationalization of transport made it possible for it to supply some and cut
off all deliveries to others. Moreover, it imported Republican army
uniforms instead of turning to the Catalonian textile collectives. On
August 22, 1937, it passed a decree suspending the application of the
Catalonian October 1936 socialization decree to the metal and mining
industries. This was done on the pretext of the necessities of national
defense; and the Catalonian decree was said to be "contrary to the spirit
of the Constitution." Foremen and managers who had been driven out by
self-management, or rather, those who had been unwilling to accept
technical posts in the self-managed enterprises, were brought back, full of
a desire for revenge.

The end came with the decree of August 11, 1938, which militarized all war
industries under the control of the Ministry of War Supplies. An overblown
and ill-behaved bureaucracy invaded the factories - a swarm of inspectors
and directors who owed their position solely to their political
affiliations, in particular to their recent membership in the Stalinist
Communist Party. The workers became demoralized as they saw themselves
deprived of control over enterprises which they had created from scratch
during the first critical months of the war, and production suffered in
consequence.

In other branches, Catalan industrial self-management survived until the
Spanish Republic was crushed. It was slowed down, however, for industry had
lost its main outlets and there was a shortage of raw materials, the
government having cut off the credit necessary to purchase them.

To sum up, the newborn Spanish collectives were immediately forced into the
strait jacket of a war carried on by classic military methods, in the name
of which the Republic clipped the wings of its own vanguard and compromised
with reaction at home.

The lesson which the collectives have left behind them, however, is a
stimulating one. In 1938 Emma Goldman was inspired to praise them thus:
"The collectivization of land and industry shines out as the greatest
achievement of any revolutionary period. Even if Franco were to win and the
Spanish anarchists were to be exterminated, the idea they have launched
will live on." On July 21, 1937, Federica Montseny made a speech in
Barcelona in which she clearly posed the alternatives: "On the one hand,
the supporters of authority and the totalitarian State, of a state-directed
economy, of a form of social organization which militarizes all men and
converts the State into one huge employer, one huge entrepreneur; on the
other hand, the operation of mines, fields, factories and workshops, by the
working class itself, organized in trade-union federations." This was the
dilemma of the Spanish Revolution, but in the near future it may become
that of socialism the world over.

(Source: Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, first published in French in
1965, the 1970 English translation is Guérin's best-known work,
describing the intellectual substance and actual practice of anarchism. The
English translation by Mary Klopper includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky,
who describes it as an attempt "to extract from the history of libertarian
thought a living, evolving tradition".)


* By Way of Conclusion


The defeat of the Spanish Revolution deprived anarchism of its only foot in
the world. It came out of this trial crushed, dispersed, and, to some
extent, discredited. History condemned it severely and, in certain
respects, unjustly. It was not in fact, or at any rate alone, responsible
for the victory of the Franco forces. What remained from the experience of
the rural and industrial collectives, set up in tragically unfavorable
conditions, was on the whole to their credit. This experience was, however,
underestimated, calumniated, and denied recognition. Authoritarian
socialism had at last got rid of undesirable libertarian competition and,
for years, remained master of the field. For a time it seemed as though
state socialism was to be justified by the military victory of the U.S.S.R.
against Nazism in 1945 and by undeniable, and even imposing, successes in
the technical field.

However, the very excesses of this system soon began to generate their own
negation. They engendered the idea that paralyzing state centralization
should be loosened up, that production units should have more autonomy,
that workers would do more and better work if they had some say in the
management of enterprises. What medicine calls "antibodies" were generated
in one of the countries brought into servitude by Stalin. Tito's Yugoslavia
freed itself from the too heavy yoke which was making it into a sort of
colony. It then proceeded to reevaluate the dogmas which could now so
clearly be seen as anti-economic. It went back to school under the masters
of the past, discovering and discreetly reading Proudhon. It bubbled in
anticipation. It explored the too-little-known libertarian areas of
thinking in the works of Marx and Lenin. Among other things it dug out the
concept of the withering away of the State, which had not, it is true, been
altogether eliminated from the political vocabulary, but had certainly
become no more than a ritual formula quite empty of substance. Going back
to the short period during which Bolshevism had identified itself with
proletarian democracy from below, with the soviets, Yugoslavia gleaned a
word which had been enunciated by the leaders of the October Revolution and
then quickly forgotten: self-management. Attention was also fumed to the
embryonic factory councils which had arisen at the same time, through
revolutionary contagion, in Germany and Italy and, much later, Hungary. As
reported in the French review Arguments by the Italian, Roberto Guiducci,
the question arose whether "the idea of the councils, which had been
suppressed by Stalinism for obvious reasons," could not "be taken up again
in modern terms."

When Algeria was decolonized and became independent its new leaders sought
to institutionalize the spontaneous occupations of abandoned European
property by peasants and workers. They drew their inspiration from the
Yugoslav precedent and took its legislation in this matter as a model.

If its wings are not clipped, self-management is undoubtedly an institution
with democratic, even libertarian tendencies. Following the example of the
Spanish collectives of 193~1937, self-management seeks to place the economy
under the management of the producers themselves. To this end a three-tier
workers' representation is set up in each enterprise, by means of
elections: the sovereign general assembly; the workers' council, a smaller
deliberative body; and, finally, the management committee, which is the
executive organ. The legislation provides certain safeguards against the
threat of bureaucratization: representatives cannot stand for reelection
too often, must be directly involved in production, etc. In Yugoslavia the
workers can be consulted by referendum as an alternative to general
assemblies, while in very large enterprises general assemblies take place
in work sections.

Both in Yugoslavia and in Algeria' at least in theory, or as a promise for
the future, great importance is attributed to the commune, and much is made
of the fact that self-managing workers will be represented there. In
theory, again, the management of public affairs should tend to become
decentralized, and to be carried out more and more at the local level.

These good intentions are far from being carried out in practice. In these
countries self-management is coming into being in the framework of a
dictatorial, military, police state whose skeleton is formed by a single
party. At the helm there is an authoritarian and paternalistic authority
which is beyond control and above criticism. The authoritarian principles
of the political administration and the libertarian principles of the
management of the economy are thus quite incompatible.

Moreover, a certain degree of bureaucratization tends to show itself even
within the enterprises, in spite of the precautions of the legislators. The
majority of the workers are not yet mature enough to participate
effectively in self-management. They lack education and technical
knowledge, have not got rid of the old wage-earning mentality, and too
willingly put all their powers into the hands of their delegates. This
enables a small minority to be the real managers of the enterprise, to
arrogate to themselves all sorts of privileges and do exactly as they like.
They also perpetuate themselves in directorial positions, governing without
control from below, losing contact with reality and cutting themselves off
from the rank-and-file workers, whom they often treat with arrogance and
contempt. All this demoralizes the workers and turns them against
self-management. Finally, state control is often exercised so indiscreetly
and so oppressively that the "self-managers" do not really manage at all.
The state appoints directors to the organs of self-management without much
caring whether the latter agree or not, although, according to the law,
they should be consulted. These bureaucrats often interfere excessively in
management, and sometimes behave in the same arbitrary way as the former
employers. In very large Yugoslav enterprises directors are nominated
entirely by the State; these posts are handed out to his old guard by
Marshall Tito.

Moreover, Yugoslavian self-management is extremely dependent on the State
for finance. It lives on credits accorded to it by the State and is free to
dispose of only a small part of its profits, the rest being paid to the
treasury in the form of a tax. Revenue derived from the self-management
sector is used by the State not only to develop the backward sectors of the
economy, which is no more than just, but also to pay for the heavily
bureaucratized government apparatus, the army, the police forces, and for
prestige expenditure, which is sometimes quite excessive. When the members
of self-managed enterprises are inadequately paid, this blunts the
enthusiasm for self-management and is in conflict with its principles.

The freedom of action of each enterprise, moreover, is fairly strictly
limited, since it is subject to the economic plans of the central
authority, which are drawn up arbitrarily without consultation of the rank
and file. In Algeria the self-managed enterprises are also obliged to cede
to the State the commercial handling of a considerable portion of their
products. In addition, they are placed under the supervision of "organs to
supply disinterested technical of tutelage," which are supposed and
bookkeeping assistance but, in practice, tend to replace the organs of
self-management and take over their functions.

In general, the bureaucracy of the totalitarian State is unsympathetic to
the claims of self-management to autonomy. As Proudhon foresaw, it finds it
hard to tolerate any authority external to itself. It dislikes
socialization and longs for nationalization, that is to say, the direct
management by officials of the State. Its object is to infringe upon
self-management, reduce its powers, and in fact absorb it.

The single party is no less suspicious of self-management, and likewise
finds it hard to tolerate a rival. If it embraces self-management, it does
so to stifle it more effectively. The party has cells in most of the
enterprises and is strongly tempted to take part in management, to
duplicate the organs elected by the workers or reduce them to the role of
docile instruments, by falsifying elections and setting out lists of
candidates in advance. The party tries to induce the workers' councils to
endorse decisions already taken in advance, and to manipulate and shape the
national congresses of the workers.

Some enterprises under self-management react to authoritarian and
centralizing tendencies by becoming isolationist, behaving as though they
were an association of small proprietors, and trying to operate for the
sole benefit of the workers involved. They tend to reduce their manpower so
as to divide the cake into larger portions. They also seek to produce as
little of everything instead of specializing. They devote time and energy
to getting around plans or regulations designed to serve the interests of
the community as a whole. In Yugoslavia free competition between
enterprises has been allowed, both as a stimulant and to protect the
consumer, but in practice the tendency to autonomy has led to flagrant
inequalities output and to economic irrationalities.

Thus self-management itself incorporates a pendulum-like movement which
makes it swing constantly between two extremes: excessive autonomy or
excessive centralization; authority or anarchy; control from below or
control from above. Through the years Yugoslavia, in particular, has
corrected centralization by autonomy, then autonomy by centralization,
constantly remodeling its institutions without so far successfully
attaining a "happy medium."

Most of the weaknesses of self-management could be avoided or corrected if
there were an authentic trade-union movement, independent of authority and
of the single party, springing from the workers themselves and at the same
time organizing them, and animated by the spirit characteristic of Spanish
anarcho-syndicalism. In Yugoslavia and in Algeria, however, trade unionism
is either subsidiary or supernumerary, or is subject to the State, to the
single party. It cannot, therefore, adequately furfill the task of
conciliator between autonomy and centralization which it should undertake,
and could perform much better than totalitarian political organs. In fact,
a trade unionism which genuinely issued from the workers, who saw in it
their own reflection, would be the most effective organ for harmonizing the
centrifugal and centripetal forces, for "creating an equilibrium" as
Proudhon put it, between the contradictions of self-management.

The picture, however, must not be seen as entirely black. Selfmanagement
certainly has powerful and tenacious opponents, who have not given up hope
of making it fail. But it has, in fact, shown itself quite dynamic in the
countries where experiments are being carried on. It has opened up new
perspectives for the workers and restored to them some pleasure in their
work. It has opened their minds to the rudiments of authentic socialism,
which involves the progressive disappearance of wages, the disalienation of
the producer who will become a free and self-determining being.
Selfmanagement has in this way increased productivity and registered
considerable positive results, even during the trials and errors of the
initial period.

From rather too far away, small circles of anarchists follow the
development of Yugoslav and Algerian self-management with a mixture of
sympathy and disbelief. They feel that it is bringing some fragments of
their ideal into reality, but the experiment is not developing along the
idealistic lines foreseen by libertarian communism. On the contrary it is
being tried in an authoritarian framework which is repugnant to anarchism.
There is no doubt that this framework makes self-management fragile: there
is always a danger that it will be devoured by the cancer of
authoritarianism. However, a close and unprejudiced look at self-management
seems to reveal rather encouraging signs.

In Yugoslavia self-management is a factor favoring the democratization of
the regime. It has created a healthier basis for recruitment in
working-class circles. The party is beginning to act as an inspiration
rather than a director, its cadres are becoming better spokesmen for the
masses, more sensitive to their problems and aspirations. As Albert
Meister, a young Swiss sociologist who set himself the task of studying
this phenomenon on the spot, comments, self-management contains a
"democratic virus" which, in the long run, invades the single party itself.
He regards it as a "tonic." It welds the lower party echelons to the
working masses. This development is so clear that it is bringing Yugoslav
theoreticians to use language which would not disgrace a libertarian. For
example, one of them, Stane Kavcic, states: "In future the striking force
of socialism in Yugoslavia cannot be a political party and the State acting
from the top down, but the people, the citizens, with constitutional rights
which enable them to act from the base up." He continues bravely that
self-management is increasingly loosening up "the rigid discipline and
subordination which are characteristic of all political parties."

The trend is not so clear in Algeria, for the experiment is of more recent
origin and still in danger of being called into question. A clue may be
found in the fact that at the end of 1964, Hocine Zahouane, then head of
orientation of the National Liberation Front, publicly condemned the
tendency of the "organs of guidance" to place themselves above the members
of the self-management groups and to adopt an authoritarian attitude toward
them. He went on: "When this happens, socialism no longer exists. There
remains only a change in the form of exploitation of the workers." This
official concluded by asking that the producers "should be truly masters of
their production" and no longer be "manipulated for ends which are foreign
to socialism." It must be admitted that Hocine Zahouane has since been
removed from office by a military coup d'e'tat and has become the leading
spirit of a clandestine socialist opposition. He is for the time being in
compulsory residence in a torrid area of the Sahara.

To sum up, self-management meets with all kinds of difficulties and
contradictions, yet, even now, it appears in practice to have the merit of
enabling the masses to pass through an apprenticeship in direct democracy
acting from the bottom upward; the merit of developing, encouraging, and
stimulating their free initiative, of imbuing them with a sense of
responsibility instead of perpetuating age-old habits of passivity,
submission, and the inferiority complex left to them by past oppression, as
is the case under state communism. This apprenticeship is sometimes
laborious, progresses rather slowly, loads society with extra burdens and
may, possibly, be carried out only at the cost of some "disorder." Many
observers think, however, that these difficulties, delays, extra burdens,
and growing pains are less harmful than the false order, the false luster,
the false "efficiency" of state communism which reduces man to nothing,
kills the initiative of the people, paralyzes production, and, in spite of
material advances obtained at a high price, discredits the very idea of
socialism.

The U.S.S.R. itself is reevaluating its methods of economic management, and
will continue to do so unless the present tendency to liberalization is
canceled by a regression to authoritarianism. Before he fell, on October
15, 1964, Khrushchev seemed to have understood, however timidly and
belatedly, the need for industrial decentralization. In December 1964
Pravda published a long article entitled "The State of the Whole People"
which sought to define the changes of structure that differentiate the form
of State "said to be of the whole people" from that of the "dictatorship of
the proletariat"; namely, progress toward democratization, participation of
the masses in the direction of society through self-management, and the
revitalization of the soviets, the trade unions, etc.

The French daily Le Monde of February 16, 1965, published an article by
Michel Tatu, entitled "A Major Problem: The Liberation of the Economy,"
exposing the most serious evils "affecting the whole Soviet bureaucratic
machine, especially the economy." The high technical level this economy has
attained makes the rule of bureaucracy over management even more
unacceptable. As things are at present, directors of enterprises cannot
make decisions on any subject without referring to at least one office, and
more often to half a dozen. "No one disputes the remarkable technical,
scientific, and economic progress which has been made in thirty years of
Stalinist planning. The result, however, is precisely that this economy is
now in the class of developed economies, and that the old structures which
enabled it to reach this level are now totally, and ever more alarmingly,
unsuitable." "Much more would be needed than detailed reforms; a
spectacular change of thought and method, a sort of new de-Stalinization
would be required to bring to an end the enormous inertia which permeates
the machine at every level." As Ernest Mandel has pointed out, however, in
an article in the French review Les Temps Modernes, decentralization cannot
stop at giving autonomy to the directors of enterprises, it must lead to
real workers' self-management.

The late Georges Gurvitch, a left-wing sociologist, came to a similar
conclusion. He considers that tendencies to decentralization and workers'
self-management have only just begun in the U.S.S.R., and that their
success would show "that Proudhon was more right than one might have
thought."

In Cuba the late state socialist Che Guevara had to quit the direction of
industry, which he had run unsuccessfully owing to overcentralization. In
Cuba: Socialism and Development, Rene Dumont, a French specialist in the
Castro economy, deplores its "hypercentralization" and bureaucratization.
He particularly emphasized the "authoritarian" errors of a ministerial
department which tries to manage the factories itself and ends up with
exactly the opposite results: "By trying to bring about a strongly
centralized organization one ends up in practice . . . by letting any kind
of thing be done, because one cannot maintain control over what is
essential." He makes the same criticism of the state monopoly of
distribution: the paralyzes which it produces could have been avoided "if
each production unit had preserved the function of supplying itself
directly." "Cuba is beginning all over again the useless cycle of economic
errors of the socialist countries," a Polish colleague in a very good
position to know confided to Rene Dumont. The author concludes by abjuring
the Cuban regime to turn to autonomous production units and, in
agriculture, to federations of small farm-production cooperatives. He is
not afraid to give the remedy a name, self-management, which could
perfectly well be reconciled with planning. Unfortunately, the voice of
Rene Dumont has not yet been heard in Havana.

The libertarian idea has recently come out of the shadow to which its
detractors had relegated it. In a large part of the world the man of today
has been the guinea pig of state communism, and is only now emerging,
reeling, from the experience. Suddenly he is turning, with lively curiosity
and often with profit, to the rough drafts for a new self-management
society which the pioneers of anarchism were putting forward in the last
century. He is not swallowing them whole, of course, but drawing lessons
from them, and inspiration to try to complete the task presented by the
second half of this century: to break the fetters, both economic and
political, of what has been too simply called "Stalinism"; and this,
without renouncing the fundamental principles of socialism: on the
contrary, thereby discovering - or rediscovering - the forms of a real,
authentic socialism, that is to say, socialism combined with liberty.

Proudhon, in the midst of the 1848 Revolution, wisely thought that it would
have been asking too much of his artisans to go, immediately, all the way
to "anarchy." In default of this maximum program, he sketched out a minimum
libertarian program: progressive reduction in the power of the State,
parallel development of the power of the people from below, through what he
called clubs, and which the man of the twentieth century would call
councils. It seems to be the more or less conscious purpose of many
contemporary socialists to seek out such a program.

Although a possibility of revival is thus opened up for anarchism, it will
not succeed in fully rehabilitating itself unless it is able to belie, both
in theory and in practice, the false interpretations to which it has so
long been subject. As we saw, in 1924 Joaqum Maurin was impatient to finish
with it in Spain, and suggested that it would never be able to maintain
itself except in a few "backward countries" where the masses would "cling"
to it because they are entirely without "socialist education," and have
been "left to their natural instincts." He concluded: "Any anarchist who
succeeds in improving himself, in learning, and in seeing clearly,
automatically ceases to be an anarchist."

The French historian of anarchism, Jean Maitron, simply confused "anarchy"
and disorganization. A few years ago he imagined that anarchism had died
with the nineteenth century, for our epoch is one of "plans, organization,
and discipline." More recently the British writer George Woodcock saw fit
to accuse the anarchists of being idealists swimming against the dominant
current of history, feeding on an idyllic vision of the future while
clinging to the most attractive features of a dying past. Another English
specialist on the subject, James Joll, insists that the anarchists are
out-of-date, for their ideas are opposed to the development of large-scale
industry, to mass production and consumption, and depend on a retrograde
romantic vision of an idealized society of artisans and peasants, and on a
total rejection of the realities of the twentieth century and of economic
organization. [37]

In the preceding pages I have tried to show that this is not a true picture
of anarchism. Bakunin's works best express the nature of constructive
anarchism, which depends on organization, on selfdiscipline, on
integration, on federalist and noncoercive centralization. It rests upon
large-scale modern industry, up-to-date techniques, the modern proletariat,
and internationalism on a world scale. In this regard it is of our times,
and belongs to the twentieth century. It may well be state communism, and
not anarchism, which is out of step with the needs of the contemporary
world.

In 1924 Joaquin Maurin reluctantly admitted that throughout the history of
anarchism "symptoms of decline" had been "followed by sudden revival." The
future may show that only in this reluctant admission was the Spanish
Marxist a good prophet.

(Source: Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, first published in French in
1965, the 1970 English translation is Guérin's best-known work,
describing the intellectual substance and actual practice of anarchism. The
English translation by Mary Klopper includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky,
who describes it as an attempt "to extract from the history of libertarian
thought a living, evolving tradition".)


* Footnotes


1. Authoritarian was an epithet used by the libertarian anarchists and
denoted those socialists whom they considered less libertarian than
themselves and who they therefore presumed were in favor of authority.

2. Jules Guesde (1845-1922) in 1879 introduced Marxist ideas to the French
workers' movement. (Translator's note.)

3. The term societaire is used to define a form of anarchism which
repudiates individualism and aims at integration into society.
(Translator's note. )

4. "Voline" was the pseudonym of V. M. Eichenbaum, author of La Revolution
Inconnue 1917-1921, the third volume of which is in English as The Unknown
Revolution (1955). Another partial translation is Nineteen-seventeen: The
Russian Revolution Betrayed (1954) . (Translator's note. )

4a. Alias of the French terrorist François-Claudius Koenigstein
(1859-1892) who committed many acts of violent terrorism and was eventually
executed. (Translator's note. )

5. In 1883 an active nucleus of revolutionary socialists founded an
International Working Men's Association in the United States. They were
under the influence of the International Anarchist Congress, held in London
in 1881, and also of Johann Most, a social democrat turned anarchist, who
reached America in 1882. Albert R. Parsons and Adolph Fischer were the
moving spirits in the association, which took the lead in a huge mass
movement concentrated on winning an eight-hour day. The campaign for this
was launched by the trade unions and the Knights of Labor, and May 1, 1886,
was fixed as the deadline for bringing the eight-hour day into force.
During the first half of May, a nationwide strike involved 190,000 workers
of whom 80,000 were in Chicago. Impressive mass demonstrations occurred in
that city on May 1 and for several days thereafter. Panic-stricken and
terrified by this wave of rebellion, the bourgeoisie resolved to crush the
movement at its source, resorting to bloody provocation if need be. During
a street meeting on May 4, 1885, in Haymarket Square, a bomb thrown at the
legs of the po]ice in an unexplained manner provided the necessary pretext.
Eight leaders of the revolutionary and libertarian socialist movement were
arrested, seven of them sentenced to death, and four subsequently hanged (a
fifth committed suicide in his cell the day before the execution). Since
then the Chicago martyrs - Parsons, Fischer, Enge], Spies, and Lingg - have
be]onged to the international proletariat, and the universal celebration of
May Day (May 1) still commemorates the atrocious crime committed in the
United States.

6. All quotations have been translated into English by the translator.

7. French writer (1830-1905) known principally as a geographer. His brother
Elie played an active part during the Commune of 1871. (Translator's note.)

8. Wilhelm Weitling (1808-1871), German utopian communist writer and
founder of Communist Workers' Clubs during the 1830s and 1840s.
(Translator's note.)

9. Guizot, a minister under Louis Philippe, was known for his extreme
conservative views. (Translator's note.)

10. Followers of Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), French socialist and
revolutonary' advocate of insurrection by minorities. (Translator's note.)

11. In his book The Ego and His Own.

12. Without direct mention of Stirner, whose work he may not, therefore,
have read.

13. Cf. the 1963 decrees by which the Algerian Republic institutionalized
the self-management which had been originated spontaneously by the
peasants. The apportionment - if not the actual percentages - is very
similar, and the last quarter, "to be divided among tile workers," is the
same as the "balance" over which there was controversy in Algeria.

14. Alleu is a feudal term for heritable inalienable property. The Germains
were a German tribe in which individual freedom was highly developed.
(Translator's note.)

15. Cf. a similar discussion in the Critique of the Gotha Program, drafted
by Karl Marx in 1875 though not published until 1891.

16. Cuba is today gropingly and prematurely trying to find the way to
integral communism.

17. A state monopoly in France. (Translator's note.)

18. A Swiss branch of the Intemational which had adopted Bakunin's ideas.

19. Pi y Margall was a minister in the period between 1873 and 1874 when a
republic was briefly established in Spain. (Translator's note.) When, in
January 1937, Fedenca Montseny, a woman anarchist who had become a
minister, praised the legionalism of Pi y Margall, Gaston Leval replied
that he was far from a faithful follower of Bakunin.

20. La Revolution Proletarienne is a French monthly; Robert Louzon a
veteran revolutionary syndicalist. (Translator's note.)

21. Robert Lonzon pointed out to the author that from a dialectic point of
view this statement and that of Pelloutier are in no way mutually
exclusive: terrorism had contradictory effects on the working-class
movement.

22. A Bolshevik historian who later became a Stalinist.

23. see [SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC CONDEMNATION OF ANARCHISM].

24. Jacquerie was the name given, to the French peasant revolt of 1358
(from racques, the nickname of the French peasant). (Translator's note.)

25. Debate among anarcho-syndicalists on the relative merits of factory
councils and trade unions was, moreover, nothing new; it had recently
divided the anarchists in Russia and even caused a split in the ranks of
the editorial team in charge of the libertarian paper Golos Truda, some
members remaining faithful to classical syndicalism while others, including
G. P. Maximoff, opted for the councils.

26. In April 1922, the KAPD set up a "Communist Workers International" with
Dutch and Belgian opposition groups.

27. The Spanish National Confederation of Labor.

28. In France, for example, the trade unionists who followed Pierre Besnard
were expelled from the Confederation Generale du Travail Unitaire (obedient
to the Communists) and, in 1924, founded the Confederation Genlrale du
Travail Syndicaliste Revolutionnaire.

29. Whereas in Castile and in the Asturias, etc., the social-democratic
trade union center, the General Union of Workers (UGT) was predominant.

30. The CNT only agreed to the creation of industrial federations in 1931.
In 1919 this had been rejected by the "pure" anarchists as leading toward
centralism and bureaucracy; but it had become essential to reply to the
concentration of capitalism by the concentration of the unions in a single
industry. The large industrial federations were only really stabilized in
1937.

31. See [ANARCHISTS IN THE TRADE UNIONS].

32. Not to be confused with intermediate political forms, which the
anarchists, unlike the Marxists, reject.

33. The International Workers' Association to which the CNT was affiliated
had a special congress in Paris, June 11-13, 1937, at which the
anarcho-syndicalist trade-union center was reproached for participating in
government and for the concessions it had mate in consequence. With this
backing, Sebastien Faure decided to publish a series of articles in the
July 8, 15, and 22 issues of Le Libertaire, entitled "The Fatal Slope."
These were severely critical of the decision of the Spanish anarchists to
take part in government. The CNT was enraged and brought about the
resignation of the secretary of the International Workers' Association,
Pierre Besnard.

34 "In theory," because there was some litigation between villages on this
subject.

35. This refers to the time when the POUM (Partido Obrero Unido Marxista)
together with rank-and-file anarchists came into armed conflict with the
police and were defeated and crushed. (Translator's note.)

36. As of July 1969.

37. James Joll recently wrote to the author that after reading this book he
had to some extent revised his views.

(Source: Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, first published in French in
1965, the 1970 English translation is Guérin's best-known work,
describing the intellectual substance and actual practice of anarchism. The
English translation by Mary Klopper includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky,
who describes it as an attempt "to extract from the history of libertarian
thought a living, evolving tradition".)


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     Anarchism: From Theory To Practice -- Publication : November 30, 1969

     Anarchism: From Theory To Practice -- Added : February 06, 2017

     Anarchism: From Theory To Practice -- Updated : December 30, 2021

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