Reply to errors and distortions in John Fisher's "Why we must further Marxism and not Anarchism"

Fisher starts his diatribe against anarchism with some thoughts on the radical youth active in the anti-globalisation demonstrations and movements:

"The so-called Anarchistic youth of today, year 2001, for the most part simply use the term 'Anarchist' as an indication of not wanting to go along with the 'system' in not wanting to assimilate, which is a giant leap forward on their part considering all their lives they've constantly been bombarded with the huge American Corporate propaganda machine. For this achievement, they are already more our ally than our enemy."

It makes you wonder how Fisher knows this. Has there been a poll of "anarchistic youth" recently? It would be interesting to discover the empirical basis for this statement. Given the quality of the rest of the article, we can hazard a guess and say that these particular facts are just assertions and express wishful thinking rather than any sort of reality.

Needless to say, these "anarchistic youth" had better watch out. We all know what happens to the "ally" of the vanguard party once that party takes power. Anarchists remember the fate of our comrades when Lenin and Trotsky ruled the "proletarian" state.

The Russian anarchists were at the forefront of the struggle between the February and October revolutions in 1917. As socialist historian Samuel Farber notes, the anarchists "had actually been an unnamed coalition partner of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution." [Before Stalinism, p. 126] The anarchists were the "allies" of the Bolsheviks before they took power as both shared the goals of abolishing the provisional government and for a social revolution which would end capitalism.

This changed once the Bolsheviks had taken power. On the night of April 11th, 1918, the Cheka surrounded 26 Anarchist clubs in Moscow, in the insuring fighting Anarchists suffered 40 casualties and 500 were taken prisoner. The Petrograd anarchists protested this attack:

"The Bolsheviks have lost their senses. They have betrayed the proletariat and attacked the anarchists. They have joined . . . the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. They have declared war on revolutionary anarchism. . . . We regarded you [Bolsheviks] as our revolutionary brothers. But you have proved to be traitors. You are Cains -- you have killed your brothers . . . There can be no peace with the traitors to the working class. The executioners of the revolution wish to become the executioners of anarchism." [quoted by Paul Avrich, The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution, p. 113]

Fifteen days later similar raids were carried out in Petrograd. This repression, we must note, took place months before the outbreak of the Russian Civil War (in late May 1918). In May of that year, leading anarchist periodicals (including Burevestnik, Anarkhia and Golos Truda) were closed down by the government. The repression continued during the war and afterwards. Many imprisoned anarchists were deported from the "workers' state" in 1921 after they went on hunger strike and their plight was raised by libertarian delegates to the founding congress of the Red International of Labour Unions held that year.

Unsurprisingly, the Bolsheviks denied they held anarchists. French anarchist Gaston Leval accounted how Lenin had "reiterated the charges made by Dzerzhinsky [founder of the Bolsheviks secret police, the Cheka] . . . Those in prison were not true anarchists nor idealists -- just bandits abusing our good intentions." Leval, having gathered the facts, indicated this was not true, making Lenin backtrack. [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 2, p. 213]

Unsurprisingly, when the libertarian delegates to the congress reported back on conditions in Russia to their unions, they withdrew from the Trade-Union International.

In the Ukraine, the anarchist influenced Makhnovist movement also became an "ally" with the Bolsheviks in the common struggle against the counter-revolutionary White armies. The Bolsheviks betrayed their allies each time they formed an alliance.

The first alliance was in March 1919 during the struggle against Denikin, In May of that year, two Cheka agents sent to assassinate Makhno (the main leader of the movement) were caught and executed. The following month Trotsky, the commander of the Red Army, outlawed the Makhnovists and Communist troops attacked their headquarters at Gulyai-Polye.

Denikin's massive attack on Moscow in September 1919 saw the shaky alliance resumed in the face of a greater threat. Once Denikin had been defeated, the Bolsheviks ordered the Makhnovists to the Polish front. This was obviously designed to draw them away from their home territory, so leaving it defenceless against Bolshevik rule. The Makhnovists refused and Trotsky, again, outlawed and attacked them.

Hostilities were again broken off when the White General Wrangel launched a major offensive in the summer of 1920. Again the Bolsheviks signed a pact with Makhno. This promised amnesty for all anarchists in Bolshevik prisons, freedom for anarchist propaganda, free participation to the Soviets and "in the region where the Makhnovist Army is operating, the population of workers and peasants will create its own institutions of economic and political self-management." [quoted by Peter Arshinov, The History of the Makhnovist Movement, pp. 177-9] Once Wrangel had been defeated, the Bolsheviks ripped up the agreement and turned their forces, once again, against their "ally" and finally drove them out of the Soviet Union in 1921.

These events should be remembered when the authoritarian left argue that we aim for the same thing and are allies.

Fisher continues:

"In some cases, 'Anarchist' youth begin to try to learn about what Anarchism truly is instead of seeing it merely as utter rebellion. They learn Anarchism is a form of Socialism, they learn they have much in common with Marxists, they learn the state must be smashed, they learn the state is a tool of suppression used by one class against another."

They learn much more than this. They learn, for example, about the history of Marxism and how anarchism differs from it.

They learn, for example, about the history of Marxist Social Democracy. Many forget that Social Democracy was the first major Marxist movement. It was formed initially in Germany in 1875 when the followers of Lassalle and Marx united to form the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). This party followed Marx and Engels recommendations that workers should form a distinct political party and conquer political power. It rejected the anarchist argument that workers should "abstain from politics" (i.e. elections) and instead, to use an expression from Marx's preamble of the French Workers' Party, turn the franchise "from a means of deception . . . into an instrument of emancipation." [Marx and Engels Reader, p. 566]

Rather than confirm Marx's politics, Social Democracy confirmed Bakunin's. It quickly degenerated into reformism. As Bakunin predicted, when "the workers . . . send common workers . . . to Legislative Assemblies . . . The worker-deputies, transplanted into a bourgeois environment, into an atmosphere of purely bourgeois ideas, will in fact cease to be workers and, becoming Statesmen, they will become bourgeois . . . For men do not make their situations; on the contrary, men are made by them." [The Basic Bakunin, p. 108]

Form the early 1890s, Social Democracy was racked by arguments between reformists (the "revisionist" wing) and revolutionaries. The former wanted to adapt the party and its rhetoric to what it was doing. As one of the most distinguished historians of this period put it, the "distinction between the contenders remained largely a subjective one, a difference of ideas in the evaluation of reality rather than a difference in the realm of action." [C. Schorske, German Social Democracy, p. 38]

In 1914, the majority of social democrats in Germany and across the world supported their state in the imperialist slaughter of the First World. This disgraceful end would not have surprised Bakunin.

Anarchists also learn about the Russian Revolution. They learn how Lenin and Trotsky eliminated democracy in the armed forces, in the workplace and in the soviets.

They learn, for example, that the Bolsheviks had disbanded soviets which had been elected with non-Bolshevik majorities in the spring and summer of 1918. [Samuel Farber, Op. Cit., p. 24]

They learn that at the end of March, 1918, Trotsky reported to the Communist Party that "the principle of election is politically purposeless and technically inexpedient, and it has been, in practice, abolished by decree" in the Red Army. [quoted by M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, pp. 37-8]

They learn that Lenin opposed workers' management of production. Before the October Revolution he saw "workers' control" purely in terms of the "universal, all-embracing workers' control over the capitalists." [Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?, p. 52] He did not see it in terms of workers' management of production itself (i.e. the abolition of wage labour) via federations of factory committees. Anarchists and the workers' factory committees did. "On three occasions in the first months of Soviet power, the [factory] committee leaders sought to bring their model into being. At each point the party leadership overruled them. The result was to vest both managerial and control powers in organs of the state which were subordinate to the central authorities, and formed by them." [Thomas F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia, p. 38]

Lenin himself quickly supported "one-man management" invested with "dictatorial powers" after "control over the capitalists" failed. By 1920, Trotsky was advocating the "militarisation of labour" and implemented his ideas on the railway workers.

They learn that Leninism is just another form of capitalism (state capitalism). As Lenin put it, socialism "is nothing but the next step forward from state capitalist monopoly. In other words, Socialism is merely state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people; by this token it ceases to be capitalist monopoly." [The Threatening Catastrophe and how to avoid it, p. 37]

Fisher now makes a common Marxist assertion. He states:

"But what they do not learn, and never will from an Anarchist perspective is what is to replace the smashed state machine?"

In reality, if you read anarchist thinkers you will soon discover what anarchists think will "replace" the state: namely the various working class organisations created by the class struggle and revolution. In the words of Kropotkin, the "elaboration of new social forms can only be the collective work of the masses." [Words of a Rebel, p. 175] He stressed that "[to] make a revolution it is not . . . enough that there should be . . . [popular] risings . . . It is necessary that after the risings there should be something new in the institutions [that make up society], which would permit new forms of life to be elaborated and established." [The Great French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 200]

Thus the framework of a free society would be created by the process of the revolution itself. As such, as Kropotkin put it, "[d]uring a revolution new forms of life will always germinate on the ruins of the old forms . . . It is impossible to legislate for the future. All we can do is vaguely guess its essential tendencies and clear the road for it." [Evolution and Environment, pp. 101-2] So while the specific forms these organisations would take cannot be predicted, their general nature can be.

So what is the general nature of these new organisations? Anarchists have consistently argued that the state would be replaced by a free federation of workers' associations and communes, self-managed and organised from the bottom-up. In Malatesta's words, anarchy is the "free organisation from below upwards, from the simple to the complex, through free agreement and the federation of associations of production and consumption." In particular, he argued anarchists aim to "push the workers to take possession of the factories, to federate among themselves and work for the community" while the peasants "should take over the land and produced usurped by the landlords, and come to an agreement with the industrial workers." [Life and Ideas, p. 147 and p. 165]

This vision of revolution followed Bakunin's:

"the federative alliance of all working men's associations . . . [will] constitute the Commune . . . [the] Communal Council [will be] composed of . . . delegates . . . vested with plenary but accountable and removable mandates. . . all provinces, communes and associations . . . by first reorganising on revolutionary lines .. . . [will] constitute the federation of insurgent associations, communes and provinces . . . [and] organise a revolutionary force capable defeating reaction . . . [and for] self-defence . . . [The] revolution everywhere must be created by the people, and supreme control must always belong to the people organised into a free federation of agricultural and industrial associations . . . organised from the bottom upwards by means of revolutionary delegation. . ." [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, pp. 170-2]

Similarly, Proudhon argued federations of workers associations and communes to replace the state. While seeing such activity as essentially reformist in nature, he saw the germs of anarchy as being the result of "generating from the bowels of the people, from the depths of labour, a greater authority, a more potent fact, which shall envelop capital and the State and subjugate them" as "it is of no use to change the holders of power or introduce some variation into its workings: an agricultural and industrial combination must be found by means of which power, today the ruler of society, shall become its slave." [System of Economical Contradictions, p. 399 and p. 398] What, decades later, Proudhon called an "agro-industrial federation" in his Principle of Federation.

Kropotkin, unsurprisingly enough, had similar ideas. He saw the revolution as the "expropriation of the whole of social wealth" by the workers, who "will organise the workshops so that they continue production" once "the governments are swept out by the people." The "coming social revolution" would see "the complete abolition of States, and reorganisation from the simple to the complex through the free federation of the popular forces of producers and consumers," the "federation of workers' corporations and groups of consumers." The "Commune will know that it must break the State and replace it by the Federation" (which is "freely accepted by itself as well as the other communes"). [Words of a Rebel, p. 99, p. 91, p. 92 and p. 83]

Thus "independent Communes for the territorial organisation, and of federations of Trade Unions [i.e. workplace associations] for the organisation of men [and women] in accordance with their different functions, gave a concrete conception of society regenerated by a social revolution." [Peter Kropotkin, Evolution and Environment, p. 79]

In his classic history of the French Revolution he pointed to "the popular Commune" as an example of the "something new" required to turn an uprising into a revolution. He argued that "the Revolution began by creating the Commune . . . and through this institution it gained . . . immense power." He stressed that it was "by means of the 'districts' [of the Communes] that . . . the masses, accustoming themselves to act without receiving orders from the national representatives, were practising what was to be described later as Direct Self-Government." Such a system did not imply isolation, for while "the districts strove to maintain their own independence" they also "sought for unity of action, not in subjection to a Central Committee, but in a federative union." The Commune "was thus made from below upward, by the federation of the district organisations; it spring up in a revolutionary way, from popular initiative." [The Great French Revolution, vol. 1, p. 200 and p. 203]

During the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, Kropotkin expressed his support for the soviets created by the workers in struggle. He argued that anarchists should "enter the Soviets, but certainly only as far as the Soviets are organs of the struggle against the bourgeoisie and the state, and not organs of authority." [quoted by Graham Purchase, Evolution and Revolution, p. 30] After the 1917 revolution, he re-iterated this point, arguing that "idea of soviets . . . of councils of workers and peasants . . . controlling the economic and political life of the country is a great idea. All the more so, since it necessarily follows that these councils should be composed of all who take part in the production of natural wealth by their own efforts." [Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 254]

Fisher continues his inaccurate attack:

"What we as Marxists explain is what must replace the smashed bourgeois state machine.

"Engels explains that the state is a 'special coercive force'. So what must come after the bourgeoisie is overthrown to keep it down? As Lenin explains in the State and Revolution: the bourgeois state 'must be replaced by a "special coercive force" for the suppression of the bourgeois by the proletariat (the dictatorship of the proletariat)' (pg 397 vol. 25 collected works) that is workers' democracy."