A.5.3 Building the Syndicalist Unions
Just before the turn of the century in Europe, the anarchist
movement began to create one of the most successful attempts
to apply anarchist organisational ideas in everyday life.
This was the building of mass revolutionary unions (also known
as syndicalism or anarcho-syndicalism). The syndicalist movement,
in the words of a leading French syndicalist militant, was
"a practical schooling in anarchism" for it was "a laboratory
of economic struggles" and organised "along anarchic lines."
By organising workers into "libertarian organisations," the
syndicalist unions were creating the "free associations of
free producers" within capitalism to combat it and, ultimately,
replace it. [Fernand Pelloutier, No Gods, No Masters, vol. 2,
p. 57, p. 55 and p. 56]
While the details of syndicalist organisation varied from country
to country, the main lines were the same. Workers should form
themselves into unions (or syndicates, the French for union).
While organisation by industry was generally the preferred form,
craft and trade organisations were also used. These unions were
directly controlled by their members and would federate together
on an industrial and geographical basis. Thus a given union would
be federated with all the local unions in a given town, region
and country as well as with all the unions within its industry
into a national union (of, say, miners or metal workers). Each
union was autonomous and all officials were part-time (and paid
their normal wages if they missed work on union business). The
tactics of syndicalism were direct action and solidarity and its
aim was to replace capitalism by the unions providing the basic
framework of the new, free, society.
Thus, for anarcho-syndicalism, "the trade union is by no means a
mere transitory phenomenon bound up with the duration of capitalist
society, it is the germ of the Socialist economy of the future,
the elementary school of Socialism in general." The "economic
fighting organisation of the workers" gives their members "every
opportunity for direct action in their struggles for daily bread,
it also provides them with the necessary preliminaries for carrying
through the reorganisation of social life on a [libertarian] Socialist
plan by them own strength." [Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism,
p. 59 and p. 62] Anarcho-syndicalism, to use the expression of the
I.W.W., aims to build the new world in the shell of the old.
In the period from the 1890's to the outbreak of World War I,
anarchists built revolutionary unions in most European countries
(particularly in Spain, Italy and France). In addition, anarchists
in South and North America were also successful in organising
syndicalist unions (particularly Cuba, Argentina, Mexico and
Brazil). Almost all industrialised countries had some syndicalist
movement, although Europe and South America had the biggest and
strongest ones. These unions were organised in a confederal manner,
from the bottom up, along anarchist lines. They fought with
capitalists on a day-to-day basis around the issue of better
wages and working conditions and the state for social reforms, but
they also sought to overthrow capitalism through the revolutionary
general strike.
Thus hundreds of thousands of workers around the world were applying
anarchist ideas in everyday life, proving that anarchy was no utopian
dream but a practical method of organising on a wide scale. That
anarchist organisational techniques encouraged member participation,
empowerment and militancy, and that they also successfully fought for
reforms and promoted class consciousness, can be seen in the growth
of anarcho-syndicalist unions and their impact on the labour movement.
The Industrial Workers of the World, for example, still inspires union
activists and has, throughout its long history, provided many union
songs and slogans.
However, as a mass movement, syndicalism effectively ended by the 1930s.
This was due to two factors. Firstly, most of the syndicalist unions
were severely repressed just after World War I. In the immediate
post-war years they reached their height. This wave of militancy was
known as the "red years" in Italy, where it attained its high point
with factory occupations (see section A.5.5). But these years also
saw the destruction of these unions in country after county. In the
USA, for example, the I.W.W. was crushed by a wave of repression backed
whole-heartedly by the media, the state, and the capitalist class.
Europe saw capitalism go on the offensive with a new weapon -- fascism.
Fascism arose (first in Italy and, most infamously, in Germany) as an
attempt by capitalism to physically smash the organisations the working
class had built. This was due to radicalism that had spread across
Europe in the wake of the war ending, inspired by the example of Russia.
Numerous near revolutions had terrified the bourgeoisie, who turned to
fascism to save their system.
In country after country, anarchists were forced to flee into exile,
vanish from sight, or became victims of assassins or concentration
camps after their (often heroic) attempts at fighting fascism failed.
In Portugal, for example, the 100,000 strong anarcho-syndicalist CGT
union launched numerous revolts in the late 1920s and early 1930s
against fascism. In January 1934, the CGT called for a revolutionary
general strike which developed into a five day insurrection. A state
of siege was declared by the state, which used extensive force to crush
the rebellion. The CGT, whose militants had played a prominent and
courageous role in the insurrection, was completely smashed and Portugal
remained a fascist state for the next 40 years. [Phil Mailer, Portugal:
The Impossible Revolution, pp. 72-3] In Spain, the CNT (the most famous
anarcho-syndicalist union) fought a similar battle. By 1936, it claimed
one and a half million members. As in Italy and Portugal, the capitalist
class embraced fascism to save their power from the dispossessed, who
were becoming confident of their power and their right to manage their
own lives (see section A.5.6).
As well as fascism, syndicalism also faced the negative influence of
Leninism. The apparent success of the Russian revolution led many
activists to turn to authoritarian politics, particularly in English
speaking countries and, to a lesser extent, France. Such notable
syndicalist activists as Tom Mann in England, William Gallacher in
Scotland and William Foster in the USA became Communists (the last
two, it should be noted, became Stalinist). Moreover, Communist
parties deliberately undermined the libertarian unions, encouraging
fights and splits (as, for example, in the I.W.W.). After the end of
the Second World War, the Stalinists finished off what fascism had
started in Eastern Europe and destroyed the anarchist and syndicalist
movements in such places as Bulgaria and Poland. In Cuba, Castro
also followed Lenin's example and did what the Batista and Machado
dictatorship's could not, namely smash the influential anarchist
and syndicalist movements (see Frank Fernandez's Cuban Anarchism
for a history of this movement from its origins in the 1860s to
the 21st century).
So by the start of the second world war, the large and powerful anarchist
movements of Italy, Spain, Poland, Bulgaria and Portugal had been crushed
by fascism (but not, we must stress, without a fight). When necessary,
the capitalists supported authoritarian states in order to crush the
labour movement and make their countries safe for capitalism. Only Sweden
escaped this trend, where the syndicalist union the SAC is still organising
workers. It is, in fact, like many other syndicalist unions active today,
growing as workers turn away from bureaucratic unions whose leaders seem
more interested in protecting their privileges and cutting deals with
management than defending their members. In France, Spain and Italy and
elsewhere, syndicalist unions are again on the rise, showing that
anarchist ideas are applicable in everyday life.
Finally, it must be stressed that syndicalism has its roots in the
ideas of the earliest anarchists and, consequently, was not invented in
the 1890s. It is true that development of syndicalism came about, in
part, as a reaction to the disastrous "propaganda by deed" period,
in which individual anarchists assassinated government leaders in
attempts to provoke a popular uprising and in revenge for the mass
murders of the Communards and other rebels (see
section A.2.18 for
details). But in response to this failed and counterproductive campaign,
anarchists went back to their roots and to the ideas of Bakunin. Thus,
as recognised by the likes of Kropotkin and Malatesta, syndicalism was
simply a return to the ideas current in the libertarian wing of the
First International.
Thus we find Bakunin arguing that "it is necessary to organise
the power of the proletariat. But this organisation must be the
work of the proletariat itself . . . Organise, constantly organise
the international militant solidarity of the workers, in every trade
and country, and remember that however weak you are as isolated
individuals or districts, you will constitute a tremendous,
invincible power by means of universal co-operation." As one
American activist commented, this is "the same militant spirit
that breathes now in the best expressions of the Syndicalist and
I.W.W. movements" both of which express "a strong world wide revival
of the ideas for which Bakunin laboured throughout his life." [Max
Baginski, Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth,
p. 71] As with the syndicalists, Bakunin stressed the "organisation
of trade sections, their federation . . . bear in themselves the
living germs of the new social order, which is to replace the
bourgeois world. They are creating not only the ideas but also the
facts of the future itself." [quoted by Rudolf Rocker, Op. Cit.,
p. 50]
Such ideas were repeated by other libertarians. Eugene Varlin, whose
role in the Paris Commune ensured his death, advocated a socialism
of associations, arguing in 1870 that syndicates were the "natural
elements" for the rebuilding of society: "it is they that can easily
be transformed into producer associations; it is they that can
put into practice the retooling of society and the organisation
of production." [quoted by Martin Phillip Johnson, The Paradise of
Association, p. 139] As we discussed in
section A.5.2, the Chicago
Anarchists held similar views, seeing the labour movement as both the
means of achieving anarchy and the framework of the free society.
As Lucy Parsons (the wife of Albert) put it "we hold that the granges,
trade-unions, Knights of Labour assemblies, etc., are the embryonic
groups of the ideal anarchistic society . . ." [contained in Albert R.
Parsons, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis, p. 110]
These ideas fed into the revolutionary unionism of the I.W.W. As one
historian notes, the "proceedings of the I.W.W.'s inaugural convention
indicate that the participants were not only aware of the 'Chicago Idea'
but were conscious of a continuity between their efforts and the struggles
of the Chicago anarchists to initiate industrial unionism." The Chicago
idea represented "the earliest American expression of syndicalism."
[Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November, p. 71]
Thus, syndicalism and anarchism are not differing theories but, rather,
different interpretations of the same ideas (see for a fuller discussion
section H.2.8). While not all syndicalists are anarchists (some Marxists
have proclaimed support for syndicalism) and not all anarchists are
syndicalists (see section J.3.9
for a discussion why), all social
anarchists see the need for taking part in the labour and other
popular movements and encouraging libertarian forms of organisation
and struggle within them. By doing this, inside and outside of syndicalist
unions, anarchists are showing the validity of our ideas. For, as
Kropotkin stressed, the "next revolution must from its inception
bring about the seizure of the entire social wealth by the workers
in order to transform it into common property. This revolution can
succeed only through the workers, only if the urban and rural workers
everywhere carry out this objective themselves. To that end, they
must initiate their own action in the period before the revolution;
this can happen only if there is a strong workers' organisation."
[Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, p. 20] Such popular
self-managed organisations cannot be anything but "anarchy in action."
The Russian revolution of 1917 saw a huge growth in anarchism
in that country and many experiments in anarchist ideas. However,
in popular culture the Russian Revolution is seen not as a mass
movement by ordinary people struggling towards freedom but as
the means by which Lenin imposed his dictatorship on Russia.
The truth is radically different. The Russian Revolution was
a mass movement from below in which many different currents
of ideas existed and in which millions of working people
(workers in the cities and towns as well as peasants) tried
to transform their world into a better place. Sadly, those
hopes and dreams were crushed under the dictatorship of the
Bolshevik party -- first under Lenin, later under Stalin.
The Russian Revolution, like most history, is a good example
of the maxim "history is written by those who win." Most
capitalist histories of the period between 1917 and 1921
ignore what the anarchist Voline called "the unknown
revolution" -- the revolution called forth from below
by the actions of ordinary people. Leninist accounts, at
best, praise this autonomous activity of workers so long
as it coincides with their own party line but radically
condemn it (and attribute it with the basest motives) as
soon as it strays from that line. Thus Leninist accounts
will praise the workers when they move ahead of the
Bolsheviks (as in the spring and summer of 1917) but
will condemn them when they oppose Bolshevik policy once
the Bolsheviks are in power. At worse, Leninist accounts
portray the movement and struggles of the masses as little
more than a backdrop to the activities of the vanguard party.
For anarchists, however, the Russian Revolution is seen
as a classic example of a social revolution in which the
self-activity of working people played a key role. In
their soviets, factory committees and other class
organisations, the Russian masses were trying to
transform society from a class-ridden, hierarchical
statist regime into one based on liberty, equality and
solidarity. As such, the initial months of the Revolution
seemed to confirm Bakunin's prediction that the "future
social organisation must be made solely from the bottom
upwards, by the free associations or federations of
workers, firstly in their unions, then in the communes,
regions, nations and finally in a great federation,
international and universal." [Michael Bakunin: Selected
Writings, p. 206] The soviets and factory committees
expressed concretely Bakunin's ideas and Anarchists
played an important role in the struggle.
The initial overthrow of the Tsar came from the direct action of
the masses. In February 1917, the women of Petrograd erupted in
bread riots. On February 18th, the workers of the Putilov Works
in Petrograd went on strike. By February 22nd, the strike had
spread to other factories. Two days later, 200 000 workers
were on strike and by February 25th the strike was virtually
general. The same day also saw the first bloody clashes between
protestors and the army. The turning point came on the 27th, when
some troops went over to the revolutionary masses, sweeping along
other units. This left the government without its means of
coercion, the Tsar abdicated and a provisional government was
formed.
So spontaneous was this movement that all the political parties
were left behind. This included the Bolsheviks, with the
"Petrograd organisation of the Bolsheviks oppos[ing] the
calling of strikes precisely on the eve of the revolution
destined to overthrow the Tsar. Fortunately, the workers ignored
the Bolshevik 'directives' and went on strike anyway . . .
Had the workers followed its guidance, it is doubtful
that the revolution would have occurred when it did."
[Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 194]
The revolution carried on in this vein of direct action from
below until the new, "socialist" state was powerful enough to
stop it.
For the Left, the end of Tsarism was the culmination of
years of effort by socialists and anarchists everywhere. It
represented the progressive wing of human thought overcoming
traditional oppression, and as such was duly praised by
leftists around the world. However, in Russia things
were progressing. In the workplaces and streets and on the
land, more and more people became convinced that abolishing
feudalism politically was not enough. The overthrow of the
Tsar made little real difference if feudal exploitation still
existed in the economy, so workers started to seize their
workplaces and peasants, the land. All across Russia,
ordinary people started to build their own organisations,
unions, co-operatives, factory committees and councils (or
"soviets" in Russian). These organisations were initially
organised in anarchist fashion, with recallable delegates
and being federated with each other.
Needless to say, all the political parties and organisations
played a role in this process. The two wings of the Marxist
social-democrats were active (the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks),
as were the Social Revolutionaries (a populist peasant based
party) and the anarchists. The anarchists participated in this
movement, encouraging all tendencies to self-management and
urging the overthrow of the provisional government. They
argued that it was necessary to transform the revolution
from a purely political one into an economic/social one. Until
the return of Lenin from exile, they were the only political
tendency who thought along those lines.
Lenin convinced his party to adopt the slogan "All Power
to the Soviets" and push the revolution forward. This meant
a sharp break with previous Marxist positions, leading one
ex-Bolshevik turned Menshevik to comment that Lenin had
"made himself a candidate for one European throne that has
been vacant for thirty years -- the throne of Bakunin!"
[quoted by Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution,
p. 40] The Bolsheviks now turned to winning mass support,
championing direct action and supporting the radical actions
of the masses, policies in the past associated with anarchism
("the Bolsheviks launched . . . slogans which until then
had been particularly and insistently been voiced by the
Anarchists." [Voline, The Unknown Revolution, p. 210]).
Soon they were winning more and more votes in the soviet and
factory committee elections. As Alexander Berkman argues, the
"Anarchist mottoes proclaimed by the Bolsheviks did not fail
to bring results. The masses relied to their flag." [What is
Anarchism?, p. 120]
The anarchists were also influential at this time. Anarchists
were particularly active in the movement for workers
self-management of production which existed around the
factory committees (see M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and
Workers Control for details). They were arguing for workers
and peasants to expropriate the owning class, abolish all
forms of government and re-organise society from the bottom
up using their own class organisations -- the soviets, the
factory committees, co-operatives and so on. They could
also influence the direction of struggle. As Alexander
Rabinowitch (in his study of the July uprising of 1917)
notes:
"At the rank-and-file level, particularly within the
[Petrograd] garrison and at the Kronstadt naval base,
there was in fact very little to distinguish Bolshevik
from Anarchist. . . The Anarchist-Communists and the
Bolsheviks competed for the support of the same
uneducated, depressed, and dissatisfied elements of
the population, and the fact is that in the summer of
1917, the Anarchist-Communists, with the support they
enjoyed in a few important factories and regiments,
possessed an undeniable capacity to influence the
course of events. Indeed, the Anarchist appeal was
great enough in some factories and military units
to influence the actions of the Bolsheviks themselves."
[Op. Cit., p. 64]
Indeed, one leading Bolshevik stated in June, 1917 (in
response to a rise in anarchist influence), "[b]y fencing
ourselves off from the Anarchists, we may fence ourselves
off from the masses." [quoted by Alexander Rabinowitch,
Op. Cit., p. 102]
The anarchists operated with the Bolsheviks during the
October Revolution which overthrew the provisional
government. But things changed once the authoritarian
socialists of the Bolshevik party had seized power.
While both anarchists and Bolsheviks used many of the
same slogans, there were important differences between
the two. As Voline argued, "[f]rom the lips and pens of
the Anarchists, those slogans were sincere and concrete,
for they corresponded to their principles and called for
action entirely in conformity with such principles. But
with the Bolsheviks, the same slogans meant practical
solutions totally different from those of the libertarians
and did not tally with the ideas which the slogans
appeared to express." [The Unknown Revolution,
p. 210]
Take, for example, the slogan "All power to the Soviets."
For anarchists it meant exactly that -- organs for the
working class to run society directly, based on mandated,
recallable delegates. For the Bolsheviks, that slogan was
simply the means for a Bolshevik government to be formed
over and above the soviets. The difference is important, "for
the Anarchists declared, if 'power' really should belong
to the soviets, it could not belong to the Bolshevik
party, and if it should belong to that Party, as the
Bolsheviks envisaged, it could not belong to the soviets."
[Voline, Op. Cit., p. 213] Reducing the soviets to simply
executing the decrees of the central (Bolshevik)
government and having their All-Russian Congress be
able to recall the government (i.e. those with real
power) does not equal "all power," quite the reverse.
Similarly with the term "workers' control of production."
Before the October Revolution Lenin saw "workers' control"
purely in terms of the "universal, all-embracing workers'
control over the capitalists." [Will the Bolsheviks
Maintain Power?, p. 52] He did not see it in terms of
workers' management of production itself (i.e. the
abolition of wage labour) via federations of factory
committees. Anarchists and the workers' factory committees
did. As S.A. Smith correctly notes, Lenin used "the term
['workers' control'] in a very different sense from that
of the factory committees." In fact Lenin's "proposals . . .
[were] thoroughly statist and centralist in character,
whereas the practice of the factory committees was
essentially local and autonomous." [Red Petrograd,
p. 154] For anarchists, "if the workers' organisations
were capable of exercising effective control [over
their bosses], then they also were capable of
guaranteeing all production. In such an event, private
industry could be eliminated quickly but progressively,
and replaced by collective industry. Consequently,
the Anarchists rejected the vague nebulous slogan of
'control of production.' They advocated expropriation
-- progressive, but immediate -- of private industry
by the organisations of collective production."
[Voline, Op. Cit., p. 221]
Once in power, the Bolsheviks systematically undermined the
popular meaning of workers' control and replaced it with their
own, statist conception. "On three occasions," one historian
notes, "in the first months of Soviet power, the [factory]
committee leaders sought to bring their model into being.
At each point the party leadership overruled them. The
result was to vest both managerial and control powers
in organs of the state which were subordinate to the
central authorities, and formed by them." [Thomas F.
Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia, p. 38]
This process ultimately resulted in Lenin arguing for, and
introducing, "one-man management" armed with "dictatorial"
power (with the manager appointed from above by the state)
in April 1918. This process is documented in Maurice
Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, which
also indicates the clear links between Bolshevik practice
and Bolshevik ideology as well as how both differed from
popular activity and ideas.
Hence the comments by Russian Anarchist Peter Arshinov:
"Another no less important peculiarity is that [the] October
[revolution of 1917] has two meanings -- that which the working'
masses who participated in the social revolution gave it, and
with them the Anarchist-Communists, and that which was given
it by the political party [the Marxist-Communists] that captured
power from this aspiration to social revolution, and which
betrayed and stifled all further development. An enormous gulf
exists between these two interpretations of October. The October
of the workers and peasants is the suppression of the power of
the parasite classes in the name of equality and self-management.
The Bolshevik October is the conquest of power by the party of
the revolutionary intelligentsia, the installation of its 'State
Socialism' and of its 'socialist' methods of governing the masses."
[The Two Octobers]
Initially, anarchists had supported the Bolsheviks, since the
Bolshevik leaders had hidden their state-building ideology
behind support for the soviets (as socialist historian Samuel
Farber notes, the anarchists "had actually been an unnamed
coalition partner of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution."
[Before Stalinism, p. 126]). However, this support quickly
"withered away" as the Bolsheviks showed that they were, in
fact, not seeking true socialism but were instead securing power
for themselves and pushing not for collective ownership of land
and productive resources but for government ownership. The
Bolsheviks, as noted, systematically undermined the workers'
control/self-management movement in favour of capitalist-like
forms of workplace management based around "one-man management"
armed with "dictatorial powers."
As regards the soviets, the Bolsheviks systematically undermining
what limited independence and democracy they had. In response to
the "great Bolshevik losses in the soviet elections" during the
spring and summer of 1918 "Bolshevik armed force usually overthrew
the results of these provincial elections." Also, the "government
continually postponed the new general elections to the Petrograd
Soviet, the term of which had ended in March 1918. Apparently,
the government feared that the opposition parties would show
gains." [Samuel Farber, Op. Cit., p. 24 and p. 22] In the
Petrograd elections, the Bolsheviks "lost the absolute majority
in the soviet they had previously enjoyed" but remained the
largest party. However, the results of the Petrograd soviet
elections were irrelevant as a "Bolshevik victory was
assured by the numerically quite significant representation
now given to trade unions, district soviets, factory-shop
committees, district workers conferences, and Red Army and
naval units, in which the Bolsheviks had overwhelming
strength." [Alexander Rabinowitch, "The Evolution of Local
Soviets in Petrograd", pp. 20-37, Slavic Review, Vol. 36,
No. 1, p. 36f] In other words, the Bolsheviks had undermined
the democratic nature of the soviet by swamping it by their
own delegates. Faced with rejection in the soviets, the
Bolsheviks showed that for them "soviet power" equalled party power.
To stay in power, the Bolsheviks had to destroy the soviets,
which they did. The soviet system remained "soviet" in name
only. Indeed, from 1919 onwards Lenin, Trotsky and other
leading Bolsheviks were admitting that they had created a
party dictatorship and, moreover, that such a dictatorship
was essential for any revolution (Trotsky supported party
dictatorship even after the rise of Stalinism).
The Red Army, moreover, no longer was a democratic organisation.
In March of 1918 Trotsky had abolished the election of officers
and soldier committees:
"the principle of election is politically purposeless and
technically inexpedient, and it has been, in practice,
abolished by decree." [Work, Discipline, Order]
As Maurice Brinton correctly summarises:
"Trotsky, appointed Commissar of Military Affairs after
Brest-Litovsk, had rapidly been reorganising the Red Army.
The death penalty for disobedience under fire had been
restored. So, more gradually, had saluting, special forms
of address, separate living quarters and other privileges
for officers. Democratic forms of organisation, including
the election of officers, had been quickly dispensed with."
[The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, p. 37]
Unsurprisingly, Samuel Farber notes that "there is no
evidence indicating that Lenin or any of the mainstream
Bolshevik leaders lamented the loss of workers' control or
of democracy in the soviets, or at least referred to these
losses as a retreat, as Lenin declared with the replacement
of War Communism by NEP in 1921." [Before Stalinism,
p. 44]
Thus after the October Revolution, anarchists started to denounce
the Bolshevik regime and call for a "Third Revolution"
which would finally free the masses from all bosses (capitalist or
socialist). They exposed the fundamental difference between the
rhetoric of Bolshevism (as expressed, for example, in Lenin's
State and Revolution) with its reality. Bolshevism in power
had proved Bakunin's prediction that the "dictatorship of
the proletariat" would become the "dictatorship
over the proletariat" by the leaders of the Communist Party.
The influence of the anarchists started to grow. As Jacques
Sadoul (a French officer) noted in early 1918:
"The anarchist party is the most active, the most militant
of the opposition groups and probably the most popular . . .
The Bolsheviks are anxious." [quoted by Daniel Guerin,
Anarchism, pp. 95-6]
By April 1918, the Bolsheviks began the physical suppression of their
anarchist rivals. On April 12th, 1918, the Cheka (the secret police
formed by Lenin in December, 1917) attacked anarchist centres in
Moscow. Those in other cities were attacked soon after. As well
as repressing their most vocal opponents on the left, the Bolsheviks
were restricting the freedom of the masses they claimed to be
protecting. Democratic soviets, free speech, opposition political
parties and groups, self-management in the workplace and
on the land -- all were destroyed in the name of "socialism."
All this happened, we must stress, before the start of the Civil
War in late May, 1918, which most supporters of Leninism blame
for the Bolsheviks' authoritarianism. During the civil war, this
process accelerated, with the Bolsheviks' systematically repressing
opposition from all quarters -- including the strikes and protests
of the very class who they claimed was exercising its "dictatorship"
while they were in power!
It is important to stress that this process had started
well before the start of the civil war, confirming anarchist
theory that a "workers' state" is a contraction in terms. For
anarchists, the Bolshevik substitution of party power for
workers power (and the conflict between the two) did not
come as a surprise. The state is the delegation of power --
as such, it means that the idea of a "workers' state" expressing
"workers' power" is a logical impossibility. If workers are
running society then power rests in their hands. If a state
exists then power rests in the hands of the handful of people
at the top, not in the hands of all. The state was designed
for minority rule. No state can be an organ of working class
(i.e. majority) self-management due to its basic nature,
structure and design. For this reason anarchists have argued
for a bottom-up federation of workers' councils as the
agent of revolution and the means of managing society
after capitalism and the state have been abolished.
As we discuss in section H,
the degeneration of the Bolsheviks
from a popular working class party into dictators over the
working class did not occur by accident. A combination of
political ideas and the realities of state power (and the
social relationships it generates) could not help but result
in such a degeneration. The political ideas of Bolshevism,
with its vanguardism, fear of spontaneity and identification
of party power with working class power inevitably meant
that the party would clash with those whom it claimed to
represent. After all, if the party is the vanguard then,
automatically, everyone else is a "backward" element. This
meant that if the working class resisted Bolshevik policies
or rejected them in soviet elections, then the working class
was "wavering" and being influenced by "petty-bourgeois" and
"backward" elements. Vanguardism breeds elitism and, when
combined with state power, dictatorship.
State power, as anarchists have always stressed, means the
delegation of power into the hands of a few. This automatically
produces a class division in society -- those with power
and those without. As such, once in power the Bolsheviks were
isolated from the working class. The Russian Revolution
confirmed Malatesta's argument that a "government, that is a
group of people entrusted with making laws and empowered to
use the collective power to oblige each individual to obey
them, is already a privileged class and cut off from the
people. As any constituted body would do, it will instinctively
seek to extend its powers, to be beyond public control, to
impose its own policies and to give priority to its special
interests. Having been put in a privileged position, the
government is already at odds with the people whose strength
it disposes of." [Anarchy, p. 34] A highly centralised state
such as the Bolsheviks built would reduce accountability
to a minimum while at the same time accelerating the isolation
of the rulers from the ruled. The masses were no longer
a source of inspiration and power, but rather an alien
group whose lack of "discipline" (i.e. ability to follow
orders) placed the revolution in danger. As one Russian
Anarchist argued,
"The proletariat is being gradually enserfed by the state. The
people are being transformed into servants over whom there has
arisen a new class of administrators -- a new class born mainly
form the womb of the so-called intelligentsia . . . We do not
mean to say . . . that the Bolshevik party set out to create a
new class system. But we do say that even the best intentions
and aspirations must inevitably be smashed against the evils
inherent in any system of centralised power. The separation of
management from labour, the division between administrators and
workers flows logically from centralisation. It cannot be
otherwise." [The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution,
pp. 123-4]
For this reason anarchists, while agreeing that there is an
uneven development of political ideas within the working class,
reject the idea that "revolutionaries" should take power on
behalf of working people. Only when working people actually
run society themselves will a revolution be successful. For
anarchists, this meant that "[e]ffective emancipation can
be achieved only by the direct, widespread, and independent
action . . . of the workers themselves, grouped . . . in
their own class organisations . . . on the basis of
concrete action and self-government, helped but not
governed, by revolutionaries working in the very midst
of, and not above the mass and the professional, technical,
defence and other branches." [Voline, Op. Cit.,
p. 197] By
substituting party power for workers power, the Russian
Revolution had made its first fatal step. Little wonder
that the following prediction (from November 1917)
made by anarchists in Russia came true:
"Once their power is consolidated and 'legalised', the Bolsheviks
who are . . . men of centralist and authoritarian action will
begin to rearrange the life of the country and of the people by
governmental and dictatorial methods, imposed by the centre.
The[y] . . . will dictate the will of the party to all Russia,
and command the whole nation. Your Soviets and your other local
organisations will become little by little, simply executive organs
of the will of the central government. In the place of healthy,
constructive work by the labouring masses, in place of free
unification from the bottom, we will see the installation of
an authoritarian and statist apparatus which would act from
above and set about wiping out everything that stood in its
way with an iron hand." [quoted by Voline, Op. Cit., p. 235]
The so-called "workers' state" could not be participatory
or empowering for working class people (as the Marxists
claimed) simply because state structures are not designed
for that. Created as instruments of minority rule, they
cannot be transformed into (nor "new" ones created which
are) a means of liberation for the working classes. As
Kropotkin put it, Anarchists "maintain that the State
organisation, having been the force to which minorities
resorted for establishing and organising their power
over the masses, cannot be the force which will
serve to destroy these privileges." [Anarchism, p. 170] In the words of
an anarchist pamphlet written in 1918:
"Bolshevism, day by day and step by step, proves that state
power possesses inalienable characteristics; it can change
its label, its 'theory', and its servitors, but in essence
it merely remains power and despotism in new forms." [quoted
by Paul Avrich, "The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution,"
pp. 341-350, Russian Review, vol. 26, issue no. 4, p. 347]
For insiders, the Revolution had died a few months after the
Bolsheviks took over. To the outside world, the Bolsheviks and
the USSR came to represent "socialism" even as they systematically
destroyed the basis of real socialism. By transforming the soviets
into state bodies, substituting party power for soviet power,
undermining the factory committees, eliminating democracy in
the armed forces and workplaces, repressing the political
opposition and workers' protests, the Bolsheviks effectively
marginalised the working class from its own revolution.
Bolshevik ideology and practice were themselves important
and sometimes decisive factors in the degeneration of the
revolution and the ultimate rise of Stalinism.
As anarchists had predicted for decades previously, in the
space of a few months, and before the start of the Civil War,
the Bolshevik's "workers' state" had become, like any state,
an alien power over the working class and an instrument of
minority rule (in this case, the rule of the party). The Civil
War accelerated this process and soon party dictatorship was
introduced (indeed, leading Bolsheviks began arguing that it
was essential in any revolution). The Bolsheviks put down the
libertarian socialist elements within their country, with the
crushing of the uprising at Kronstadt and the Makhnovist
movement in the Ukraine being the final nails in the coffin
of socialism and the subjugation of the soviets.
The Kronstadt uprising of February, 1921, was, for anarchists, of
immense importance (see the appendix "What was the Kronstadt
Rebellion?" for a full discussion of this
uprising). The uprising started when the sailors of Kronstadt
supported the striking workers of Petrograd in February, 1921.
They raised a 15 point resolution, the first point of which
was a call for soviet democracy. The Bolsheviks slandered the
Kronstadt rebels as counter-revolutionaries and crushed the
revolt. For anarchists, this was significant as the repression
could not be justified in terms of the Civil War (which had
ended months before) and because it was a major uprising of
ordinary people for real socialism. As Voline puts it:
"Kronstadt was the first entirely independent attempt of the
people to liberate themselves of all yokes and carry out the
Social Revolution: this attempt was made directly . . . by
the working masses themselves, without political shepherds,
without leaders or tutors. It was the first step towards the
third and social revolution." [Voline, Op. Cit.,
pp. 537-8]
In the Ukraine, anarchist ideas were most successfully applied.
In areas under the protection of the Makhnovist movement, working
class people organised their own lives directly, based on their
own ideas and needs -- true social self-determination. Under the
leadership of Nestor Makhno, a self-educated peasant, the movement
not only fought against both Red and White dictatorships but also
resisted the Ukrainian nationalists. In opposition to the call
for "national self-determination," i.e. a new Ukrainian state,
Makhno called instead for working class self-determination in
the Ukraine and across the world. Makhno inspired his fellow
peasants and workers to fight for real freedom:
"Conquer or die -- such is the dilemma that faces the Ukrainian
peasants and workers at this historic moment . . . But we will
not conquer in order to repeat the errors of the past years,
the error of putting our fate into the hands of new masters;
we will conquer in order to take our destinies into our own
hands, to conduct our lives according to our own will and
our own conception of the truth." [quoted by Peter Arshinov,
History of the Makhnovist Movement, p. 58]
To ensure this end, the Makhnovists refused to set up
governments in the towns and cities they liberated, instead
urging the creation of free soviets so that the working
people could govern themselves. Taking the example of
Aleksandrovsk, once they had liberated the city the
Makhnovists "immediately invited the working population
to participate in a general conference . . . it was
proposed that the workers organise the life of the city
and the functioning of the factories with their own
forces and their own organisations . . . The first
conference was followed by a second. The problems of
organising life according to principles of self-management
by workers were examined and discussed with animation
by the masses of workers, who all welcomed this ideas
with the greatest enthusiasm . . . Railroad workers
took the first step . . . They formed a committee
charged with organising the railway network of the
region . . . From this point, the proletariat of
Aleksandrovsk began to turn systematically to the problem
of creating organs of self-management."
[Op. Cit., p. 149]
The Makhnovists argued that the "freedom of the workers and
peasants is their own, and not subject to any restriction. It
is up to the workers and peasants themselves to act, to
organise themselves, to agree among themselves in all
aspects of their lives, as they see fit and desire . . .
The Makhnovists can do no more than give aid and counsel . . .
In no circumstances can they, nor do they wish to, govern."
[Peter Arshinov, quoted by Guerin, Op. Cit., p. 99] In Alexandrovsk, the Bolsheviks proposed to the Makhnovists
spheres of action - their Revkom (Revolutionary Committee)
would handle political affairs and the Makhnovists military
ones. Makhno advised them "to go and take up some honest
trade instead of seeking to impose their will on the
workers." [Peter Arshinov in The Anarchist Reader,
p. 141]
They also organised free agricultural communes which
"[a]dmittedly . . . were not numerous, and included only
a minority of the population . . . But what was most
precious was that these communes were formed by the poor
peasants themselves. The Makhnovists never exerted any
pressure on the peasants, confining themselves to propagating
the idea of free communes." [Arshinov, History of the
Makhnovist Movement, p. 87] Makhno played an
important role in abolishing the holdings of the landed
gentry. The local soviet and their district and regional
congresses equalised the use of the land between all
sections of the peasant community. [Op. Cit., pp. 53-4]
Moreover, the Makhnovists took the time and energy to involve
the whole population in discussing the development of the
revolution, the activities of the army and social policy.
They organised numerous conferences of workers', soldiers'
and peasants' delegates to discuss political and social
issues as well as free soviets, unions and communes. They
organised a regional congress of peasants and workers when
they had liberated Aleksandrovsk. When the Makhnovists
tried to convene the third regional congress of peasants,
workers and insurgents in April 1919 and an extraordinary
congress of several regions in June 1919 the Bolsheviks
viewed them as counter-revolutionary, tried to ban them
and declared their organisers and delegates outside the law.
The Makhnovists replied by holding the conferences anyway
and asking "[c]an there exist laws made by a few people
who call themselves revolutionaries, which permit them to
outlaw a whole people who are more revolutionary than they
are themselves?" and "[w]hose interests should the revolution
defend: those of the Party or those of the people who set
the revolution in motion with their blood?" Makhno himself
stated that he "consider[ed] it an inviolable right of the
workers and peasants, a right won by the revolution, to call
conferences on their own account, to discuss their affairs."
[Op. Cit., p. 103 and p. 129]
In addition, the Makhnovists "fully applied the revolutionary
principles of freedom of speech, of thought, of the press,
and of political association. In all cities and towns
occupied by the Makhnovists, they began by lifting all
the prohibitions and repealing all the restrictions
imposed on the press and on political organisations by
one or another power." Indeed, the "only restriction that
the Makhnovists considered necessary to impose on the
Bolsheviks, the left Socialist-Revolutionaries and other
statists was a prohibition on the formation of those
'revolutionary committees' which sought to impose a
dictatorship over the people." [Op. Cit.,
p. 153 and p. 154]
The Makhnovists rejected the Bolshevik corruption of the
soviets and instead proposed "the free and completely
independent soviet system of working people without
authorities and their arbitrary laws." Their
proclamations stated that the "working people
themselves must freely choose their own soviets,
which carry out the will and desires of the working
people themselves, that is to say. ADMINISTRATIVE,
not ruling soviets." Economically, capitalism would
be abolished along with the state - the land and
workshops "must belong to the working people themselves,
to those who work in them, that is to say, they must be
socialised." [Op. Cit., p. 271 and p. 273]
The army itself, in stark contrast to the Red Army, was
fundamentally democratic (although, of course, the horrific
nature of the civil war did result in a few deviations from
the ideal -- however, compared to the regime imposed on the
Red Army by Trotsky, the Makhnovists were much more democratic
movement).
The anarchist experiment of self-management in the Ukraine came
to a bloody end when the Bolsheviks turned on the Makhnovists
(their former allies against the "Whites," or pro-Tsarists)
when they were no longer needed. This important movement is
fully discussed in the appendix "Why does the Makhnovist
movement show there is an alternative to Bolshevism?" of our FAQ. However, we must
stress here the one obvious lesson of the Makhnovist movement,
namely that the dictatorial policies pursued by the Bolsheviks
were not imposed on them by objective circumstances. Rather,
the political ideas of Bolshevism had a clear influence in
the decisions they made. After all, the Makhnovists were active
in the same Civil War and yet did not pursue the same policies
of party power as the Bolsheviks did. Rather, they successfully
encouraged working class freedom, democracy and power in
extremely difficult circumstances (and in the face of strong
Bolshevik opposition to those policies). The received wisdom
on the left is that there was no alternative open to the
Bolsheviks. The experience of the Makhnovists disproves this.
What the masses of people, as well as those in power, do and
think politically is as much part of the process determining
the outcome of history as are the objective obstacles that
limit the choices available. Clearly, ideas do matter and,
as such, the Makhnovists show that there was (and is) a
practical alternative to Bolshevism -- anarchism.
The last anarchist march in Moscow until 1987 took place at the
funeral of Kropotkin in 1921, when over 10,000 marched behind
his coffin. They carried black banners declaring "Where there
is authority, there is no freedom" and "The Liberation of the
working class is the task of the workers themselves." As the
procession passed the Butyrki prison, the inmates sang anarchist
songs and shook the bars of their cells.
Anarchist opposition within Russia to the Bolshevik regime started
in 1918. They were the first left-wing group to be repressed by the
new "revolutionary" regime. Outside of Russia, anarchists continued
to support the Bolsheviks until news came from anarchist sources
about the repressive nature of the Bolshevik regime (until then,
many had discounted negative reports as being from pro-capitalist
sources). Once these reliable reports came in, anarchists across
the globe rejected Bolshevism and its system of party power and
repression. The experience of Bolshevism confirmed Bakunin's
prediction that Marxism meant "the highly despotic government
of the masses by a new and very small aristocracy of real or
pretended scholars. The people are not learned, so they will
be liberated from the cares of government and included in
entirety in the governed herd." [Statism and Anarchy,
pp. 178-9]
From about 1921 on, anarchists outside of Russia started describing
the USSR as a "state-capitalist" nation to indicate that although
individual bosses might have been eliminated, the Soviet state
bureaucracy played the same role as individual bosses do in the
West (anarchists within Russia had been calling it that since
1918). For anarchists, "the Russian revolution . . . is trying
to reach . . . economic equality . . . this effort has been made
in Russia under a strongly centralised party dictatorship . . .
this effort to build a communist republic on the basis of a
strongly centralised state communism under the iron law of a
party dictatorship is bound to end in failure. We are learning
to know in Russia how not to introduce communism."
[Anarchism, p. 254]
For more information on the Russian Revolution and the role
played by anarchists, see the appendix on
"The Russian Revolution"
of the FAQ. As well as covering the Kronstadt uprising and the
Makhnovists, it discusses why the revolution failed, the role of
Bolshevik ideology played in that failure and whether there were
any alternatives to Bolshevism.
The following books are also recommended: The Unknown Revolution
by Voline; The Guillotine at Work by G.P. Maximov; The Bolshevik
Myth and The Russian Tragedy, both by Alexander Berkman; The
Bolsheviks and Workers Control by M. Brinton; The Kronstadt
Uprising by Ida Mett; The History of the Makhnovist Movement
by Peter Arshinov; My Disillusionment in Russia and Living
My Life by Emma Goldman.
Many of these books were written by anarchists active during
the revolution, many imprisoned by the Bolsheviks and deported
to the West due to international pressure exerted by
anarcho-syndicalist delegates to Moscow who the Bolsheviks
were trying to win over to Leninism. The majority of such
delegates stayed true to their libertarian politics and
convinced their unions to reject Bolshevism and break with
Moscow. By the early 1920's all the anarcho-syndicalist union
confederations had joined with the anarchists in rejecting
the "socialism" in Russia as state capitalism and party
dictatorship.
After the end of the First World War there was a massive radicalisation
across Europe and the world. Union membership exploded, with strikes,
demonstrations and agitation reaching massive levels. This was partly
due to the war, partly to the apparent success of the Russian Revolution.
This enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution even reached Individualist
Anarchists like Joseph Labadie, who like many other anti-capitalists,
saw "the red in the east [giving] hope of a brighter day" and the
Bolsheviks as making "laudable efforts to at least try some way out
of the hell of industrial slavery." [quoted by Carlotta R. Anderson,
All-American Anarchist p. 225 and p. 241]
Across Europe, anarchist ideas became more popular and anarcho-syndicalist
unions grew in size. For example, in Britain, the ferment produced the
shop stewards' movement and the strikes on Clydeside; Germany saw the
rise of IWW inspired industrial unionism and a libertarian form of
Marxism called "Council Communism"; Spain saw a massive growth in the
anarcho-syndicalist CNT. In addition, it also, unfortunately, saw the
rise and growth of both social democratic and communist parties. Italy
was no exception.
In Turin, a new rank-and-file movement was developing. This
movement was based around the "internal commissions" (elected
ad hoc grievance committees). These new organisations were
based directly on the group of people who worked together
in a particular work shop, with a mandated and recallable
shop steward elected for each group of 15 to 20 or so
workers. The assembly of all the shop stewards in a given
plant then elected the "internal commission" for that
facility, which was directly and constantly responsible
to the body of shop stewards, which was called the
"factory council."
Between November 1918 and March 1919, the internal commissions
had become a national issue within the trade union movement.
On February 20, 1919, the Italian Federation of Metal Workers
(FIOM) won a contract providing for the election of "internal
commissions" in the factories. The workers subsequently tried to
transform these organs of workers' representation into factory
councils with a managerial function. By May Day 1919, the
internal commissions "were becoming the dominant force within
the metalworking industry and the unions were in danger of
becoming marginal administrative units. Behind these alarming
developments, in the eyes of reformists, lay the libertarians."
[Carl Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists, p. 135] By November
1919 the internal commissions of Turin were transformed into
factory councils.
The movement in Turin is usually associated with the weekly
L'Ordine Nuovo (The New Order), which first appeared on
May 1, 1919. As Daniel Guerin summarises, it was "edited by
a left socialist, Antonio Gramsci, assisted by a professor
of philosophy at Turin University with anarchist ideas,
writing under the pseudonym of Carlo Petri, and also of a
whole nucleus of Turin libertarians. In the factories, the
Ordine Nuovo group was supported by a number of people,
especially the anarcho-syndicalist militants of the metal
trades, Pietro Ferrero and Maurizio Garino. The manifesto
of Ordine Nuovo was signed by socialists and libertarians
together, agreeing to regard the factory councils as
'organs suited to future communist management of both
the individual factory and the whole society.'"
[Anarchism, p. 109]
The developments in Turin should not be taken in isolation.
All across Italy, workers and peasants were taking action.
In late February 1920, a rash of factory occupations
broke out in Liguria, Piedmont and Naples. In Liguria, the
workers occupied the metal and shipbuilding plants in
Sestri Ponente, Cornigliano and Campi after a breakdown
of pay talks. For up to four days, under syndicalist
leadership, they ran the plants through factory councils.
During this period the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) grew
in size to around 800 000 members and the influence of the
Italian Anarchist Union (UAI) with its 20 000 members and
daily paper (Umanita Nova) grew correspondingly. As the
Welsh Marxist historian Gwyn A. Williams points out "Anarchists
and revolutionary syndicalists were the most consistently and
totally revolutionary group on the left . . . the most
obvious feature of the history of syndicalism and anarchism
in 1919-20: rapid and virtually continuous growth . . . The
syndicalists above all captured militant working-class opinion
which the socialist movement was utterly failing to capture."
[Proletarian Order, pp. 194-195] In Turin, libertarians
"worked within FIOM" and had been "heavily involved in the
Ordine Nuovo campaign from the beginning."
[Op. Cit.,
p. 195] Unsurprisingly, Ordone Nuovo was denounced as
"syndicalist" by other socialists.
It was the anarchists and syndicalists who first raised the
idea of occupying workplaces. Malatesta was discussing
this idea in Umanita Nova in March, 1920. In his words,
"General strikes of protest no longer upset anyone . . . One
must seek something else. We put forward an idea: take-over
of factories. . . the method certainly has a future, because
it corresponds to the ultimate ends of the workers' movement
and constitutes an exercise preparing one for the ultimate
act of expropriation." [Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 134] In the
same month, during "a strong syndicalist campaign to establish
councils in Mila, Armando Borghi [anarchist secretary of the
USI] called for mass factory occupations. In Turin, the
re-election of workshop commissars was just ending in a
two-week orgy of passionate discussion and workers caught
the fever. [Factory Council] Commissars began to call for
occupations." Indeed, "the council movement outside Turin
was essentially anarcho-syndicalist." Unsurprisingly,
the secretary of the syndicalist metal-workers "urged
support for the Turin councils because they represented
anti-bureaucratic direct action, aimed at control
of the factory and could be the first cells of syndicalist
industrial unions . . . The syndicalist congress voted
to support the councils. . . . Malatesta . . . supported
them as a form of direct action guaranteed to generate
rebelliousness . . . Umanita Nova and Guerra di Classe
[paper of the USI] became almost as committed to the
councils as L'Ordine Nuovo and the Turin edition of
Avanti." [Williams, Op. Cit., p. 200, p. 193 and
p. 196]
The upsurge in militancy soon provoked an employer
counter-offensive. The bosses organisation denounced
the factory councils and called for a mobilisation
against them. Workers were rebelling and refusing
to follow the bosses orders -- "indiscipline" was
rising in the factories. They won state support for
the enforcement of the existing industrial regulations.
The national contract won by the FIOM in 1919 had
provided that the internal commissions were banned from
the shop floor and restricted to non-working hours.
This meant that the activities of the shop stewards'
movement in Turin -- such as stopping work to hold shop
steward elections -- were in violation of the contract.
The movement was essentially being maintained through
mass insubordination. The bosses used this infringement
of the agreed contract as the means combating the factory
councils in Turin.
The showdown with the employers arrived in April, when a
general assembly of shop stewards at Fiat called for sit-in
strikes to protest the dismissal of several shop stewards.
In response the employers declared a general lockout. The
government supported the lockout with a mass show of force
and troops occupied the factories and mounted machine guns
posts at them. When the shop stewards movement decided to
surrender on the immediate issues in dispute after two
weeks on strike, the employers responded with demands that
the shop stewards councils be limited to non-working hours,
in accordance with the FIOM national contract, and that
managerial control be re-imposed.
These demands were aimed at the heart of the factory council
system and Turin labour movement responded with a massive
general strike in defence of it. In Turin, the strike was
total and it soon spread throughout the region of Piedmont
and involved 500 000 workers at its height. The Turin
strikers called for the strike to be extended nationally
and, being mostly led by socialists, they turned to the
CGL trade union and Socialist Party leaders, who rejected
their call.
The only support for the Turin general strike came from
unions that were mainly under anarcho-syndicalist influence,
such as the independent railway and the maritime workers
unions ("The syndicalists were the only ones to move."). The railway workers in
Pisa and Florence refused to transport troops who were
being sent to Turin. There were strikes all around Genoa,
among dock workers and in workplaces where the USI was a
major influence. So in spite of being "betrayed and abandoned
by the whole socialist movement," the April movement "still
found popular support" with "actions . . . either directly
led or indirectly inspired by anarcho-syndicalists."
In Turin itself, the anarchists and syndicalists were
"threatening to cut the council movement out from
under" Gramsci and the Ordine Nuovo group.
[Williams, Op. Cit., p. 207, p. 193 and p. 194]
Eventually the CGL leadership settled the strike on terms
that accepted the employers' main demand for limiting the
shop stewards' councils to non-working hours. Though the
councils were now much reduced in activity and shop floor
presence, they would yet see a resurgence of their position
during the September factory occupations.
The anarchists "accused the socialists of betrayal.
They criticised what they believed was a false sense
of discipline that had bound socialists to their own
cowardly leadership. They contrasted the discipline
that placed every movement under the 'calculations,
fears, mistakes and possible betrayals of the leaders'
to the other discipline of the workers of Sestri Ponente
who struck in solidarity with Turin, the discipline of
the railway workers who refused to transport security
forces to Turin and the anarchists and members of the
Unione Sindacale who forgot considerations of party
and sect to put themselves at the disposition of the
Torinesi." [Carl Levy, Op. Cit., p. 161] Sadly, this
top-down "discipline" of the socialists and their
unions would be repeated during the factory
occupations, with terrible results.
In September, 1920, there were large-scale stay-in
strikes in Italy in response to an owner wage cut
and lockout. "Central to the climate of the crisis
was the rise of the syndicalists." In mid-August,
the USI metal-workers "called for both unions to
occupy the factories" and called for "a preventive
occupation" against lock-outs. The USI saw this as the
"expropriation of the factories by the metal-workers"
(which must "be defended by all necessary measures") and
saw the need "to call the workers of other industries
into battle." [Williams, Op. Cit., p. 236, pp. 238-9]
Indeed, "[i]f the FIOM had not embraced the syndicalist
idea of an occupation of factories to counter an employer's
lockout, the USI may well have won significant support
from the politically active working class of Turin."
[Carl Levy, Op. Cit., p. 129] These strikes began in
the engineering factories and soon spread to railways,
road transport, and other industries, with peasants seizing
land. The strikers, however, did more than just occupy their
workplaces, they placed them under workers' self-management.
Soon over 500 000 "strikers" were at work, producing for
themselves. Errico Malatesta, who took part in these events,
writes:
"The metal workers started the movement over wage rates. It was
a strike of a new kind. Instead of abandoning the factories, the
idea was to remain inside without working . . . Throughout Italy
there was a revolutionary fervour among the workers and soon the
demands changed their characters. Workers thought that the moment
was ripe to take possession once [and] for all the means of
production. They armed for defence . . . and began to organise
production on their own . . . It was the right of property
abolished in fact . . .; it was a new regime, a new form of
social life that was being ushered in. And the government
stood by because it felt impotent to offer opposition."
[Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 134]
Daniel Guerin provides a good summary of the extent of the movement:
"The management of the factories . . . [was] conducted by technical
and administrative workers' committees. Self-management went quite a
long way: in the early period assistance was obtained from the banks,
but when it was withdrawn the self-management system issued its own
money to pay the workers' wages. Very strict self-discipline was
required, the use of alcoholic beverages forbidden, and armed
patrols were organised for self-defence. Very close solidarity
was established between the factories under self-management. Ores
and coal were put into a common pool, and shared out equitably."
[Anarchism, p. 109]
Italy was "paralysed, with half a million workers occupying their
factories and raising red and black flags over them." The movement
spread throughout Italy, not only in the industrial heartland
around Milan, Turin and Genoa, but also in Rome, Florence,
Naples and Palermo. The "militants of the USI were certainly in
the forefront of the movement," while Umanita Nova argued that
"the movement is very serious and we must do everything we can
to channel it towards a massive extension." The persistent call
of the USI was for "an extension of the movement to the whole
of industry to institute their 'expropriating general strike.'"
[Williams, Op. Cit., p. 236 and pp. 243-4] Railway workers,
influenced by
the libertarians, refused to transport troops, workers went on
strike against the orders of the reformist unions and
peasants occupied the land. The anarchists whole-heartedly
supported the movement, unsurprisingly as the "occupation of
the factories and the land suited perfectly our programme of
action." [Malatesta, Op. Cit., p. 135] Luigi Fabbri described
the occupations as having "revealed a power in the proletariat
of which it had been unaware hitherto." [quoted by Paolo
Sprinao, The Occupation of the Factories, p. 134]
However, after four weeks of occupation, the workers decided to
leave the factories. This was because of the actions of the
socialist party and the reformist trade unions. They opposed
the movement and negotiated with the state for a return to
"normality" in exchange for a promise to extend workers'
control legally, in association with the bosses. The question
of revolution was decided by a vote of the CGL national
council in Milan on April 10-11th, without consulting the
syndicalist unions, after the Socialist Party leadership
refused to decide one way or the other.
Needless to say, this promise of "workers' control" was not
kept. The lack of independent inter-factory organisation made
workers dependent on trade union bureaucrats for information
on what was going on in other cities, and they used that power
to isolate factories, cities, and factories from each other.
This lead to a return to work, "in spite of the opposition of
individual anarchists dispersed among the factories."
[Malatesta, Op. Cit., p. 136] The local syndicalist union
confederations could not provide the necessary framework
for a fully co-ordinated occupation movement as the
reformist unions refused to work with them; and although
the anarchists were a large minority, they were still a
minority:
"At the 'interproletarian' convention held on 12 September
(in which the Unione Anarchia, the railwaymen's and maritime
workers union participated) the syndicalist union decided
that 'we cannot do it ourselves' without the socialist
party and the CGL, protested against the 'counter-revolutionary
vote' of Milan, declared it minoritarian, arbitrary and
null, and ended by launching new, vague, but ardent calls
to action." [Paolo Spriano, Op. Cit., p. 94]
Malatesta addressed the workers of one of the factories at Milan.
He argued that "[t]hose who celebrate the agreement signed at
Rome [between the Confederazione and the capitalists] as a great
victory of yours are deceiving you. The victory in reality belongs
to Giolitti, to the government and the bourgeoisie who are saved
from the precipice over which they were hanging." During the
occupation the "bourgeoisie trembled, the government was powerless
to face the situation." Therefore:
"To speak of victory when the Roman agreement throws you back under
bourgeois exploitation which you could have got rid of is a lie. If
you give up the factories, do this with the conviction [of] hav[ing]
lost a great battle and with the firm intention to resume the struggle
on the first occasion and to carry it on in a thorough way. . .
Nothing is lost if you have no illusion [about] the deceiving
character of the victory. The famous decree on the control of
factories is a mockery . . . because it tends to harmonise your
interests and those of the bourgeois which is like harmonising
the interests of the wolf and the sheep. Don't believe those of
your leaders who make fools of you by adjourning the revolution
from day to day. You yourselves must make the revolution when
an occasion will offer itself, without waiting for orders which
never come, or which come only to enjoin you to abandon action.
Have confidence in yourselves, have faith in your future and you
will win." [quoted by Max Nettlau, Errico Malatesta: The
Biography of an Anarchist]
Malatesta was proven correct. With the end of the occupations,
the only victors were the bourgeoisie and the government. Soon
the workers would face Fascism, but first, in October 1920,
"after the factories were evacuated," the government (obviously
knowing who the real threat was) "arrested the entire leadership
of the USI and UAI. The socialists did not respond" and
"more-or-less ignored the persecution of the libertarians
until the spring of 1921 when the aged Malatesta and other
imprisoned anarchists mounted a hunger strike from their
cells in Milan." [Carl Levy, Op. Cit., pp. 221-2] They were
acquitted after a four day trial.
The events of 1920 show four things. Firstly, that workers can
manage their own workplaces successfully by themselves, without
bosses. Secondly, on the need for anarchists to be involved in
the labour movement. Without the support of the USI, the Turin
movement would have been even more isolated than it was. Thirdly,
anarchists need to be organised to influence the class struggle.
The growth of the UAI and USI in terms of both influence and
size indicates the importance of this. Without the anarchists
and syndicalists raising the idea of factory occupations and
supporting the movement, it is doubtful that it would have
been as successful and widespread as it was. Lastly, that
socialist organisations, structured in a hierarchical fashion,
do not produce a revolutionary membership. By continually
looking to leaders, the movement was crippled and could not
develop to its full potential.
This period of Italian history explains the growth of Fascism in Italy. As
Tobias Abse points out, "the rise of fascism in Italy cannot be detached
from the events of the biennio rosso, the two red years of 1919 and
1920, that preceded it. Fascism was a preventive counter-revolution . . . launched as a result of the failed revolution" ["The Rise of Fascism in
an Industrial City", p. 54, in Rethinking Italian Fascism, David Forgacs
(ed.), pp. 52-81] The term "preventive counter-revolution" was originally
coined by the leading anarchist Luigi Fabbri.
As Malatesta argued at the time of the factory occupations, "[i]f we do
not carry on to the end, we will pay with tears of blood for the fear we
now instil in the bourgeoisie." [quoted by Tobias Abse, Op.
Cit., p. 66]
Later events proved him right, as the capitalists and rich landowners
backed the fascists in order to teach the working class their place. In
the words of Tobias Abse:
"The aims of the Fascists and their backers amongst the industrialists
and agrarians in 1921-22 were simple: to break the power of the organised
workers and peasants as completely as possible, to wipe out, with the
bullet and the club, not only the gains of the biennio rosso, but
everything that the lower classes had gained . . . between the turn
of the century and the outbreak of the First World War." [Op. Cit.,
p. 54]
The fascist squads attacked and destroyed anarchist and socialist meeting
places, social centres, radical presses and Camera del Lavoro (local trade
union councils). However, even in the dark days of fascist terror, the
anarchists resisted the forces of totalitarianism. "It is no coincidence
that the strongest working-class resistance to Fascism was in . . . towns
or cities in which there was quite a strong anarchist, syndicalist or
anarcho-syndicalist tradition." [Tobias Abse, Op. Cit., p. 56]
The anarchists participated in, and often organised sections of,
the Arditi del Popolo, a working-class organisation devoted to the
self-defence of workers' interests. The Arditi del Popolo organised and
encouraged working-class resistance to fascist squads, often defeating
larger fascist forces (for example, "the total humiliation of thousands
of Italo Balbo's squadristi by a couple of hundred Arditi del Popolo
backed by the inhabitants of the working class districts" in the
anarchist stronghold of Parma in August 1922 [Tobias Abse, Op. Cit.,
p. 56]).
The Arditi del Popolo was the closest Italy got to the idea of a
united, revolutionary working-class front against fascism, as had
been suggested by Malatesta and the UAI. This movement "developed
along anti-bourgeois and anti-fascist lines, and was marked by the
independence of its local sections." [Red Years, Black Years:
Anarchist Resistance to Fascism in Italy, p. 2] Rather than being
just an "anti-fascist" organisation, the Arditi "were not a movement
in defence of 'democracy' in the abstract, but an essentially
working-class organisation devoted to the defence of the interests
of industrial workers, the dockers and large numbers of artisans
and craftsmen." [Tobias Abse, Op. Cit., p. 75] Unsurprisingly, the Arditi del Popolo "appear to have been
strongest and most successful in areas where traditional working-class
political culture was less exclusively socialist and had strong
anarchist or syndicalist traditions, for example, Bari, Livorno,
Parma and Rome." [Antonio Sonnessa, "Working Class Defence Organisation,
Anri-Fascist Resistances and the Arditi del Popolo in Turin, 1919-22,"
pp. 183-218, European History Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 2, p. 184]
However, both the socialist and communist parties withdrew from the
organisation. The socialists signed a "Pact of Pacification" with
the Fascists in August 1921. The communists "preferred to withdraw
their members from the Arditi del Popolo rather than let them work
with the anarchists." [Red Years, Black Years, p. 17]
Indeed, "[o]n
the same day as the Pact was signed, Ordine Nuovo published a
PCd'I [Communist Party of Italy] communication warning communists
against involvement" in the Arditi del Popolo. Four days later,
the Communist leadership "officially abandoned the movement. Severe
disciplinary measures were threatened against those communists who
continued to participate in, or liase with," the organisation.
Thus
by "the end of the first week of August 1921 the PSI, CGL and the
PCd'I had officially denounced" the organisation. "Only the anarchist
leaders, if not always sympathetic to the programme of the [Arditi
del Popolo], did not abandon the movement." Indeed, Umanita Nova
"strongly supported" it "on the grounds it represented a popular
expression of anti-fascist resistance and in defence of freedom
to organise." [Antonio Sonnessa, Op. Cit., p. 195 and p. 194]
However, in spite of the decisions by their leaders, many rank and
file socialists and communists took part in the movement. The latter
took part in open "defiance of the PCd'I leadership's growing abandonment"
of it. In Turin, for example, communists who took part in the Arditi
del Polopo did so "less as communists and more as part of a wider,
working-class self-identification . . . This dynamic was re-enforced
by an important socialist and anarchist presence" there. The failure
of the Communist leadership to support the movement shows the
bankruptcy of Bolshevik organisational forms which were unresponsive
to the needs of the popular movement. Indeed, these events show the
"libertarian custom of autonomy from, and resistance to, authority was
also operated against the leaders of the workers' movement, particularly
when they were held to have misunderstood the situation at grass roots
level." [Sonnessa, Op. Cit., p. 200, p. 198 and p. 193]
Thus the Communist Party failed to support the popular resistance to
fascism. The Communist
leader Antonio Gramsci explained why, arguing that "the party
leadership's attitude on the question of the Arditi del Popolo . . .
corresponded to a need to prevent the party members from being
controlled by a leadership that was not the party's leadership."
Gramsci added that this policy "served to disqualify a mass movement
which had started from below and which could instead have been
exploited by us politically." [Selections from Political Writings
(1921-1926), p. 333] While being less sectarian towards the Arditi del Popolo than other
Communist leaders, "[i]n common with all communist leaders, Gramsci
awaited the formation of the PCd'I-led military squads." [Sonnessa,
Op. Cit., p. 196] In other words, the
struggle against fascism was seen by the Communist leadership as a
means of gaining more members and, when the opposite was a possibility,
they preferred defeat and fascism rather than risk their followers becoming
influenced by anarchism.
As Abse notes,
"it was the withdrawal of support by the Socialist and Communist parties
at the national level that crippled" the Arditi. [Op. Cit., p. 74] Thus "social
reformist defeatism and communist sectarianism made impossible an armed
opposition that was widespread and therefore effective; and the isolated
instances of popular resistance were unable to unite in a successful
strategy." And fascism could have been defeated: "Insurrections at
Sarzanna, in July 1921, and at Parma, in August 1922, are examples of the
correctness of the policies which the anarchists urged in action and
propaganda." [Red Years, Black Years, p. 3 and p. 2] Historian
Tobias
Abse confirms this analysis, arguing that "[w]hat happened in Parma in
August 1922 . . . could have happened elsewhere, if only the leadership
of the Socialist and Communist parties thrown their weight behind the
call of the anarchist Malatesta for a united revolutionary front
against Fascism." [Op. Cit., p. 56]
In the end, fascist violence was successful and capitalist power
maintained:
"The anarchists' will and courage were not enough to counter the
fascist gangs, powerfully aided with material and arms, backed by
the repressive organs of the state. Anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists
were decisive in some areas and in some industries, but only a similar
choice of direct action on the parts of the Socialist Party and the
General Confederation of Labour [the reformist trade union] could
have halted fascism." [Red Years, Black Years, pp. 1-2]
After helping to defeat the revolution, the Marxists helped ensure the
victory of fascism.
Even after the fascist state was created, anarchists resisted both
inside and outside Italy. Many Italians, both anarchist and non-anarchist,
travelled to Spain to resist Franco in 1936 (see Umberto Marzochhi's
Remembering Spain: Italian Anarchist Volunteers in the Spanish Civil
War for details). During the Second World War, anarchists played a
major part in the Italian Partisan movement. It was the fact that the
anti-fascist movement was dominated by anti-capitalist elements that
led the USA and the UK to place known fascists in governmental positions
in the places they "liberated" (often where the town had already been
taken by the Partisans, resulting in the Allied troops "liberating"
the town from its own inhabitants!).
Given this history of resisting fascism in Italy, it is surprising
that some claim Italian fascism was a product or form of syndicalism.
This is even claimed by some anarchists. According to Bob Black the
"Italian syndicalists mostly went over to Fascism" and references
David D. Roberts 1979 study The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian
Fascism to support his claim. [Anarchy after Leftism, p. 64]
Peter Sabatini in a review in Social Anarchism makes a similar statement,
saying that syndicalism's "ultimate failure" was "its transformation
into a vehicle of fascism." [Social Anarchism, no. 23, p. 99] What
is the truth behind these claims?
Looking at Black's reference we discover that, in fact, most of the
Italian syndicalists did not go over to fascism, if by syndicalists
we mean members of the USI (the Italian Syndicalist Union). Roberts
states that:
"The vast majority of the organised workers failed to respond
to the syndicalists' appeals and continued to oppose [Italian]
intervention [in the First World War], shunning what seemed to
be a futile capitalist war. The syndicalists failed to convince
even a majority within the USI . . . the majority opted for the
neutralism of Armando Borghi, leader of the anarchists within
the USI. Schism followed as De Ambris led the interventionist
minority out of the confederation." [The Syndicalist Tradition
and Italian Fascism, p. 113]
However, if we take "syndicalist" to mean some of the intellectuals
and "leaders" of the pre-war movement, it was a case that the "leading
syndicalists came out for intervention quickly and almost unanimously"
[Roberts, Op. Cit., p. 106] after the First World War started. Many
of these pro-war "leading syndicalists" did become fascists. However,
to concentrate on a handful of "leaders" (which the majority did
not even follow!) and state that this shows that the "Italian
syndicalists mostly went over to Fascism" staggers belief. What is
even worse, as seen above, the Italian anarchists and syndicalists
were the most dedicated and successful fighters against fascism. In
effect, Black and Sabatini have slandered a whole movement.
What is also interesting is that these "leading syndicalists" were
not anarchists and so not anarcho-syndicalists. As Roberts notes
"[i]n Italy, the syndicalist doctrine was more clearly the
product of a group of intellectuals, operating within the Socialist
party and seeking an alternative to reformism." They "explicitly
denounced anarchism" and "insisted on a variety of Marxist orthodoxy."
The "syndicalists genuinely desired -- and tried -- to work within
the Marxist tradition." [Op. Cit., p. 66, p. 72, p. 57 and p. 79] According to Carl Levy, in his
account of Italian anarchism, "[u]nlike other syndicalist movements,
the Italian variation coalesced inside a Second International party.
Supporter were partially drawn from socialist intransigents . . .
the southern syndicalist intellectuals pronounced republicanism . . .
Another component . . . was the remnant of the Partito Operaio."
["Italian Anarchism: 1870-1926" in For Anarchism: History, Theory,
and Practice, David Goodway (Ed.), p. 51]
In other words, the Italian syndicalists who turned to fascism were,
firstly, a small minority of intellectuals who could not convince the
majority within the syndicalist union to follow them, and, secondly,
Marxists and republicans rather than anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists
or even revolutionary syndicalists.
According to Carl Levy, Roberts' book "concentrates on the syndicalist intelligentsia" and that "some syndicalist intellectuals . . . helped
generate, or sympathetically endorsed, the new Nationalist movement . . .
which bore similarities to the populist and republican rhetoric of the
southern syndicalist intellectuals." He argues that there "has been far
too much emphasis on syndicalist intellectuals and national organisers"
and that syndicalism "relied little on its national leadership for its
long-term vitality." [Op. Cit., p. 77, p. 53 and p. 51] If we do look
at the membership of the USI, rather than finding a group which "mostly
went over to fascism," we discover a group of people who fought fascism
tooth and nail and were subject to extensive fascist violence.
To summarise, Italian Fascism had nothing to do with syndicalism
and, as seen above, the USI fought the Fascists and was destroyed
by them along with the UAI, Socialist Party and other radicals. That
a handful of pre-war Marxist-syndicalists later became Fascists and
called for a "National-Syndicalism" does not mean that syndicalism
and fascism are related (any more than some anarchists later becoming
Marxists makes anarchism "a vehicle" for Marxism!).
It is hardly surprising that anarchists were the most consistent and
successful opponents of Fascism. The two movements could not be further
apart, one standing for total statism in the service of capitalism while
the other for a free, non-capitalist society. Neither is it surprising
that when their privileges and power were in danger, the capitalists and
the landowners turned to fascism to save them. This process is a common
feature in history (to list just four examples, Italy, Germany, Spain
and Chile).
As Noam Chomsky notes, "a good example of a really large-scale
anarchist revolution -- in fact the best example to my knowledge
-- is the Spanish revolution in 1936, in which over most of
Republican Spain there was a quite inspiring anarchist revolution
that involved both industry and agriculture over substantial
areas . . . And that again was, by both human measures and
indeed anyone's economic measures, quite successful. That is,
production continued effectively; workers in farms and factories
proved quite capable of managing their affairs without coercion
from above, contrary to what lots of socialists, communists,
liberals and other wanted to believe." The revolution of 1936
was "based on three generations of experiment and thought and
work which extended anarchist ideas to very large parts of the
population." [Radical Priorities, p. 212]
Due to this anarchist organising and agitation, Spain in the 1930's had the largest anarchist movement in the world. At the start of the Spanish "Civil" war, over one and one half million workers and peasants were members of the CNT (the National Confederation of Labour), an anarcho-syndicalist union federation, and 30,000 were members of the FAI (the Anarchist Federation of Iberia). The total population of Spain at this time was 24 million.
The social revolution which met the Fascist coup on July 18th, 1936, is the greatest experiment in libertarian socialism to date. Here the last mass syndicalist union, the CNT, not only held off the fascist rising but encouraged the widespread take-over of land and factories. Over seven million people, including about two million CNT members, put self-management into practise in the most difficult of circumstances and actually improved both working conditions and output.
In the heady days after the 19th of July, the initiative and power truly rested in the hands of the rank-and-file members of the CNT and FAI. It was ordinary people, undoubtedly under the influence of Faistas (members of the FAI) and CNT militants, who, after defeating the fascist uprising, got production, distribution and consumption started again (under more egalitarian arrangements, of course), as well as organising and volunteering (in their tens of thousands) to join the militias, which were to be sent to free those parts of Spain that were under Franco. In every possible way the working class of Spain were creating by their own actions a new world based on their own ideas of social justice and freedom -- ideas inspired, of course, by anarchism and anarchosyndicalism.
George Orwell's eye-witness account of revolutionary Barcelona in late December, 1936, gives a vivid picture of the social transformation that had begun:
"The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Seĝor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. . . Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine." [Homage to Catalonia, pp. 2-3]
The full extent of this historic revolution cannot be covered here. It will be discussed in more detail in Section I.8 of the FAQ. All that can be done is to highlight a few points of special interest in the hope that these will give some indication of the importance of these events and encourage people to find out more about it.
All industry in Catalonia was placed either under workers' self-management or workers' control (that is, either totally taking over all aspects of management, in the first case, or, in the second, controlling the old management). In some cases, whole town and regional economies were transformed into federations of collectives. The example of the Railway Federation (which was set up to manage the railway lines in Catalonia, Aragon and Valencia) can be given as a typical example. The base of the federation was the local assemblies:
"All the workers of each locality would meet twice a week to examine all that pertained to the work to be done... The local general assembly named a committee to manage the general activity in each station and its annexes. At [these] meetings, the decisions (direccion) of this committee, whose members continued to work [at their previous jobs], would be subjected to the approval or disapproval of the workers, after giving reports and answering questions."
The delegates on the committee could be removed by an assembly at any time and the highest co-ordinating body of the Railway Federation was the "Revolutionary Committee," whose members were elected by union assemblies in the various divisions. The control over the rail lines, according to Gaston Leval, "did not operate from above downwards, as in a statist and centralised system. The Revolutionary Committee had no such powers. . . The members of the. . . committee being content to supervise the general activity and to co-ordinate that of the different routes that made up the network." [Gaston Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, p. 255]
On the land, tens of thousands of peasants and rural day workers created voluntary, self-managed collectives. The quality of life improved as
co-operation allowed the introduction of health care, education, machinery and investment in the social infrastructure. As well as increasing production, the collectives increased freedom. As one member puts it, "it was marvelous. . . to live in a collective, a free society where one could say what one thought, where if the village committee seemed unsatisfactory one could say. The committee took no big decisions without calling the whole village together in a general assembly. All this was wonderful." [Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain, p. 360]
We discuss the revolution in more detail in
section I.8. For
example, sections I.8.3 and
I.8.4 discuss in more depth how the
industrial collectives. The rural collectives are
discussed in sections I.8.5 and
I.8.6. We must stress
that these sections are summaries of a vast social movement,
and more information can be gathered from such works
as Gaston Leval's Collectives in the Spanish Revolution,
Sam Dolfgoff's The Anarchist Collectives, Jose Peirats'
The CNT in the Spanish Revolution and a host of other
anarchist accounts of the revolution.
On the social front, anarchist organisations created rational schools,
a libertarian health service, social centres, and so on. The
Mujeres Libres (free women) combated the traditional role of women in Spanish society, empowering thousands both inside and outside the anarchist movement (see The Free Women of Spain by Martha A. Ackelsberg for more information on this very important organisation). This activity on the social front only built on the work started long before the outbreak of the war; for example, the unions often funded rational schools, workers centres, and so on.
The voluntary militias that went to free the rest of Spain from Franco were organised on anarchist principles and included both men and women. There was no rank, no saluting and no officer class. Everybody was equal. George Orwell, a member of the POUM militia (the POUM was a dissident Marxist party, influenced
by Leninism but not, as the Communists asserted, Trotskyist) makes this clear:
"The essential point of the [militia] system was the social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.s, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was not perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or that I would have though conceivable in time of war. . . " [Op. Cit., p. 26]
In Spain, however, as elsewhere, the anarchist movement was smashed
between Stalinism (the Communist Party) on the one hand and Capitalism (Franco) on
the other. Unfortunately, the anarchists placed anti-fascist unity
before the revolution, thus helping their enemies to defeat both
them and the revolution. Whether they were forced by circumstances
into this position or could have avoided it is still being debated
(see section I.8.10
for a discussion of why the CNT-FAI collaborated and
section I.8.11
on why this decision was not a product of anarchist theory).
Orwell's account of his experiences in the militia's indicates why the Spanish Revolution is so important to anarchists:
"I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilised life -- snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. -- had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class- division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. . . One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all . . . In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. . ." [Op. Cit., pp. 83-84]
For more information on the Spanish Revolution, the following books
are recommended: Lessons of the Spanish Revolution by Vernon
Richards; Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution and The CNT
in the Spanish Revolution by Jose Peirats; Free Women of
Spain by Martha A. Ackelsberg; The Anarchist Collectives
edited by Sam Dolgoff; "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship"
by Noam Chomsky (in The Chomsky Reader); The Anarchists
of Casas Viejas by Jerome R. Mintz; and Homage to
Catalonia by George Orwell.
The May-June events in France placed anarchism back on the radical landscape after a period in which many people had written the movement off as dead. This revolt of ten million people grew from humble beginnings. Expelled by the university authorities of Nanterre in Paris for anti-Vietnam War activity, a group of anarchists (including Daniel Cohn-Bendit) promptly called a protest demonstration. The arrival of 80 police enraged many students, who quit their studies to join the battle and drive the police from the university.
Inspired by this support, the anarchists seized the administration building and held a mass debate. The occupation spread, Nanterre was surrounded by police, and the authorities closed the university down. The next day, the Nanterre students gathered at the Sorbonne University in the centre of Paris. Continual police pressure and the arrest of over 500 people caused anger to erupt into five hours of street fighting. The police even attacked passers-by with clubs and tear gas.
A total ban on demonstrations and the closure of the Sorbonne brought thousands of students out onto the streets. Increasing police violence provoked the building of the first barricades. Jean Jacques Lebel, a reporter, wrote that by 1 a.m., "[l]iterally thousands helped build barricades. . . women, workers, bystanders, people in pyjamas, human chains to carry rocks, wood, iron." An entire night of fighting left 350 police injured. On May 7th, a 50,000-strong protest march against the police was transformed into a day-long battle through the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter. Police tear gas was answered by molotov cocktails and the chant "Long Live the Paris Commune!"
By May 10th, continuing massive demonstrations forced the Education Minister to start negotiations. But in the streets, 60 barricades had appeared and young workers were joining the students. The trade unions condemned the police violence. Huge demonstrations throughout France culminated on May 13th with one million people on the streets of Paris.
Faced with this massive protest, the police left the Latin Quarter. Students seized the Sorbonne and created a mass assembly to spread the struggle. Occupations soon spread to every French University. From the Sorbonne came a flood of propaganda, leaflets, proclamations, telegrams, and posters. Slogans such as "Everything is Possible," "Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible," "Life without Dead Times," and "It is Forbidden to Forbid" plastered the walls. "All Power to the Imagination" was on everyone's lips. As Murray Bookchin pointed out, "the motive forces of revolution today. . . are not simply scarcity and material need, but also quality of everyday life,.. the attempt to gain control of one's own destiny." [Post-Scarcity Anarchism, pp. 249-250]
Many of the most famous slogans of those days originated from
the Situationists. The Situationist International had been
formed in 1957 by a small group of dissident radicals and
artists. They had developed a highly sophisticated (if jargon
riddled) and coherent analysis of modern capitalist society
and how to supersede it with a new, freer one. Modern life,
they argued, was mere survival rather than living, dominated
by the economy of consumption in which everyone, everything,
every emotion and relationship becomes a commodity. People
were no longer simply alienated producers, they were also
alienated consumers. They defined this kind of society
as the "Spectacle." Life itself had been stolen and so
revolution meant recreating life. The area of revolutionary
change was no longer just the workplace, but in everyday
existence:
"People who talk about revolution and class struggle
without referring explicitly to everyday life,
without understanding what is subversive about love
and what is positive in the refusal of constraints,
such people have a corpse in their mouth." [quoted by
Clifford Harper, Anarchy: A Graphic Guide, p. 153]
Like many other groups whose politics influenced the Paris
events, the situationists argued that "the workers' councils
are the only answer. Every other form of revolutionary
struggle has ended up with the very opposite of what it
was originally looking for." [quoted by Clifford Harper,
Op. Cit., p. 149] These councils would be self-managed
and not be the means by which a "revolutionary" party
would take power. Like the anarchists of Noire et Rouge
and the libertarian socialists of Socialisme ou Barbarie,
their support for a self-managed revolution from below had
a massive influence in the May events and the ideas that
inspired it. Beneath the Paving Stones by Dark Star is a
good anthology of situationist works relating to Paris 68
which also contains an eye-witness account of events.
On May 14th, the Sud-Aviation workers locked the management in its offices and occupied their factory. They were followed by the Cleon-Renault, Lockhead-Beauvais and Mucel-Orleans factories the next day. That night the National Theatre in Paris was seized to become a permanent assembly for mass debate. Next, France's largest factory, Renault-Billancourt, was occupied. Often the decision to go on indefinite strike was taken by the workers without consulting union officials. By May 17th, a hundred Paris Factories were in the hands of their workers. The weekend of the 19th of May saw 122 factories occupied. By May 20th, the strike and occupations were general and involved six million people. Print workers said they did not wish to leave a monopoly of media coverage to TV and radio, and agreed to print newspapers as long as the press "carries out with objectivity the role of providing information which is its duty." In some cases print-workers insisted on changes in headlines or articles before they would print the paper. This happened mostly with the right-wing papers such as 'Le Figaro' or 'La Nation'.
With the Renault occupation, the Sorbonne occupiers immediately prepared to join the Renault strikers, and led by anarchist black and red banners, 4,000 students headed for the occupied factory. The state, bosses, unions and Communist Party were now faced with their greatest nightmare -- a worker-student alliance. Ten thousand police reservists were called up and frantic union officials locked the factory gates. The Communist Party urged their members to crush the revolt. They united with the government and bosses to craft a series of reforms, but once they turned to the factories they were jeered out of them by the workers.
The struggle itself and the activity to spread it was organised by self-governing mass assemblies and co-ordinated by action committees. The strikes were often run by assemblies as well. As Murray Bookchin argues, the "hope [of the revolt] lay in the extension of self-management in all its forms -- the general assemblies and their administrative forms, the action committees, the factory strike committees -- to all areas of the economy, indeed to all areas of life itself." [Op. Cit., pp. 251-252] Within the assemblies, "a fever of life gripped millions, a rewaking of senses that people never thought they possessed." [Op. Cit., p. 251] It was not a workers' strike or a student strike. It was a peoples' strike that cut across almost all class lines.
On May 24th, anarchists organised a demonstration. Thirty thousand marched towards the Palace de la Bastille. The police had the Ministries protected, using the usual devices of tear gas and batons, but the Bourse (Stock Exchange) was left unprotected and a number of demonstrators set fire to it.
It was at this stage that some left-wing groups lost their nerve. The Trotskyist JCR turned people back into the Latin Quarter. Other groups such as UNEF and Parti Socialiste Unife (United Socialist Party) blocked the taking of the Ministries of Finance and Justice. Cohn-Bendit said of this incident "As for us, we failed to realise how easy it would have been to sweep all these nobodies away. . . .It is now clear that if, on 25 May, Paris had woken to find the most important Ministries occupied, Gaullism would have caved in at once. . . . " Cohn-Bendit was forced into exile later that very night.
As the street demonstrations grew and occupations continued, the state prepared to use overwhelming means to stop the revolt. Secretly, top generals readied 20,000 loyal troops for use on Paris. Police occupied communications centres like TV stations and Post Offices. By Monday, May 27th, the Government had guaranteed an increase of 35% in the industrial minimum wage and an all round-wage increase of 10%. The leaders of the CGT organised a march of 500,000 workers through the streets of Paris two days later. Paris was covered in posters calling for a "Government of the People." Unfortunately the majority still thought in terms of changing their rulers rather than taking control for themselves.
By June 5th most of the strikes were over and an air of what passes for normality within capitalism had rolled back over France. Any strikes which continued after this date were crushed in a military-style operation using armoured vehicles and guns. On June 7th, they made an assault on the Flins steelworks which started a four-day running battle which left one worker dead. Three days later, Renault strikers were gunned down by police, killing two. In isolation, those pockets of militancy stood no chance. On June 12th, demonstrations were banned, radical groups outlawed, and their members arrested. Under attack from all sides, with escalating state violence and trade union sell-outs, the General Strike and occupations crumbled.
So why did this revolt fail? Certainly not because "vanguard" Bolshevik parties were missing. It was infested with them. Fortunately, the traditional authoritarian left sects were isolated and outraged. Those involved in the revolt did not require a vanguard to tell them what to do, and the "workers' vanguards" frantically ran after the movement trying to catch up with it and control it.
No, it was the lack of independent, self-managed confederal organisations to co-ordinate struggle which resulted in occupations being isolated from each other. So divided, they fell. In addition, Murray Bookchin argues that "an awareness among the workers that the factories had to be worked, not merely occupied or struck," was missing. [Op. Cit., p. 269]
This awareness would have been encouraged by the existence of a strong anarchist movement before the revolt. The anti-authoritarian left, though very active, was too weak among striking workers, and so the idea of self-managed organisations and workers self-management was not widespread. However, the May-June revolt shows that events can change very rapidly. The working class, fused by the energy and bravado of the students, raised demands that could not be catered for within the confines of the existing system. The General Strike displays with beautiful clarity the potential power that lies in the hands of the working class. The mass assemblies and occupations give an excellent, if short-lived, example of anarchy in action and how anarchist ideas can quickly spread and be applied in practice.
