Anarchism and Communism Seminar at the Brecht Forum Spring 2009 / Conducted by Russell Dale

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Anarchism and Communism Seminar at the Brecht Forum Spring 2009 / Conducted by Russell Dale “Anarchy leads to Communism, and Communism to Anarchy, both alike being expressions of the predominant tendency in modern societies, the pursuit of equality.” —Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (1892), Chapter III, “Anarchist Communism.” “These gentlemen are against all political-revolutionary action. Russia is to leap into the anarchist- communist-atheist millennium in one breakneck jump!” —Karl Marx, Letter to Friedrich Sorge, November 5, 1880. “The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the...revolution must begin by doing away with the...state. But after its victory the sole organization which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the state. ...[T]o destroy it...would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the...proletariat can assert its...power...without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris Commune. ... Does it require my express assurance that Marx opposed this anarchist nonsense from the first day it was put forward in its present form by Bakunin?” Friedrich Engels, Letter to Philipp Van Patten, April 18, 1883. Anarchism and communism are, historically, the two main wings of the socialist movement. Anarchism is represented by such thinkers and writers as Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Daniel Guérin, and Noam Chomsky, to name a few key figures; communism, by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci, again, to name just a few key figures. While both anarchism and communism have as their ultimate goal a society without oppressive, hierarchical class divisions, these two wings of socialism have disagreed crucially on just how to create such a society. While communists have argued that the science of socialism shows that the state must be captured and used by the revolutionary class as a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and that, from there, the state will slowly whither away as society moves towards it ultimate, non-hierarchical organization, anarchists have argued that the state needs to be entirely scuttled from the start of any revolutionary movement towards socialism, that any attempt to use the state for revolutionary ends will result in the continuation of oppressive class hierarchy as a class of governing bureaucrats, running the state, gets formed who will, ultimately, sink into and fight to protect the privileged social position their role as administrators of the state gives them. This seminar will look into the thinking behind (socialist) anarchism and communism, try to figure out what these positions are about, and what this fundamental debate within socialism means. We will read some of the fundamental texts associated with these matters, and look at key aspects of the history of the movements and their differences..

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