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LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM Politics in Black and Red

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LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM Politics in Black and Red 'Jusi what we lu-cd as wf nunc inii> a new pliasc (if ic\(ih against ilic <)l)s(('iiily of ( apiialisni: a rccmcry ol ricliiu-vs nf our (lifttTcni Iradiiions of .sirugoic. will) ihcir \\fa\s aiitl hnmpiiigs." LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM Politics in Black and Red Alex Pricliard 1 Rutli Kinna | Sakii Pima | David Berry xviii Preface 9. Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005); Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian 1 History of India's Liberation Struggle (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), 10. Murray Bookchin, Post-scarcity Anarchism, 2nd edition (Montreal: Black Rose, 1986). Introduction 11. Subcomandante Marcos, '1 Shit on All the Revolutionary Vanguards of This Planet' (January 2003), accessed 27 January 2017, http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard ezln/2003/marcos/etaJAN.html. 12. Michael Knapp, Anja Flach, and Ercan Ayboga, Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women's Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan (London: Pluto, 2016). 13. David Graeber, 'Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria?', The Guardian, October 8, 2014, accessed 30 January 2017, https://www.theguardlan. com/comnientisfree/2014/oct/OS/why-world-ignoring-revolutionary-kurds-syria- isis. 14. Knapp et al., Revolution in Rojava. Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again 15. Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party: How Do Mass Protests Become an Organised Activist the Black and Red unite! Collective? (London: Verso, 2016). Otto Von Bismarck' 16. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2015), This book is about two currents of ideas, anarchism and Marxism. It examines their complex interrelationship and mutual borrowings in history, theory and practice and it probes the limits and possibilities of co-operation by looking at the institutional and social contexts in which both heretical and orthodox expressions of these movements have operated. In presenting this collection, we have not attempted to fix the ideological content of either of these two currents but to show instead how this content has itself been shaped by a process of engagement, theoretical debate and political activity. To begin with definitions is to restart the long and wearisome tradition of demarcating difference and establishing doctrinal purity. This tradition has dominated in the past and its historical significance can hardly be underes• timated, and we discuss it by way of introduction in order to contextualise the aims of the collection. But its practical effect has been to establish exclu• sive boundaries and to encourage a view that a politics of black and red is impossible, impractical or dangerous. The essays in this book suggest that such a politics might well be problematic, but that it nevertheless provides a welcome counter to sectarianism. To turn, then, to the context: the history of European revolutionary social• ism is usually told as a story of factionalism and dispute, and the politics of black and red - black being the colour of anarchism, and red of com• munism - is usually understood as dysfunctional and oppositional. The antagonism at the core of the relationship is often traced back to 1871 when the collapse of the First International appeared to mark the neat divi• sion of socialism into Bakuninist and Marxist currents. Suggestions that the significant marker was earlier, in the 1840s, when Proudhon refused collab• oration with Marx, tend to reinforce the importance of this later split: 1871 cemented the formation of an ideological divide that Marx and Proudhon's 1 2 Introduction Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard 3 mutual suspicion presaged.^ Criticisms of Max Stirner, voiced since the Leninist version), to a belief in the indispensability of leadership, organiza• 1890s - sometime after Marx and Engels sketched their critique of 'Saint tion and discipline and the inadequacy of any movement based on mere Max' in The German Ideology - similarly bolstered the view that the political "spontaneity" 'J From an apparent agreement about the ends of the revolu• disputes that divided Marxists and anarchists were grounded in very dif• tion, Hobsbawm identified a combined package of ideas that was antithetical ferent, perhaps irreconcilable, philosophical traditions, always latent in the to anarchist thought and which, in parts and in whole, many self-identifying socialist movement. Marxists also rejected.* A second influential story of the relationship is the account promoted A fourth story of the relationship between Marxism and anarchism relates by Lenin and it consists of the view that the differences between Marxists to the relative significance of these two currents of thought. One version and anarchists have been overstated: both groups of socialists are com• of this story focuses on practical activity, the other on emergence and mitted to the realisation of a common end, they disagree only about the re-emergence, dominance and subservience. As to the first, the place of means of transformation. In the 1970s this case was advanced by the Marxism as the dominant current within socialism is sometimes assumed historian Eric Hobsbawm. The rejection of anarchism, he argued, had a num• without qualification. Indeed, such has been the dominance of Marxism ber of dimensions, but its leading idea was that '[t]here is no difference that recent histories of the Left simply conflate socialism with Marxism and between the ultimate objects of Marxists and anarchists, i.e. a libertarian ignore the anarchists completely.' Others assign anarchism little more than communism in which exploitation, classes and the state will have ceased to a footnote in a wider narrative of Marxist infighting and factionalism."' exist'.' Hobsbawm attempted to explain the apparent tension between this A second version of the poor relation thesis centres on the assessment of theoretical accord and the actual history of the revolutionary socialist move• the relative intellectual merits of Marxist and anarchist ideas. Anarchism ment by showing how revolutionary Marxists - Marx, Engels and Lenin - fares badly here, too. The blunt claim of Murray Bookchin's essay 'The combined a rejection of anarchist thought with benevolence towards anar• Communaiist Project' is that anarchism 'is simply not a social theory'. chist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. The agreement on ends reflected the shared practical experience of revolution, but it was also consistent with Its foremost theorists celebrate its seeming openness to eclecticism a firm denial of anarchist means to that end, and the theory that supported and the liberatory effects of 'paradox' or even 'contradiction,' to use those means. His explanation implied a clear separation of ideas from prac• Proudhonian hyperbole. Accordingly, and without prejudice to the tice in the development of ideology. Although Hobsbawm acknowledged earnestness of many anarchistic practices, a case can made that many of the imprecision of 'doctrinal, ideological and programmatic distinctions' in the ideas of social and economic reconstruction that in the past have been rank-and-file movements, contrary to contemporary treatments of ideolog• advanced in the name of 'anarchy' were often drawn from Marxism." ical formation, he failed to see how the ideas of 'ideologists and political leaders', of both Marxist and anarchist varieties, were also shaped by polit• Bookchin's evaluation is not untypical. As Graeber and Grubacic note, anar• ical engagements and events - not just theory.'' The result was to reinforce chism's most distinctive contribution to socialism is often identified with the principle of theoretical division whilst providing a positive account of revolutionary commitment. It is the passionate, idealistic heart to Marxism's Leninism that, for anarchists, was unpersuasive. sober and realistic head. In a discussion of 'small-a anarchists' they note: Hobsbawm's elaboration of the apparent dovetailing of Marxist and anar• 'Marxism... has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about rev• chist positions points to a line of division that many anarchists have wanted olutionary strategy. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about to highlight - a third account of difference. This turns on the relationship revolutionary practice... where Marxism has produced brilliant theories of between the means and ends of revolutionary struggle and the anarchist praxis, it's mostly been anarchists who have been working on the praxis rejection of the idea that the transition from capitalism to socialism requires itself."^ Although there is now talk of an 'anarchist turn' in radical political a period of transition in which state power is captured and used as an instru• theory, it is not yet clear that anarchism's relationship to Marxism has fun• ment of change, before 'withering away'.' For anarchists, the adoption of damentally altered.'^ Nor is it clear which Marxism the new Left today are such means necessarily compromises the ends of the revolution and it points turning from or which anarchism is it moving towards. The danger of 'turns' to a model of socialist organisation that most have rejected. Although he is that they reinforce existing, often caricatured, assumptions of difference passed over the theoretical grounds of the anarchist complaints, Hobsbawm and ossify identity. The reality is that the terms of debate have evolved and pinpointed precisely the nature
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