All feathered up: a new defence of anarchism Martin Thomas Review of "Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism", by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt (AK Press). ----------------- Variants of revolutionary syndicalism were major new authority to organise "coordinated military influences in the labour movements of several defence" with "the best weaponry" (i.e. not just countries between the 1890s and World War One. scattered militia groups with hand-weapons). Their activists reckoned the work of the "political" They agree that revolutionaries must build "a socialists who spent much time on parliamentary coherent... organisation, with a common analysis, electioneering to be deficient or even harmful, and strategy, and tactics, along with a measure of focused effort on building up militant and democratic collective responsibility, expressed in a programme". trade-union movements which they believed could be They use the term "party" sometimes and the term both the agency to overthrow capitalist power and the "vanguard" often for that. framework for future working-class administration of They agree that the party must be disciplined and society. Some of them saw themselves as anarchists tight. They quote with approval an account of the as well as syndicalists - "anarcho-syndicalists". Nabat organisation led by Nestor Makhno: "The Schmidt and van der Walt, a journalist and an secretariat... was not merely 'technically' executive... academic from Johannesburg, South Africa, tell us not It was also the movement's ideological 'pilot core'... only about the famous movements of France and controlling and deploying the movement's resources Spain, Argentina and Mexico, but also about the less- and militants". known ones of China, Japan, and Korea. While many anarchists today see the fact that Their book is not primarily a history. The authors Marxist organisations stretch themselves to produce reconstruct what the authors call a "broad anarchist and circulate weekly papers as infamous, Schmidt tradition". They argued that it includes all of and van der Walt report on the extensive newspaper- revolutionary syndicalism, not just the strands which producing and newspaper-selling culture of late 19th called themselves anarchist. They present their own century anarchists with approval and pride. variant of "anarchism" as the most thorough and They agree that the process of the working class "sophisticated" development of the "tradition". preparing itself for revolution must include struggle Their own version of anarchism is one in which the for reforms. They approvingly quote Bakunin's traditional points of dispute with Marxism are thinned statement, from the time (1867-8) when he was down or, some of them, virtually given up; but it is focused on trying to win over the bourgeois League accompanied by a horror of Marxism. for Peace and Freedom, that "the most imperfect Schmidt and van der Walt never say straight out republic is a thousand times better than the most that they agree that a working class overthrowing enlightened monarchy... The democratic regime lifts capitalism must organise from among itself a strong the masses up gradually to participation in public revolutionary authority to combat counter-revolution life". (Bakunin wrote different things later). and consolidate the new order. They never directly They emphasise that the value of the struggle for disavow the traditional anarchist doctrine of the reforms lies in organisation from below in the immediate abolition of any form of state. struggle; but this is not a point of difference from But they pointedly do not repeat Bakunin's doctrine Marxism. They explicitly dissent from the strands in that the task of anarchists on the day after any anarchism which "refuse to deal with reforms, laws, revolution must be (through, so Bakunin held, a and compromises". "secret" network of "invisible pilots") to thwart, Schmidt and van der Walt argue that revolutionary divert, disrupt the victorious workers in their moves socialists should work systematically in trade unions, to coordinate their efforts democratically by electing a generally on building sustained and organised rank- revolutionary authority. and-file movements, and also sometimes contest elections for union office. Junta They agree that revolutionary socialists should take up battles for national liberation - "engage seriously They agree with "taking power in society" and with national liberation struggles and [aim] at "creating a coordinated system of governance". They supplanting nationalism, radicalising the struggle, and say "stateless governance", but the adjective merging the national and class struggles in one "stateless", for them, seems to mean "radically revolutionary movement". democratic", "linked through delegates and They oppose "identity politics" and the "cultural mandates". In that sense, the Marxist-envisaged relativist" "claim made by some nationalists that "workers' state" (or, in Lenin's term, "semi-state"), is certain rights are alien to their cultures and therefore "stateless". unimportant or objectionable". They accept the term "Revolutionary Junta" or On all these points Schmidt and van der Walt have, "Workers' Republic" for the new authority. Although in in effect, a criticism of most of what calls itself one passage they claim that "class no longer exists" anarchism today different only in shading from what once the workers' revolution wins, in other passages we in Workers' Liberty would say. They are further they concede that counter-revolutionary groups will away from conventional anarchism than is a group not disappear instantly, and accept the need for the like the avowedly-Marxist Socialist Workers Party 1 today, with its "One Solution, Revolution" slogan and The poor quality of Schmidt's and van der Walt's its pretence that all "direct action" against the polemic on such points can be judged from their established order, even if it be led by Islamist quotations. For example, they claim that Marx was clerical-fascists, is revolutionary and progressive. cool on trade-unions, and that it was the anarchists Schmidt and van der Walt seem to stick to the old who explained and championed the potential of trade- anarchist dogma of boycotting all electoral politics - union struggles. "this would apply regardless of the mandates given... "Marx complained that anarchists contended that the wages paid to the parliamentarians, or the workers 'must... organise themselves by trades- existence of other mechanisms to keep the unions' to 'supplant the existing states'..." parliamentarians accountable to their constituents" - This is the passage from Marx (in a letter to Paul and their account of anarchists in Korea who were Lafargue of April 1870) from which Schmidt and van elected to parliament there in the 1920s is der Walt quote their snippets: disapproving. But they make little fuss about that "Bakunin's programme [held that] the working class issue. must not occupy itself with politics. They must only In one passage they uphold the old anarchist idea organise themselves by trades-unions. One fine day, of "the revolutionary general strike" as the only and by means of the International, they will supplant the more or less self-sufficient path to socialist revolution. place of all existing states. You see what a caricature But they make little of it, and other passages in the he [Bakunin] has made of my doctrines! book imply a much less "fetishistic" view of the "As the transformation of the existing States into general strike. Associations is our last end, we must allow the governments, those great Trade-Unions of the ruling Anti-Marxism classes, to do as they like, because to occupy ourselves with them is to acknowledge them. Why! In Their anti-Marxism is built not so much on a the same way the old socialists said: You must not defence of traditional anarchist points as on a skewed occupy yourselves with the wages question, because presentation of Marxism. For them, Marxism from its you want to abolish wages labour, and to struggle earliest days was proto-Stalinism. They construct with the capitalist about the rate of wages is to their picture of Marxism by "reading back" from acknowledge the wages system! Stalinism. "The ass has not even seen that every class They concede that "in claiming that his theory was movement, as a class movement, is necessarily and scientific, Marx was no different from say, Kropotkin was always a political movement". or Reclus, who saw their own theories as scientific". Marx was not hostile or cool about workers But somehow they also think that Marx's claim to organising in trade unions. On the contrary: he was have worked some things out and got some things probably (in "The Poverty of Philosophy", his polemic right was more sinister than the similar claim made against Proudhon in 1846, at a time when trade by anyone who ventures to trouble the public with unions existed only in infant form) the first socialist to their writings. argue that trade-union organisation could be central "Classical Marxism purported to alone understand in working-class emancipation. the movement of history and express the Marx's objection was not to organising in trade fundamental interests of the proletariat... When [this] unions, but to Bakunin's claim that the working class claim to a unique truth was welded to the strategy of should not also "occupy itself with politics" (i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat... the formula for a struggles for political reforms, and electoral activity). one-party dictatorship through an authoritarian state Trotsky fought Stalinism to the death. But Schmidt was written". and van der Walt claim he "envisaged socialism as Marxist theory was also, the authors claim, 'authoritarian leadership... centralised distribution of "teleological", seeing history as progressing the labour force... the workers' state... entitled to mechanically "in a straight line towards a better send any worker wherever his labour may be future", through predetermined "stages". Marx (so needed', with dissenters sent to labour camps if they allege, on the basis of out-of-context snippets necessary".