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Marxism, Anarchism and the State During the battle against the poll tax small groups calling themselves anarchists gained a certain notoriety. More seriously, in Eastern Europe anarchist ideas have found an echo amongst some workers and youth. Could anarchism see a renaissance? Nick Wrack looks at what anarchism is and what it represents. ANARCHISM COMES FROM the Greek word. 'anarchos, meaning 'without government. The general ideology of anarchism is absolute opposition to all government, reflected in a complete hostility to the state in any form.
Anarchists see the state as the root cause of all that is wrong in society - oppression, poverty: the denial of individual liberty. They see the state as giving rise to the power of the capitalists. They stand for the immediate and complete destruction of the state, replacing it not with any other system of government, but immediately arriving at a stateless society. To the anarchists any 'state' means 'authority" which signifies a suppression of individual freedom. The antipathy of anarchism to the state is carried over into an antipathy to politics in general. Anarchists argue that having anything to do with the state will inevitably affect those involved in the struggle and lead to corruption or 'authoritarianism'.
Thus anarchism rejects all participation in any form of parliamentary activity and opposes workers belonging to political parties which fight for political change through the state There is much in common in their opposition to the state between anarchism and Marxism. brutal Marxism completel! opposes the domination of the capitalist state which enslaves and exploits the workers and peasants of the world. Mary saw a future in which there would be no state but "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all". There would be no coercive power of the state but only a free. self-governing people. But the question is: how to achieve this! Whereas anarchism sees the state as the fount of all the problems in society - which would be resolved by removing the state - Marxism sees the state as an expression of class society which is itself the cause of the problems. The aim is not only to MIR C31 abolish the existing state, but to destroy class
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320 MIR Summer 1991 The State
The state ables the ling class dominate
society which gives rise to the state.
The state is the instrument through which the ruling class maintains its domination over the rest of society. The capitalist state can take many different forms: monarchy, republic, military dictatorship. But its purpose is the same in each case - to enable a minority to exploit the majority. For a minority to maintain its dominant position it must have an instrument of coercion. That instrument is the state with its control of religion, education, the media, the law and most importantly, the police and the armed forces, which will be used if the class rule of the minority is ever threatened That is why any challenge to the state has to be taken seriously, not in the light-minded fashion of the anarchists.
The state first developed in society with the creation of private property and the emergence of classes. Ever since, the state has served as the instrument of the minority class in society to protect their control over the surplus produced. So long as there is class society there will be the need for a state. It can not be otherwise. The state will only disappear when there are no classes. When there are no classes there will be no need for a state.
This can only be achieved by the socialist revolution, that is by the working class conquering state power, by the political destruction of the capitalist state and its replacement by a democratic workers' state.
Having destroyed the capitalist state it will be necessary for the victorious working class to constitute themselves as a new state, to prevent the defeated bourgeois from organising counter-revolution. The capitalists will do everything possible to destroy the gains of the revolution. Unless the working class takes the practical step of organising its own state, that is an instrument of its own class rule, then the working class will be defeated by the violent action of the capitalists and capitalism will be restored.
In The State and Revolution Lenin answers the arguments of both the reformists and the anarchists: "The proletariat needs the state only temporarily. We do not at all disagree with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the instruments, resources and methods of state power against the exploiters..."
Similarly, Trotsky in Stalinism and Bolshevism writes that "Marxists are wholly in agreement with the anarchists in regard to the final goal: the liquidation of the state. Marxists are 'statist' only to the extent that one cannot achieve the liquidation of the state simply by ignoring it."
There will be however a fundamental difference between the state immediately after the socialist revolution and the previous capitalist state. Whereas the capitalist state is the instru-
ment of rule by the minority class in society, the workers' state will be for the first time in history the instrument of the majority class rule - over the defeated minority. In all previous revolutionary transitions from one form of society to another, from slave-owning to feudalism, from feudalism to capitalism, the new ruling class has taken over and adapted the old state and used it for its own purposes. The experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 led Marx and Engels to conclude that the working class could not simply take hold of the ready made state apparatus from the bourgeois but would have to completely replace it with a different form of state, one to serve the interests of the majority in society and to lay the basis for the building of a socialist society.
Thus, where the anarchists see the state as giving power to the bourgeois they are only seeing a part of the whole picture. While the ruling class derives its power from its control of the state, this ultimately rests on the class nature of society under capitalism. That is why the tasks of the revolution lie not simply in 'abolition of the state' but in laying the basis for the eradication of class society itself. The socialist revolution will 'abolish' or destroy the capitalist state but temporarily will have to replace it with a workers' state.
To ensure that the working class maintains control over its own state, so establishing the basis for its ultimate disappearance, Lenin advocated the election of all officials, paid no more than the wages of a skilled worker, and subject to the right of immediate recall so that nobody could abuse their position. All bureaucratic tasks were to be rotated to prevent power resting too long in the hands of one person or group. There was to be no standing army apart from the people which could be used against the people. To these conditions we add that all parties, except fascists, be allowed to organise and conduct political activity.
This state will be needed only so long as the minority, the defeated capitalist class, poses a threat to the new socialist society. With the introduction of a socialist plan of production replacing the profit nature of capitalism - it will be possible to increase production greatly. As production increases so will poverty, starvation, disease and material want of any kind disappear. New technology will be used to limit the working day.
So long as there are shortages, so long as there is want, there is a necessity to regulate society - to govern. As production increases and want disappears there will be less and less need to govern society. The danger of counterrevolution will begin to disappear as the new form of society shows its huge advantages over capitalism.
Side by side with the development of socialist production, classes begin to disappear and so will the state. The state will be needed less and
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less until eventually, as Engels put it, the state 'withers away'. The government of people is replaced by the administration of things and a society without government is achieved. As Lenin argues in The State and Revolution, "only communism makes the state completely unnecessary, for there is nobody to be suppressed - 'nobody' in the sense of a class, in the sense of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the population. We are not utopians, and do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses by individual persons, or the need to suppress such excesses. But in the first place, no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression is needed for this; it will be done by the armed people itself, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilised people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of community life, is the exploitation of the masses, their want and their poverty. With the removal of this chief cause. excesses will inevitably begin to 'wither away.
Anarchism, with its simplistic and utopian calls to abolish the state overnight. has neither the understanding nor programme to achieve its own goal. Without an understanding of the nature of the state and how it arose it is not possible to show how it can be destroyed. ANARCHISM DEVELOPED AS a philosophy in Mikhail the 19th century with the growth of the big Bakunin and Marx.
capitalists and the domination of the bourgeois state. It represented the rebellion of a section of the petit bourgeois at the loss of their position in society to the capitalist class which came to dominate them more and more.
Anarchist ideas did not stop at rejection of the state. Anarchism also rejected political action and saw in political parties an authoritarianism which mirrored that of the state itself. This position was argued by the anarchist Bakunin and his supporters within the ranks of the First International. Their ideas were clearly stated at an anarchist conference held at Saint- Imier in 1872: "The aspirations of the proletariat can have no other aim than the creation of an absolutely free economic organisation and federation based on work and equality and wholly independent of any political government, and such an organisation can only come into being through the spontaneous actions of the proletariat itself, through trade societies and through self-governing communes... political organisation can be anything but the organisation of rule in the interests of a class and to the detriment of the masses... the proletariat. should it seize power, would become a ruling. and exploiting, class." Here the anti-political stance of anarchism is clearly shown as a recipe for do-nothingness, inaction and disaster. Also revealed is the MIR •33
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340 MIR summer 199 The State
CEDA leader
Gil Robles.
complete lack of understanding about the role of the working class in capitalist society. As Marx explained, capitalism creates its own gravedigger in the form of the working class. Because of its place in the productive processes of society the working class is the only really revolutionary force in society. When it moves it swings behind it the peasantry and the petitbourgeois.
Anarchism could only make gains inside the working class in its early days. That these ideas gained any following is a reflection of the immaturity of the proletariat in the 19th century. Even then anarchism never really attracted wide support, winning most support and lingering longest in those countries with a rural population or large petit-bourgeois. In the course of events the reality of working class struggle dealt a series of death blows to anarchism as a serious force. In each country workers came to realise that political activity was a vital and essential part of their struggle against capital.
Bakunin and his followers, like the anarchists today, opposed participation in parliamentary elections, campaigns for social reforms and all attempts to win influence and power in the state. He condemned such activity as a 'betrayal of the revolution' since it gave rise to illusions among workers that they could be emancipated by means other than revolution. He proclaimed that the International Alliance of Social Democracy, the anarchist international, "rejected all political action not having as its immediate and direct objective the triumph of the workers over capitalism, and as a consequence, the abolition of the state". Thus the only action allowable is a revolutionary assault to overthrow the capitalist state - anything short of this is a betrayal.
Marxism sets its goal as the conquest of political power and the organising of a socialist society under which the state will eventually wither away. But until the working class is powerful enough and armed with a programme to change society completely is it to refrain from political activity? Of course not. Marxists advocate a continuous struggle for all political gains that can be made, even including utilising elements of the state, for example, parliamentary elections, to strengthen the working class against the state.
The anarchists' ultra-left rejection of political activity is only able to gain any credence at all because of the hostility aroused by the betrayals of the reformist labour leaders who, while engaged in political activity, limit themselves only to reforms without linking the day-to-day struggles to the need to change society completely.
Marxists fight hard for all reforms possible but do not limit the struggle to this, explaining that any reforms can only be made permanent and improved under socialism which means the
revolutionary transformation of society. Political activity leads to a growing awareness and confidence of the working class of its own power and ability to carry out the socialist revolution.
THE PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE of anarchism in the course of the Spanish revolution demonstrated not only its bankruptcy but its counterrevolutionary nature when it came to the decisive moment of carrying out the revolution it had all along proclaimed as its aim.
Spain was one of the few places where anarchism lasted as a significant force beyond the 1920s. Its roots were established in the days of the First International and there were strong anarchist traditions amongst the peasants in the rural communities. In Barcelona they had a base within the working class. The anarchist union, the CNT, claimed 600,000 members in June 1931, 250,000 of them in Catalonia. Trotsky wrote that "in the ranks of this organisation (the CNT) are concentrated the elite of the Spanish proletariat"
In 1933 the right-Republicans (a capitalist party) under Lerroux won the elections and in October 1934 invited CEDA (the extreme right wing) into the government. The Socialist party called a general strike and there were insurrectionary movements in Asturias and Catalonia. In Madrid and Catalonia the anarchist CNT stood to one side, arguing that this was a 'struggle between politicians' and did not concern the workers even though this was a strike against a move to incorporate fascism into the government.
In Asturias the anarchist militants participated under the pressure of the masses and because of the traditions of unity in that area. However, because of their abstentionist stupidity, the anarchists elsewhere continued to work, even working the trains which brought the Moorish troops under Franco to suppress the Asturias insurrection with the consequent death of thousands.
In the elections of 1936 the anarchists did not at first participate. But at the last minute they encouraged their members to vote for the Popular Front even though this was a Front containing bourgeois parties. Such support could only have the effect of placing the Spanish workers under the leadership of their enemy, the bourgeois.
Here we see the anarchists revealing the ugliness of both sides of their face, ultra-leftism and opportunism. Firstly they reject any participation in the elections because they reject participation in political activity. Then they advise their supporters to vote for the Popular Front which contained bourgeois as well as
workers' parties, but not the anarchists.
In fact, their advocation of abstention was
utilised by the right. In Cadiz for example, the
right realised the importance of anarchist abs-
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tentions and offered substantial sums to the anarchist leaders in return electoral propaganda.
Worse was to come. Faced with the Fascist uprising of 17 July 1936 against the Popular Front government the workers instinctively moved into action. Workers with arms in hand controlled whole cities. In Republican Spain the forces of the state had collapsed. The only decisive armed force was the working class. A situation of dual power developed which, had it been utilised by the working class organisations, could have led to the victorious socialist revolution.
Neither the 'Communist' nor the Socialist leaders wanted revolution. And now the anarchists revealed in practice the true nature of their revolutionary' theory. They had a strong position in Catalonia amongst the workers and elsewhere among the rural workers. Yet, instead of calling for the organisation of soviets through which the workers and peasants could have taken control and organised a new society, the anarchists did nothing to consolidate the gains the workers had won. Augustin Souchey was an anarchist who supported their entry into the government. Between 1936-39 he was in charge of the foreign propaganda of the CNT- FAI. He wrote: "The workers of Barcelona, under the leadership of the anarchists, succeeded in smashing the fascist rising within two and a half days. The anarchists did not want to conquer power for themselves, nor did the unions seek to establish a dictatorship. As in all other parts of Spain, an anti-fascist united front was formed. It ranged all the way from the various republican tendencies of the bourgeois to the most extreme tendencies of the proletariat - the anarchists"
Thus the anarchists led the workers into a popular front to fight fascism. Such an alliance with bourgeois parties can only weaken the struggle. A fight against fascism has to be a fight to destroy the power of the bourgeois which gives rise to fascism.
But they took this popular frontism even further. These opponents of the state, antagonists of government, entered the Popular Front government! They joined a government that was not a workers' government but a bourgeois government whose aim was to destroy the incipient socialist revolution, instinctively sought by the masses, and to maintain the bourgeois state.
All that would have been necessary was for the workers to have organised their own state, and society would have been transformed. But faced with the actual test of carrying through the tasks of the revolution the anarchist leaders found their theory wanting and joined the state they had spent their lives denouncing
This episode was repeated in 'the May Days in Barcelona in 1937. The Stalinists in the government in Catalonia, the Generalidad, at-
of money for anti-
TIMAS DEL FA
CNI
COMPRAR
DIAÇOS
AVOZOETT PREOL
'Sons of
barricade
Spanish :
war post
tempted forcibly to wrest control of the Barcelona telephone exchange from the anarchist militants who had occupied it from the first days of the revolution. Barricades were erected to protect this element of workers' control and when the government troops refused to move against the workers, power was in their hands. Once again the anarchist leaders appealed for restraint. The anarchist ministers (!) Garcia Oliver and Federica Montseny broadcast an appeal to their followers to lay down their arms and return to work.
Souchey admits that "the entire movement (of the government) was organised to destroy the CNT and the Federation of Iberian Anarchists (FAI) and, with them, the revolutionary achievements of 19 July". Yet. rather than mobilise their forces against this counterrevolution the anarchists advocated restraint.
In a diary of the events, Souchey notes that on 5 May, "reports came in from all parts of Barcelona and from the provinces of Catalonia that the overwhelming majority of the population were with the CNT and that most towns and villages were in the hands of our organisations. It would have been easy to attack the centre of the city had the responsible committees so decided. They only had to appeal to the defence committees of the outlying districts. But the regional committee of the CNT was opposed to it. Every proposal of attack was unanimously rejected by them and by the FAI"
Troops sympathetic to the anarchists were prepared to join them. On 6 May he writes: "Under-Secretary of State Juanel Molina, even
th 11:
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I though he was a member of the FAI, did was needed was the revolutionary seizure of their side and victory would have been cer- widely by the workers' organisations. there is no doubt that they could have been , course, the anarchist ranks were horrified by 360 MIR Summer 1991 everything to keep the troops from entering the The State struggle. Had the FAI really gone into action, the entire military force would have been on tain... The anarchists could also have called in their columns from the Aragon front, as well as armed forces from other parts of Catalonia, and victorious within 24 hours".
Instead the anarchist leaders continued to participate in the Catalan government that was dispatching troops against the workers. A CNT manifesto broadcast on 6 May stated, "The CNT and FAI continue to collaborate loyally, as in the past, with all political and trade union sectors of the anti-fascist front. The best proof of this is that the CNT continues to collaborate with the central government, the government of the Generalidad and all the municipalities... Further proof that the CNT of Catalonia did not want to break, and did not break, the anti-fascist front, is that when the new government of the Generalidad was formed, on 5 May, the representatives of the CNT of Catalonia offered it every facility, and the secretary of the CNT was a member of the government"
This collaboration served only to disarm the in the face workers of armed counterrevolution. The movement was betrayed. Yet what was to have stopped the anarchist leaders from carrying through the revolution if they had wanted it? In April 1937 the CNT claimed over one million members in Catalonia. In the course of these events the most militant sections of the anarchists, the anarchist youth and a group known as 'The Friends of Durruti' (after the anarchist leader Buenoventura Durruti who had been killed in the defence of Madrid) came over to the ideas of Marxism. The small Trotskyist group, the Bolshevik Leninists, called for the seizure of power by the workers through the establishment of 'commit- Anarchist tees of defence' or soviets. This perspective was leader Durruti. adopted by the anarchist left and the youth. The Friends of Durruti called for 'a revolutionary junta'. Thus in the course of events the best sections of the anarchists were drawn to the same conclusions as the Marxists - that what "We have already heard from some Anarchist theoreticians that at the time of such 'exceptional' circumstances as war and revolution, it is necessary to renounce the principles of one's own programme. "Such revolutionists bear a close resemblance to raincoats that leak only when it rains, ie in 'exceptional' circumstances, but during dry weather they remain waterproof with complete success."
Leon Trotsky, January 27, 1938 power by the workers themselves. There is no doubt that this could have been achieved in Catalonia had this position been taken up The May Days revealed a gulf between the leaders, the theoreticians of anarchism, and the youth and worker militants of the CNT. Of the betrayal of their leaders. Copies of the anarchist paper, Solidaridad Obrera, were ripped up in disgust by the workers on the barricades. But the whole preceding period of anarchist schooling had miseducated the masses. Only a Marxist party armed with a revolutionary programme for seizing power through the creation of soviets and establishing a workers' state could have shown what was necessary.
Unfortunately, the genuine Marxists were too weak to counter the influence of the Stalinist, socialist reformists and anarchist leaders. The revolution was lost and fascism triumphed. Franco was to rule for forty years. Commenting on the counter-revolutionary nature of anarchism as demonstrated by the events in Spain, Trotsky wrote: "To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realise its own programme in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing for the conquest of power.
"No one could have prevented the Anarchists after the conquest of power from establishing the sort of regime they deem necessary, assuming, of course. that their programme is realisable. But the Anarchist leaders themselves lost faith in it"
The entry of the anarchists into the government and the betrayal of the revolution spelt the death of anarchism as a historic force. It revealed itself as a useless weapon in the hands of the workers.
However, there are some who are incapable of learning anything from history. Jose Peirats was an active anarchist during the events in Spain who opposed the entry of the anarchists into the government. But what was the alternative? In The Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution he writes: "From a distance of more than twenty years, I believe that those of us who consistently opposed collaboration with the government had as our only alternative a principled, heroic defeat". What sort of revolutionary theory is it whose best hope is defeat, however 'principled' and 'heroic"?
UNDERSTANDABLY, ONE OF the main arguments used by anarchists against Marxism is the nature of the state in the Stalinist countries.
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Here we see, not the withering away of the state but the growth of monstrous dictatorships in the name of 'Marxism'. 'Bigger sticks and bigger cages,' as some anarchists put it.
Trotsky long ago answered those capitalist opponents of the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, as well as anarchists, who equated Stalinism with Bolshevism. In fact, in the course of the Russian revolution many anarchists joined the ranks of the Bolsheviks who showed in practice how to make a revolution and change society. Not all, however. Peter Kropotkin, the communist anarchist who had suffered tremendously at the hands of the state for his ideas, ended up supporting the Provisional government and urged workers to enlist in the Russian army to help win the war!
The reasons why the new-born workers' state grew into a dictatorship rather than withering away into communism are rooted in the isolation of the nascent workers' state and the cultural and economic level of the working class at that time. The civil war, the demands of the economy and the prevailing level of literacy and general education forced the new regime to rely heavily on elements from the old Tsarist state apparatus. Together with the isolation of the Russian revolution, this allowed a bureaucratic clique, with Stalin at its centre, to accrue more and more power to itself. Their aim became to maintain the privileges of the bureaucracy rather than to protect and develop the gains of the revolution.
The only consistent criticism of the Stalinist regimes has come not from the anarchists but from Trotsky and the adherents of genuine Marxism. All the leaders of the Bolsheviks saw the Russian revolution as a prelude to a European revolution which would raise the economic and cultural level of Russia and thus lay the basis for socialism to develop. This did not happen. The subsequent development of the Stalinist state is not an argument either for anarchism or against the carrying out of the revolution. The alternative was not the anarchist society of free communes or free soviets but the triumph of reaction, the restoration of autocracy as shown by the Kornilor assault against the Provisional government.
The argument that organising a workers state inevitably leads to dictatorship is simply an argument for inertia. for nowhere do the anarchists explain how we are to jump' from the capitalist state to the stateless society overnight.
The demise of the Stalinist regimes throughout Eastern Europe and the crisis inside the Soviet Union has given birth to a multitude of different ideas as to the best way forward Decades of Stalinist rule have served to set back the consciousness of the working class in these countries. All sorts of different ideas will be studied, tested and discarded as the working class makes its way through the myriad of false
"Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the
producers, will put the whole machiner! of state where it will belong: into the museum of
antiquities by the side of the spinning-wheel
and the bronze axe."
Friedrich
Engel
turnings betore arriving at the ideas of Marxism.
It is not surprising, in view of the way the state has developed under Stalinism, that anarchist ideas have found an echo amongst some workers and youth. That these regimes claimed to be based on Marxism has led many to reject, for the time being, any form of socialism and seek alternatives. But these regimes have nothing in common with Marxism, just as the Communist Parties of the world have nothing to do with communism. They are both monstrous perversions of the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. An ocean of blood separates these regimes from the genuine adherents of Marxism.
Only on the basis of rejecting the market and by carrying out the political revolution, that is by removing the bureaucracy and establishing workers' democracy resting on the planned economy, can the working class establish the basis for socialism under which the state will begin to disappear and a genuine communist society be achieved.
In Britain today there are very few active anarchists. However a layer of unemployed and homeless youth are attracted to anarchism with its attacks on the power of the state, the rich and anyone else in authority. But how many of those who march behind the red and black flags of anarchism on the anti-poll tax demonstrations would have read anything more than Class War? What draws them to anarchism is their position at the bottom of society where those in authority, including the labour leaders, have abandoned them.
For the past twelve years the Tory attacks have gone unanswered by the labour leaders, who are now hated by many of this layer of society. Anarchism is thus a payment for the inability of reformism to chart a way forward. Once the organised working class does begin to move, however, and demonstrates its power, the influence of anarchism, even on this layer of youth, will begin to decline.
A mass Marxist youth organisation could win this layer for the socialist revolution by showing in practice how to fight for jobs, for homes and a decent life, linking this to the fight to change society completely. That is the only programme that can offer a hope of any future for them or for mankind in general. Our goal, a form of society with no state, is the same but only Marxism offers a way of achieving it.C
Engels.
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