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Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red

January 2012

Publisher: Palgrave

Authors:

Alex Prichard

University of Exeter

Ruth Kinna

Loughborough University

David Berry

Loughborough University

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July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-i 9780230280373

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Libertarian Socialism

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-ii 9780230280373

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Libertarian Socialism

Politics in Black and Red

Edited by

Alex Prichard

Lecturer in International Relations, Department of Politics, University of Exeter, UK

Ruth Kinna

Professor of Political Theory, Department of Politics, History and IR,

Loughborough University, UK

Saku Pinta

Adjunct faculty, Department of Political Science, Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada

David Berry

Senior Lecturer in History, Department of Politics, History and IR,

Loughborough University, UK

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Notes on Contributors viii

1 Introduction 1

Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard

2 Freedom and Democracy: Marxism, Anarchism and the

Problem of Human Nature 17

Paul Blackledge

3 Anarchism, Individualism and Communism: William Morris’s

Critique of Anarcho-communism 35

Ruth Kinna

4 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalﬁeld before

1914 57

Lewis H. Mates

5 Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism 78

Renzo Llorente

6 Antonio Gramsci, Anarchism, Syndicalism and Sovversivismo 96

Carl Levy

7 Council Communist Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War

and Revolution, 1936–1939 116

Saku Pinta

8 A ‘Bohemian Freelancer’? C.L.R. James, His Early Relationship

to Anarchism and the Intellectual Origins of Autonomism 143

Christian Høgsbjerg

9 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’: Marxist and Anti-racist Roots

of Contemporary US Anarchism 167

Andrew Cornell

10 The Search for a Libertarian Communism: Daniel Guérin and

the ‘Synthesis’ of Marxism and Anarchism 187

David Berry

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vi Contents

11 Socialisme ou Barbarie or the Partial Encounters Between

Critical Marxism and Libertarianism 210

Benoît Challand

12 Beyond Black and Red: The Situationists and the Legacy

of the Workers’ Movement 232

Jean-Christophe Angaut

13 Carnival and Class: Anarchism and Councilism in Australasia

During the 1970s 251

Toby Boraman

14 Situating Hardt and Negri 275

David Bates

15 Conclusion: Towards a Libertarian Socialism for

the Twenty-First Century? 294

Saku Pinta and David Berry

Index 304

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our contributors to the volume for their patience

and for responding so positively to editorial requests. The team at Palgrave

have shown similar patience, and we thank them for this and their helpful

advice and encouragement. We would also like to thank all the participantsat

the ‘Is Black and Red Dead?’ conference held at the Centre for the Study

of Social and Global Justice, University of Nottingham in September 2009.

which provided the original inspiration for this collection. Sue Simpson and

Tony Burns deserve a special mention for their help and support throughout.

We would also like to acknowledge the generosity of the UK Political Studies

Association, the Marxist Specialist Group of the PSA and the PSA Anarchist

Studies Network, who, in supporting this conference, made it possible for

some of the contributors, and many others whose excellent papers could

not be included, to meet and exchange ideas face-to-face in a convivial

environment.

vii

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Contributors

Jean-Christophe Angaut has been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at

the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon since 2006. His ﬁelds of research

and teaching are nineteenth-century philosophy, political philosophy, and

connections between socialist, communist and anarchist thought. He has

published two books on the young Bakunin’s thought: Bakounine jeune

hégélien – La philosophie et son dehors (2007) and La liberté des peuples –

Bakounine et les révolutions de 1848 (2009). He has also published articles

about Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, the Young Hegelian movement and the

Situationists. He is a member of the editorial committee of the French

anarchist journal Réfractions.

David Bates is Principal Lecturer and Director of Politics and International

Relations in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Canterbury Christ

Church University. His interests are focused primarily in the area of radical

politics, including anti-capitalist forms of thinking. He has a particular con-

cern with Marxist and post-Marxist approaches to socialist emancipation.

More recently he has been interested in the critical relationship between

Marxist and libertarian radical politics.

David Berry is Senior Lecturer in History at Loughborough University. He

was awarded his DPhil in French labour history from the University of

Sussex. His research area is the history of the Left and of labour movements

in twentieth-century France. He has worked mostly on the French anarchist

movement and ‘alternative Left’, and is currently working on the life and

ideas of Daniel Guérin (1904–1988) and the libertarian communist tradition

from 1917 to the present. His publications include A History of the French

Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945 (2009) and (edited jointly with Constance

Bantman) New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Indi-

vidual, the National and the Transnational (2010). Having been involved for

some years with the Journal of Contemporary European Studies (formerly the

Journal of Area Studies), he is currently an associate editor and reviews editor

of the journal Anarchist Studies. He is a member of the CIRA (Centre Inter-

national de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme, Lausanne and Marseille), of the

ASMCF (Association for the Study of Modern & Contemporary France) and

of the Anarchist Studies Network.

Paul Blackledge is Professor of Political Theory and UCU Branch Secretary

at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is author of Marxism and Ethics (2012),

viii

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Notes on Contributors ix

Reﬂections on the Marxist Theory of History (2006), and Perry Anderson, Marxism

and the New Left (2004). He is co-editor of Virtue and Politics (2011), Alasdair

MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism (2008), Revolutionary Aristotelianism

(2008), and Historical Materialism and Social Evolution (2002). He has written

on Marxism and anarchism in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-

Century Philosophy (2011) and in International Socialism. He is a member of

the Socialist Workers Party.

Toby Boraman is a Historian for the Waitangi Tribunal in Wellington, New

Zealand. His research interests are labour history from below (anti-state),

communism and extra-parliamentary protest of the 1960s and 1970s. He

received his PhD in 2006 from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New

Zealand on the subjects of the New Left and anarchism in New Zealand.

Afterwards, he published a history of anarchism and anti-Bolshevik commu-

nism in New Zealand from the 1950s to the 1980s called Rabble Rousers and

Merry Pranksters (2007). He has also published a book chapter and articles on

the subjects of the New Left and working-class resistance to neoliberalism,

and historical pieces on strikes and near riots in New Zealand.

Benoît Challand is Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Pol-

itics of the New School for Social Research and Lecturer at the University

of Bologna. He works in the ﬁeld of political and historical sociology, with

a particular interest in Arab politics and political theory. His publications

include La Ligue Marxiste Révolutionaire,1969-1980 (2000) and Palestinian

Civil Society and Foreign Donors (2009). He is co-author, with Chiara Bottici,

of The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (2010) and The Politics of Imagination

(edited 2011).

Andrew Cornell is an Educator, Author and Organiser based in Brooklyn,

New York. He holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University

and is completing a study of anarchism in mid-twentieth-century USA. He is

the author of Oppose and Propose! Lessons from Movement for a New Society (AK

Press and Institute for Anarchist Studies). His writing appears in periodicals

such as the Journal for the Study of Radicalism,Perspectives on Anarchist The-

ory and Left Turn magazine. He has also contributed to the collections The

University against Itself (2008) and The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism

(2010).

Christian Høgsbjerg has completed a doctoral thesis on ‘C.L.R. James in

Imperial Britain, 1932–38’ in the Department of History at the University

of York (UK), and is the editor of a special edition of C.L.R. James’s 1934

play about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture: The story of the only

successful slave revolt in history (forthcoming). He is a member of the editorial

board of the journal International Socialism.

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xNotes on Contributors

Ruth Kinna is Professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University.

She is the author of William Morris: The Art of Socialism (2000) and the

Beginner’s Guide to Anarchism (2005, 2009). She has published numerous arti-

cles on late nineteenth- and early twentieth–century socialism, including

‘Guy Aldred: Bridging the Gap Between Marxism and Anarchism’ (Journal

of Political Ideologies, 16 (1) 2011), which explores themes examined in this

collection.

Carl Levy is a Reader in the Department of Politics, Goldsmiths, University

of London. He is the author of six books. His interests include compara-

tive European politics, history, policy-making and the history of ideas since

1860 with particular interest in anarchism, specialising in Italy and Italian

anarchism. He is currently writing a biography of Errico Malatesta.

Renzo Llorente teaches Philosophy at Saint Louis University’s Madrid Cam-

pus. His research centres on issues in social philosophy, ethics and Latin

American philosophy, and he is the author of numerous papers in these

and other areas. His recent publications include Beyond the Pale: Exercises in

Provocation (2010), the chapter on Marxism in A Companion to Latin American

Philosophy (2010), ‘The Moral Framework of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation’

in Ethical Perspectives (2009), and ‘Sobre el humanismo especista de Víctor

Gómez Pin’, in Razonar y actuar en defensa de los animales (2008). He is

currently working on a study of the moral foundations of Marxism.

Lewis Mates is a Tutor in History and Politics at Durham University. He

AQ1 has published several journal articles and book chapters on aspects of inter-

war British political history, and a monograph entitled The Spanish Civil War

and the British Left (2007). He is currently working on two projects: mem-

bership and activism in the Labour and Conservative parties (1945–1974),

and rank-and-ﬁle movements and political change in the Durham coalﬁeld

before 1914.

Saku Pinta is adjunct faculty in the Department of Political Science at

AQ2 Lakehead University and also works as a documentary ﬁlmmaker, sheet-

metal worker, and independent scholar. He completed his doctoral thesis,

entitled ‘Towards a Libertarian Communism: A Conceptual History of the

Intersections between Anarchisms and Marxisms’, at Loughborough Univer-

sity, UK in 2011. His current research focuses on the history of the Finnish

membership of the Industrial Workers of the World (c.1905–1975) in Canada

and the USA. An essay on this topic – ‘Educate, Organize, Emancipate: The

Work People’s College and the IWW’ – is set to appear in Anarchist Pedagogies:

Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reﬂections on Education (Oakland: PM

Press, 2012).

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Notes on Contributors xi

Alex Prichard is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of

Exeter. He gained his PhD from Loughborough University in 2008, and has

since held research and teaching posts at the University of Bath and the

London School of Economics, and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the

University of Bristol. He has published articles on anarchism and world pol-

itics in the Review of International Studies,Millennium: Journal of International

Studies and Anarchist Studies. He is the founder of the PSA Anarchist Studies

Network and co-editor of the new monograph series Contemporary Anarchist

Studies, published by Continuum Books. His ﬁrst monograph, Justice, Order

and Anarchy: The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was

published in 2012.

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QUERIES TO BE ANSWERED BY AUTHOR (SEE MARGINAL MARKS)

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please mark your corrections and answer to these

queries directly onto the proof at the relevant place. Do NOT mark your

corrections on this query sheet.

Prelims

Query No. Page No. Query

AQ1 x There is discrepancy between author name

in TOC and Notes on Contributors, please

check.

AQ2 x Is this Saku Pinta’s job title?

This ﬁle is to be used only for a purpose speciﬁed by Palgrave Macmillan, such as checking proofs, preparing an index, reviewing,

endorsing or planning coursework/other institutional needs. You may store and print the ﬁle and share it with others helping

you with the speciﬁed purpose, but under no circumstances may the ﬁle be distributed or otherwise made accessible to any other

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July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-1 9780230280373

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Introduction

Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard

Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again

the Black and Red unite!

Otto Von Bismarck1

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

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2Introduction

mutual suspicion presaged.2Criticisms of Max Stirner, voiced since the

1890s – sometime after Marx and Engels sketched their critique of ‘Saint

Max’ in The German Ideology – similarly bolstered the view that the political

disputes that divided Marxists and anarchists were grounded in very dif-

ferent, perhaps irreconcilable, philosophical traditions, always latent in the

socialist movement.

A second inﬂuential story of the relationship is the account promoted

by Lenin and it consists of the view that the differences between Marxists

and anarchists have been overstated: both groups of socialists are com-

mitted to the realisation of a common end, they disagree only about the

means of transformation. In the 1970s this case was advanced by the

historian Eric Hobsbawm. The rejection of anarchism, he argued, had a num-

ber of dimensions, but its leading idea was that ‘[t]here is no difference

between the ultimate objects of Marxists and anarchists, i.e. a libertarian

communism in which exploitation, classes and the state will have ceased to

exist.’3Hobsbawm attempted to explain the apparent tension between this

theoretical accord and the actual history of the revolutionary socialist move-

ment by showing how revolutionary Marxists – Marx, Engels and Lenin –

combined a rejection of anarchist thought with benevolence toward anar-

chist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. The agreement on ends reﬂected

the shared practical experience of revolution, but it was also consistent with

a ﬁrm denial of anarchist means to that end, and the theory that supported

those means. His explanation implied a clear separation of ideas from prac-

tice in the development of ideology. Although Hobsbawm acknowledged

the imprecision of ‘doctrinal, ideological and programmatic distinctions’ in

rank and ﬁle movements, contrary to contemporary treatments of ideolog-

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-

ical engagements and events – not just theory.4The result was to reinforce

the principle of theoretical division whilst providing a positive account of

Leninism that, for anarchists, was unpersuasive.

Hobsbawm’s elaboration of the apparent dovetailing of Marxist and anar-

chist positions points to a line of division that many anarchists have wanted

to highlight – a third account of difference. This turns on the relationship

between the means and ends of revolutionary struggle and the anarchist

rejection of the idea that the transition from capitalism to socialism requires

a period of transition in which state power is captured and used as an instru-

ment of change, before ‘withering away’.5For anarchists, the adoption of

such means necessarily compromises the ends of the revolution and it points

to a model of socialist organisation that most have rejected. Although he

passed over the theoretical grounds of the anarchist complaints, Hobsbawm

pinpointed precisely the nature of the concern: Marxists not only accepted

the ‘withering away’ thesis6they also adopted a ‘ﬁrm belief in the superior-

ity of centralization to decentralization or federalism and (especially in the

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Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard 3

Leninist version), to a belief in the indispensability of leadership, organiza-

tion and discipline and the inadequacy of any movement based on mere

“spontaneity” ’.7From an apparent agreement about the ends of the revolu-

tion, Hobsbawm identiﬁed a combined package of ideas that was antithetical

to anarchist thought and which, in parts and in whole, many self-identifying

Marxists also rejected.8

A fourth story of the relationship between Marxism and anarchism relates

to the relative signiﬁcance of these two currents of thought. One version

of this story focuses on practical activity, the other on emergence and

re-emergence, dominance and subservience. As to the ﬁrst, the place of

Marxism as the dominant current within socialism is sometimes assumed

without qualiﬁcation. Indeed, such has been the dominance of Marxism

that recent histories of the Left simply conﬂate socialism with Marxism and

ignore the anarchists completely.9Others assign anarchism little more than

a footnote in a wider narrative of Marxist inﬁghting and factionalism.10

A second version of the poor relation thesis centres on the assessment of

the relative intellectual merits of Marxist and anarchist ideas. Anarchism

fares badly here, too. The blunt claim of Murray Bookchin’s essay ‘The

Communalist Project’ is that anarchism ‘is simply not a social theory’.

Its foremost theorists celebrate its seeming openness to eclecticism

and the liberatory effects of ‘paradox’ or even ‘contradiction,’ to use

Proudhonian hyperbole. Accordingly, and without prejudice to the

earnestness of many anarchistic practices, a case can made that many of

the ideas of social and economic reconstruction that in the past have been

advanced in the name of ‘anarchy’ were often drawn from Marxism.11

Bookchin’s evaluation is not untypical. As Graeber and Grubacic note, anar-

chism’s most distinctive contribution to socialism is often identiﬁed with

revolutionary commitment. It is the passionate, idealistic heart to Marxism’s

sober and realistic head. In a discussion of ‘small-a anarchists’ they note:

‘Marxism ...has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about rev-

olutionary strategy. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about

revolutionary practice ...where Marxism has produced brilliant theories of

praxis, it’s mostly been anarchists who have been working on the praxis

itself’.12 Although there is now talk of an ‘anarchist turn’ in radical political

theory, it is not yet clear that anarchism’s relationship to Marxism has fun-

damentally altered.13 Nor is it clear which Marxism the new Left today are

turning from or which anarchism is it moving toward. The danger of ‘turns’

is that they reinforce existing, often caricatured, assumptions of difference

and ossify identity. The reality is that the terms of debate have evolved and

resist easy pigeon-holing, as the chapters in this volume testify.

The imbalance between Marxism and anarchism is also sometimes

expressed through the language of emergence and re-emergence. In this

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4Introduction

discourse, anarchism is treated as a somewhat juvenile expression of inter-

mittent protest. 1968 is often referred to as a moment of rebirth for

anarchism and the new Left.14 1999 is likewise a marker for the appearance

of a new anarchistic ‘movement of movements’ and the reappearance of

anarchism, now galvanised by the struggle for global justice.15 At the height

of the Paris évènements, Daniel Cohn-Bendit identiﬁed both the continu-

ities and the important critical interchanges that these movements actually

represented. His unusual formulation of ‘Leftism’ was based on an under-

standing of socialism as a continuous theoretical dispute which gave equal

weight to opposing views: ‘Marx against Proudhon, Bakunin against Marx,

Makhno against Bolshevism’, and what Cohn-Bendit called the student-

workers’ movement against the ‘transformation and development of the

Russian Revolution into a bureaucratic counter-revolution, sustained and

defended by Communist Parties throughout the world’.16 Moreover, Cohn- AQ1

Bendit’s approach pointed to a process of political development based on

continuous constructive critique: if Leftism was new, it borrowed from

anarchism – anarchism had not re-emerged, it was merely that new groups

were only just discovering it. Yet Cohn-Bendit’s dialogic approach did not

predominate and the sense that anarchism follows a phoenix-like existence,

albeit with a shorter life-cycle, is still powerful.

The dominance of Marxism over anarchism might be explained in a num-

ber of ways. The tendency to read a utopian prehistory back into scientiﬁc

socialism and to tie revolutionary socialism tightly to the rise of an urban,

industrialised working-class movement has undoubtedly played a role in

sealing Marxism’s good reputation. The sense that anarchism was attractive

to predominantly rural populations – though itself contestable – has encour-

aged a view that it was irrelevant to the modern world and attractive only

to an uneducated and therefore theoretically unsophisticated audience. The

inspiration that Marxism has provided for a range of socialist regimes and

political parties also helps explain why anarchism has often been seen as

Marxism’s poor relation. The working assumption of Donald Sassoon’s sem-

inal study of European socialism was that the only socialist organisations to

alter the trajectory of European society were the ‘traditional socialist parties’

(Communist and Social Democratic) which emerged from 1889. This blot-

ted all sorts of revolutionary organisations out of socialist history, especially

the anarchists, even though, as Tony Judt noted, the fringe groups that fell

under Sassoon’s radar nevertheless exerted a signiﬁcant (albeit unwelcome

in his view) inﬂuence on socialist thought. Moreover, as recent research has

conﬁrmed, other mass movements – notably the syndicalist – occupied a

pivotal place in many parts of the world.17

The approach to socialism that measures success in terms of a competitive

struggle for power in the state naturally disadvantages anarchism, particu-

larly since no anarchist ideology is likely to ﬁnd the statist patrons that have

sustained and nurtured nationalist, Marxist, religious and other ideological

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Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard 5

movements. The subordination of anarchism to Marxism in accounts of

socialism also owes something to the way in which political ‘success’ and

‘defeat’ are estimated and understood. The defeat of the anarchist revolu-

tion in Spain in 1939 is sometimes interpreted as a symbol of the collapse of

anarchism, both in theory and practice. For Hobsbawm it provided further

proof of the ideological bankruptcy of anarchism and the ‘failure’ of the rev-

olution itself, evidence of the inadequacy of anarchism as a practical goal.18

George Woodcock’s view was not much different. In Anarchism, Woodcock

argued that the ‘actual anarchist movement ...stemmed from the organiza-

tion and inspiration activities of Michael Bakunin in the 1860s’ and that it

‘ceased to have any real relevance in the modern world’ after the Spanish

defeat.19 The inability of the anarchists to stand up to Hitler, Stalin, Franco

and Mussolini – practically alone – is judged as a weakness of ideology rather

than of material capability. Admittedly, in the aftermath of 1968 Woodcock

suggested that this had been an overly pessimistic judgement. However, its

implication, which he accepted, was that anarchism was a mere tendency, a

current of thought that was likely to receive only sporadic expression for it

lacked institutional longevity.

In different ways, each of these four accounts of the relationship between

anarchism and Marxism has helped to deﬁne and delimit the focus of crit-

ical study: anarchism is linked only to its nineteenth-century ‘fathers’ and

Marxism tied tightly to Bolshevism, opening the way to charting Marxism’s

rise through the Soviet regime and its satellites and the emergence of the

composite doctrine, Marxism –Leninism, at the cost of say, Trotskyism,

autonomism or other currents of ultra-Left dissent. Interest in party-political

success and the analysis of practical activity in the state only extends this

bias. Following the logic of this approach it is easy to see why the collapse of

the Berlin Wall was widely treated as the beginning of the end for European

Marxism and the dawn of ‘a new anarchism’.20 Impressions such as these are

today widely contested. Notions of ‘the old Left’ resonate in our imagina-

tion, while those who discover the antecedents of ‘the new Left’ ﬁnd that

these antecedents are often the same groups and people that populated ‘the

old Left’ but who were marginalised or forgotten: the dissenters and heretics,

but also often the acolytes or (self-appointed) vanguard. This book ought to

help give more shape to this ideological morphology, but so much more

remains to be done.

This reading of history leads to a similar delimitation in anarchist his-

torical analysis. The twin claims that anarcho-syndicalism was the most

important current in the anarchist movement and that it had its origins in

Bakunin and his heirs, and can only be traced back to him, is one exam-

ple.21 And it similarly skews understandings of anarchism. An important

consequence of the argument is that Proudhon’s inﬂuence, which was par-

ticularly strong in France, Spain, Switzerland and Russia, long before Marx

sought his collaboration and for a good period after, is bypassed. As a result,

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6Introduction

the republicanism of Pí-y-Margall, the pluralism of G. D. H. Cole and Harold

Laski, Tolstoy’s anarchism, or the French tradition of ‘personalisme’ and

pluralist syndicalism to give a few examples, appear anomalous in social-

ist traditions, and the currents of thought they developed and of which they

were a part are stripped of integral aspects of their substance in efforts to

force them into one or other ‘tradition’ of socialist thinking.22

Reviewing these traditional accounts of anarchism and Marxism here

helps illuminate the subterranean trends in socialist thinking that have

always given the lie to that easy dichotomy and helps us understand

the complexity of the lines of division. Continual reference to the ‘anar-

chist core’ of contemporary activist movements, illuminated and developed

at length by David Graeber elsewhere,23 belies the explosion of alterna-

tive socialist groups in the post-Cold War period that are neither red nor

black but draw on the politics of both. Autonomists, Council Communists,

open Marxists, the Zapatistas, primitivists, nowtopians and post-anarchists

all share space with longer-established groups of anarchists and Marxists,

Trotskyists and Leninists, sometimes within the fuzzy intellectual plurality

of the Climate Camps and the horizontalism of the wider protest move-

ments, often in speciﬁc labour struggles or revolutionary moments. The

relationships between the groups that make up this contemporary kaleido-

scope are by no means clear or uncontested.24 Few of their members are

perhaps aware of, and probably more are indifferent to, the equally messy

history of the movements which preceded their own. Yet the leading con-

tention of this book is that they have something to gain from re-engaging

with and reﬂecting on the past, on the complexity of socialist history and on

the problems which previous generations of activists encountered. The drive

to action and the mythological but ‘tainted history’ shared by anarchists and

Marxists have ignited a desire for novelty and ingenuity, and a ﬂourishing

of revolutionary vitality. An understanding of the processes of ideological

formation or ossiﬁcation, of the ways in which ideas translate into and are

transformed by practice, helps reveal the contestability of claims made about

both traditions – about both the permanence of the past or the shape of the

future. There is much to be gained from opening up this rich seam.

In mining it, this collection has three main aims that have been hinted

at above but are worth stating clearly. The ﬁrst is to challenge conventional

accounts of socialist interrelations and reopen analysis of the relationship of

Marxism to anarchism. This is to suggest that the ideological boundaries are

far more complex, ﬂuid and porous than these potted histories indicate; that

the diversity of views within broadly anarchist and Marxist groups is wider

than the alignment with key ﬁgures allows; and that the conceptual dif-

ferences between socialists who identify with different currents of thought

are more interesting and nuanced than the means–end dichotomy suggests.

A second aim is to reconsider the overlaps and tensions between and within

different Marxisms and anarchisms and highlight the plural forms that both

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Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard 7

main currents have taken since the end of the nineteenth century. The aim

here is to begin to map a more contemporary history of the Left.25 The third

aim is to delve into areas of the relatively neglected history of the socialist

movement to show both how socialist ideas have played out at speciﬁc times

and in particular locations and how the borrowings and mutual critiques of

well-known activists – Morris, Sorel, C.L.R James, Castoriades – who refused

to adopt orthodox positions, were importantly shaped through engagement

in particular struggles.

The methodological bias of the collection is towards the history of ideas.26

While the essays are written from a range of different theoretical standpoints

and advance very different normative claims, they do so by contextualising

arguments rather than through appeal to abstract theoretical debate alone.

This volume proceeds from the view that politics without history is direc-

tionless and that attempts to renegotiate an alignment between red and

black would beneﬁt from a sense of historical precedent rather than more

theory.27

This book is not designed as a bridge-building project or as a search for

similarity, nor is it one that presumes uniformity or homogeneity to be

a suitable platform for future Left-wing strategy.28 Moreover, the essays in

this collection do not pass over the sectarianism of revolutionary social-

ism, but variously attempt to pinpoint what the conceptual fault lines are,

show why they are signiﬁcant, how they might be bridged and/or reﬂect

on the trade-offs and creative tensions within socialism and the limits to

co-operation in context. In some cases, the argument points to the irreconcil-

ability of socialist ideologies and to insurmountable philosophical problems

in bridging gaps between different factions. In other cases, spaces for negoti-

ation are identiﬁed and encouraged. Some have found some correspondence

between black and red, others have not, but even where some correspon-

dence has been identiﬁed, the terms are divergent because the contexts are

often distinct, or even – less prosaically – people simply have not understood

one another. Studies that focus on key individuals show how the interplay

between anarchist and Marxist currents has been captured in their writings

and can be seen to have been lived through the lives of these individu-

als in particular intellectual and social contexts. Other chapters illustrate

how attempts at engagement failed. Historical analyses of particular social

or labour movements also arrive at starkly different conclusions, and while

some case studies show how groups and individuals successfully exploited

overlaps, others highlight sectarian collapse.

There are no general lessons here, but a number of important insights can

be gleaned about the ways in which ideas translate into and through differ-

ent practices, how revolutionary ambitions have changed over time and how

the experience of struggle has exercised a common inﬂuence on activists in

very different geographical and historical locations. In their own ways, each

of these essays presents a realistic and representative platform for debate and

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8Introduction

each contributes to our understandings of ideological division and forma-

tion on the Left, and within ideologies more broadly.29 In the conclusion to

this volume, David Berry and Saku Pinta set out what they understand to be

the most productive terms on which red and black have engaged, and show

how ways and means of thinking the past into the present might be given a

particular content. But we leave it to readers to decide which (indeed, if any)

of the versions of socialism presented here is feasible or attractive and reﬂect

on the future prospects of synthesis or reconciliation.

No history is ever complete, and no collection of papers that seeks to pro-

vide a snapshot of an epochal series of such disparate debates as this can

be anything more than a beginning. The present collection includes chap-

ters that collectively span nearly 150 years of socialist wrangling, with all its

practical achievements and huge disappointments. In spite of our best efforts

we were unable to source a chapter on historical feminist engagements with

the black and red divide or a feminist perspective on the history of this

split. This was particularly disappointing, given the practical and theoretical

contribution feminist activists on the Left have made to the understand-

ing of ideological division and its effective negotiation, and to the practical

achievements of women’s groups in the socialist movement. But perhaps it

is telling that the voices of Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman or groups such

as the Mucheres Libres, and innumerable other women’s movements, do not

feature prominently in the historiography of anarchism or Marxism. As will

become clear, socialism has been recorded predominantly as a man’s game

over the past century and it is a shame that this collection has failed to

redress this notable imbalance.30

Alongside this gender imbalance, there is also a geographical one.

Discussion is mainly, though not exclusively, centred on European and

North American subjects and their inﬂuence elsewhere. This is another

regrettable limit on the collection.31 So, too, is the narrowly ‘political’ focus.

Unfortunately, the collection lacks a wider discussion of the cultural and

artistic movements that emerged across and between black and red divides.32

But despite these glaring lacunae, we are conﬁdent that the present volume

provides rich enough material to introduce the broad contours of the red

and black divide, give cause to pause for reﬂection, and kick-start wider

discussions.

The essays have been organised to trace a history of engagement and to

give some sense of the chronology of anarchist and Marxist relations. The

volume begins with a robust defence of Marxism and presents an analy-

sis of anarchism which identiﬁes its theoretical and political weakness in

a model of human nature that is deemed liberal and, therefore, essentially

individualist. Paul Blackledge argues that one of Marx’s great achievements

was to present a historicised conception of nature which, in showing how

human essence is transformed in and through the process of revolutionary

action, also highlighted Marxism’s democratic character. Blackledge sees a

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Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard 9

potential for dialogue with some forms of anarchism, but argues that the

commitment to liberal individualism (here identiﬁed with Stirner) leaves

anarchists without the practical means of revolutionary organisation and

results in failure to develop a plausible theory of democracy. Until anarchists

accept Marx’s Hegelian conception of history, division will remain. Indeed,

the anarchists’ rejection of this conception not only puts them at odds with

Marxism, it explains why they have characteristically misunderstood and

misrepresented Leninism.

Ruth Kinna’s chapter, which follows, picks up some of these themes.

It examines William Morris’s rejection of anarchism as individualist, and

shows how this critique fed into Morris’s conception of collective decision-

making. The discussion looks at the ways in which anarchism and individ-

ualism were understood at the end of the nineteenth century in order to

show that Morris’s treatment conjured up a ghoul, an anarchism that was

individualist and hence antithetical to socialism. Morris contributed to the

stigmatisation of a tradition of thinking that was far richer than he was

prepared to give it credit for, and his critique forced him to substantially

revise some of his own democratic principles. It also demonstrated how a

lack of care and clarity in the terms of debate helped narrow the scope

for co-operation. Morris, like Blackledge, saw little room for negotiating

black and red traditions. In unpicking the relationship between anarchism

and individualism, Kinna argues that there is at least some scope for the

reappraisal of the terms of this split.

Lewis Mates’ chapter provides a powerful and complex counterpoint and

development to the preceding chapters. Through an analysis of the lives

of George Harvey (an industrial unionist) and Will Lawther (an anarchist

syndicalist) in pre-war Durham, Mates shows how the urge to collective

action and communist ends were led by idealistic and highly motivated

individuals in and around the pit villages during these momentous years.

Inﬂuenced by the writings of De Leon, Morris, Kropotkin and Aldred, and

the practical iniquities and challenges they experienced daily, the socialism

that emerged largely eschewed parliamentary action and sought collective

direct action for socialist ends. But there were signiﬁcant ideological ten-

sions between the purist Lawther and pragmatic Harvey, which were played

out in the course of the miners’ struggle. The struggle for autonomy and

self-management in Durham is a microcosm of wider struggles elsewhere at

that time and bears careful reading precisely for the light it sheds on the

lived attempts to realise communal ends through individual initiative and

revolutionary commitment.

In Chapter 4, Renzo Llorente reopens the question of ideological division

through a reappraisal of George Sorel. Llorente’s main concern, however, is

to classify Sorel as an anarcho-Marxist: someone in whom certain key fea-

tures of both traditions were united and around whom both black and red

might be able to unite. Llorente shows how Sorel’s direct engagement with

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10 Introduction

the writings of Marx, Proudhon and Bakunin did not lead to theoretical

paradox but to hybridisation. In some respects, Llorente shows us that anar-

chist means can lead to communist ends. Sorel distinguished between the

violence perpetrated by the state, individual acts of violence and the revolu-

tionary violence of the working classes – the latter essentially a synonym for

strikes. He claimed that it was through the marshalling of forces for the gen-

eral strike that the working class was educated both in its own agency and

revolutionary potential. Democratic participation in the organisation of the

general strike was the direct means to empowerment. The links to Lenin,

Kropotkin and Bakunin are clear – the question raised is whether they are

convincing enough to help us move beyond black and red, towards some

sort of viable synthesis.

The cross-currents of socialist thought are further probed in Carl Levy’s

analysis of Gramsci, a ﬁgure who, perhaps more than any other either before

or after him, is identiﬁed with the fusion of anarchism and Marxism. Levy’s

chapter brings this out to good effect, but contests this view. In Gramsci we

see the eschewal of orthodoxy and the turn to small(er)-scale voluntarism

as the motor of progressive counter-hegemonic blocs – the role of the intel-

lectual and moral vanguard notwithstanding. But his thought was shaped

by his early engagement with Croce and by involvement in the complex

politics of the Italian Left. His relationship with the anarchists reﬂected the

depth of his disagreements with other activists and was not an indication

of deep empathy with anarchist ideas. Indeed, his criticisms of Malatesta

and other anarchist intellectuals ran alongside an appreciation of Leninism,

only to be replaced by councillism once the orthodoxies of Second and Third

International Marxism came to prominence.

Saku Pinta’s chapter takes the historical narrative of the volume to the

onset of the Second World War. While the First World War proved disas-

trous for the anarchist movement as a whole, the Second World War and the

defeat of the Spanish anarchists killed off what was left of a mass anarchist

revolutionary movement, at least in Europe.33 What came later, as the fol-

lowing chapters show, is a far stronger Leninist form of libertarianism than

the anarchist-ﬂavoured synthesis that preceded it. In this respect, the per-

spectives of the Council Communists on the Spanish Revolution provide an

important historical marker in the twentieth-century history of anarchism

and Marxism, while at the same time showing that even in the so-called

death throes of anarchism alternative hybrids of libertarian socialism were

already well established.

Christian Høgsbjerg’s chapter covers the unique life experiences of the

Trinidadian socialist C. L. R. James. As the complementary chapters of Berry

and Cornell show, James’ connections with anarchist, syndicalist and black

civil rights activists make him a hugely signiﬁcant ﬁgure in the history of the

Left. James’ criticism of Trotsky also presents us with a glimpse into the per-

sonal and political that shaped this ‘bohemian freelancer’. Høgsbjerg argues

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Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard 11

that despite an early ﬂirtation with Kropotkin’s work on the French Revolu-

tion, James was no anarchist and his criticism of the direction of the Soviet

state and later his break with ofﬁcial Trotskyism are no more indication of

this than his appreciation of Kropotkin’s work. James was an anti-anarchist

who, despite drawing on and developing the ideas of many around him,

remained a committed Marxist. His intellectual legacy lies in autonomism.

David Berry examines the work of Daniel Guérin, a friend of James. His

essay considers Guérin’s attempt to synthesise anarchism and Marxism, an

attempt which sprang from a desire for ‘total revolution’, a dissatisfaction

with the economic reductionism and authoritarianism of Trotskyism, and

from the inspirational works of Bakunin and Proudhon. The way in which

Guérin appropriated anarchism after his break with Trotskyism is remark-

able precisely because it mirrored the path taken by James, Gramsci and

others. And yet Guérin was far more open in his admiration for Proudhon,

Stirner and Bakunin and seemed remarkably more open to engagement

with their ideas in ﬁnding an audience for his own synthesis of anarchism

and Marxism. Berry argues that Guérin’s importance lies in his practical

engagement with French movements and in his eschewal of abstract the-

ory. He identiﬁes his legacy in the emergence of the new Left in France and

elsewhere, highlighted during the events of May ‘68 and beyond.

Benoit Challand provides an analysis of one of the key intellectual

markers in the pre-‘68 French revolutionary Left: the group of writers

that coalesced around the publication Socialisme ou Barbarie, in particu-

lar Cornelius Castoriadis. The life and times of these characters provides

an excellent case study of the role of authoritarian personalities in the

formation and trajectory of intellectual movements and the failure of rev-

olutionary socialist movements to bridge the divide between anarchism and

Marxism – anarchism here identiﬁed with Council Communism. The Coun-

cil Communist tradition and the particular brand of Trotskyism outlined by

Lefort and Castoriadis were both productive and suggestive, but ultimately

the factionalism and the contrast between the libertarian politics of ‘SouB’

and the authoritarianism of the group’s leader proved too much for the

smooth running of the group. This factionalism is probably the lived experi-

ence of day-to-day socialism for innumerable activists. What every expulsion

and every act of intellectual dissidence shows, of course, is that ‘red’ and

‘black’ have been, and still are, deeply and passionately contested concepts.

Jean-Christophe Angaut’s essay examines the politics of the Situationist

International (SI). While he acknowledges the important inﬂuence that the

SI exercised on the events in 1968, his analysis is designed to reveal the

signiﬁcance of the critiques that Guy Debord and others levelled against

anarchist anti-authoritarians and Marxist anti-capitalists. His intellectually

and socially contextualised analysis draws out the Hegelianism of the SI.

The SI’s view, he argues, was that the unity of revolutionary theory was

to be found in an original critical relation of both black and red with

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12 Introduction

Hegelian thought – a current from which Bakunin, Marx, Engels and Stirner

all emerged. Their attempt to go beyond the subsequent separation (out-

lined in different ways by Blackledge and Kinna), brings us back to a point

of unity. Angaut’s point is not to endorse the unity and totality that the

SI found, but to return to this starting point. Historical versions of Marxism

and anarchism are both redundant, he argues. Today, ‘black and red’ means

‘the multiplicity of real social alternatives, avoiding hierarchy and the rule

of the commodity’ (p. 441).

Andrew Cornell takes us back over the Atlantic to a contemporaneous

revolutionary movement and shows us how today’s anarchist tactics inﬂu-

enced, morphed into and then once again developed out of the tactics of

the black civil rights activists between the late 1930s and the mid-1970s.

Anarchists went into the US penitentiary system as conscientious objectors,

campaigned against racial separation while inside and also helped radicalise

the future leaders of the civil rights movement – their fellow inmates. Once

outside, the anarchist-inspired black civil rights movement in the US evolved

further through encounters with the doctrines of Marxist national liberation

ideology – particularly the writings of C. L R. James and the Johnson Forest

Tendency – and erupted through both violent and non-violent civil disobe-

dience, direct action and ‘black bloc’ tactics. The latter were to feed back into

the radical undercurrents of anarchist politics in the run up to mass protests

surrounding Seattle in 1999.

As Toby Boraman makes clear, Australasian revolutionary socialists were at

the fringes of the global movement but in many respects the experiences of

the main characters in his micro-drama are familiar to us all. Boraman’s case

study sheds light on a neglected area of anarchist research. It shows us the

typical rather than the extraordinary, the everyday rather than the high pol-

itics of revolution, and is enlightening for precisely that reason. Boraman

examines how ideas translated in the Australasian context; how situationists,

Council Communists and class struggle anarchists intermingled; and how

their acolytes fell out with one another and struggled together for social

change and self-expression. He draws on this analysis to reﬂect on the splits

between carnival anarchists and class warriors as an example of a division

between the ideologically pure and the pragmatists of life. Many will recog-

nise some aspect of Boraman’s detailed picture and doubtless agree that with

the collapse brought about by factional disputes it is likely that the moniker

‘libertarian socialism’ – understood here as ‘a many-sided struggle to change

not only work, but also everyday life’ – will supersede those that went before

(p. 470).

Bates brings our collection up to date with the most recent and perhaps the

most famous rearticulation of contemporary socialist politics: Michael Hardt

and Antonio Negri’s work. Their writings are controversial and, as he shows,

open to a wide variety of interpretations. Bates explains these disagreements

by discussing their self-identiﬁcation as communists, their reinterpretation

of Leninism and vocal rejection of anarchism. His analysis also shows the

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Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard 13

complex historical processes and intellectual lineages that shaped their ideas,

both opening up our understanding of them as well as asking a range of

difﬁcult questions about the political efﬁcacy of a politics founded on mul-

titude, a rejection of class conﬂict and a celebration of ‘foundationlessness’.

Hardt and Negri are without doubt original; the questions Bates raises are in

relation to what, and at what cost.

Pinta and Berry’s conclusion draws on some of the cross-currents of social-

ist thinking expressed in these chapters and identiﬁes the most powerful

areas of convergence in the gap between social democracy and Bolshevism

on the one hand, and anarchist individualism on the other. Their analysis

treats libertarian socialism as a form of anti-parliamentary, democratic, anti-

bureaucratic grass-roots socialist organisation strongly linked to working-

class activism. Locating libertarian socialism in a grey area between anarchist

and Marxist extremes, they argue that the multiple experiences of histori-

cal convergence remain inspirational and that, through these examples, the

hope of socialist transformation survives. And though history can only teach

us about the past, the potential for revolutionary change continues to rest

on the possibility of convergence rooted in social struggles, because it is here

that afﬁnities are forged and mutual dialogue takes place.

To bring this introduction to a close, it is important to emphasise that

this book is simply a collection of reﬂections on the antecedents and emer-

gent hybrids of contemporary socialist thought. Many will recognise the

pictures painted here and many others will disagree with particular inﬂec-

tions, interpretations and biases. This would be to engage with precisely the

historical recovery and rearticulation this book seeks to defend and would

be a necessary ﬁrst step towards developing alternatives. Ideas do not spring

ready-formed from our minds, but emerge out of the conﬂuence of quiet

reﬂection and the tumult of social struggle. That is what these chapters

show and they undoubtedly suggest that political agency and ideological

morphology are born of and live through speciﬁc times and places. The past

might not hold lessons, but a better appreciation of history provides a coun-

terweight to presentism, expands the terms of political praxis and checks

political myopia. In this respect, this book is for those who seek to realise

new possibilities from within the shell of the old.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank David Berry, Lucien Van Der Walt and Gabriel Kuhn

for comments on an earlier draft of this introduction.

Notes

1. These are the words that Bismark was reported to have said on hearing of the

split between the anarchists and Marxists in the First International. They appear

in Burnette G. Haskell’s statement of the principles for the reuniﬁcation of red and

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14 Introduction

black, written in 1883. Haskell was the secretary of the West Coast International

Workingmen’s Association, and his project failed. See Chester McA. Destler, ‘Shall

Red and Black Unite? An American Revolutionary Document of 1883’, Paciﬁc

Historical Review, 14, no. 4 (December, 1945), p. 447.

2. For a critical revisionist account of the debate between Marx and Proudhon see

Iain McKay, Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology (Edinburgh: AK

Press, 2011), pp. 64–79.

3. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Bolshevism and the Anarchists’, Revolutionaries (London: Quar-

tet Books, 1977), p. 57.

4. Hobsbawm, ibid., p. 59. For a discussion of ideology and politics see Michael

Freeden, ‘Thinking Politically and Thinking Ideologically’, Journal of Political Ide-

ologies, 13, no. 1 (2008), pp. 1–10; Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory:

A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).

5. This is not to imply that all anarchists accepted the idea of violent revo-

lution: Proudhon is a notable exception and others, including Stirner and

Tolstoy, also rejected revolution on this model. However, both the idea of

preﬁguration – that the means of struggle are inextricably linked to its ends –

and the rejection of state-led transformation are also common themes in non-

revolutionary anarchist writing. For a recent exchange on the question of

means and ends, revolutionary violence and the idea of the state see Paul

Blackledge, ‘Marxism and Anarchism’, International Socialism: A Quarterly Jour-

nal of Socialist Theory, 125 (2010), at http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=616&

issue=125 (accessed 14 May 2012), and Lucien van der Walt, ‘Detailed reply

to International Socialism: debating power and revolution in anarchism, Black

Flame and historical Marxism’, at http://lucienvanderwalt.blogspot.com/2011/

02/anarchism-black-ﬂame-Marxism-and-ist.html (accessed 27 July 2011).

6. A critique of the thesis is presented by Solomon F. Bloom, ‘The Withering Away of

the State’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 7, no. 1 (1946), pp. 113–121, and Richard

Adamiak, ‘The Withering Away of the State: A Reconsideration’, Journal of Politics,

32 (1970), pp. 3–18.

7. Hobsbawm, ‘Bolshevism and the Anarchists’, p. 58. The division on the ques-

tion of centralisation is noted in E. Yaorslavsky’s History of Anarchism in Russia

(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937) and by Ivan Scott, ‘Nineteenth Century

Anarchism and Marxism’, Social Science, 47 (1972), pp. 212–218.

8. The extent to which the Marxism(s) against which anarchism is assessed has

any relationship to Marx is a moot point. Daniel Guérin tackled the question of

interpretation in ‘Marxism and Anarchism’, in D. Goodway (ed.) For Anarchism:

History, Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 109–125. For a discus-

sion of Marxist distortions of Marxian thought see Paul Thomas, Marxism and

Scientiﬁc Socialism: From Engels to Althusser (London: Routledge, 2008). Thomas’s

Marxian analysis of anarchism does not result in a substantially more sympathetic

account of anarchism than other Marxist readings. See Paul Thomas’s Karl Marx

and the Anarchists (London: Routledge, 1985).

9. See, for example, Subrata Mukherjee and Sushila Ramaswamy, A History Of Social-

ist Thought: From the Precursors to the Present (Delhi: Sage, 2000).

10. Darrow Schecter, The History of the Left from Marx to the Present: Theoretical

Perspectives (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 127–134.

11. Murray Bookchin, ‘The Communalist Project’, The Harbinger, 3 (1) (2002), http://

www.social-ecology.org/2002/09/harbinger-vol-3-no-1-the-communalist-project/

(accessed 14 June 2011).

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Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard 15

12. David Graeber and Andrej Grubacic, ‘Anarchism, or the Revolutionary Movement

for the 21st Century’, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=

4796 (accessed 14 June 2011).

13. The claim that there has been a fundamental shift is made by Duane Rousselle and

Süreyyya Evren in Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, vol. 1, 2010, http://

anarchist-developments.org (accessed 17 June 2011). A link to papers presented

at ‘The Anarchist Turn’ conference held at the New School for Social Research,

New York, 5–6 May 2011 is available at http://anarchist-developments.org/index.

php/adcs/issue/view/4 (accessed 14 June 2011).

14. See the collection ‘Anarchism Today’ edited by David Apter in Government and

Opposition, 5, no. 4 (1970).

15. Barbara Epstein, ‘Anarchism and the Alter-Globalization Movement’, Monthly

Review, 53, no. 4 (2001) http://www.monthlyreview.org/0901epstein.htm

(accessed 01 November 2010).

16. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism the Left-Wing Alternative, trans.

A. Pomerans (London: André Deutsch, 1968), p. 18.

17. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twen-

tieth Century (London: Fontana, 1996), p. xxi; Tony Judt, Times Literary Supplement,

8 November 1996, p. 21. Judt was dismissive of the ‘multifarious socialist “sects” ’

but argued their impact gave historians sufﬁcient reason to study them. For a

recent study of anarcho-syndicalism see Michael Schmidt and Lucien Van der

Wal t, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism

(Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009).

18. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Spanish Background’, Revolutionaries (London: Quartet

Books, 1977), p. 75; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth

Century 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1999), p. 74.

19. George Woodcock, Anarchism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 452.

20. David Graeber, ‘The New Anarchists’, New Left Review, 13 January/February 2002,

pp. 61–73.

21. Schmidt and van der Walt make this claim, though their analysis of the broad

anarchist tradition and anarcho-syndicalist strategy also discusses a variety of

other anarchisms. Schmidt and Van der Walt, Black Flame.

22. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-

Colonial Imagination (London, Verso 2005); Cécile Laborde, Pluralist thought and

the State in Britain and France, 1900–1925 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).

23. David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2010).

24. The extent to which the horizontal politics of the alter-globalisation movement

is rooted in anarchism, for example, is contested. See, for example, Uri Gordon,

Anarchy Alive! Antiauthoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto,

2008).

25. Cf.G.D.H.Cole,A History of Socialist Thought 1789–1939 (VII vols.) (London:

Macmillan, 1953–1961).

26. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics Volume 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002).

27. See also Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard, ‘Anarchism: Past Present and Utopia’,

in Randall Amster et al. (eds), Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory

Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy (London: Routledge, 2009) pp. 270–279.

28. For an example of this see William T. Armaline and Deric Shannon, ‘Intro-

duction: Toward a More Uniﬁed Libertarian Left’, Theory in Action,special

edition, ‘Building Bridges Between Anarchism and Marxism’, 3, no. 4 (2010),

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-16 9780230280373

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16 Introduction

available at http://www.transformativestudies.org/publications/theory-in-action-

the-journal-of-tsi/past-issues/volume-3-number-4-october-2010/ (accessed 17

June 2011). See also Howard Zinn on Anarchism and Marxism in an interview

with Sasha Lilley, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbaizDSg1YU (accessed

17 June 2011).

29. For a discussion of the morphological character of ideologies see Freeden,

Ideologies and Political Theory.

30. On the historiography of anti-feminism in anarchist studies see Sharif Gemie,

‘Anarchism and Feminism: A Historical Survey’, Women’s History Review 5, no. 3

(1996), pp. 417–444, or a recent account of women’s involvement in a range of

early twentieth-century movements and campaigns and a useful bibliography,

see Shelia Rowbotham, Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth

Century (London: Verso, 2010).

31. For an important and interesting collection of papers that traces a global his-

tory of anarcho-syndicalism see Steven Hirsch and Lucien Van der Walt (eds)

Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The

Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Leiden: Brill,

2010).

32. See the work of Allan Antliff, for example, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics and

the First American Avant-Garde (London: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

33. Elsewhere, anarchism maintained a healthy if subterranean existence. See Hirch

and Van Der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism for far more on this.

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-16 9780230280373

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Freedom and Democracy: Marxism,

Anarchism and the Problem

of Human Nature

Paul Blackledge

Introduction

In this paper I argue that anarchist1criticisms of Marx’s ‘statism’ inherit

themes from liberalism which serve as a brake on the democratic aspira-

tions of anarchist practice. While superﬁcially attractive, especially when

deployed to explain the character of both Stalinism and social democracy,

this liberal element of anarchist theory prevents anarchist practice develop-

ing from a mode of resistance to capitalism to become an adequate strategic

alternative to it. I argue that classical Marxism offers tools by which to over-

come this problem and suggest that Marx is best understood not as the

statist other to libertarian socialism, but as the most coherent exponent of

human emancipation. I conclude that anarchists would do well to re-engage

with his critique of liberalism to help move beyond the politics of perpetual

opposition.

The overlap between anarchism and liberalism is evident, for instance, in

the parallels between Bakunin’s suggestion that ‘power corrupts the best’2

and Lord Acton’s famous aphorism that ‘all power tends to corrupt and

absolute power corrupts absolutely’.3Underlying Acton’s claim is a highly

contentious concept of human nature which undermines not only the asser-

tion of papal infallibility – Acton’s speciﬁc target – but also the democratic

aspirations of the socialist movement. Acton was a liberal Roman Catholic

whose comments on power are perhaps best understood as a particularly

pithy expression of the political implications of the Christian conception of

original sin as secularised through the liberal idea of egoistic individualism.

To accept that power corrupts implies something like this model of human

essence. One implication of this idea is liberalism’s contradictory view of

social organisation and thus the state as simultaneously alien and essential:

‘a necessary evil’ in Tom Paine’s felicitous phrase.4For the socialist move-

ment the implications of this idea were drawn out most forcefully by Robert

Michels. He insisted that an ‘iron law of oligarchy’ followed from humanity’s

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18 Freedom and Democracy

‘natural love of power’,5and argued that the utopian nature of the socialist

project was tacitly registered by Marx through his concept of the dictatorship

of the proletariat – ‘the direct antithesis of the concept of democracy’6–and

practically negated by the German Social Democratic Party’s reproduction

of the kind of guiding aristocratic ‘political class’ that ran traditional elitist

parties.

Michels wrote that ‘[a]narchists were the ﬁrst to insist upon the hierar-

chical and oligarchical consequences of party organisation. Their view of

the defects of organisation is much clearer than that of the socialists.’7

Interestingly, not only did Michels register anarchism’s insights about the

tendency to oligarchy, but anarchists have often returned the compliment.

Most recently, for instance, Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt have

borrowed the concept of ‘iron law of oligarchy’ in their analysis of trade

union organisation – though they mediate it through reference to a counter

‘tendency towards democracy’.8Schmidt and van der Walt’s positive refer-

ence to Michels is not unusual in anarchist literature. Indeed, it has been

suggested that Bakunin ‘foreshadowed’ Michels’ analysis.9And it is clear that

there is at least a family resemblance between Michels’ iron law of oligarchy

and Bakunin’s claim that ‘all political organisation is destined to end in the

negation of freedom.’10

In this essay I explore some broader implications of these theoretical

parallels with a view to challenging what Chomsky called Bakunin’s ‘all

too perceptive’ warnings about the inevitable logic of Marxist authori-

tarianism towards the creation of a ‘red bureaucracy’.11 I argue that the

parallels between social anarchism and Michels’ elite theory actually illumi-

nate aspects of a shared model of human essence that weakens anarchism’s

revolutionary intent. Moreover, I argue that the theoretical roots of this

weakness are to be found in what is often portrayed as one of anarchism’s

strengths: the liberal moment of its dual inheritance from socialism and

liberalism. So, whereas Rudolf Rocker, in his oft-repeated claim that anar-

chism represents the ‘conﬂuence of ...socialism and liberalism’,12 implied

that anarchism had forged a synthesis from the best of modern political and

economic theory, I argue that far from working a synthesis of these two tra-

ditions, anarchism’s inheritance from liberalism acts as a barrier to the full

realisation of the revolutionary implications of its socialist side. I therefore

suggest that if anarchism is to move beyond the politics of resistance to point

to an adequate revolutionary alternative to capitalism it needs to reassess the

liberal side of its heritage.

Marx pointed to the kind of root and branch critique of liberalism nec-

essary for such a manoeuvre. In arguments ﬁrst articulated in response

to Max Stirner’s anarchism, he responded to the naturalisation of egoism

not by positing an opposite socialistic essence, but rather by extending

Hegelian insights to suggest a fully historicised conception of our nature.13

Marx’s critique of Stirner is of general signiﬁcance because it acts as the

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Paul Blackledge 19

theoretical core of his critique of the liberalism underpinning Acton’s

aphorism about the corrupting inﬂuence of power. Against liberalism’s

embrace of a transhistorical conception of human nature,14 Marx grasped

the socio-historic co-ordinates of modern egoism in the rise of capitalism,

and conversely pointed to the seeds of its potential transcendence in the

solidaristic movements of the ‘newfangled’ working class. His was a his-

torical model of human essence that underpinned a historical model of

human freedom.15 It was through these arguments that he was able to con-

ceptualise socialism as, in the words of Ernst Bloch, a ‘concrete utopia’: a

tendency towards political power rooted in the workers’ movement against

capitalism.16

This argument illuminates an important difference between Marxism and

anarchism. Both of these tendencies on the revolutionary Left emerged in

the nineteenth century as aspects of a democratic revolt against capitalism.

However, whereas Marx was able to conceive of new forms of democracy

that overcame the capitalist separation of economic and politics, as we shall

see anarchism’s tendency to embed a transhistorical conception of human

egoism acts as a barrier to its conceptualisation of any such project. I suggest

that if the potential of the democratic impulse behind class-struggle anar-

chism is to be realised, anarchism needs to address underlying ontological

assumptions about human nature.

Marx’s critique of anarchism: human nature and democracy

The ﬁrst signiﬁcant engagement between Marxism and anarchism was

Marx’s critique of Stirner in the 1840s. It is important to note that Marx

did not reject Stirner from a pre-established position, but rather developed

his vision of socialism in no small part in answer to Stirner’s critique of ‘true

socialist’ moralism in the context of the emergence of the collective workers’

struggles against capital in the 1840s.17

Stirner argued that all political systems lead in practice to the authori-

tarian suppression of the individual ego. Even revolutions, by claiming to

be in the common interest, lead to the suppression of individual egoism.

Consequently, he conceived ‘self-liberation’ to be possible through an act

of rebellion rather than through revolution.18 In a comment on the French

Revolution which he believed to have general salience, he suggested that

this upheaval was not directed against ‘the establishment, but against the

establishment in question, against a particular establishment. It did away with

this ruler, not with the ruler.’ That the French Revolution ended in reaction

should therefore come as no surprise: for it is in the nature of revolutions

that one authority is merely exchanged for another.19 ‘Political liberalism’s’

embrace of the post-revolutionary state revealed its authoritarian implica-

tions, implications that were also inherent in socialism and communism

(ideologies he subsumed under the revealing heading ‘social liberalism’), for

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20 Freedom and Democracy

these too would merely repeat the transference of power from one authority

to another.20

Stirner embraced an absolute model of freedom, according to which

‘freedom can only be the whole of freedom, a piece of freedom is not

freedom’.21 From this perspective, he concluded that all moral approaches,

because they preached self-sacriﬁce in the name of some metaphysical

notion – god, man, the state, class, nation and so on – were the enemies

of freedom. If ‘the road to ruin is paved with good intentions’, the correct

egoistic response was not revolution in the name of some ‘good’ but a more

simple rebellion of the ego against authority.22 For Stirner, therefore, there

exists a fundamental opposition between individual ego and society, which

could not be overcome by any form of social organisation.23 Indeed, he

believed that communism (‘social liberalism’) was not so much a radical

alternative to the status quo as it was its latest moralistic variant.24

In his reply to Stirner, Marx argued that, far from being an abstract moral

doctrine, solidarity was becoming a real need within the working-class move-

ment whose emergent goal was, as he was later to write in The Communist

Manifesto, an ‘association, in which the free development of each is the con-

dition for the free development of all’.25 From this perspective there would

be no need to impose the idea of community on the working class from

without because solidarity/community would emerge from below. This his-

torical model of freedom was rooted in a historical model of human nature.

Marx argued that communism is, for Stirner:

quite incomprehensible ...because the communists do not oppose ego-

ism to selﬂessness or selﬂessness to egoism ...communists do not preach

morality at all ...on the contrary they are very well aware that egoism,

just as much as selﬂessness, is in deﬁnite circumstances a necessary form

of self-assertion of individuals.26

As we shall see, Marx was interested in the deﬁnite historical context

through which human essence evolved and the deﬁnite circumstances of

the contemporary movement for freedom against capitalism. Concretely, he

argued that it was through the movement from below that workers begin to

challenge the narrow conﬁnes of egoism in a way that allows them to con-

ceive society (and thus authority) positively as real democracy. This was no

mere political movement, for, as he wrote in On the Jewish Question, ‘political

emancipation’ does not overcome the ‘egoistic, independent individual’ of

civil society. In fact, it is when humanity ‘re-absorbs in [itself] the abstract

citizen’ that it recognises its own forces ‘as social forces, and consequently

no longer separates social power from [itself] in the shape of political power,

only then will human emancipation have been accomplished’.27

This idea of dialectical development and the model of emancipation it

supported is foreign not only to Stirner but also to the most important voices

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Paul Blackledge 21

within social anarchism – Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin. By contrast

with Marx’s fundamental critique of the liberal conception of individual ego-

ism, social anarchists tend rather to mediate this concept by mixing it with

more social conceptions of human nature. According to David Morland,

Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin all embraced models of human nature

which included transhistorical conceptions of both egoism and sociality,

and which consequently tended to conceptualise history as an ‘everlast-

ing battle in human nature between good and evil’.28 Proudhon, he argues,

wrote that ‘man is essentially and previous to all education an egoistic

creature, ferocious beast, and venomous reptile ...only transformed by edu-

cation’, while Bakunin insisted that man is ‘not only the most individual

being on earth – he is also the most social being’.29 Even Kropotkin, who

is by far social anarchism’s most sophisticated spokesperson, was only able

to make sense of the evils of modern society by embedding a transhistor-

ical conception of egoism as the necessary counterweight to the idea of

mutual aid within his model of human nature. Kropotkin suggested that

throughout human history two opposed traditions have vied with each

other. As he wrote, this timeless struggle is concretely realised in history

as struggles between ‘the Roman and the Popular; the imperial and the

federalist; the authoritarian and the libertarian’.30 Moreland concludes that

social anarchism ‘rests on the twin pillars of egoism and sociability’.31 Conse-

quently, and despite social anarchism’s attempts to articulate a social vision

in which society is ‘perceived as an organic whole within which individual

freedom is mediated through some notion of communal individuality’,32

in practice the attempt to forge a creative synthesis of socialism and lib-

eralism results in an ‘irresolvable stalemate over the question of human

nature’.33 From this we might conclude that although social anarchists

reject Stirner’s extreme individualism they tend not to make a root and

branch critique of egoism but rather reify it as an important facet of human

essence.

The political implications of this general perspective were forcefully

expressed by Bakunin in his Revolutionary Catechism where he insisted that

anarchism involves the ‘absolute rejection of every authority’. While the

negative implications of this statement is clear – it informs anarchism’s resis-

tance to all forms of domination – it is less clear how Bakunin, despite his

claim that forms of authority are acceptable if they are ‘imposed on me by

my own reason’,34 is able to move from this standpoint to a more posi-

tive project of building a democratic alternative to capitalism. Indeed, the

worry that Marxists have about Bakunin’s position is that his own criticisms

of democracy show no evidence that he even considered the possibility

that it could have a deeper social content than bourgeois democracy.35 This

ambiguous relationship to the idea of a real democratic alternative to capital-

ism seems evident elsewhere in anarchism and was perhaps best expressed

by Malatesta, who, despite writing that the worst democracy is preferable

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22 Freedom and Democracy

than the best dictatorship, remained of the opinion that ‘democracy is a lie,

it is oppression and is in reality, oligarchy’.36 Arguments such as this open

the door to George Woodcock’s claim that ‘no conception of anarchism is

farther from the truth than that which regards it as an extreme form of

democracy’.37 Similarly, Uri Gordon has recently asserted that anarchism’s

defence of the absolute rights of the individual against the state means that,

despite its congruence with certain aspects of democratic social movements,

it is best understood as ‘not “democratic” at all’.38

These arguments have been challenged from within the anarchist move-

ment by, among others, Schmidt and van der Walt, Todd May and Wayne

Price. According to Schmidt and van der Walt, ‘anarchism would be noth-

ing less than the most complete realisation of democracy’,39 while May and

Price insist, respectively, that anarchism represents the democratic unfold-

ing of social practices or the ‘most extreme, consistent and thoroughgoing

democracy’.40 Given the forthright nature of these claims it is interesting

that these authors do not address the kind of anarchist criticisms of democ-

racy noted above – though Price admits that ‘the historical relation between

anarchism and democracy is highly ambiguous’.41 Ruth Kinna’s discussion

of the relationship between anarchism and democracy goes further in regis-

tering this problem. She points out that while anarchists are drawn towards

democratic politics, they have had little of substance to say about democracy

beyond a desire for consensus decision-making. And as she acknowledges,

this approach is open to the famous criticism levelled by Jo Freeman at the

North American anarcha-feminist movement in the 1960s. What she called

The Tyranny of Structurelessness,42 or the ability of the most articulate (usu-

ally middle class) members of structureless groups to hold de facto power

within them.

In his attempt to develop the anarchist position, Price argues that anar-

chism and democracy can be married once it is recognised that it is possible

to distinguish between the kind of power that ‘it will be necessary for the

oppressed to take’ in the struggle for socialism, and ‘state power’.43 Price

argues that this position was, in essence, shared by Marx and Lenin, against

the broad current of anarchist and autonomist thinking which associates

Marxism with the idea of state ‘seizure’. Interestingly, van der Walt suggests

something similar when they argue that the revolution should be defended

through workers’ own democratic organisations. In a reply to my own and

Leo Zeilig’s rehearsals of the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the

proletariat as a form of extreme democracy, he writes that:

If (and I stress, only if) we concede such deﬁnitions, then we must argue

that Bakunin, Kropotkin ...[and] the majority of the broad anarchist tra-

dition were for the state – at least, that is, for the ‘workers’ state’ and for

the ‘dictatorship’ of the proletariat.44

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Paul Blackledge 23

Clearly, it is safe to say that this statement would be very contentious

in anarchist circles – even Price insists that Lenin’s ‘libertarian interpreta-

tion of Marxism is contradictory to the totalitarian state’ he developed.45

Nevertheless, Price and van der Walts’s position seems to open a poten-

tial space for dialogue, and assuming anarchists, like Marxists, are able to

embrace the Paris Commune as a model of socialism any such dialogue must

at some point engage with the problem of adequately conceptualising it.

In a critique of reformism, Engels famously wrote ‘of late, the Social-

Democratic philistine has once more been ﬁlled with wholesome terror

at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen,

do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris

Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’.46 The concept

of the dictatorship of the proletariat sits at the very core of the divide

between Marxists and anarchists, and forms the basis for anarchist crit-

icisms of Marx’s ‘state socialism’. The tension between the idea of the

dictatorship of the proletariat and Marx’s vision of socialism from below

was labelled by Alexander Berkman as ‘the great contradiction of Marxian

socialism’.47 Obviously ‘authoritarian’, Daniel Guérin argues that the idea

of the dictatorship of the proletariat represents the medium through which

the Jacobin tradition found its way into modern socialism. In Marx, he sug-

gests, elements of this tradition sit alongside more libertarian tendencies.

Anarchism developed the libertarian side of socialist theory, Guérin argues,

and Marxists generally and Lenin in particular embraced the more author-

itarian aspect of socialism.48 More recently John Holloway has argued that

although classical Marxists such as Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci and Luxemburg

believed that modern states could be used for progressive ends, in practice

Lenin and Trotsky were conquered by the states they believed they were

mastering.49

According to this interpretation, Lenin’s claim that ‘we do not at all

differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state

as aim’ is undermined by his insistence that socialism can only be won

through revolution in which workers would need temporarily to organ-

ise ‘the instruments, resources and methods of state power against the

exploiters’.50 Arguments of this type are, of course, a long-standing anar-

chist criticism of Marx and Marxism going back at least as far as the debates

in the First International.

By contrast, a minority of anarchist critics of Lenin accept that it was

through the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat that Marx sought

‘a method of achieving the liberty that neither falls into chaos nor into state

authority’.51 I think that this argument is, in essence, correct. However, to

fully grasp Marx’s arguments we need to engage with his historical concep-

tion of human essence. This is because his perspective is so alien to the

liberal tradition from which anarchism borrows that without making these

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24 Freedom and Democracy

ontological assumptions explicit anarchists and Marxists are inclined to talk

past each other.

Marx’s concept of human essence

In sharp contrast to even social anarchism’s naturalisation of one or other

aspect of modern egoism, we have noted that one of Marx’s great contribu-

tions to social theory was to outline the ﬁrst historical account of human

essence, on which he built his political theory. In the Grundrisse he devel-

oped arguments he had ﬁrst suggested in the 1840s in this critique of

Stirner. He pointed out that the further one looks back into history ‘the

more does the individual ...appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater

whole’. Through prehistory and on through pre-capitalist modes of pro-

duction, the individual’s sense of self was mediated through familial and

clan units. Conversely, it is only with the rise of capitalism that social rela-

tions between people ‘confront the individual as mere means towards his

private purposes, as external necessity’.52 The ‘private interests’ assumed to

be natural by liberals are in fact a product of history. They are ‘already a

socially determined interest, which can be achieved only within the con-

ditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society’.53

Concretely, Alasdair MacIntyre comments that whereas in pre-capitalist soci-

eties individuals conceive themselves through mutual relations involving

obligations, liberalism reﬂects the way that in modern capitalist society

individuals appear ‘unconstrained by any social bonds’.54

If Marx therefore historicises what liberalism takes as its universal onto-

logical starting point – the egoistic individual – his political opposition to

liberalism is similarly rooted in a historical conception of emergent forms of

solidarity and association. He claimed that though the division of labour sep-

arated and fragmented the ‘new fangled’ working class,55 this class’s struggle

for freedom takes a new form as a growing need and desire for associa-

tion. Against any romantic notion of a natural human solidarity, he claimed

that ‘individuals cannot gain mastery over their own social interconnections

before they have created them’. If ‘in earlier stages of development the sin-

gle individual seems to have developed more fully’, this was only because

these individuals had not yet fully worked out their mutual ‘relationships’.56

Because modern capitalism greatly deepens our mutual interconnections, it

creates the potential for us to ﬂourish as much richer social individuals. The

problem Marx addresses is not whether workers have the capacity to recreate

some pristine humanity out of their alienated existence. Rather, he criticises

the existing social order from the point of view of real struggles against it,

judging that workers’ struggles point towards a fuller realisation of human

freedom. This is why, as Hal Draper points out, rather than use the abstract

word socialism to describe their goal, Marx and Engels more usually wrote

of workers’ power.57

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Paul Blackledge 25

Marx and Engels ﬁrst drew these conclusions in the 1840s on the basis of

their engagement with the Silesian weavers’ revolt, Chartism in Manchester,

and socialist circles in Paris.58 As I have argued elsewhere, Marx generalised

from these experiences to argue that in struggling against the power of cap-

ital, workers begin to create modes of existence which underpin a virtuous

alternative to egoism.59 This is the reason why he places the working class

at the centre of his political project. Of course Marx argued that sufﬁcient

social surplus is a necessary prerequisite for socialism, but this is a necessary

not sufﬁcient prerequisite. Beyond the development of the forces of produc-

tion, Marx’s political project is predicated upon the emergence of new social

relations which underpin novel forms of solidarity and community. It is for

this reason that, he argues, the existence of the modern proletariat is a neces-

sary prerequisite for socialism, and that its emergent unity through struggle

is the process through which this potential is realised in history.

The novelty of Marx’s model of revolution was based upon his recognition

that workers’ unity could only be won through the process of class struggle.

In The German Ideology he suggested two reasons for revolution. First, in com-

mon with revolutionaries such as Robespierre and Blanqui, he argued that

the ruling class (and the state) could not be overthrown by any other means.

Second, and much more profoundly, he differentiated his conception of rev-

olution from those associated with these earlier revolutionaries by insisting

that ‘the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding

itself of all the muck of ages and become ﬁtted to found society anew’.60

From this perspective, revolutionary activity is not merely system chang-

ing, it is also individually transformative: it is the necessary means through

which workers may come to realise in consciousness their emergent needs,

ﬁrst, for solidarity and then for a new socialised mode of production.

Moreover, because the revolutionary activity through which workers

transform themselves is from the bottom up it will not be uniform. There

will, therefore, be more and less advanced sections of the working class – that

is (so to speak) vanguards and rearguards. Once this simple fact is grasped

it is easy to see, ﬁrst, that the idea of socialist leadership is actually pre-

supposed by the concept of socialism from below, and, second, that this

idea has little in common with the caricatured critiques of vanguardism that

are all too common in anarchist circles.61 Interestingly, despite widespread

rumours to the contrary, Lenin said nothing about the role of a Central

Committee, omnipotent or otherwise, in What is to be Done? His actual

argument was much more prosaic: Russia’s disparate socialist movement

could progress from its existing fragmented state to challenge for political

power if the various groups were uniﬁed through a newspaper into a single

organisation.62

Far from being a rehash of Blanquism, this general model of revolution-

ary practice is based upon Marx and Engels’ critique of Blanqui’s Jacobinism.

Though Marx agreed with Blanqui that capitalism had made workers unﬁt

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26 Freedom and Democracy

to rule, he departed from Blanqui’s revolutionary elitism by insisting that

workers could become ﬁt to rule through the revolutionary process itself: ‘the

coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-

changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary

practice’.63 Indeed it was the collective struggles in the revolutionary process

that did away with the need for Blanqui’s elitist model of ‘revolutionary dic-

tatorship’. Discussing arguments put forward by the Blanquists in the wake

of the Paris Commune (1871), Engels suggested that they were ‘socialists

only in sentiment’, because their model of socialism was not underpinned

by anything like an adequate account of either the class struggle or of the his-

torical basis for socialism itself. He thus dismissed Blanqui’s proposal that the

revolution be a ‘coup de main by a small revolutionary minority’, and claimed

that the Blanquist conception of politics involved an ‘obsolete’ model of

revolution as ‘dictatorship’.64

It is because Marx’s perspective is thus rooted in a historical material-

ist analysis of the emergence of a new social class with novel needs and

capacities (i.e. a new nature), that it is woefully inadequate to characterise

his political project in terms of Jacobinism or Blanquism. Anarchist sugges-

tions that Marx reproduced one or other (insurrectionary or reformist) form

of statist politics betray a failure to recognise how his novel conception of

human nature underpinned a model of the social that escaped liberalism’s

naturalisation of the egoism of civil society. The consequences of this misun-

derstanding are most clearly apparent from the perspective of debates over

what Marx and Engels took to be the concrete realisation of the dictatorship

of the proletariat: The Paris Commune.

The Paris Commune

For the purposes of this essay the signiﬁcance of the Paris Commune lies

in the light it casts on Marx’s and Bakunin’s conceptions of socialism. For

though both wholeheartedly backed the Commune, they interpreted it in

very different ways: while Bakunin argued that it amounted to the aboli-

tion of politics, Marx conceived it as the transcendence of politics.65 This

difference reﬂected their very different conceptions of human nature.

Within the First International the social content of the division between

Proudhonists and Marxists can, in part, be illuminated by their divergent

conceptions of human nature. Whereas Marx’s critique of capitalism was

made from the standpoint of the struggles of the ‘new fangled’ working

class, Proudhon criticised nineteenth-century French society for its deviation

from the ‘natural order’: France had become a ‘fractitious order’ with ‘par-

asite interests, abnormal morals, monstrous ambitions, [and] prejudices at

variance with common sense’.66 The dominant voice of socialism in France

at the time was Louis Blanc’s reformism. According to Proudhon, Blanc

was heir both to Robespierre’s statism, and through him to the dictatorial

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Paul Blackledge 27

methods of ‘the scoundrel’ Rousseau.67 What these ﬁgures shared was a

common focus on reform through the state. This approach, or so Proudhon

believed, confused legitimate with illegitimate forms of authority: the state

transferred patriarchal authority from its proper abode in the family to an

unnatural situation.68 This was just as true of revolutionary socialists such as

Blanqui as it was of reformists such as Blanc; Proudhon claimed that both

were counter-revolutionary because they failed to see that political power

and liberty were absolutely ‘incompatible’.69 It was against these socialists

that Proudhon insisted that the key issue of the day was not which kind

of government but rather ‘Government or No-Government’, or absolutism

versus anarchy, and the aim of the revolution was ‘to do away with ...the

state’.70 In place of the state, Proudhon envisioned a social contract which

was the opposite of Rousseau’s statism because it was to be freely entered

into by independent producers.71

From 1867 to 1868 onwards the torch of anarchism was taken up within

the International by Bakunin. He described his version of anarchism as

‘Proudhonism greatly developed and pushed to its furthest conclusion’.72

Concretely, this meant that while Bakunin agreed with Proudhon’s general

argument that natural social harmony was possible only through the erad-

ication of government and the state, he went further than Proudhon in

a collectivist direction.73 Within the International, the gap between Marx

and Bakunin was, initially at least, less than it had been between Marx

and Proudhon.74 However, areas of convergence were soon overshadowed

by renewed debates on the question of political power and the state, where

Bakunin’s position ‘was of a piece with Proudhon’s’.75 Indeed, Bakunin was

keen to stress that Marx was a statist who reproduced a top-down politics

that he inherited from the Jacobins through Blanqui.

Despite this criticism, both Marx and Bakunin embraced the Paris Com-

mune of 1871 as an example of real living socialism. According to Bakunin,

whereas ‘the communists believe it is necessary to organize the workers’

forces in order to seize the political power of the State’, ‘the revolutionary

socialists organise for the purpose of destroying or – to put it more politely –

liquidating the State’. Concretely, Bakunin proclaimed his support for the

Commune not only because it was made by ‘the spontaneous and contin-

ued action of the masses’ but also because it was the ‘negation of the state’.76

By contrast, he insisted that Marx was ‘a direct disciple of Louis Blanc’ and as

‘an Hegelian, a Jew, and German’ he was both a ‘hopeless statist’ and ‘state

communist’.77

Passing over this casual racism, Bakunin’s criticism of Marx illuminates the

social content of the claim that Marx was a state socialist. At one level this

is manifestly false: at the time Bakunin wrote, Marx had already written in

a document published under the auspices of the International that though

‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machin-

ery, and wield it for its own purposes’, it must be ‘smashed’. Nevertheless,

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28 Freedom and Democracy

the rational core of Bakunin’s argument is evidenced by Marx’s claim that

though the Commune was the ‘direct antithesis to the Empire’ it neverthe-

less was ‘a working-class government’.78 The problem for Bakunin was that

Marx was palpably correct: the Commune was a novel form of government

and indeed a novel form of state.

Given this fact, the most consistent way to maintain the anarchist variant

of an anti-statist position implied developing a much more critical perspec-

tive on the Commune. This was Kropotkin’s perspective. He produced what

was in effect an immanent critique of Bakunin’s analysis of the Commune.

According to Peter Marshall the Commune exempliﬁed not Marx’s concept

of the dictatorship of the proletariat but rather Bakunin’s ‘bold and outspo-

ken negation of the state’.79 Nonetheless, it is difﬁcult to reconcile Bakunin’s

self-image as the enemy ‘of every government and every state power’ with

the reality that the Commune organised itself as a military force or state.80

For Kropotkin the Commune’s key failing was its embrace of a representative

structure, which meant that it reproduced the typical vices of parliamentary

governments. The weaknesses of the Commune, he insisted, were due not

to the men who led it but to the ‘system’ it embraced.81

If Kropotkin’s comments point to anarchist difﬁculties with the Com-

mune, Marx shows that to embrace the Commune involved embracing a

novel form of state. He was able to square this perspective with his own

anti-statist insistence that socialism could only come through the smashing

of the old state on the basis of a deeper conception of the social. Thus in

adraftofThe Civil War in France he described the Commune in language

reminiscent of that he deployed in the 1840s:

The Commune – the reabsorption of the State power by society, as its own

living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the pop-

ular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organized

force of their suppression – the political form of their social emancipation,

instead of the artiﬁcial force (appropriated by their oppressors) (their own

force opposed to and organised against them) of society wielded for their

oppression by their enemies. The form was simple like all great things.82

This argument suggests Bakunin’s charge that Marx was a Jacobin or

Blanquist was not simply wrong (though it clearly was) but rather involved

a complete misunderstanding of Marx’s project. It is not merely that for

Marx the dictatorship of the proletariat meant the rule of the working class

rather than a dictatorship of an elite,83 more importantly Bakunin’s criticism

does not begin to rise to the level demanded of the theoretical breakthrough

underpinning Marx’s position. If, from the standpoint of the egoistic indi-

vidual, the demand to smash the state can only be understood negatively

as the removal of public power, Marx’s historicised conception of human

nature – his ‘new materialism’84 – allowed him a much more positive

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Paul Blackledge 29

interpretation of this concept: it would involve not merely the removal of an

alien form of public power that stands over society but also its replacement

by a public authority that is ‘re-absorbed’ into society.

Unfortunately, Bakunin’s failure to understand Marx is a recurring charac-

teristic of anarchist criticisms of his work. For instance, Peter Marshall is so

caught up in is rhetoric about Marx’s statism that he is quite unable to com-

prehend how Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg could embrace

the Commune as a model of the dictatorship of the proletariat except as an

‘irony of history’.85

Interestingly, this inability to grasp the novel social content of Marx’s

anti-statism informs the tendency within anarchism to conﬂate Marxism

and social democracy and thus to misunderstand both the break between

the two towards the end of the nineteenth century, and conversely the

profundity of Lenin’s renewal of Marxism at the beginning of the twenti-

eth century.86 Whereas Marx and Engels insisted that socialism could only

be won through a revolutionary ‘smashing’ of the old state, German social

democracy evolved on the basis of fudging this question. Thus at both the

Gotha conference (1875) and the Erfurt Conference (1892) the party elided

over what Engels claimed was the main issue, that ‘our party and the work-

ing class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic.

This is even the speciﬁc form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.’87

It was one of Lenin’s great contributions to Marxism to recognise that

German Social Democracy’s reformism (statism) had roots in this elision

over the issue of state power.88 Consequently, his critique of Kautskyism

opens a space for a powerful challenge to Michels’ attempt to deploy German

social democracy as a proxy for Marxism. For, despite its rhetoric, the

German Social Democratic Party was a reformist organisation, and rather

than Michels proving the iron law of oligarchy to be of universal signiﬁ-

cance, he merely showed, as Colin Barker has argued, that it applies to those

modern parties which aim to win state power. It is because Marx’s project

cannot be reduced to these terms that Michels’ critique misses its target.89

And to the extent that anarchists share Michels’ conﬂation of Marxism and

social democracy, they too miss their mark. Indeed, it is not so much that

anarchists disagree with Marx on the state as they misunderstand his project,

and this helps explain the tendency for anarchists and Marxists to talk past

each other.

Conclusion

In a brilliant early essay, Gramsci made the interesting suggestion that anar-

chism was a universal and elemental form of opposition to oppression. He

argued that, because ‘class oppression has been embodied in the state, anar-

chism is the basic subversive conception that lays all the suffering of the

oppressed class at the feet of the state’. However, he noted that because

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30 Freedom and Democracy

different states have structured different forms of oppression the concrete

form of ‘anarchism’s’ victory is distinct in each determinate epoch: each new

class substantiates ‘its own freedom’. From this perspective, the bourgeoisie

had been the ‘anarchist’ opponent of the feudal state, and their victory was

the victory of liberalism: the freedom of free trade. By contrast, the ‘anar-

chist’ opponent of the modern bourgeois state is the working class whose

victory takes the form of ‘Marxist communism’.90

Whereas Gramsci’s argument assumes something like Marx’s historicisa-

tion of the concept of human essence/freedom, anarchism’s reduction of

Marx’s politics to a new form of statism illuminates its own understand-

ing of human essence. As we have seen, social anarchism embeds one or

other variations on the liberal conception of individual egoism/freedom,

and this informs the parallels between its critique of Marxism and Acton’s

and Michels’ comments on power and oligarchy. The problem for anar-

chism with this perspective is that liberalism falsely universalises a deﬁnite,

historical conception of human essence, and this idea of essence acts as

a fundamental barrier to conceptualising a real democratic alternative to

capitalism. Indeed, Bakunin’s aprioricomments on Marxism as a prospec-

tive ‘red bureaucracy’ reﬂect not a perceptive grasp on reality but rather the

fundamental problems associated with conceiving democracy from an anar-

chist perspective and thus the limitations of anarchism as an anti-capitalist

ideology. As David Morland suggests, ‘the rationale behind the anarchist

objection to Marxism is, to put it very simply, that Marxist-Leninists have

misunderstood human nature. There is, anarchists caution, a lust for power

in humankind that will jeopardise the very outcome of the revolutionary

process itself.’91 This suggests, notwithstanding Marx’s nominal convergence

with anarchism over the desire to ‘smash’ the state, that it would be wrong

to claim that the differences between them were of a merely tactical kind.92

On the contrary, because the anarchists do not have, as did Marx, a histor-

ical conception of human nature, they do not understand, as he did, the

overthrow of the state to mean that ‘socialised man ...man freely associ-

ated with his fellows, could control the totality of his social existence, and

become master of his own environment and activity’.93

From this perspective, anarchism is best understood as sitting at a political

fork in the road: to the extent that it remains a mix of a socialist critique

of capitalism and a liberal critique of communism it is limited to a form

of perpetual opposition. Of course it is possible to take the right-hand road

from this fork towards a type of radical liberalism – this is effectively the

substance of Bookchin’s charge against lifestyle anarchism.94 On the other

hand, the democratic impulse behind class-struggle anarchism tends towards

Marxism. To realise the potential of this movement demands both that we

unpick Marx’s anti-statism from its caricatured distortion at the hands of

the Stalinists and that we reconstruct his positive democratic alternative to

alienated capitalist politics.

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Paul Blackledge 31

According to István Mészáros, ‘the central theme of Marx’s moral theory

is how to realise human freedom’ against the capitalist system of alien-

ation.95 The social content of this conception of freedom is, according to

George Brenkert, a model of social self-determination through democracy.96

The realisation of this project assumes a historical model of human essence

which denaturalises both the exchange relations characteristic of civil soci-

ety and the liberal conception of the social as an alien power. So, whereas

liberalism can conceive the state only as an alien power, Marx’s model

informs his claim that freedom consists ‘in converting the state from an

organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it’.97

Far from being a ‘statist’ project, this goal assumes the existing state must

be ‘smashed’ and replaced by organs of workers’ power. Surely authoritarian

in the sense that such an organisation must aim at suppressing the counter-

revolution, Marx’s goal was, as Herbert Marcuse insisted, the democratisation

of authority based upon the emergence of a new class rooted in new relations

of production and with a new need and desire for solidarity.98 Class-struggle

anarchism is part of this movement, but it is hindered in realising its poten-

tial by its inheritance from liberalism. Marx pointed beyond this inheritance,

and class-struggle anarchism would do well to re-engage with his political

theory to develop its own.

Notes

1. In this essay I will use anarchism as a synonym for class struggle anarchism.

2. Michael Bakunin, Power Corrupts the Best (1867) online at http://dwardmac.pitzer.

edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/bakuninpower.html

3. Antony Jay, Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1996), p. 1.

4. Paul Blackledge, ‘Marxism and Anarchism’, International Socialism II/125

(2010), 144.

5. Robert Michels, Political Parties (New York: Collier Press, 1962), p. 326.

6. Ibid., pp. 342, 349.

7. Ibid., p. 325.

8. Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class

Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, vol. 1, Counter-Power (Edinburgh: AK Press,

2009), p. 189.

9. Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1980), p. 252.

10. Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London:

HarperCollins, 2008), p. 23.

11. Noam Chomsky, Government in the Future (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005),

p. 33.

12. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto Press, 1989), p. 21; cf. David

Goodway, For Anarchism: History, Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1989),

p. 1; Noam Chomsky, Introduction to Daniel Guérin, Anarchism (New York: Monthly

Review Press, 1970), p. xii; Marshall, p. 639.

13. Sean Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature (London: Routledge, 1998).

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32 Freedom and Democracy

14. Maureen Ramsay, What’s Wrong with Liberalism? (London: Leicester University

Press, 1997), p. 7.

15. Scott Meikle, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (La Saale: Open Court, 1985).

16. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 173, 199. Paul

Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics (New York: SUNY Press, 2012).

17. David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969),

p. 134.

18. John Martin, Introduction to Stirner’s The Ego and His Own (New York: Dover, 2005),

p. xiii; Thomas, Marx and the Anarchists, p. 130.

19. Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, p. 110.

20. Ibid., pp. 122, 130.

21. Ibid., p. 160.

22. Ibid., pp. 75, 54.

23. Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. IV (New York: Monthly Review

Press, 1990), p. 156.

24. Stirner, pp. 18, 164, 258.

25. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party,inThe Revolu-

tions of 1848 (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 87; cf. Thomas, Marx and the Anarchists,

p. 154.

26. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology in Collected Works (New York:

International Publishers, 1976), p. 247.

27. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question in Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: Interna-

tional Publishers, 1975), p. 168.

28. David Morland, Demanding the Impossible? Human Nature and Politics in Nineteenth-

Century Social Anarchism (London: Cassell, 1997), pp. 38, 78.

29. Ibid., pp. 62, 78.

30. Ibid., p. 141.

31. Ibid., p. 23.

32. Ibid., p. 3.

33. Ibid., pp. 188–9.

34. Michael Bakunin, God and the State (1871) online at http://www. Marxists.org/

reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/index.htm

35. Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, p. 296.

36. Errico Malatesta, Democracy and Anarchy (1924) online at http://theanarchist

library.org/HTML/Errico_Malatesta__Democracy_and_Anarchy.html; cf. Neither

Democrats nor Dictators (1926) online at http://www.Marxists.org/archive/

malatesta/1926/05/neither.htm

37. George Woodcock, Anarchism (London: Penguin, 1962), pp. 7, 30.

38. Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory

(London: Pluto, 2008), p. 70.

39. Schmidt and van der Walt, Black Flame, p. 70.

40. Todd May, ‘Anarchism from Foucault to Ranciere’, in Randall Amster and Oth-

ers, Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the

Academy (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 16; Wayne Price, The Abolition of the State

(Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2007), p. 164.

41. Ibid., p. 165.

42. Ruth Kinna, Beginner’s Guide to Anarchism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), pp. 114–5;

Jo Freeman (1970), The Tyranny of Structurelessness, online at http://struggle.ws/

pdfs/tyranny.pdf

43. Price, Abolition of the State,p.10.

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Paul Blackledge 33

44. Lucien van der Walt, ‘Anarchism, Black Flame, Marxism and the IST: Debat-

ing Power, Revolution and Bolshevism’ (2011) online at http://lucienvanderwalt.

blogspot.com/2011/02/anarchism-black-ﬂame-Marxism-and-ist.html; ‘Debating

Black Flame, Revolutionary Anarchism and Historical Marxism’, International

Socialism II/130 (2011), pp. 195–6.

45. Price, Abolition of the State, p. 50.

46. Friedrich Engels, ‘Introduction to K. Marx’s The Civil War in France’, in Collected

Wor ks, vol. 27 (New York: International Publishers, 1990), p. 191.

47. Alexander Berkman, What is Communist Anarchism? (London: Phoenix Press,

1989), pp. 76–7.

48. Daniel Guérin, ‘Marxism and Anarchism’, in Goodway, p. 120.

49. John Holloway, Change the World without Taking Power (London: Pluto, 2002),

p. 18.

50. V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution in Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers,

1968), p. 304.

51. Kojin Karatani, Transcritique (London: MIT Press, 2003), p. 178.

52. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 84.

53. Ibid., p. 156.

54. Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1967), pp. 121–8.

55. Karl Marx, ‘Speech at the Anniversary of The People’s Paper’, in Collected Works,

vol. 14 (New York: International Publishers, 1980), p. 656.

56. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 161–2.

57. Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. II (New York: Monthly Review

Press, 1978), p. 24.

58. Stephen Perkins, Marxism and the Proletariat (London: Pluto, 1993), p. 33.

59. Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics, pp. 140–5.

60. Marx and Engels, German Ideology,p.53.

61. Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, What is to be Done? in Context (Amsterdam: Brill,

2006), p. 556.

62. Ibid.

63. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach in Karl Marx Early Writings (London: Penguin,

1975), p. 422.

64. Friedrich Engels, ‘Programme of the Blanquist Commune Refugees’, in Collected

Wor ks, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1989), p. 13; Hal Draper, Karl

Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. III (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), p. 35.

65. Donny Gluckstein, The Paris Commune (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2011),

pp. 181–207.

66. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1989), p. 75.

67. Ibid., pp. 118, 152–3.

68. Ibid., p. 171.

69. Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists, pp. 180, 212.

70. Proudhon, What is Property?, pp. 105, 128, 153, 286.

71. Ibid., 113ff; 130, 206

72. Guérin, Anarchism,p.4.

73. Ibid., p. 12.

74. Henry Collins and Chimon Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement

(London: Macmillan, 1964), p. 228; cf. Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists,

p. 268.

75. Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists, p. 294.

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34 Freedom and Democracy

76. Michael Bakunin, The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State in Bakunin on Anarchy

(London: Allen and Unwin, 1973), pp. 263, 264, 268.

77. Michael Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1990), pp. 142–3.

78. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France in The First International and After (London:

Penguin, 1974), pp. 206, 208, 212.

79. Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, p. 288.

80. Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, p. 136.

81. Peter Kropotkin, ‘Revolutionary Government’, in Peter Kropotkin: Anarchism

(New York: Dover, 2002), pp. 237–42.

82. Karl Marx, ‘Drafts of the Civil War in France’, in Collected Works vol. 22 (New York:

International Publishers,1986), p. 487.

83. Hal Draper, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (New York: Monthly Review Press,

1987), p. 29.

84. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, p. 421.

85. Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, p. 301.

86. George Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971),

pp. 34–5.

87. Friedrich Engels, ‘A Critique of the Draft Programme of 1891’ in Collected Works,

vol. 27 (New York: International Publishers, 1990), p. 227.

88. Lenin, The State and Revolution.

89. Colin Barker, ‘Robert Michels and the “Cruel Game”’, in Colin Barker and others

(eds) Leadership and Social Movements (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

2001), pp. 24–43.

90. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Address to the Anarchists’ in Selections from the Political

Writings, 1910–1920 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), p. 186.

91. Morland, Demanding the Impossible?, p. 13; cf. David Miller, Anarchism (London:

Dent, 1984), p. 93.

92. Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists, p. 13.

93. Ibid., p. 106.

94. Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (Edinburgh: AK Press,

1995).

95. István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin, 1975), p. 162.

96. George Brenkert, Marx’s Ethics of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1983), pp. 87–8;

Paul Blackledge, ‘Marxism, Nihilism and the Problem of Ethical Politics Today’,

Socialism and Democracy 24/2 (2010), 126–7.

97. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme in The First International and After,

p. 354.

98. H. Marcuse, A Study on Authority (London: Verso, 2008), p. 87.

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Anarchism, Individualism and

Communism: William Morris’s

Critique of Anarcho-communism

Ruth Kinna

Introduction

William Morris’s commitment to revolutionary socialism is now well

established, but the nature of his politics, speciﬁcally his relationship to

Marxism and anarchist thought, is still contested. Perhaps, as Mark Bevir

has argued, the ideological label pinned to Morris’s socialism is of ‘little

importance’ for as long as his political thought is described adequately.

Nevertheless, the starting point for this essay is that thinking about the

application of ideological descriptors is a useful exercise and one which sheds

important light on Morris’s socialism and the process of ideological forma-

tion in the late nineteenth-century socialist movement. Bevir is surely right

when he says that ‘ideologies are not mutually exclusive, reiﬁed entities’ but

‘overlapping traditions with ill-deﬁned boundaries’.1Yet the struggle to reify

these boundaries in a messy political world is a dominant feature in the his-

tory of the Left and one in which Morris was not afraid to engage. Indeed,

towards the end of his life he made a concerted attempt to draw an ideo-

logical boundary between his preferred form of revolutionary socialism and

anarchism. This not only makes him an interesting subject for the analysis

of Marxist–anarchist relations, it also raises questions about the adequacy of

the familiar charge that anarchism is both inherently individualistic and, as

a consequence, ill-equipped to develop a coherent approach to democratic

decision-making.

Morris deﬁned his ideological position between 1883 and 1885 and

called himself a communist. In 1890, when he withdrew from the Social-

ist League and established the Hammersmith Socialist Society he described

this position negatively: neither state socialist nor anarchist.2In adopting

this formulation Morris did not mean to suggest that he straddled these

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36 William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

two ideological poles. Rather he wanted to indicate his independence from

both. However, in 1893–1894 he repositioned himself once more, repre-

senting communism as a rejection of anarchism. His claim, that anarchists

were individualists, was a recurrent charge in the non-anarchist socialist

press, but Morris was an unusual critic of anarchism because he was sen-

sitive to the different currents that ran through anarchist and individualist

thought. Moreover, his late application of the individualist tag was extended

to include anarchists with whom he had worked most closely: anarchist

communists. Coming from him, the charge appears as an obvious reduc-

tion that grouped together a set of ideas that were based on very different,

not always compatible, political, economic and ethical principles.

The undiscriminating and angry tone of his critique can be explained

by his rejection of the political violence of the late nineteenth century, a

tactic that seemed all the more futile once Morris had acknowledged the

failure of the anti-parliamentary revolutionary strategy he had adopted in

the 1880s. He developed the theoretical justiﬁcation for the critique in a dis-

cussion of the limits of freedom and individual–community relations.3This

discussion drew on concepts of slavery, tyranny and mastership that he had

elaborated in the 1880s. Morris’s claim was that anarchism wrongly denied

limits to freedom and that it was therefore socially disintegrative: individu-

alist. The fatal ﬂaw of anarchism was illustrated, he further suggested, by the

inability of anarchists to show how individuals might enter into a process of

decision-making and, therefore, to develop any practical socialist alternative.

Unfortunately for Morris, this argument revealed that the ideological divide

he sought to establish – between communism and anarchism – could be sus-

tained only by his adoption of a model of decision-making that ran counter

to his own radical principles of mastership and tyranny because it demanded

the identiﬁcation of democracy with the subordination of individual to class

interests.

The argument is developed in three sections. The ﬁrst discusses Morris’s

late critique of anarchist communism and his treatment of this strain of

anarchism as a generic form. It examines his motivations and sets out the

key concepts on which he later relied to develop his analysis of decision-

making. The relationship between anarchism and individualism is discussed

in the middle section, both in order to contextualise Morris’s understand-

ing of these terms and to demonstrate how his awareness of anarchist and

individualist politics gave way to the narrower system of ideological clas-

siﬁcation. His attempt to demonstrate how the inherent individualism of

anarcho-communism ruled against collective agreement is the subject of the

concluding part. It should become clear that the conjunction of anarchism

and individualism that Morris sought to cement is dubious and that the

boundaries between socialist traditions are more porous than he wanted to

admit.

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Ruth Kinna 37

Morris’s critique of anarchism

On 1 May 1893 leading members of the Social Democratic Federation, the

Fabian Society and Morris’s Hammersmith Socialist Society issued the Mani-

festo of English Socialists. This document, to which Morris was a signatory, was

intended to outline ‘the main principles and broad strategy on which ...all

Socialists may combine to act with vigour’ and it called on socialists to

‘sink their individual crochets in a business-like endeavour to realise in

our own day that complete communization of industry for which the eco-

nomic forms are ready and the minds of the people are almost prepared’.4

Notwithstanding its apparent inclusiveness, the Manifesto speciﬁed the limits

of socialist co-operation:

...we must repudiate both the doctrines and tactics of Anarchism.

As Socialists we believe that those doctrines and tactics necessarily result-

ing from them, though advocated as revolutionary by men who are

honest and single-minded, are really reactionary both in theory and prac-

tice, and tend to check the advance of our cause. Indeed, so far from

hampering the freedom of the individual, as Anarchists hold it will,

Socialism will foster that full freedom which Anarchism would inevitably

destroy.5

Morris’s willingness to put his name to the Manifesto was not entirely surpris-

ing: the deterioration of his relationship with the anarchists in the Socialist

League, which eventually forced his withdrawal from the party and the edi-

torship of Commonweal, the League’s paper, helped explain the gradual but

increasing hardening of his attitude. He had already voiced misgivings about

anarchism in News From Nowhere and in the year following the publication

of the Manifesto this light ridiculing turned into uncompromising rejection.

In 1894 two important articles appeared. The ﬁrst was an interview, ‘A Social-

ist Poet on Bombs and Anarchism’, published at the start of the year in

Justice, the journal of the Social Democratic Federation. The second, an essay

entitled ‘Why I am a Communist’, appeared in James Tochatti’s anarchist

paper Liberty the following month. Morris made two claims: that anarchism

was an individualist doctrine and that its individualism was reﬂected in the

recent and unacceptable turn to political violence.

His critique of anarchist individualism focused on two points, what Stefan

Collini identiﬁes as its methodological and moral principles. These were

often used to support a politics of individualism, but were not necessarily

presupposed by it.6Morris’s objection to methodological individualism was

that it was impossible to make sense of individual behaviours by abstract-

ing individuals from their social context. The moral principle, which he

tied to it, was that that the communal bonds that he believed essential to

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38 William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

individual ﬂourishing, were wrongly represented by individualists as only so

many potential constraints. Anarchism, he argued, embraced both ideas and

the two articles that he published in 1894 advanced this case.

In Justice Morris argued: ‘man is unthinkable outside society. Man cannot

live or move outside it. This negation of society is the position taken up by

the logical Anarchists ... ’.7In ‘Why I am a Communist’ he reiterated the

point. One of the distinctive features of the communist position, he argued,

is the conviction that ‘mankind is not thinkable outside of Society’.8In con-

trast, ‘Anarchism, as a theory, negatives society, and puts man outside it’.

Although Morris accepted that anarchists like Kropotkin, who he knew quite

well, were not in fact ‘against society altogether’,9having once granted this

exception he refused to acknowledge that anarcho-communism described a

coherent politics. This term, he argued, was a ‘ﬂat contradiction’: ‘In so far

as they are Communists they must give up their Anarchism’ because anar-

chism ‘is purely destructive, purely negatory’. Comrades like Kropotkin who

called themselves anarchists were deluded, Morris argued. They ‘cannot be

Anarchists in the true sense of the word’.10

Morris’s understanding of moral individualism was underpinned by the

interrelated concepts of ‘tyranny’, ‘slavery’, ‘mastership’ and ‘fellowship’.

Perhaps ill-advisedly using tyranny to describe the nature of social exis-

tence, he reasoned that because individuals could not be understood in

the abstract and must always be considered as members of particular com-

munities, they were always necessarily constrained by social arrangements.

Tyranny was thus an unavoidable feature of all social life. Naturally, Morris

recognised that social tyranny could take different forms and that it was not

necessarily empowering or benign. In other words, some social systems were

also tyrannical. The distinction Morris made was between ‘true’ and ‘false’

or ‘arbitrary’ society. Commercial society plainly fell in the latter category,

since here social relations were based on class coercion, or what Morris called

‘force’ and ‘fraud’. In socialism, tyranny would assume ‘true’ form. This was

the position Morris outlined in the Statement of Principles of the Hammersmith

Socialist Society:

For here we must say that it is not the dissolution of society for which

we strive, but its reintegration. The idea put forward by some who attack

present society, of the complete independence of every individual, that is,

for freedom without society, is not merely impossible of realization, but,

when looked into, turns out to be inconceivable.11

The goal of revolutionaries, Morris argued, was to rid society of slavery rather

than tyranny, since when slavery was abolished tyranny’s tyrannical fea-

tures would also disappear. As Susan Buck-Morss notes ‘slavery had become

the root metaphor of Western political philosophy’ by the eighteenth cen-

tury, ‘connoting everything that was evil about power relations’.12 Morris

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Ruth Kinna 39

appeared to follow this convention and deﬁned slavery as a relation based

on compulsion, rooted in nature and institutionalised in economic power.

In nature, he argued, all life was enslaved by the necessity of labour. The

stark choice was to work or perish. In human societies, nature’s compulsion

was overlaid by secondary systems of enslavement. These could take differ-

ent forms but Morris believed that each historical type reﬂected the attempt

of a minority to escape the force of nature and the dictates of labour, and he

argued that the differences between them were irrelevant to their classiﬁca-

tion. Bond-slavery, feudalism and wage-labour were not moral equivalents

but they all enabled the elite to live from the labour of others and stripped

those charged with the burden of labour of effective choice in production.

This group were thus doubly enslaved.

Morris applied the same reasoning to women, yet he argued that there

was a difference between labour and the way that slavery operated in this

context. Women were dependent on men as well as slaves to capitalism,

and they were therefore triply enslaved. Even accepting that there was ‘the

closest of relations between the prostitution of the body in the streets and

of the body in the workshops’,13 he concluded that the liberation of women

required a social as well as an economic change: dependence on men in addi-

tion to the abolition of capitalism and, above all, the abolition of bourgeois

marriage laws which enshrined the power relations that compelled women

to prostitute themselves for the sake of economic security, controlling their

reproduction in addition to their labour.

Tyrannical societies (that is, those based on slavery) operated through

mastership. In The Dream of John Ball, a story of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt,

Morris tells the eponymous hero of the story that

men shall yet have masters over them who have at hand many a law and

custom for the behoof of masters, and being master can make yet more

laws in the same behoof; and they shall suffer poor people to thrive just

so long as their thriving shall proﬁt the mastership and no longer.14

Mastership blinded individuals to their exploitation by masking naked greed

with false ideas of duty, natural hierarchy and political obligation. John Ball

tells his listeners: ‘sooth it is that the poor deemeth the rich to be other

than he, and meet to be his master, as though, forsooth, the poor were

come of Adam, and the rich of him that made Adam, that is God’.15 Yet

in principle, Morris associated mastership with wilfulness and was more

concerned with its location than its existence. As one of the ﬁctional char-

acters of his prose romances says: ‘ “So it is then the world over, that

happy men are wilful and masterful.” ’16 The same idea is expressed by the

fourteenth-century peasants. Morris observes how the artisans sing a song

‘concerning the struggle against tyranny for the freedom of life ...of the life

of a man doing his own will and not the will of another man commanding

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40 William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

him for the commandment’s sake’.17 The promise of mastership was that it

could be recovered by and devolved to individuals, so that instead of sat-

isfying another’s will each was able to realise their own. Structurally, this

demanded economic equality (which Morris deﬁned as a principle of dis-

tribution according to need), an end to both the artiﬁcial hierarchies that

facilitated slavery and the compulsion that forced labour. Yet none of these

conditions released individuals from the duties and obligations that unjust,

tyrannical societies perverted. In just social conditions, these obligations and

duties would persist.

In a future communist society, Morris anticipated duty and obligation

transformed. As masters, individuals exercised their own will but they did

so co-operatively or, as Morris put it, in fellowship. Although he did not

pinpoint precisely what he meant by this concept, he captured the essence

of the social relations he desired in his discussions of art. His principle

assumption was that the democratisation of art in communism would free

individuals by transforming work.18 As artists, individuals would meet their

essential needs by engaging in productive leisure. Working voluntarily, they

would no longer perceive labour as compulsion but instead as pleasure. How-

ever, the freedom they experienced as artists would meet a communal as

well as an individual need. As Morris explained to James Tochatti in 1894, in

communism artists ‘will work for the beneﬁt of ...the whole people: whereas

now they work for the masters, the rich class, that lives on the labour of oth-

ers’.19 Free to do what they willed, individuals would produce things that

were thought to be ‘beautiful and pleasant’ and which they hoped would

give pleasure to others. They would have full scope for creative expression –

mastership – but would ﬁnd meaning for their art in fellowship. In the true

sense, Morris argued, art was impossible,

except by means of the co-operation of labour that produces the ordinary

wares of life; and that co-operation again they cannot have as long as the

workmen are dependent on the will of a master. They must co-operate

consciously and willingly for the expression of individual character and

gifts which we call art.20

While the theoretical weakness that Morris eventually identiﬁed in anar-

chism rested on the claim that individualism ruled against the possibility

of co-operation and collective agreement, his late critique also fastened on

what he considered to be the practical implications of the anarchists’ indi-

vidualist stance. His charge was that because anarchists failed to understand

that individuality must issue from, or in tandem with co-operation, their

individualism played itself out in violence. Evidence to support the charge

was readily available. In the early 1890s a series of trials provided a platform

for anarchists accused of committing a range of high-proﬁle assassinations

and bombings to justify the use of violence as a revolutionary tactic. In his

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Ruth Kinna 41

interview for Justice, Morris referred to some of the more notorious char-

acters involved, notably Ravachol and Vaillant. His complaint against them

was two-fold: insofar as their acts involved the targeting of ‘non-combatants’

they were immoral and as a revolutionary strategy violence was futile. Quite

a lot of anarchists – including Kropotkin – agreed. Yet Morris appeared to

draw the arguments together to suggest that the anarchists’ lack of feasi-

ble alternative highlighted a lack of constraint that was implicit in their

individualism.

His view was mediated by a longer reﬂection about the prospects for rev-

olution. During the whole period of his active involvement in socialism

(1883–1896) Morris’s expectations about revolution altered considerably and

his relationship with anarchism varied in turn. His warmest relations with

the anarchists coincided with a period of optimism in the mid- to late 1880s

when he combined a commitment to ‘making socialists’ with a policy of

anti-parliamentarism, in preparation for the anticipated collapse of capital-

ism. His sympathies began to wane after 1887 when the disaster of Bloody

Sunday (a mass demonstration in London’s Trafalgar Square which met with

extraordinary police violence, leaving three dead and hundreds injured) gave

him a glimpse of the sheer might of the state’s reactionary force. No longer

sanguine about the willingness or capability of the workers to immediately

confront or resist it, Morris became convinced that his efforts to make social-

ists through anti-parliamentary activity were hopeless and that the strategy

would likely end in disaster. By the early 1890s his criticisms of anarchism

became more strident as he reluctantly reconciled himself to the idea that

parliament offered the only available route to change.21 Having taken stock

of the reality of class struggle, he tired of talk of revolution and felt that

those who indulged in such arguments were deluded.

Morris’s reassessment of revolution not only coincided with the wave of

political violence explicitly associated with anarchism but, equally impor-

tantly, with its enthusiastic embrace by self-identifying anarchists in the

League. At precisely the point that Morris accepted parliamentarism as the

only available route to socialist change, some League anarchists found their

inspiration in assassination and random killing and adopted a rhetoric of

revolutionary violence that ﬁlled him with frustration and despair. Although

he continued to offer ﬁnancial support to former comrades who fell foul

of the incitement laws and agent provocateurs, the co-operation he had

once enjoyed with anarchists both in an out of the League as an anti-

parliamentarian gave way to a deep hostility. When James Tochatti ﬁrst

requested a statement of his politics in Liberty, Morris told him that he

could not ‘in conscience’ allow his name to be ‘attached’ to an ‘anarchist

paper’ because of the ‘promiscuous slaughter’ which anarchists had adopted

as ‘a means of converting people’.22 The signiﬁcance of this reappraisal was

not missed by observers. One anonymous anarchist correspondent to Lib-

erty wrote that Morris now counter-posed violence to political action as if

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42 William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

there were no other possibility, a view that wrongly dismissed the revolu-

tionary potential of ‘trade combinations’ and of waging precisely the kind of

extra-parliamentary struggle that he outlined in the chapter ‘how the change

came’ in News From Nowhere.23 Having put his name to the Manifesto, Morris

appeared to be persuaded that there were only two routes to socialism: par-

liament or terror. Even if the former was likely to lead to a type of socialism

that he did not like, the refusal of all anarchists to accept it and the will-

ingness of some to choose terror indicated the extent of their individualism.

Only those who prioritised this concept above all others would fail to see the

necessity of supporting the collective struggle or perform blatantly immoral

acts that ran counter to ordinary political calculations.

As individualists, Morris concluded, anarchists were not prone to vio-

lence as such, but to assertive and transgressive behaviours which might

be expressed violently and which were at root, anti-social. Taking August

Vaillant (the anarchist executed in 1894 for throwing a bomb into the

French Chamber of Deputies) as his model, Morris linked individualism to

vain-gloriousness.

Prepared to sacriﬁce his life in order to gratify his vanity; he is a type of

men [sic] you meet in all grades all professions. You and I have met some

of them; even among artists and poets they are not unknown; men who

would do, in their art, what they knew to be quite wrong and outrageous

in order to gain notoriety rather than work honesty and well and remain

in obscurity.24

In Morris’s mind, anarchists like Vaillant were artists of a particular stripe.

Failing to understand their social obligations and duties, they denied fel-

lowship and so wrongly interpreted mastership as a principle of individual

domination. Morris found another model of this brand of individualism in

capitalism and in the experimentation of elite art where, what passed as cre-

ativity was increasingly driven by the desire to secure a niche in the market

through notoriety: false claims to ‘originality’ fuelled by ‘competition for

the guineas of the Manchester patron’.25 In this competitive environment

‘everybody must at least pretend to be a master: for, look you, it no longer

pays an artist to work hard to correct the faults which he himself cannot fail

to recognize’.26 This analysis tapped into discussions of decadence, which as

Regenia Gagnier shows, cut across late Victorian literary, political and scien-

tiﬁc ﬁelds.27 Although it was clear that individualism in the arts represented

a different level of attention-seeking to assassination and terror, Morris was

not alone in thinking that it came from the same root and that it expressed

a similar anarchistic distain for social engagement, co-operation and mutual

support as well as integrity and self-reﬂection.

To summarise: Morris’s attempt to classify all anarchists as individualist

appeared to establish a clear ideological boundary between anarchism and

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Ruth Kinna 43

communism. Violence was symptomatic of this division, but it was rooted

in an understanding of individual–community relations that Morris derived

from his concepts of fellowship, mastership and tyranny: a social condition

of co-operative interdependence, supported by economic equality. Morris’s

position was certainly clear, yet as an accurate description of ideological dif-

ference it was deeply ﬂawed. The sweep of his late designation of anarchist

thought was muddied by the complexity of political debate and the contes-

tation of both of his central terms: ‘anarchism’ and ‘individualism’. As will

be seen below, these terms were used to describe free market anti-statism

at one end of the spectrum and the anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarianism of

Bakunin and Kropotkin at the other. Morris directed his critique at both, but

his blanket rejection of anarchism assumed a questionable conﬂation that

was belied by divisions within Victorian individualism and the anarchist

movement itself.

Anarchisms and individualisms: from politics to ideology

Individualism was a central term in late Victorian political debate and

disagreements about the role of the state, in particular, were conceptu-

alised in terms of its opposition to collectivism.28 In late nineteenth- and

early twentieth-century revolutionary socialist circles this debate took a dis-

tinctive turn. Revolutionaries also probed the rights and wrongs of state

intervention – the delivery of welfare services, questions of individual rights

and responsibilities – but looked as well at the state’s class composition, its

transformative potential, its ethical status and long-term existence. These

interests affected the ways in which key terms of debate were couched. For

example, socialists did not so much use collectivism as a synonym for social-

ism, as was the habit of anti-collectivists, but to describe a commitment to a

principle of common ownership which could be interpreted either to mean

centralised state ownership, decentralised communal and/or direct workers’

control. The goal of revolution was usually described in other ways: social-

ism, communism, mutualism, anarchy, the co-operative commonwealth,

and sometimes democratic socialism and, pejoratively, state socialism. Anar-

chists sometimes deﬁned ‘collectivism’ even more narrowly, to describe the

principle of distribution according to work – or deeds – as opposed to the

communist system of needs. Kropotkin’s adoption of this usage enabled him

to gloss over his differences with Bakunin while also disputing the claim that

Marx was a communist.29

Naturally, discussions conducted in the anti-collectivist circles had an

impact on socialist debates and on perceptions of anarchism in particular.

The pre-eminent position that Herbert Spencer occupied in the individualist

camp meant that individualism was habitually associated with anti-statism,

opening the way for anarchism to be linked to the defence of the free mar-

ket, the economic doctrine that socialists typically mapped to individualist

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44 William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

political theory. In the Liberty and Property Defence League (LPDL), a

Spencerite organisation whose co-authored manifesto A Plea For Liberty was

published in 1891, all these relationships were examined. Auberon Herbert,

one of the group’s leading lights called himself a ‘voluntaryist’, a stance

which combined resistance to the state, ‘the great machine’ as Herbert called

it, and the ‘many systems of State force’ with recognition of the ‘free and

open market’. His political ideal was one which released the ‘living energies

of the free individuals’ and left them

free to combine in their own way, in their own groups, ﬁnding their own

experience, setting before themselves their own hopes and desires, aiming

only at such ends as they truly share in common, and ever as the foun-

dation of it all, respecting deeply and religiously alike their own freedom,

and the freedom of all others.30

Herbert rejected the label anarchist because he supported a system of regu-

lation to ‘repress aggression or crime’31 but other members of the LPDL –

notably J. H. Levy – did not and in embracing it further blurred the

boundaries between different anarchisms. Dividing anarchists into three

camps – ‘conservative’, ‘communist’ and ‘individualist’ – he acknowledged

that communism occupied the main ground of the movement, but argued

that none of the factions could claim exclusive rights over its applica-

tion. Moreover, the generic use of the term ‘anarchist’ did not worry him

since he believed that there was an important family resemblance between

these varieties. United in their opposition to ‘coercive co-operation’ or

government – what he called socialism – anarchists differed only on the

structural mechanisms required to achieve their aims: whether to maintain

full rights of ownership, abolish property rights or allow property in use.32

The secretary of the LPDL, Wordsworth Donnisthorpe, took yet another

approach. At ﬁrst resisting the label, he later identiﬁed himself as an anar-

chist because he believed that anti-statists were more interested in defending

privilege by entrenching market advantage in monopoly than in genuinely

expanding the sphere of liberty. According to Wendy McElroy, he was

steered in this direction by Benjamin Tucker, having been for many years a

correspondent to Liberty and the paper’s most frequent British contributor.33

Outside the LPDL, anarchist opinion about the proper designation of

anti-collectivist individualism was similarly divided. For Max Nettlau, an

associate of Kropotkin, Herbert’s voluntaryism was ‘humane and vigor-

ously anti-statist’ but ultimately dilettante and not ‘anarchist’.34 In contrast,

Tucker described Herbert as a true anarchist.35 Victor Yarros, an associate of

Tucker, made the same claims for Levy.36 These responses broadly mapped

to sub-divisions between so-called individualist, egoist, mutualist and com-

munist principles. As a rule of thumb, anarchists who put themselves in

one of the ﬁrst two groups tended to be more receptive to anti-collectivist

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Ruth Kinna 45

individualism than mutualists or communists. Yet, as discussions within and

between these groups show, anarchist conceptions of individualism were

far more complex and messy. For example, notwithstanding the common

ground that anarchist individualists sometimes found with anti-collectivists,

anarcho-communists did not reject individualism out of hand. Indeed, while

Kropotkin felt that Tucker’s Spencerite leanings ultimately pointed to the

defence of a minimal state, he endorsed key tenets of his anti-statist critique.

On Spencer’s death, Freedom, the anarchist paper Kropotkin helped estab-

lish, feted Spencer as ‘the greatest philosopher of the nineteenth century’.

His two virtues were that he had ‘vigorously shaken the foundation stone

of the idea of God, or authority and of superstition on which the power

and privileges of the rich oppressors are based’ and that he had ‘denounced

the State as a pernicious establishment bequeathed to us by the barbarians

and strengthened by those idle and oppressing social classes living on the

labour of the people’.37 Kropotkin offered another appreciation, highlight-

ing his common commitment to Spencer’s rationalism, love of naturalistic

science and celebration of the idea that ‘the welfare of the individual’ was

the single most important postulate of the social and physical sciences.38

Spencer had shown that individuals had a capacity to reason, co-operate

and develop social behaviours without compulsion and without recourse to

religion or other metaphysical speculation. In this he had followed the tradi-

tion established by Proudhon. Anarchists, Kropotkin argued, endorsed both

his analytical approach and his anti-statism.

Anarchist communists were intolerant of anti-collectivist economics, how-

ever, and parted company equally with anti-collectivists and anarchist

individualists on questions of property and exchange. Nettlau, together with

another of Kropotkin’s comrades, Varlaam Tcherkesov, argued that these

issues were the real determinants of individualist and non-individualist doc-

trines. Insofar as Nettlau and Tcherkesov’s arguments treated varieties of

anarchism as mere ‘economic forms’ their understanding bore some rela-

tion to Levy’s.39 The difference was that Levy’s Spencerite leanings led him

to identify all anarchists (including communist) as individualists and anti-

socialist, whereas Tcherkesov changed the ideological poles of debate to

argue that individualism represented a deviation from a socialist-anarchist

norm. By his reckoning, the division between anarchists and individualists

was marked by the anarchist’s rejection of private ownership and the mar-

ket. Thus placing ‘[Max] Sterner’ [sic] in the same category as Spencer, he

dismissed both as ‘bourgeois’.40 In 1893 Freedom published a full statement

of this view:

Communist anarchists claim as the basis of the new social order common

property, whereas Individualists defend private property as the necessary

foundation of society ... Nor is that the only difference between Commu-

nist and Individualist Anarchists. Communist Anarchists maintain that

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46 William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

the necessary accompaniment of private property is government; a gov-

ernment of some kind, whether a parliamentary one, or a sort of East

India Company, or a Pinkerton Police Force salaried by the capitalists.

And as to the ‘voluntary’ taxation and other ‘voluntary’ things advocated

by Individualists, we fail to see how, in a society based on private property

and individual competition, the people who ‘voluntarily’ submit to a tax

could be prevented from shifting the burden on to their neighbours; or

how those who join in a Defence Association would be prevented from

using this organized force against others than themselves.41

Tying the anarchism to a particular politics rather than an economic

form, mutualists challenged Tcherkesov’s anarchist–individualist dichotomy.

Mutualism, they argued, was not a mere economic system, even if liberty of

production, or the right of producers to determine how goods were to be dis-

tributed and disposed of, was central to it.42 Importantly, mutualism differed

from the anti-collectivist individualism associated with Herbert and Spencer,

because it did not justify unlimited accumulation or authority through pri-

vate property.43 Some communists accepted the ethical distinction that the

mutualists sought to make between their own position and unqualiﬁed

anti-statism. As a correspondent to Freedom noted, plain individualism was

Lockean: it described ‘the right of the individual to appropriate the result of

other people’s labor over and above what he pays them in wages, though he

generally has to share this surplus according to agreement with the usurer,

landlord and government’.44 Mutualism, by contrast, was egalitarian and it

did not allow such appropriations. Treating mutualist claims seriously, these

anarchists nevertheless criticised mutualists for calling themselves individ-

ualists because it wrongly implied ‘a tautology between Individualism and

Anarchism’ and misleadingly conﬂated an agreement (between communists

and mutualists) about ethics with a disagreement about the operation of

markets.45 Rejecting this implication, the anarcho-communists argued that

they were as committed to individual freedom as the mutualists were and

that communism was the only economic system capable of securing the

liberties that both groups of anarchists cherished. Kropotkin made a similar

point in a discussion of Proudhon and Stirner, but introduced a modiﬁcation

to the terms of debate. Proudhon, Kropotkin argued, understood correctly

that moral conscience, by which he meant a conception of justice and equal-

ity, had a basis in social life. Stirner argued that morality existed only by

convention and wrongly concluded that it was necessarily rooted in author-

ity.46 On this reading, mutualism described a system of anarchist ethics based

on the principle of individuality; egoism, by contrast, was an individualist

doctrine which sanctioned selﬁshness in the name of self-expression.47

These were a complex set of debates and because they involved a range

of individuals who assumed a number of different theoretical perspec-

tives, there was little consensus about where or how to draw the lines of

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Ruth Kinna 47

ideological division. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, outside observers

sometimes simply passed over the complexity of anarchist politics and

failed to acknowledge the different ways in which the relationship between

anarchism and individualism was understood. For example, in a sweeping

critique of aprioripolitical philosophy, T. H. Huxley identiﬁed two impor-

tant trends in the history of European thought: regimentation and anarchy.

The ﬁrst was deﬁned by the view that ‘the blessings of peace’ required the

surrender of rights to authority. In the modern period Hobbes stood at its

head. The second, anarchy, typically treated individuals as ‘highly intelli-

gent and respectable persons, “living together according to reason, without

a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them” ’.48 This

was the tradition of Locke. On this system of classiﬁcation Auberon Herbert –

who rejected the label – was as much an anarchist as Levy who was willing

to accept it or, as Huxley in fact suggested, as Stirner and Bakunin.49 Non-

anarchist socialist critics tended to treat the divisions within the anarchist

movement in an equally cavalier manner and even more mischievously.

In 1893 Freedom noted that social democrats usually ‘disposed’ of anarchism

in one of three ways. One was to claim that it was ‘too perfect an ideal’

and utopian. Another was to suggest that anarchy was identical to the social

democratic vision and that ‘anarchism and anarchy’ were just ‘bad neolo-

gisms’. The third was to argue that anarchism was ‘a return to barbarism ...a

new form of the old and discredited laissez-faire doctrine’, ‘reactionary’ to

boot.50 This last claim touched directly on the nature of anarchist individual-

ism and it became one of the dominant themes in social democratic writing,

not least because it was taken up at the turn of the century by Lenin.51 Writ-

ing in 1896, William Liebkecht advanced precisely this case. On account of

the inﬂuence that Stirner had exercised on the anti-socialist Eugene Richter

(whose 1891 satire Pictures of a Socialistic Future mocked German social

democracy as a hopelessly inefﬁcient and frighteningly utopian tyranny),

Liebkecht traced the origins of anarchism to Stirner and thus denounced

it as an individualist doctrine.52 While Stirner’s egoism was indeed open to

individual property ownership, the elision of egoism with limited state doc-

trines and the extension of this combination to anarchism in general was –

as Tcherkesov protested – highly misleading. Still, Liebkneckt argued:

There is, in fact, nothing in common between Anarchism and Socialism.

Anarchism ...has individualism for its basis; that is, the same principle

on which capitalist society rests, and therefore it is essentially reactionary,

however hysterical may be its shrieks of revolution.53

How did Morris approach these debates? The answer is that the view he

expressed in 1893–1894 was based on a classiﬁcation equally reductive as

Huxley’s and Liebkneckt’s. Yet it was unusual because it was also based on

both a familiarity with the anarchist movement (that Huxley lacked) and

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48 William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

a much closer and sympathetic involvement with anarchist politics than

Liebkneckt had ever enjoyed.

Morris’s diary for 1887 distinguished three groups. The ﬁrst were what he

called the ‘orthodox’ anarchists who met at Cleveland Hall and he identi-

ﬁed Victor Dave – with whom he and Belfort Bax co-wrote their history of

the Paris Commune – as their ‘leading spirit’. The second were the anar-

chists of the Autonomy group and the third the Freedom group organised

around Kropotkin and Charlotte Wilson. Morris was aware of these groups’

different constituencies. He noted, for example, that Dave’s ‘orthodox’ anar-

chists were fervent internationalists, largely French and German speaking

refugees. A newspaper cutting from the Daily News pasted into his diary

described Charlotte Wilson as a ‘South Kensington or British Museum art-

student’ type, an ‘aesthete with views’, capturing an image of the Freedom

group that was usually painted in less polite terms by the anarchists of the

Socialist League.54

Apart from noting their different meeting places and memberships, Morris

seemed unsure of the issues that divided these groups. For example, he

admitted ignorance of the grounds of the ‘quarrel’ – a spying scandal –

which divided Dave’s anarchists from the Autonomy group, though later

becoming involved in the affair, he designated the latter as ‘unrespectable’.55

Yet, as Florence Boos notes, Morris appreciated that there were signiﬁ-

cant divisions between ‘orthodox Anarchists’, ‘collectivists’ and Kropotkin’s

anarcho-communists.56 Moreover, he identiﬁed the distinctively commu-

nist position with the rejection of government, of parliamentarism and the

characterisation of bourgeois politics as a condition of war – a most tyran-

nous tyranny. What Morris called the ‘anarchical’ tendencies of Charlotte

Wilson’s ‘Utopian Anarchist Superstition’ referred, additionally, to the com-

munists’ unwavering faith in the latent power of spontaneous grass roots

resistance, a faith which he did not share.57

Morris’s observations of the anarchist movement hardly touched on

the theoretical issues discussed in the anarchist press, but he was cer-

tainly familiar with the anti-collectivism of the LPDL. The text of a speech

by Wordsworth Donnisthorpe, published in Henry Seymour’s paper The

Anarchist, earned a scornful review in Commonweal in 1887.58 Donnisthorpe’s

critical dissection of the Socialist Catechism by Morris’s friend J. L. Joynes

might well have inﬂuenced his judgement, but either way Morris described

the speech as an example of the ‘pessimistic paradoxical exercises which are a

disease of the period, and whose aim would seem to be the destruction of the

language’.59 Morris’s judgements of Auberon Herbert were hardly warmer. He

had worked with Herbert in the Eastern Question Association in the 1870s,

and thereafter followed debates about ‘voluntaryism’ in the liberal reviews,

but this personal association failed to encourage an appreciation of his ideas.

The critique Grant Allen presented in the essay ‘Individualism and Socialism’

was too tame for Morris, but he agreed with Allen that the LPDL’s defence

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Ruth Kinna 49

of property in use would result in the very monopoly that undercut the

equal enjoyment of individual liberty the group championed.60 As Morris

put it: by supporting a principle of distribution according to deed, these

anarchists ‘wished to abolish organised monopoly but supported unorganised

monopoly, or the rule of the strongest individual...upholding ...private

property with no association’.61

However confusing Morris found the internal politics of the anarchist

movement, he was certainly familiar with some of the issues that divided

anarchist communists from limited-state anti-collectivists. Nevertheless, in

his late critique of anarchism he subordinated these differences to cap-

ture both groups under the common principle of anti-authoritarianism.

This approach to anarchism was well rehearsed in the non-anarchist social-

ist press, though Freedom’s commentary on social democratic objections to

anarchism overlooked it. For example, ﬁnding agreement neither in ‘object,

policy, nor methods’ with the anarchists, Justice argued that the anarchist,

‘will have no authority on any account’ and that ‘the Social-Democrat

believes that a certain amount of authority will always be necessary’.62

Anarchist anti-authoritarianism was also central to Engels’ critique and, just

as Liebkneckt used Stirner to link laissez-faire economics to anarchism, he

drew on the same source to reveal the chaotic destructiveness of anarchist

doctrines. Identifying Bakunin as the transmitter of ‘Stirnerian “rebellion” ’

he jibed: ‘the anarchists have all become “unique ones”, so unique that

no two of them can agree with each other’.63 Morris arrived at his posi-

tion by a different route, fastening on collective agreement rather than

abstract authority, but his claims were similar. He attempted to show that

anarchist moral individualism rendered agreement in socialism impossi-

ble. His discussion drew back to the concepts he had elaborated in the

1880s: social tyranny, slavery and fellowship. Rejecting ‘social tyranny’, he

contended, anarchists also denied fellowship, leaving individuals exposed

to new forms of slavery, rooted in the unconﬁned principle of individual

mastership. The difﬁculty of the charge was that it ran counter to a process of

decision-making that Morris also supported, suggesting that the ideological

reduction that he had distilled from his engagement with anarchist politics

was perhaps faulty.

Communism, anarchism and democracy

Accusing the anarchists of being ‘somewhat authoritative’ on the issue,

Morris argued that the individualism of the anarcho-communists was

expressed through their rejection of collective agreement.64 His starting

point was that anarchists opposed agreement on the grounds that it gave

power to majorities and was therefore coercive. For Morris, this argument

was self-defeating. To illustrate why, he imagined a dispute about the build-

ing of a bridge. Should opinion be divided, he asked: ‘What is to be done?

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50 William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

Which party is to give way?’ The anarchist answer, Morris thought, was to

‘say it must not be carried by a majority’; Morris responded, ‘in that case,

then, it must be carried by a minority’.65 The illogicality of the anarchist

position pointed to an important theoretical principle: anarchists prioritised

the rights of individuals over all forms of collective power.

Failing to recognise that equal freedom necessarily involved a coercive

limit on the liberty of all, anarchists not only tied themselves in knots on the

question of majoritarianism, they also committed themselves to the negative

moral individualism that genuine communism – Morris’s doctrine – rejected.

To the anarcho-communist readers of the Commonweal Morris argued that ‘if

freedom from authority means the assertion of the advisability or possibility

of an individual man doing what he pleases always and under all circum-

stances, this is an absolute negation of society’.66 No matter how much

these anarchists openly disagreed with the ‘voluntaryists’ on questions of

economics, they shared the same moral outlook.67

The strength of Morris’s conclusion lay in his claim that the anarcho-

communists in fact understood authority as he suggested. Yet as the debates

about individualism make clear, this argument was difﬁcult to sustain.

Admittedly, the clearest statements of anarchist-communist ethics appeared

only after Morris had died. However it was clear from discussions in Freedom

that anarcho-communists were extremely wary of non-communist anarchist

doctrines and their impact on individual–community relations. Two partic-

ular examples were that mutualism failed to provide adequate safeguards to

protect the egalitarian relations it espoused and that egoism gave free reign

to individual competition. Morris expressed precisely the same worry about

‘voluntaryism’ and the individualism of the LPDL. More tellingly, Morris’s

further explorations of democracy suggested that the fault line that he iden-

tiﬁed between communism and anarcho-communism was not based on the

presumed incompatibility of anti-authoritarianism with unrestrained indi-

vidual freedom, at all. Indeed, he located the problem of individualism in

the tension between anti-authoritarianism and class interest. This argument

secured the ideological division he wanted to cement, but it did not sit

easily with the model of decision-making that he presented in his utopian

romance, News From Nowhere.

Morris opened up the gap in the debate in his letter to the readers of

Commonweal where he attempted to show how anarchist defences of liberty

conﬂicted with the idea of a common good. He imagined two scenarios:

one where the long-term stability of society was threatened by the rise of

a tyrannous interest, for example, the attempt to reintroduce some form of

slavery (like monopoly), and a second, short term dispute where opinions

about a particular policy diverged. Both scenarios, he argued, legitimised

coercion, but the legitimate tyranny assumed different forms. The ﬁrst case,

the threat of new enslavement, convinced Morris that there was a need

for an organisation or a ‘central body’, at least for a temporary period, to

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Ruth Kinna 51

enforce commitments to socialist principles.68 The second dispute – the

policy disagreement – did not demand this kind of regulatory body, but

resolution depended on observance of socialist principles, or an idea of col-

lective good. To illustrate, Morris imagined how a proposal to cut down ‘all

the timber in England’ and turn the ‘country into ...a market-garden under

glass’ might be challenged. Opponents, he suggested, might prefer the land-

scape to remain wild and to preserve its natural beauty.69 However, if the

majority backed the proposal, it was only right that the imagined objectors

(Morris put himself among them) subordinate their own interests to the gen-

eral interest of the community. No matter how signiﬁcant their differences

might be – and the example Morris chose was designed to highlight how

divisive he felt the issue was – the minority would ‘give up the lesser for the

greater’.70

On this account, Morris perceived communism to be anti-anarchist in

two ways. On the one hand, the imagined central body institutionalised the

social tyranny on which socialism depended, and on the other it gave prior-

ity to majority over minority or individual interests. Yet in 1894 he drew still

further from anarchist thinking by adopting a position which relied on the

recognition of a universal interest, not just the priority of the numeric major-

ity. The pluralism which explained the policy disagreements that socialists

were likely to face was now denied. Majority rule, he argued, ‘is only harmful

where there is conﬂict of interest’.71 In socialism, ‘there would be no oppo-

sition of interests, but only divergences of opinion’ because the ‘struggles

between opposing interests for ...mastery’, that were part and parcel of the

existing parliamentary system, would be a thing of the past.72 Morris’s argu-

ment was consistent with his earlier rejection of representative democracy

as a system of class rule,73 but it suggested that majorities could never injure

minorities once class divisions based on private ownership had been abol-

ished. As Morris put it, ‘community cannot compel the community’.74 This

very Rousseauean view meant that individuals would be expected to identify

with a higher authority, even while their opinions were being trampled on

or ignored.75

Morris’s unqualiﬁed defence of simple majoritarianism, let alone his

assumption of universal class interest certainly put him at odds with a

good proportion of anarchists, communists and individualists alike.76 He was

probably right to think that his proposal for a central defensive body would

alarm all sorts of anarchists, ever mindful of the potential for the state’s

reconstitution. However, his claim the anarchist rejection of ‘the tyranny

of society’ meant ‘that every man should be quite independent of every

other’77 – as he phrased the critique in News From Nowhere – wrongly assumed

that the rejection of these two models of decision-making exhausted the

possibilities of radical democracy. This assumption was faulty because it

overlooked the possibility of stepping between the tyranny of class interest

and moral individualism, even though his own work contained an outline

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52 William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

model of a non-tyrannous democratic system. Indeed, he ﬂeshed out the

point in News From Nowhere, where he again discussed the building of a

bridge.78

In his second hypothetical context, disagreements about the proposal are

resolved through dialogue and a continuous process of direct, open ballot-

ing, neither by the submission of the minority to majority interests, nor

by the recognition of the common good. In this picture of communism,

agreement is reached through a deliberative process, supported by ordinary

tyranny, capable of determining policy outcomes through the resolution

rather than the subordination of differences. Morris ﬂeshed out a similar

process of consensual and deliberative debate in Commonweal. Assuming

that ‘a dozen thoughtful men’ would have ‘twelve different opinions’ on

‘any subject which is not a dry matter of fact’, he argued that the group

would negotiate a compromise to ‘get their business done’. Morris described

the ‘common rule of conduct’ that underpinned this process as a ‘common

bond’ of ‘authority’. In this context, however, ‘authority’ referred only to the

background concept of tyranny, which he believed essential to any society,

not the positive commitment to the common good – or class interest – that

he subsequently adopted to distinguish his brand of communism from the

individualism of the anarchists.79

Having developed a model of decision-making which assumed that indi-

viduals might reach voluntary agreement through open discussion and

consensus, Morris shifted his position when it came to distinguishing com-

munism from anarchism. When it came to pinpointing the anarchism’s

ideological distinctiveness, agreement appeared to require more than the

observance of moral norms and respect for individual autonomy (tyranny

and mastership), which were the only conditions for consensus. In addition,

it demanded the enforcement of majority rule (the relocation of mastership

from individuals to the group) or, even more stringently, the recognition of a

universal interest (the institutionalisation of mastership as an abstract idea).

The elision of ordinary tyranny with majoritarianism substantiated Morris’s

claim that anarchists were individualists, but the integrity of his consensual

alternative was the price he paid.

One way of thinking about the alternatives Morris explored is to return

to his understanding of mastery and art. His conception of anarchist anti-

authoritarianism pointed to egotism, or a form of competitive, vain-glorious

mastership which was consciously transgressive. Against this, he posited a

defence of majoritarianism and universal interest. This mapped onto an idea

of mastership which subordinated the interests of individual artists to the

well-being of the community. A third possibility, one that he sidelined in

his late critique of anarchism, was outlined in News From Nowhere.Itsug-

gested that creativity was primary but that the pleasure artists derived from

their production was linked to its reception in the wider community. This

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Ruth Kinna 53

assumed the existence of social tyranny, but one that was shaped by the

expression of individual wills.

Conclusion

Morris’s rejection of anarchism was fuelled by his frustrations with the

Socialist League and the political violence of the early 1890s. It can be

explained by the refusal to accept compromise on parliamenatary action –

and perhaps the discomfort Morris felt in adopting a strategy that he knew

to be ﬂawed. His concerns about anarchist individualism were informed by

principles of fellowship, mastership and tyranny which derived from deeply-

held convictions about social relations in communism, but his critique

depended on reductive ideological labelling which smothered the politics

of the anarchist movement. Morris’s critique of anarchist individualism suc-

ceeded when couched in terms of ‘anti-authoritarianism’, but the costs of

success were high: his discussion of decision-making and collective agree-

ment was not easily reconciled with the idea of mastership he sought to

defend. Anarchists might have found aspects of Morris’s communism trou-

bling. But his attempts to dismiss anarchism as individualistic by showing

that it was wholly incompatible with it, failed.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Alex Prichard for repeated attempts to bring clarity to the

argument.

Notes

1. Mark Bevir, ‘William Morris: The Modern Self, Art and Politics’, History of European

Ideas 24 (1998), 176.

2. William Morris, Statement of Principles of the Hammersmith Socialist Society,

(London: Kelmscott Press, 1890), p. 6.

3. On Morris’s divergence from Kropotkin on this issue see ‘Morris, Anti-statism

and Anarchy’, in Peter Faulkner and Peter Preston (eds), William Morris: Centenary

Essays (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), pp. 215–228.

4. Manifesto of English Socialists, (London: Twentieth Century Press, 1893), p. 8.

5. Manifesto,p.5.

6. Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in

England 1880–1914, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 16.

7. William Morris, ‘A Socialist Poet on Bombs and Anarchism: An Interview with

William Morris’, Justice (27 January 1894), p. 6.

8. William Morris, ‘Why I am a communist’, Liberty (February 1894), pp. 13–15.

9. Morris, ‘Socialist Poet’.

10. Ibid.

11. Morris, Statement of Principles,p.5.

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54 William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

12. Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry 26 (2000), 821.

13. William Morris, Journalism: Contributions to Commonweal 1885–1890, Nicholas

Salmon (ed.) (Bristol: Thoemmes press, 1996), p. 27.

14. William Morris, ‘The Dream of John Ball’, in A. L. Morton (ed.), Three Works by

William Morris (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), pp. 94–95.

15. Morris, John Ball, p. 56.

16. William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996),

p. 322.

17. Morris, John Ball, p. 45.

18. For a recent discussion see Laurence Davis, ‘Everyone an Artist: Art, Labour,

Anarchy and Utopia’, in Laurence Davis and Ruth Kinna (eds), Anarchism and

Utopianism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 73–98.

19. Norman Kelvin (ed.), The Collected Letters of William Morris, vol. IV: 1893–1896

(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 209.

20. William Morris, Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal,

Nicholas Salmon (ed.) (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), p. 397.

21. This shift is sometimes interpreted as a principled reversal of his earlier posi-

tion, but can be explained as a pragmatic response to his disappointment with

the failure of the League and his perception that workers were more interested in

electoral power and welfare reform than revolution and the realisation of commu-

nism in the society of art. In 1895 Morris wrote that while he saw the ‘necessity’ of

the ‘political side’ of the struggle, this was still an element with which he could

not work. Norman Kelvin (ed.), The Collected Letters of William Morris, vol. IV:

1893–1896, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 285.

22. Letters IV, p. 113.

23. Morris, Liberty,p.18.

24. Morris, ‘Socialist Poet’.

25. Morris, Political Writings, p. 37.

26. Ibid., pp. 37–38.

27. Regina Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization (London: Palgrave/

Macmillan, 2010), p. 2.

28. Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, pp. 14–15.

29. Peter Kropotkin, ‘Modern Science and Anarchism’, in R. Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkin’s

Revolutionary Pamphlets (New York: Dover, 1970), pp. 146–194, 166, 295.

AQ1 30. Auberon Herbert, The Voluntaryist Creed: Being the Herbert Spencer Lecture Deliv-

ered at Oxford, June 7, 1906 (London: Henry Frowde, 1908), pp. 6–7. http://ﬁles.

libertyfund.org/ﬁles/1026/0545_Bk.pdf (access 17 September 2010].

31. See C. Tame, ‘The Libertarian Tradition no. 1: Auberon Herbert’, Free Life, The

Journal of the Libertarian Alliance, 1/2 (1980), 2; E. Mack, ‘Voluntaryism: The Polit-

ical Thought of Auberon Herbert’, Journal of Libertarian Studies, 2/4 (1978), 306;

Wen dy McElroy, The Debates of Liberty: An Overview of Individualist Anarchism,

1881–1908 (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003), p. 33.

32. J. Levy, Appendix to Auberon Herbert, Taxation and Anarchism: A Discussion

between the Hon. Auberon Herbert and J.H. Levy (London: Personal Rights Asso-

ciation, 1912). http://app.libraryoﬂiberty.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticﬁle=

show.php%3Ftitle=2257&chapter=212934&layout=html&Itemid=27 (access

17 October 2010].

33. McElroy, Debates of Liberty, pp. 7, 164.

34. Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, ed. H. M. Becker, trans. I. P. Isca

(London: Freedom Press, 1996), p. 40.

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Ruth Kinna 55

35. Mack, ‘Voluntaryism’, p. 306.

36. McElroy, Debates of Liberty, p. 164.

37. Freedom, January 1904.

38. Peter Kropotkin, Freedom, April 1893.

39. Freedom, July 1895.

40. Varlaam Tcherkesov, ‘Socialism or Democracy’, Supplement to Freedom, June 1895.

41. Freedom, July 1893.

42. Freedom, June 1895.

43. Mutualists distinguished between property and possession and argued that the

former, anything more than ones tools, personal possessions and dwelling, must

always be co-operatively organised and co-ordinated.

44. Freedom, July 1895.

45. Ibid.

46. Kropotkin, Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 297; Peter Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and

Development, trans. Louis S. Friedland and J. R. Piroshnikoff (Montreal/New York:

Black Rose, 1992), pp. 269–270, 338.

47. Kropotkin, Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 172.

48. T.H. Huxley, ‘Government: Anarchy or Regimentation’ (1890), in Collected Essays,

http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE1/G-AR.html (access 17 October 2010].

49. Ibid.

50. Freedom, July 1893.

51. V.I. Lenin, ‘Anarchism and Socialism’, in Marx, Engels, Lenin: Anarchism and

Anarcho-Syndicalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 185–186.

52. Eugene Richter, Pictures of the Socialistic Future (London: Swan Sonnenschein &

co. 1907) available at http://www.econlib.org

53. William Liebknecht, ‘Our Recent Congress’, Justice, 15 August 1895.

54. ‘Celebrating the Commune’, Daily News, 18 March 1887.

55. Florence Boos, ‘William Morris’s Socialist Diary’, History Workshop 13 (1982), 38.

56. Ibid., 28 n. 56–58.

57. Ibid., 38 n. 106.

58. Morris, Political Writings, pp. 180–183.

59. Ibid., p. 180. For Donnisthorp’s comments on Joynes see. Socialism Analyzed. Being

a Critical Examination of Mr. Joynes’s ‘Socialist Catechism’ (London: Liberty and

Property Defence League, 1888).

60. W. Morris, Collected Letters of William Morris, vol. III: 1889–1892, Norman

Kelvin (ed.) (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 59; Grant Allen,

‘Individualism and Socialism’, Contemporary Review LV (1889), 730–734.

61. Morris, Letters III, p. 88.

62. Justice, 5 September 1896.

63. Friedrich Engels, Letter to M. Hildebrand, in Marx, Engels, Lenin, p. 179.

64. Morris, Letters III, p. 63.

65. Ibid., p. 87.

66. Ibid., p. 63.

67. Ibid., p. 64.

68. Morris, Letters II, p. 769.

69. Morris, Letters III, p. 63.

70. Ibid., p. 64.

71. Morris, ‘Socialist Poet’, p. 6.

72. Morris, Liberty, p. 14.

73. Morris, Letters II, p. 768.

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56 William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

74. Ibid., p. 766.

75. Morris, Liberty,p.14.

76. For a qualiﬁed anarchist defence of majoritarianism see A. Bertolo, ‘Democ-

racy and Beyond’, Democracy and Nature: An International Journal of Inclu-

sive Democracy, 5(2) (1999) at http://www.democracynature.org/vol5/vol5.htm

(access 28 November 2010).

77. William Morris, News From Nowhere, David Leopold (ed.), (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003.), p. 77.

78. Ibid.

79. Morris, Letters III, p. 64.

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The Syndicalist Challenge in the

Durham Coalﬁeld before 1914

Lewis H. Mates

Introduction

The British ‘labour revolt’ immediately before the outbreak of the First World

War saw millions of working days lost in strike action and the mushroom-

ing of trade unions. This unrest, which included the ﬁrst British national

miners’ strike in 1912, coincided with a growth in revolutionary agitation.

The emergence of syndicalist ideas, essentially revolutionary trade unionism,

seemed fortuitously timed to give coherence and revolutionary temper to an

urge to revolt evident in important sections of the organised (and previously

unorganised) British working class.

‘Syndicalism’ is deployed here in its ‘broadest sense’ to refer to ‘all revolu-

tionary, direct-actionist’ organisations.1As Lucien van der Walt and Michael

Schmidt have recently argued, syndicalism’s ideological origins lay in the

works of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. That said, self-deﬁning Marxists

also developed ideas and approaches that fed into syndicalism.

Consequently, revolutionaries who self-identiﬁed as Marxists, anarchists

and others all contributed to the syndicalist canon and operated on its ide-

ological terrain; syndicalism thus fed from, and into, both anarchist and

Marxist traditions.2Nevertheless, the traditional divisions between Marxist

and anarchist approaches persisted within syndicalism; there were both

points of convergence as well as of divergence even over fundamentals.

Syndicalism, therefore, offers a unique forum to study at close quarters the

relations between revolutionary activists of the red and the black.

This chapter explores the impact of ideology on the conduct of revolution-

ary struggle among activists in the Durham coalﬁeld, in north-east England.

Coal miners, especially those of south Wales, were fundamental to the

syndicalist project in Britain. The single most signiﬁcant British syndicalist

propaganda document was The Miners’ Next Step, written by Welsh miners in

1911 and published in January 1912. It expressed lessons militants had taken

from the defeat of the Cambrian Combine dispute. At its peak, the dispute

involved 30,000 south Wales miners striking over conditions and wages, and

it saw serious rioting at Tonypandy in November 1910.3

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58 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalﬁeld

The unusual socio-economic conditions and radical cultural milieu in

south Wales – its miners were 70 per cent more likely to strike than their

counterparts in any other British coalﬁeld before 1910 – proved particularly

conducive to generating and sustaining syndicalism.4Yet contemporaneous

upheaval in the Durham coalﬁeld – of a similar size and, like south Wales,

dependent on the vicissitudes of the unpredictable export market – offered

promising ground for fruitful syndicalist intervention.

The Durham coalﬁeld witnessed some of the ﬁrst skirmishes in the wave

of late Edwardian industrial unrest when, in January 1910, a consider-

able proportion of lodges afﬁliated to the 130,000 strong Durham Miners’

Association (DMA) struck against an agreement signed by their executive

to institute a ‘three shift system’ in the coalﬁeld. For the vast majority

of Durham miners this was an incredibly unpopular change because it

demanded they work night as well as morning and afternoon shifts and

consequently brought signiﬁcant disruption to family and social life. The

unpopularity of the DMA leaders – and especially the most inﬂuential, gen-

eral secretary and Liberal MP John Wilson – grew with their high-handedness

during the national miners’ strike of 1912.

Anger from disenchanted sections of the Durham rank and ﬁle after the

1912 national strike was manifest in two main ways: ﬁrst, in the growth of

an aggressive and unofﬁcial (i.e. not ofﬁcially endorsed by the DMA’s ofﬁcial

leadership) lodge strike policy and, second, with the institutionalisation of

efforts to reform the DMA (as well as ﬁght for increased wages), in the form

of the Durham Forward Movement.5This was a well-supported rank-and-ﬁle

initiative headed by a group of miner activists of the Independent Labour

Party (ILP). Established nationally in 1893, the ILP had become one of the

founders of the Labour Party, and had since made some (contested) progress

in establishing itself in the coalﬁeld.

This chapter begins by discussing the ideological strands that informed

the development of syndicalism in Britain. It then considers the ideological

development of Durham coalﬁeld’s two most signiﬁcant pre-1914 revolu-

tionary activists, Will Lawther and George Harvey, before examining their

activities and evidence of their immediate impact. After brief consideration

of the wider syndicalist inﬂuence in the coalﬁeld, the chapter ends by exam-

ining some of the ways in which both Harvey and Lawther’s politics arguably

inhibited their potential impact on the wider radical milieu.

Ideological origins of syndicalism

Three currents, involving both Marxists and anarchists, were crucial in shap-

ing the tendencies that arose within British syndicalism. The ﬁrst major

one came from America in the form of the writings of Daniel De Leon

(a self-identifying Marxist) and the subsequent emergence of the Industrial

Workers of the World (IWW or ‘Wobblies’). De Leon developed a theory

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Lewis H. Mates 59

of revolutionary working-class advancement that demanded both ‘political

action’ – deﬁned in this context as standing for elections at local and

national levels on a revolutionary platform – and industrial action. The lat-

ter took the form of ‘industrial unionism’ (rather than ‘syndicalism’ as such):

revolutionary trade unions of skilled and unskilled workers in the major

industries. These industrial unions were to work alongside the pre-existing

unions until they supplanted them; this was dual unionism. De Leon was

inﬂuential in establishing the Chicago IWW in 1905, successfully propos-

ing an amendment to the IWW’s preamble that committed it to political

action. Though ratiﬁed, the issue of political action soon split the IWW

between De Leon and Wobblies under Big Bill Haywood of the Western Fed-

eration of Miners, as well anarchists like Thomas Hagerty (who penned the

ﬁrst draft of the original preamble) and veteran anarchist organiser Lucy

Parsons, wife of the Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons. This grouping pre-

vailed at the fourth IWW convention (1908) and the amended preamble

precluded afﬁliation to any political party. Using sadly characteristic lan-

guage, De Leon denounced the victorious ‘bummery’, ‘slum proletarians’

and ‘anarchist scum’ and left to form a rival IWW based in Detroit, which

soon faded away.6

In 1903 and under the inﬂuence of De Leon, most of the Scottish branches

of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) broke away, eventually

forming the Socialist Labour Party (SLP).7In its early years, the party was

an exclusive sect, but it gained importance in the trade union sponsored

working-class educational institution Ruskin College, Oxford. This was evi-

dent during the strike of 1908, when the majority of Ruskin students and the

college’s principal resigned in protest at its failure to place Marx at the centre

of the teaching curriculum. The protest led to the founding of the Central

Labour College, in London. De Leon’s inﬂuence was clear in the choice of

‘Plebs’ League’ (inspired by a De Leon pamphlet) as the name of the organ-

isation formed to support the Central Labour College.8The SLP began to

place an increasing emphasis on the industrial sphere and it grew with the

labour revolt after 1910. However, its increasing relaxation of certain sec-

tarian positions also lost it members and the still less sectarian and more

ﬂexible syndicalists began to outmanoeuvre it in the industrial sphere.

The second major inﬂuence was French. In 1910, Tom Mann, a veteran

of the New Union struggles of the late 1880s who had been agitating in

Australia, visited French syndicalists with fellow socialist Guy Bowman.

Mann had also seen the North American IWW at close quarters. However,

indigenous ideas, and particularly those of self-styled ‘communist’ William

Morris, also inﬂuenced Mann as well as nurturing the development of British

syndicalism more generally.9Morris had left the rather dogmatic SDF to form

the Socialist League. While Morris developed a distinct brand of anti-statist

and revolutionary anti-parliamentarianism based on Marxism, many other

Socialist League activists gravitated towards anarchism.

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60 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalﬁeld

On his return to Britain, Mann established the Industrial Syndicalist Edu-

cation League (ISEL) and began producing the Industrial Syndicalist from July

1910. Mann played a leading role in the industrial unrest in Liverpool in

1911 and his paper, The Transport Worker, achieved an astonishing circu-

lation of 20,000. Mann became even more prominent after reprinting the

famous ‘Don’t shoot’ appeal to soldiers policing the picket lines in The

Syndicalist of January 1912. His and Bowman’s subsequent imprisonment

became a cause celebre for the Left. Nevertheless, the SLP criticised the ISEL’s

overemphasis on the use of the ‘general strike’ and its consequent deni-

gration of working-class political action. The SLP also disparaged the ISEL’s

apparently weak and informal organisation and its industrial sabotage tactic,

which they regarded as a counter-productive sign of weakness.10

Still, The Miners’ Next Step emerged from this second syndicalist strand.

Its authors were the self-styled ‘Unofﬁcial Reform Committee of the South

Wales Miners’ Federation’ which included Marxist miners who, like Noah

Ablett, had been to Ruskin, were important at Central Labour College, and

who had been inﬂuenced by De Leon.11 Aiming for the ‘elimination of the

employer’, The Miners’ Next Step was quite clearly revolutionary.12 This would

occur when the union in each industry was ‘thoroughly organised, in the

ﬁrst place, to ﬁght, to gain control of, and then to administer that indus-

try’.13 Yet it was also a pragmatic document, laying out in some detail a

strategy for making the mines unproﬁtable so that the workers could assume

control. But this would be full workers’ control, not that exercised by the

state in some form of nationalisation. While the document contained a pow-

erful critique of trade union bureaucracy and leadership in general terms,

it still – crucially – advocated internal union restructuring rather than dual

unionism. The only area of contradiction in The Miners’ Next Step was around

political action, where different sections endorsed and rejected it outright.14

The emphasis on industrial action (as well as the rejection of dual unionism)

meant the SLP denounced the authors of The Miners’ Next Step as ‘anarchist

freaks’.15 But their pejorative use of ‘anarchist’ was merely rhetorical – the

word ‘anarchist’ only appeared in The Miners’ Next Step to describe how the

mine owners feared the miners’ radicalisation.16 Nevertheless, the incon-

sistency in The Miners’ Next Step over political action, as well as its strong

critique of leadership and power within organisations, meant that it was

open to anarchist interpretations.

The third strand of syndicalism was more libertarian and grouped around

Guy Aldred’s Herald of Revolt (and its successor from May 1914, The Spur).

Bakunin was the major inﬂuence, certainly on Aldred, who published trans-

lations of Bakunin’s writings in the Herald of Revolt and in his later papers

(The Spur, 1914–1921; The Commune, 1923–1929 and The Council, 1923–

1933), and, in 1920, an abridged edition of Bakunin’s works and a biography.

This strand claimed Mann was too unclear and non-committal on the

issue of political action and that Mann’s criticisms of parliament did not

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Lewis H. Mates 61

go far enough. Aldred’s efforts to establish an ‘Industrial Union of Direct

Actionists’ after 1908, however, made little headway.17 Aldred self-identiﬁed

as ‘communist’ or ‘anti-parliamentarian’. Others in this strand explicitly

adopted the word ‘anarchist’ to describe their position. While it was possible

that a British activist, Sam Mainwaring, ﬁrst coined the term ‘anarcho-

syndicalist’ before 1914, it did not come into widespread use until the

interwar period.18 In essence, then, this group’s ideology was a precursor

of anarcho-syndicalism.

In the Durham coalﬁeld itself, early anarchist inﬂuences were rather dif-

ferent. Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin spoke at the 1882 Durham miners’

gala, as well as elsewhere in the region. Kropotkin’s inﬂuence was also evi-

dent in the founding of the anarchist commune at Clousden Hill in Forest

Hall, just outside Newcastle. In the 1890s, there were anarchist meetings in

a handful of scattered Durham pit villages and in several of the larger conur-

bations bordering the coalﬁeld where anarchist propaganda circulated.19

While there was a renewed phase of anarchist activity from around 1907 in

Newcastle and Sunderland, the growth after 1910 was unprecedented. The

form of anarchism also altered in the region, away from Kropotkin’s anarcho-

communism towards a syndicalist emphasis on workplace and trade union

struggle.

This regional development reﬂected a countrywide trend (Aldred was crit-

ical of Kropotkin); as anarchism became more syndicalist orientated so the

anarchist current in syndicalism became stronger. Indeed, by 1914, anar-

chist syndicalism, partly because of ‘the refusal of many of its supporters

to uphold dual unionism’, was in the ascendancy.20 The new weekly jour-

nal The Voice of Labour (launched in early 1914) helped to draw together

disparate anarchist groups around the country, though there remained the

divide with the predominately Scottish dual unionist anarchists around The

Herald of Revolt. What was the interplay of these inﬂuences on George Harvey

and Will Lawther, the two main Durham coalﬁeld revolutionary activists

before 1914?

Harvey and Lawther’s political development

Both Harvey and Lawther were politically active before they moved to rev-

olutionary syndicalism. Harvey, born in 1885 (and four years Lawther’s

senior), spent his early political life as a fairly moderate member of the

ILP. Harvey’s radicalisation took place at Ruskin College (which he attended

from 1908–1909) probably, according to Ray Challinor, under the inﬂu-

ence of tutors W. W. Craik and Noah Ablett.21 While at Ruskin, Harvey

joined the Plebs’ League, and the SLP. His rise through the Party’s ranks

was evident when he became editor of its journal, The Socialist, between

1911 and 1912. Harvey remained committed to the SLP and industrial

unionism throughout the pre-war period. Nevertheless, there was nothing

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62 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalﬁeld

inevitable about either his radicalisation or his move into the SLP. Jack Parks,

a Northumberland miner and boyhood friend, was Harvey’s roommate at

Ruskin. He too became radicalised, though over a longer period, leaving the

ILP in 1910 and becoming linked with Mann’s Industrial Syndicalist by March

1911.22

Will Lawther’s more complex political trajectory deserves further scrutiny.

Born into a Northumberland mining family in 1889, Lawther was initially

inﬂuenced by Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England and was aware that his

grandfather had been imprisoned for involvement in the Chartist agitation

(though his own parents were not politically active). Like Harvey, Lawther

began his political life (at the age of 15) by helping to establish an ILP

branch in his pit village. A year later, the Lawthers moved to Chopwell, a

new pit in the north-west Durham coalﬁeld. Lawther soon became secretary

of Chopwell ILP branch.23 He later wrote that his ‘groping for a philosophy

hardened into a positive conviction that militant socialism was the answer

to most of the problems that beset the working class ...’.24 Perhaps more

signiﬁcantly, Lawther rapidly rose in the union; in 1906 he was elected

vice-chair of Chopwell lodge and soon after he became its delegate to

the DMA.

Lawther’s conversion to syndicalism came at the newly established Cen-

tral Labour College, which he attended for a year from October 1911, aided

by funding from his family and lodge. As an ‘exhibitioner’, he had already

received free education in his spare time at Rutherford College in Newcastle,

having been unable, as the eldest of a big family, to take up a scholarship he

won to a local grammar school. At Labour College Lawther studied sociol-

ogy, economics, politics and history. Sociology lectures, delivered by Dennis

Hird, considered the work of Herbert Spencer. In economics, the emphasis

was, unsurprisingly, almost exclusively on Marx. Lawther read Capital twice

and studied other works of his including Critique of Political Economy in addi-

tion to well-known studies of Marx by Louis Boudin and Daniel De Leon and

Ricardo’s Political Economy. Lawther also read Morris, Bernard Shaw and John

Ruskin.25 Of these, Marx was obviously a signiﬁcant inﬂuence. Lawther’s

favourite work was the Eighteenth Brumaire, especially the line: ‘Him whom

we must convince we recognise as the master of the situation’, which he

quoted frequently throughout his life.26

What of the individuals Lawther met at college? As with Harvey, Craik,

who delivered Lawther’s economics lectures, must have been inﬂuential,

as was Ablett, who Lawther later regarded as ‘the greatest of all pre-war

Marxists’.27 Indeed, Ablett’s inﬂuential role was probably crucial; his inﬂu-

ence on the two Durham miners was quite different, as Ablett’s own politics

had changed signiﬁcantly between the times Harvey and Lawther came into

contact. Ablett had moved from activism in the SLP to rejecting its dual

unionism and gravitating instead towards Mann’s less doctrinaire, but more

‘anti-political’ syndicalism.

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Lewis H. Mates 63

Lawther also joined the Plebs’ League and, already ﬁred by a militant brand

of ILP socialism, he had less political distance to travel than the initially

relatively moderate Harvey. While he was still at Labour College, Lawther

had clearly imbibed much of the syndicalist case, condemning, in a letter to

the Daily Chronicle, DMA secretary John Wilson’s ‘old fashioned notion of

conciliation’, and arguing instead that the union’s attitude should embody

the class war.28 Writing in retirement in 1955, Lawther remained clear about

the appeal that the revolutionary doctrine held at that time: ‘to us it was

new and exciting. It was the ultimate in extremism, the demand for direct

action, and the professed disgust, not only with the class ridden structure,

but also with all gradual means of getting rid of that form of society’.29

In his last months at Central Labour College, Lawther seemed to endorse

a basic syndicalist case in the vein of The Miners’ Next Step.Thiswasevi-

dent in the ﬁrst syndicalist propagandising Lawther conducted in his own

coalﬁeld in May 1912 when he supported south Wales syndicalist miner

W. F. Hay’s speaking tour of county Durham.30 As the chair of these meet-

ings, Lawther’s rhetoric was indistinguishable from Hay’s. After returning to

Chopwell in August 1912, much of Lawther’s rhetoric remained in tune with

The Miners’ Next Step. For example, there was Lawther’s revolutionary critique

of nationalisation and advocacy of workers’ control. Speaking in October

1912, Lawther ‘found that nationalisation of the mines, state ownership,

was nothing more or less than state capitalism ...’.31

Indeed, the inspiration of The Miners’ Next Step, and particularly its empha-

sis on aggressive class conﬂict, the need for workers’ direct action and

self-empowerment and the rejection of leaders and bureaucracies, remained

evident in Lawther’s rhetoric throughout the pre-war period. For example,

in October 1913, Lawther wrote in a letter to the local press, that activists

of the ‘New [revolutionar y] Movement [ ...] will not wait for the “lead” to

come from a chosen few, for they will be conscious of their own desires and

destination and their mandate will therefore be supreme’.32 Yet these were all

features of The Miners’ Next Step that readily lent themselves to an anarchist

interpretation.

One indication that Lawther’s politics were shifting came in his ﬂirtation

with dual-unionism. Thus, in October 1912 Lawther based part of his speech

at a conference he had helped organise in Chopwell on the IWW’s preamble,

saying that ‘they were out for the whole of the workers to be in one organi-

sation’.33 Yet Lawther’s position on dual-unionism is difﬁcult to discern, not

least because he was not particularly vocal on this essential issue. Indeed,

Lawther later appeared to have a foot in both anarchist camps, contributing

to the dual-unionist Herald of Revolt and becoming a leading supporter of the

Voice of Labour, which rejected dual-unionism.34

There was no mystery where Lawther stood on another fundamental issue

though, as he became increasingly vocal on his rejection of political action.

At a public debate in Chopwell Miners’ Hall in September 1913, for example,

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64 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalﬁeld

Lawther argued in support of the motion ‘That the emancipation of the

working class can be brought about more readily by direct action than by leg-

islation’.35 He followed this up with a lengthy letter in the local press entitled

‘Direct Action or Legislation. Which?’36 This increasingly overt anti-political

attitude suggested Lawther’s syndicalism was moving in an anarchist direc-

tion, and, when he began to contribute to the Herald of Revolt,hewasin

good company. Lawther then began using the term ‘anarchist’ explicitly to

describe his politics (as he did when writing about this period of his life as a

retired miners’ leader in 1955), though it was clear that he continued to see

revolutionary trade unionism as the vehicle for ‘direct action’.37

What caused Lawther’s more Marxist-inﬂuenced syndicalism to develop

into a self-proclaimed anarchism? In terms of his studies at Central Labour

College, Morris’ interpretation of Marx must have been pivotal, and seemed

particularly evident in Lawther’s anti-parliamentary rhetoric.38 Lawther later

said that Morris ‘made an appeal for life against the machine horrors’.39

While in London Lawther also met the anarchist engineer Jack Tanner and

they later collaborated on several anarchist projects, including the Voi ce of

Labour.40 Probably the most inﬂuential individual was George Davison, who

Lawther ﬁrst met at the 1911 TUC conference in Newcastle (before he went

to Central Labour College). A follower of Kropotkin, Davison was an ‘eccen-

tric and courageous millionaire ... who held very advanced views on politics

and theology’.41 From a humble background, Davison rose to become a civil

servant. He was also a pioneer of photography and a Kodak shareholder.

By 1900, Davison was Kodak’s managing director, though his political activ-

ities (and alleged lack of business acumen) forced his resignation from the

company’s board in 1912.42 By this time, Davison’s desire to support pro-

gressive causes was manifest in his funding of the nascent Central Labour

College in 1910. As ﬁnancial backer of W. F. Hay’s speaking tour of the

Durham coalﬁeld in 1912, his path crossed with Lawther’s once more.43

Davison’s wealth was to impact in at least one corner of the Durham coalﬁeld

before 1914.

While Harvey and Lawther shared very similar backgrounds both socio-

economically and politically, the precise timing of the periods they spent in

full-time working-class educational institutions helps to explain their adop-

tion of signiﬁcantly different forms of revolutionary syndicalism, Harvey’s

more Marxist and Lawther’s increasingly anarchist. Scrutiny of their activi-

ties shows that they also developed their political activism in different ways.

Activities

Harvey and Lawther’s conversions to syndicalism demanded that they pro-

pagandise. That they did so to some extent in different ways was more a

reﬂection of their relative strengths as political activists and their access to

different resources rather than a result of differing Marxist and anarchist

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Lewis H. Mates 65

approaches within syndicalism. Harvey, a diminutive and unimpressive

presence on the public platform whose head would wobble from side-

to-side as he spoke, nurtured a talent for writing reports in The Socialist

and information-rich propaganda pamphlets.44 His ﬁrst, entitled ‘Industrial

Unionism and the Mining Industry’, appeared in August 1911.

In June 1912, Harvey produced a second pamphlet, ‘Does Dr. John Wilson

MP, secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, Serve the Working Class?’

This was an enraged response to a ‘joke’ Wilson cracked at the retirement cer-

emony of Charles Fenwick (Liberal MP for Wansbeck and a miners’ leader).

Lord Joicey, a mine owner, gifted Fenwick £260 and, at the presentation cere-

mony, Wilson remarked that he would like a similar ‘bribe’ on his retirement.

Harvey wrote that Wilson’s ‘aim has always been to bolster up capital-

ism, and he, more than any other leader perhaps, has swayed the miners

to take that particular action which is either harmless or beneﬁcial to the

capitalist class ... If £260 is the price, then miners’ leaders are cheap and

worth getting at’.45 Wilson demanded that Harvey withdraw the accusation.

Harvey refused. The libel case went to court in November 1912 where Harvey

maintained that Wilson was an enemy of the working-class and servant of

capitalism, citing Wilson’s agreement to a 5 per cent reduction in miners’

wages (which even an arbitrator had deemed unwarranted) in evidence. The

judge, however, found in favour of Wilson, and awarded £200 damages and

£100 costs.

By contrast, Lawther was less of a theorist than Harvey. He did not write

detailed propaganda pamphlets.46 Yet he was active from the point of his

return from Central Labour College. Lawther soon established a ‘Workers’

Freedom Group’ based on similar groups in the south Wales coalﬁeld, which

engaged in energetic and varied propagandising.47 Lawther reported in July

1913, for example, that: ‘by selling FREEDOMS [the London-based anarchist

newspaper] and pamphlets and by discussion circles, the kind of propaganda

that matters is being kept up ...’.48 Lawther also performed a pivotal role

in organising a conference to discuss syndicalism in October 1912, which

attracted representatives from seven Durham lodges to Chopwell.

Furthermore, Lawther contributed to public debates, corresponded with

the local press and involved himself in community struggles. In spring 1913,

there was intense agitation throughout the coalﬁeld against a 50 per cent

increase in the doctors’ fee for miners, a result of recent National Insur-

ance legislation. Lawther was central to the campaign in Chopwell for a

return to pre-Act fees.49 Retaining his commitment to working-class educa-

tion, Lawther also ran Plebs’ League classes three times a week in Consett

and South Shields as well as Chopwell.50 He clearly regarded this form of

education as essential propaganda work; Lawther later commented ‘that the

Labour College was of the utmost inﬂuence ... ’.51

Ambition was evident in this frenetic political work. Lawther and the

Chopwell anarchists’ aims extended well beyond creating a stronghold in

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66 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalﬁeld

their own pit village. In July 1913, the Chopwell group wanted ‘the mes-

sage of direct action to be carried right throughout the coalﬁeld and no

help is refused’.52 Thus, the previous month, Lawther had spoken at the

‘new ground’ of Crawcrook (another Durham pit village), while in July he

spoke at the miners’ annual gala on the ‘need for direct action and revolu-

tion’.53 The DMA annual gala, or ‘Big Meeting’, was a day out for all Durham

miners and their families, and tens of thousands thronged to Durham race-

course to hear speeches from local and national leaders. It was an obvious

place to take propaganda efforts. Lawther was also concerned that anarchists

should organise effectively together in the region and nationally. In April

1914, for example, he took a delegation and spoke at an anarchist conference

in Newcastle. The conference concerned itself with national organisational

issues such as supporting a new anarchist newspaper and international top-

ics such as the (recently state-executed) Spanish freethinker Francisco Ferrer’s

‘modern schools’, as well as organising an international anarchist confer-

ence in London in September 1914.54 Lawther spoke at a modern school in

east London in summer 1913.55 To maintain the lines of communication,

Lawther supplied regular reports to the national anarchist paper Freedom as

well as contributing to other anarchist and syndicalist publications. In sum-

mary: both Harvey and Lawther were committed activists. Harvey’s strength

was theoretical and embodied in his written propaganda, while Lawther

excelled as a speaker. These strengths, which reﬂected their personal abilities

and inclinations, fuelled the syndicalist movement of the Durham coalﬁeld.

But what was the impact of their efforts?

Speciﬁc and immediate impacts

Clearly, Harvey and Lawther’s speciﬁc activity had some degree of immedi-

ate impact. That Harvey, Lawther and their groupings were also (in Lawther’s

words) ‘fellow slave[s] of the lamp and pick’ must have encouraged a sym-

pathetic reception at a time of intense industrial and socio-political ﬂux

in the Durham coalﬁeld.56 Harvey’s pamphlets were particularly impor-

tant. ‘Industrial Unionism and the Mining Industry’ sold 2,000 copies, and

Harvey received invitations to speak all over the Durham coalﬁeld about

it in summer 1911. An audience of 3,000 saw Harvey speak at a Chester-

le-Street meeting on ‘Industrial unionism and fakirdom in the DMA.’57

Similarly, the libel case surrounding Harvey’s June 1912 pamphlet attack-

ing John Wilson received extensive press coverage. The verbatim coverage

read like a trial of the old methods by the new revolutionary ideas; this trial

encapsulated the revolutionary challenge to the old DMA leadership. Cer-

tainly, the press coverage enhanced Harvey’s reputation and raised the

proﬁle of his politics. Indeed, Harvey’s very public championing of the

Durham miner in 1912 must have played an important part in his securing

a checkweighman post only a year later, at Wardley pit near Gateshead (see

below).

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Lewis H. Mates 67

The 1912 trial also gave Harvey’s political project a welcome boost. A mat-

ter of days after the court-case, Harvey launched the ‘Durham Mining

Industrial Union Group’, what the Durham Chronicle deemed somewhat

wearily ‘still another organisation anxious to reform the Durham Miners’

Association’.58 The group formed after a meeting of ‘about twenty repre-

sentatives’ at Chester-le-Street, and decided to issue lodges with a copy

of its industrial unionist manifesto.59 This built on Harvey’s own local

grouping, ‘Chester-le-Street and District Industrial Union’. Harvey certainly

maintained a strong local support base wherever he worked in the Durham

coalﬁeld throughout his life. One example of the longer-term inﬂuence he

exercised came in the form of Tom Aisbitt, one of his Chester-le-Street indus-

trial unionist converts. The same age as Harvey, Aisbitt had also been a

member of Chester-le-Street ILP (he was its secretary) as well as helping

to found Chester-le-Street trades council.60 Aisbitt later secured an inﬂuen-

tial post in the Newcastle trades council with which he inﬂuenced regional

labour politics in the interwar period.61

While Lawther did not introduce anarchism to the region, he certainly

brought its syndicalist version into the Durham coalﬁeld in a concerted and

energetic way. Naturally, it was in Lawther’s home pit village of Chopwell

that his direct inﬂuence was most obvious, and in the form of bricks and

mortar. Lawther’s wealthy anarchist contact George Davison agreed to spon-

sor a ‘Communist Club’ in Chopwell. One of only three in the country, it

opened in December 1913. The police were certainly impressed with the

club’s members, who were apparently ‘mostly young men and are above

the average miner in intelligence’.62 Only four months after its opening,

there was an anarchist conference in Newcastle. Freedom reported that ‘the

Chopwell boys came in their dozens, each an embryo ﬁghter, from whom

more will be heard anon, we hope’.63 Many of these must have been

Lawther’s converts, directly or indirectly.

However, not all Chopwell radicals were convinced by this new gospel.

Certainly, the response to the war effort from Chopwell –500 went to ﬁght,

including two of Lawther’s own brothers – suggested that the village’s revolu-

tionary nucleus had had a distinctly limited impact. Only a small hardcore,

that included Lawther and two other brothers, took a militant stand against

the war and became conscientious objectors.64 This response to Harvey and

Lawther’s propagandising efforts suggests a rather circumscribed degree of

inﬂuence of syndicalist ideas in the Durham coalﬁeld. A possible explanation

is that the activists concerned lacked conviction, their propaganda deﬁcient

in substance. Since this charge has been levelled at Lawther, in particular, it

bares considering, before turning to an alternative understanding.

The syndicalists’ wider inﬂuence?

In assessing syndicalist inﬂuence in Durham, commentators have tended to

focus on Harvey and Lawther (and to a lesser extent their groupings), though

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68 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalﬁeld

their conclusions have been quite different. Roy Church and Quentin

Outram, for example, claimed that syndicalist inﬂuence was negligible in

County Durham, basing this on an interpretation of Lawther’s role and pol-

itics.65 Speciﬁcally, they endorsed John Saville’s view that in his early years

Lawther ‘described himself as a Marxist, syndicalist, anarchist and member

of the ILP’ (which echoed Robin Smith, a prospective biographer of Lawther,

in the North-east Labour History Society journal).66

In one respect Saville was right, for, as we have seen, syndicalism was

attractive for some self-deﬁned Marxists as well as anarchists. But syndi-

calism’s emphasis on direct action and eschewal of parliamentary or ‘polit-

ical’ action easily lent itself to anarchist interpretations within what was

a fairly broad church. Neither the theories nor (most of) the organisa-

tions formed to advocate them were exclusive, ideologically pure and

self-contained in this time of ﬂux.67 Indeed, Robin Smith employed his (the

original) claim about Lawther’s politics to illustrate this very point, though

Smith was referring to the whole period before 1926 (when Lawther was

aged between 15 and 36). This was unhelpful, as the period before 1926

saw considerable change in Lawther’s politics, which reﬂected developing

events on the international scene. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution had had a

tremendous impact on the revolutionary Left in Britain, resulting in the for-

mation of a British Communist Party from sections of the SLP, shop stewards’

movement activists, left-wing ILP members and others in 1920. Lawther

was thus a communist-supporting Labour Party activist by the early 1920s.

Furthermore, the birth of the British Communist Party heralded a slow drift

towards more exclusivity and sectarianism among the Left.

Nevertheless, the implication of Smith’s claim and the accounts of those

who endorsed it was that Lawther was something of a dilettante, a political

butterﬂy, ﬂitting between parties and political programmes at whim, or that

he was confused about his true political home. That Lawther ended his career

as a right-wing national miners’ leader after 1945 has also thrown doubt over

his early revolutionism. In reality, there were distinct and logical phases in

the development of Lawther’s politics between 1905 and the early 1920s.

There is no reason to question the sincerity of his conversion to syndicalism

from activism in the ILP in 1912 and his subsequent move to anarchist

syndicalism before August 1914. The very intensity of his activity is sufﬁ-

cient evidence of the extent to which his political conversion was felt. The

shorter pieces Lawther published in the local press in the war period reveal

an individual capable of grasping and expressing applied theory including

that of Marx. Certainly, it is rather facile to claim that, because Lawther

ended up on the political Right, that this was where he was always destined

to go. If the authenticity of Lawther’s politics is the yardstick for measuring

syndicalism in the Durham coalﬁeld then it was a signiﬁcant force.

Unlike Smith, Bob Holton took Lawther and Harvey’s politics very seri-

ously. Indeed, his study of the two informed his judgement that the Durham

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Lewis H. Mates 69

coalﬁeld provided the second most important ground for syndicalism after

south Wales.68 Unfortunately, Holton’s wider discussion of the Durham

coalﬁeld was insubstantial, and suggested a relationship between syndical-

ism and militancy that was difﬁcult to sustain. He noted the particularly

strong unrest in the coalﬁeld over the return to work after the 1912 national

strike, but later acknowledged that the major coalﬁeld to vote for areturn

to work in 1912 was south Wales (where syndicalism was strongest). While

Holton explained this vote by the peculiar conditions in south Wales includ-

ing a lack of resources after the Cambrian Combine dispute that engendered

strike weariness, there was clearly no simple correlation between indus-

trial militancy and syndicalist inﬂuence.69 While there remains considerable

research to do in this area, Holton’s work makes clear that, thanks to

Harvey, Lawther and their groupings, syndicalism did have an impact in the

Durham coalﬁeld, but that it was not as far reaching as that in south Wales.

In Durham, the ILP had been remarkably effective in channelling miners’

grievances through the Durham Forward Movement. But by the same token,

the Forward Movement’s success testiﬁed to the continued existence of con-

siderable grievances among Durham miners. Syndicalists, too, could have

spoken to this rank-and-ﬁle discontent. How, then, did Harvey and Lawther

apply their politics and how might this have blunted their potential impact

in the Durham coalﬁeld?

Dogma, pragmatism and sectarianism

Two intertwining aspects of the Durham syndicalists’ own politics –

their puritanism (or, more negatively put, their dogmatism) and their

sectarianism – militated against their inﬂuence. First, some aspects of their

politics inhibited their ability to propagate their message, thereby helping to

isolate them from the wider movement. Second, the revolutionary alterna-

tive Harvey and Lawther offered in the Durham coalﬁeld was, and remained,

to some extent divided both theoretically and organisationally (as elsewhere

in Britain).

In terms of dogmatism, Lawther’s politics suffered the most. His anar-

chism demanded a rejection of any form of constitutional ofﬁce and he

did not stand for any lodge, DMA or party position (until 1915). This was

signiﬁcant as Lawther had been a Chopwell lodge ofﬁcial in one of the

largest and most militant pits in county Durham before going to Labour

College. Being a lodge ofﬁcial earlier in his life had brought Lawther into

contact with inﬂuential Durham miners throughout the coalﬁeld, as well as

with signiﬁcant national and international ﬁgures within the movement.70

Lawther’s principled decision not to stand for any constitutional ofﬁce was

undoubtedly laudable. It further testiﬁed to Lawther’s complete commit-

ment to his politics at this time. But it denied Lawther access to important

means of exercising local and regional inﬂuence. By contrast, two signiﬁcant

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70 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalﬁeld

south Wales syndicalists, Noahs Ablett and Rees, were elected to the SWMF

Executive Committee in 1911, thereby demonstrating their prominence in

the coalﬁeld and enhancing their authority.

George Harvey did not have these particular qualms. Indeed, the (in some

respects) more pragmatic Harvey had been instrumental in altering the SLP’s

proscription on members standing for trade union ofﬁce. Harvey pointed

out that in Durham any prospective party member would have to relin-

quish trade union ofﬁce to join the party. Naturally, they refused to do

this, and yet the lodges in which these individuals were ofﬁcials were

also those that bought the most SLP propaganda.71 The newly-unshackled

Harvey then won a checkweighman post in 1913. This development was

of considerable signiﬁcance, as this prestigious position demanded a high

degree of trust from the pit’s miners. In his application letter, Harvey clearly

stated he was ‘a Revolutionary Socialist and a strong believer in Industrial

Unionism’.72 Harvey’s election both reﬂected his already established reputa-

tion as well as entrenching and widening his inﬂuence. The growing interest

in syndicalism between 1910 and 1914 seemed to allow for a blurring of

the barriers between Marxism and anarchism, at least at the level of theory.

The relative ease with which individuals could move between the two tradi-

tions, exempliﬁed by the (rapid) development of Lawther’s politics, reﬂected

the wider socio-economic ﬂux of the times. This blurring of the bound-

aries between Marxism and anarchism was also evident, for example, in the

explanation Lawther gave (during the time of the cold war) for the naming

of the Edwardian ‘communist clubs’ such as that in Chopwell. They were

‘supposed to be the rallying grounds for those interested in communism

and anarchism, a communism, by the way, which bore little resemblance to

the Russian brand today [1955]’.73 Marx and Marxists had clearly inﬂuenced

Lawther, though he soon branded himself an anarchist, and in a similar way

the Chopwell ‘Communist Club’ (which was also known in this period as

the ‘Anarchist Club’), was a forum for the discussion of various revolutionary

ideas that were in many respects difﬁcult to disentangle.

Ray Challinor wrote of the SLP’s diminishing sectarianism in this period

too.74 However, sectarian divisions remained between the syndicalists in

the Durham coalﬁeld. Harvey was the main offender. This was evident at

the Chopwell syndicalist conference in October 1912, where Harvey and

Lawther vied to convince the audience of their case. Lawther glossed over

the differences in politics between himself and Harvey, concluding his

speech, ‘they were out for the whole of the workers to be in one organi-

sation. They could call that Industrialism, Unionism [sic. presumably a press

mistake for ‘industrial unionism’] or syndicalism, or what they liked ...’75

Harvey, speaking after Lawther, suggested his audience should propagan-

dise for a Durham mining industrial union. There was certainly overlap:

Harvey’s call for education and organisation, his claim that ‘Leaders and

politicians could do nothing’ and that the ‘hope of the working-class lay

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Lewis H. Mates 71

in the working-class themselves’ all echoed Lawther. Harvey’s description of

industrial unionism – working on the principle ‘that an injury to one is an

injury to all’ (an IWW slogan) – also resonated with Lawther’s speech.76

However, Harvey then underlined where he and Lawther differed in

explicit terms:

they ought not to go in for syndicalism, because if it were a halfway house

they had to recognise sooner or later that they must go to the higher

pinnacle of organisation. He contended that the scientiﬁc weapon was

industrial unionism. They were out for industrial and political action.

The two must go hand in hand.77

This political action included ﬁghting all elections, not for votes as such but

on a ‘revolutionary issue’ to ‘create a fever heat of industrial revolution and

they could only do that by industrial and political propaganda’.78 Indeed,

the extent to which Harvey argued in favour of political action caused prob-

lems in his own party. His claim in The Socialist (March 1912) that SLP

candidates would be the best parliamentarians as only revolutionaries could

win reforms, sparked extensive internal criticism. It provoked the secession

of most of the party’s members in Lancashire, claiming that the SLP had

become reformist.79

More unfortunately, Harvey, like many SLP activists, replicated aspects of

De Leon’s language, denouncing other revolutionary groupings as ‘fakirs’.

Harvey was similarly a ‘virulent critic’ of Tom Mann’s syndicalism.80

In response to Mann’s imprisonment for publishing the famous ‘Don’t

shoot’ article appealing for soldiers not to ﬁre on strikers, Harvey wrote in

The Socialist (of April 1912) that his Party were not syndicalists and ‘have

no sympathy with syndicalism’. That said there were limits to Harvey’s

sectarianism. On this occasion, the SLP reprinted Mann’s banned article

because they were ‘ﬁghters for freedom and the free press’.81 It was per-

haps then rather unfortunate that sectarianism was apparently the most

noteworthy aspect of Harvey’s politics for authors such as Robin Page

Arnot.82

In County Durham, Lawther seemed prepared to accept Harvey’s attempts

to mark a clear ideological divide between them; and Harvey’s support for

‘political action’ remained anathema to Lawther’s anarchism. Nevertheless,

Lawther continued to promote solidarity with Harvey. In February 1913,

Lawther made an impassioned appeal for Harvey in the aftermath of the

Wilson case:

It is up to us, as miners, to show to George Harvey, by word or deed, that

we believe that what he said [about Wilson] was true...And I believe that,

during the forthcoming summer, the gospel of revolt, of direct action,

of anti-leadership will spread, not because Harvey or any other person

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72 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalﬁeld

believes in it, but because of the oppression and tyranny that is taking

place in the mines ...83

In July 1913, the two men, among others, shared a platform at the Durham

miners’ annual gala.84 Notwithstanding a willingness to share public plat-

forms, Lawther and Harvey offered two distinct brands of syndicalism in the

Durham coalﬁeld. Their differing visions of revolutionary politics and the

theoretical terms they used to express them to an interested, but not neces-

sarily informed miner audience (for example, at the Chopwell conference of

October 1912), must have confused more than just the local press.

Lawther revealed another kind of sectarianism, however, and, while it

underscored his revolutionary credentials, it hampered his ability to oper-

ate effectively, denying him access to the platforms of potentially inﬂuential

and sympathetic organisations and individuals in the DMA. One of the ﬁrst

to address the syndicalist conference in Chopwell in October 1912, Lawther

opened his speech by explaining why they ‘were out for the new movement.

They were out against the “forward movement” ’.85 Lawther was clearly

keen to distinguish himself and his followers from the Forward Movement’s

project – indeed, deﬁning them as opponents – from the outset. He did so by

ﬁrst attacking nationalisation, the aim of key Forward Movement activists,

and thus effectively marked the gap between the apparent reformists of the

Forward Movement and the revolutionaries. That the Forward Movement

leaders were intent on making reputations and careers for themselves on

the back of the miners’ discontent was a fairly common theme in Lawther’s

rhetoric86 (and, ironically, a charge that was later made, unjustly, against

Lawther himself).

Again, Harvey displayed a little less principled idealism and a little more

pragmatism in relations with the wider rank-and-ﬁle movement. At his libel

trial in November 1912, Harvey asked Wilson if he was aware that he had

been heavily criticised by the Forward Movement. Harvey quoted part of a

speech by John Jeffries, a Forward Movement leader, claiming that Wilson’s

evident talents were ‘from time to time not used for the purpose they ought

to be’ and, explicitly, that Jeffries was referring to the conciliation doctrine

that Wilson ‘continually dinned into their ears’. Harvey’s defence here was

signiﬁcant, as he was taking the logic of Forward Movement rhetoric a step

further, clearly aligning himself with it as he did so. Indeed, Harvey claimed

(slightly disingenuously) that he ‘had said no more than what had been said

by other bodies during the last decade – by the socialists or the “Forward

Movement” – and the action had only been taken against him because he

was a working miner’.87 The extent to which Harvey’s more conciliatory

approach to the larger rank-and-ﬁle movement in Durham beneﬁted him in

terms of his ability to propagate his politics is difﬁcult to measure. But it cer-

tainly seems to have secured him a prominent position on the platform of at

least one Durham Forward Movement mass meeting. In April 1912, Harvey

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Lewis H. Mates 73

seconded a motion of censure of the DMA agents, with a speech complain-

ing that the men had been ‘sold-out’ by their leaders. Harvey argued that

the leaders should receive the same wage as the miners; then perhaps the

leaders would ﬁght for their demands, as ‘every time the men got a rise

they would also be better off’.88 Lawther, unsurprisingly, never appeared on

a Durham Forward Movement platform as such – although he did speak at a

meeting on the miners’ minimum wage in Newcastle in December 1913, this

was not apparently under their auspices.89 That said, Lawther’s attitude did

not prevent co-operation in Chopwell with Forward Movement activists. For

example, Lawther sat on the local negotiating committee in the doctor’s fee

agitation in early 1913 with Vipond Hardy, who Lawther had failed to con-

vince of syndicalism and who was, instead, active in the maligned Durham

Forward Movement.90

Conclusion: an opportunity missed?

Revolutionary activists are often confronted with a dilemma when faced

with favourable circumstances in which to propagate their politics. To what

extent should they soft-pedal or compromise on fundamentals in order to

be able to access platforms and provide a message that has the potential to

chime with large numbers of individuals in some form of struggle? If they

compromise too much they are open to the jibe of being opportunistic, while

too little compromise means they could be denounced as zealots: inﬂexible,

too dogmatic.

In the period of industrial strife 1910–1914, Lawther, certainly, adopted a

purity of praxis that denied him access to certain platforms and alienated

him from some potential allies. Harvey, on the other hand, seemed too sec-

tarian, ﬁxated on the ﬁner points of the policy of his inﬁnitesimal party.

This is not to argue that Lawther, in particular, should have abandoned the

principled political positions he held. However, it is to recognise that main-

taining such ideological positions had clear consequences and that in certain

circumstances what was sacriﬁced for the sake of principle was potentially

considerable.

Arguably, Lawther’s anarchist syndicalism was more theoretically coher-

ent and defensible than the looser syndicalism of the south Wales ‘Unofﬁcial

Reform Committee’. Yet, even when better co-ordinated in 1914, anarchism

remained a minority strand within the minority revolutionary syndicalist

section of the mass labour movement. Harvey’s SLP, though more tightly

organised for a longer period, also remained a minority tendency within

syndicalism. Furthermore, in its efforts to break out of this ghetto (often

prompted by Harvey himself), the SLP often lost as much as it gained.

By the outbreak of war, like the other Left parties, both revolutionary and

reformist alike, the SLP was losing members.91 Clearly, conditions were not

as favourable for syndicalism in the Durham coalﬁeld as they were in south

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74 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalﬁeld

Wales. Still, in their interpretation and application in syndicalism, both

Marxism and anarchism fell short in the pre-1914 upheaval in the Durham

coalﬁeld.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Trevor Bark, Emmet O’Connor, Kevin Davies, Nick Heath,

Ken John, Don Watson, Chris Williams, John Patten, and to Dave Douglass,

Peter Mates and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier

drafts. I would like to dedicate this chapter to the late, great Dr Ray Challinor.

Notes

1. Marcel van der Linden, ‘Second Thoughts on Revolutionary Syndicalism’, Labour

History Review, 63/2 (1998), 182.

2. Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt consequently include De Leonism

as part of the broad anarchist tradition, notwithstanding De Leon’s self-

identiﬁcation as a Marxist. This is problematic not least because De Leon

consistently deﬁned his position against the ‘anarchists’ and with good reason.

The issue of political action was crucial. Regardless of the weight that De Leon

attached to political action, attitudes to its utility were signiﬁcant in his and his

followers’ rejection of the rest of the syndicalist milieu and especially of the anar-

chists. See Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism

(Counter-Power) (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009), pp. 16–17, 161–162.

3. See D. Smith, ‘Tonypandy 1910: Deﬁnitions of Community’, Past and Present,87

(1980), 158–184.

4. David Egan, ‘The Miners’ Next Step’, Labour History Review, 38 (1979), 10;

D.K. Davies, The Inﬂuence of Syndicalism, and Industrial Unionism in the South Wales

Coalﬁeld 1898–1921: A Study in Ideology, and Practice (Ph.D. thesis, University of

Wales, 1991).

5. C. Marshall, Levels of Industrial Militancy and the Political Radicalisation of the

Durham Miners, 1885–1914 (MA thesis, Durham University, 1976), pp. 92–95,

99–100, 310–311.

6. See Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph McCartin, We Shall be All: A History of the

Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969).

7. Ray Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism (London: Croom Helm, 1977).

8. See John Atkins, Neither Crumbs Nor Condescension: The Central Labour College,

1909–1915 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen People’s Press, 1981).

9. Bob Holton, British Syndicalism 1900–1914. Myths and Realities (London: Pluto,

1976), p. 38.

10. Holton, British Syndicalism, pp. 114–116; Challinor, British Bolshevism, pp. 95–96.

11. Egan, ‘The Miners’ Next Step’, p. 11.

12. The Miners’ Next Step (1912) Reprinted with introduction by Dave Douglass

(Doncaster: Germinal and Phoenix Press, 1991), p. 30.

13. Ibid., p. 31.

14. Ibid., pp. 16–17, 21; Holton, British Syndicalism, p. 87.

15. G. Walker, George Harvey: The Conﬂict Between the Ideology of Industrial Unionism

and the Practice of its Principles in the Durham Coalﬁeld (MA thesis, Ruskin College,

1982), pp. 36–39.

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Lewis H. Mates 75

16. The Miners’ Next Step,p.13.

17. John Caldwell, Guy A. Aldred (1886–1963) (Glasgow: The Strickland Press, 1966).

18. This chapter employs the term ‘anarchist syndicalist’ where speciﬁcity is nec-

essary. Albert Meltzer, The Anarchists in London 1935–1955 (Sanday: Cienfuegos

Press, 1976), p. 9; David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement,

1917–1945 (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), pp. 134–135.

19. G. Pattison ‘Anarchist Inﬂuence in the Durham Coalﬁeld Before 1914’, The Raven,

11 (1990), 239; John Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse: the Lost History of British

Anarchists (London: Paladin, 1978), pp. 250–254.

20. Holton, British Syndicalism, p. 142.

21. Challinor, British Bolshevism, p. 116.

22. The Industrial Syndicalist, 1(9), March 1911 in Geoff Brown, The Industrial

Syndicalist (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1974), pp. 314–315; Ray Challinor,

‘Jack Parks, Memories of a Militant’, Bulletin of the North-east Group for the Study of

Labour History, 9 (1975), 34–38; Dave Douglass ‘The Durham Pitman’, in Raphael

Samuel (ed.), Miners, Quarrymen and Salt Workers (London: Routledge & Kegan

Paul, 1977), pp. 286–287.

23. Newcastle Journal, 8, 10, 11, 15 March 1955; R. Smith ‘Obituary Article: Sir William

Lawther’, Bulletin of the North-east Group for the Study of Labour History, 10 (1976),

27–28; J.F. Clarke, ‘An Interview with Sir Will Lawther’, Bulletin of the Society for

the Study of Labour History, 18 (1969), 20.

24. Newcastle Journal, 15 March 1955.

25. Ibid., 11 March 1955; 15 March 1955; Lawther’s Notebooks of Economics and

Sociology Lectures, October 1911–July 1912 (both in possession of the late Jack

Lawther); Smith, ‘Obituary Article’, 28–29, 33; Clarke, ‘Lawther Interview’, 14, 19.

26. Smith, ‘Obituary Article’, 33.

27. Holton, British Syndicalism, p. 169.

28. Smith, ‘Obituary Article’, p. 29.

29. Newcastle Journal, 17 March 1955.

30. Durham Chronicle, 31 May 1912; Blaydon Courier, 1 June 1912.

31. Blaydon Courier, 19 October 1912.

32. Ibid., 18 October 1913.

33. Ibid., 19 October 1912.

34. Holton, British Syndicalism, pp. 142–143.

35. Freedom, September 1913; Blaydon Courier, 20 September 1913.

36. Blaydon Courier, 18 October 1913.

37. See for example the Newcastle Chronicle, 13 April 1914.

38. Ibid.

39. Smith, ‘Obituary Article’, 28.

40. Holton, British Syndicalism, pp. 142–143.

41. Newcastle Journal, 16 March 1955.

42. Colin Harding, ‘George Davison’, in John Hannavy (ed.) Encyclopedia of

Nineteenth-century Photography (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 387–288.

43. Quail, Slow Burning Fuse, p. 254; Atkins, Crumbs nor Condescension, p. 63.

44. Challinor, British Bolshevism, p. 117.

45. Evening Chronicle, 7 November 1912.

46. Lawther did, however, contribute fairly short theoretical pieces to the local press

from 1916. See Lewis H. Mates, From Revolutionary to Reactionary: the Life of Will

Lawther (M.A. Thesis, Newcastle University, 1996), pp. 11–16.

47. Quail, Slow Burning Fuse, pp. 278–279.

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76 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalﬁeld

48. Freedom, July 1913.

49. Blaydon Courier, 25 January 1913.

50. Smith, ‘Obituary Article’, 33.

51. Holton, British Syndicalism, p. 169.

52. Freedom, July 1913.

53. Ibid., September 1913.

54. Ibid. May 1914; Evening Chronicle, 13 April 1914.

55. Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United

States (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2006), p. 263.

56. The Herald of Revolt, February 1913.

57. G. Walker ‘George Harvey and Industrial Unionism’, Bulletin of the North-east

Group for the Study of Labour History, 17 (1983), 21.

58. Durham Chronicle, 15 November 1912.

59. Evening Chronicle, 7 November 1912.

60. Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Manchester, CP/CENT/PERS/1/01, Tom

Aisbitt biography by Horace Green.

61. Lewis H. Mates, The Spanish Civil War and the British Left: Political Activism and the

Popular Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007).

62. Tyne and Wear Archive Service T148/1 Copy letter, 27 December 1913, p. 71.

My thanks to Kevin Davies for drawing my attention to these ﬁles.

63. Freedom, May 1914.

64. L. Turnbull, Chopwell’s Story (Gateshead: Gateshead Borough Council, 1978), (no

page numbers).

65. Roy A. Church and Quentin Outram, Strikes and Solidarity: Coalﬁeld Con-

ﬂict in Britain, 1889–1966 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),

pp. 62, 68.

66. John Saville, ‘Will Lawther’, in J. Bellamy and J. Saville, Dictionary of Labour

Biography Vol. VII (London: Macmillan, 1984), 141; Smith ‘Obituary Article’, 29.

67. White ‘Syndicalism’, 110.

68. Holton, British Syndicalism, p. 169.

69. Ibid., pp. 117–119.

70. Newcastle Journal, 11 March 1955.

71. Challinor, British Bolshevism, pp. 116–118.

72. Walker, ‘Harvey thesis’, p. 40.

73. Newcastle Journal, 16 March 1955.

74. Challinor, British Bolshevism, p. 117.

75. Blaydon Courier, 19 October 1912.

76. Ibid.; Dubofsky and McCartin, We Shall be Al l, p. 118.

77. Blaydon Courier, 19 October 1912.

78. Ibid.

79. Challinor, British Bolshevism, pp. 120–121.

80. Brown, Introduction, Industrial Syndicalist, p. 19.

81. Challinor, British Bolshevism, p. 85.

82. R. Page Arnot, South Wales Miners to 1914 (London: George Allen and Unwin,

1967), p. 376.

83. The Herald of Revolt, February 1913.

84. Freedom, September 1913.

85. Blaydon Courier, 19 October 1912.

86. See, for example, The Herald of Revolt, February 1913.

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Lewis H. Mates 77

87. Evening Chronicle, 7 November 1912.

88. Durham Chronicle, 12 April 1912.

89. Ibid., 5 December 1913.

90. Blaydon Courier, 19 October 1912; 25 January 1913.

91. Challinor, British Bolshevism, pp. 118–121.

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July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-78 9780230280373

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Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism

Renzo Llorente

When one considers the tragic history of the international working-class

movement since 1914, one is inclined to regard the doctrine of revolu-

tionary syndicalism advocated ...by the ‘new school’ of Georges Sorel,

Edouard Berth, and Arturo Labriola as one of the most interesting

and promising forms in which Marxian thought has experienced a

renaissance.

Maximilien Rubel1

Introduction: Sorel’s uncertain legacy

Georges Sorel (1847–1922) was an important ﬁgure in the development of

radical left-wing theory during the early decades of the twentieth century,

and his ideas strongly inﬂuenced the work of some major Marxist thinkers,

including Antonio Gramsci,2Georg Lukács,3José Carlos Mariátegui4and

Antonio Labriola.5Today, however, the Left shows very little interest in

Sorel’s writings. This lack of interest is regrettable, for Sorel’s works address

many of the central themes in emancipatory social theory: the permissible

use of violence in political struggles; the possibilities and limits of parliamen-

tarism; the role of intellectuals in revolutionary movements; the advantages

and disadvantages of various revolutionary strategies and organisational

structures; the contrast between reform and revolution; the relationship

between left-wing political parties and those whose interests they claim to

represent; the transformation of the bourgeois state; and the moral aims of

socialism.

At the same time, the contemporary tendency to ignore Sorel is per-

haps not so surprising after all, considering the great divergence of opinion

regarding the value of Sorel’s contribution to political thought. On the one

hand, there are the views of scholars and thinkers such as Eugene Kamenka,

John Gray and José Carlos Mariátegui. Kamenka, a philosopher and Marx

scholar, ranks Sorel among the ‘most perceptive exponents’ of socialism,6

while Gray endorses Croce’s description of Sorel as ‘the most original and

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Renzo Llorente 79

important Marxist theorist after Marx himself’.7For his part, Mariátegui,

Latin America’s greatest Marxist writer, considers Sorel ‘Marx’s most vigorous

follower [continuador]in...[a] period of social-democratic parliamentarism’.8

On the other hand, George Lichtheim, a historian of Marxism, calls Sorel an

‘irresponsible chatterbox’ and a ‘romantic littérateur’,9and Lenin himself

dismisses Sorel as a ‘notorious muddler’.10

These highly divergent judgements regarding Sorel have arisen not only

in connection with the calibre and value of his writings; there is also consid-

erable disagreement when it comes to the basic political orientation of his

texts: does Sorel belong to the Left or to the Right? If his place is with the

theorists of the left, should we include him among the Marxists or among

the anarchists? With respect to the ﬁrst question, I think it is clear, in light

of Sorel’s most signiﬁcant political writings, that we ought to situate him

on the Left, and for our present purposes I will simply assume that those

who depict Sorel as a right-wing thinker are fundamentally mistaken.11 How,

then, to respond to the second question? Which label best describes Sorel –

‘Marxist’ or ‘anarchist’?

To be sure, in Reﬂections on Violence, his most important work as a polit-

ical theorist (ﬁrst published in 1908), Sorel unequivocally identiﬁes his

enterprise with Marxism, and most works in political philosophy tend to

classify Sorel as a Marxist of sorts.12 YetitisalsotruethatSorelhas,

as Jeremy Jennings puts it, ‘traditionally been regarded as one of the

most controversial ﬁgures in the history of Marxism’.13 While there are

many factors that account for Sorel’s controversial status in the history of

Marxism, one reason is undoubtedly his debt to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,

whose works had a profound and lasting inﬂuence on Sorel’s thought.

In fact, as Sorel scholar John Stanley points out, ‘it is Proudhon who

is cited most frequently in his [Sorel’s] early writings’, and Stanley goes

on to claim that ‘the thinker who is closest to Sorel is ...Pierre-Joseph

Proudhon’.14 It is partly owing to this afﬁnity that some commentators,

such as Lichtheim, tend to consider Sorel a ‘Proudhonist’,15 while oth-

ers view him as an outright anarchist. Indeed, Irving Louis Horowitz

not only includes a selection from Reﬂections on Violence in his 1964

anthology of anarchist texts, but actually refers to Sorel, along with Bakunin,

Malatesta and Kropotkin, as one of ‘the classical anarchists’,16 and James

Joll’s well-known study of anarchism also devotes several pages to Sorel’s

thought.17

What is one to make of so much disagreement in interpreting Sorel? In my

view, the disagreement and uncertainty stem from the fact that the theoret-

ical basis for the position developed in Reﬂections on Violence is in essence

neither Marxism nor anarchism, but rather a fairly coherent, if idiosyn-

cratic, variety of anarcho-Marxism. Accordingly, I would propose the term

‘anarcho-Marxism’ to describe Sorel’s perspective, as this term is more accu-

rate than either ‘Marxism’ or ‘anarchism’ and, on the other hand, much

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80 Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism

more illuminating, theoretically speaking, than ‘anarcho-syndicalism’, the

customary label for his views.

Before discussing the anarcho-Marxist features of Sorel’s thought in Reﬂec-

tions (and elsewhere), I should perhaps explain that I shall be using this term

to designate (non-evaluatively) any theoretical perspective that combines

fundamental elements of anarchist doctrine with fundamental elements of

Marxism. In the case of Sorel’s anarcho-Marxism, this blend involves, in

essence, a commitment to Marxist social and historical analysis (including

Marx’s philosophy of history, with the theoretical justiﬁcation for socialism

that it entails) coupled with an espousal of what is, in effect, an anarchist

political practice. In short, the political proﬁle I have in mind in labelling

Sorel an ‘anarcho-Marxist’ is not unlike that which Donald Clark Hodges

evokes in claiming that Bakunin was ‘the ﬁrst anarcho-Marxist’, Bakunin

being an anarchist ‘who accepted his [Marx’s] theories but rejected his pol-

itics as authoritarian’.18 Whether or not Hodges is correct in characterising

Bakunin as an anarcho-Marxist, a careful examination of Reﬂections on Vio-

lence and other texts reveals the aptness of this description as applied to

Sorel, as we shall see.

My aim in the remainder of this chapter is to sketch the justiﬁcation for

construing Sorel’s theoretical outlook, as articulated in Reﬂections on Vio-

lence, as ﬁrst and foremost a form of anarcho-Marxism. To this end, my

essay focuses on four themes, or rather positions, that ﬁgure prominently in

the Reﬂections: anti-statism; the condemnation of parliamentary socialism;

the advocacy of revolutionary syndicalism; and defence of the revolutionary

general strike. Starting from the premise that these four positions are charac-

teristically anarchist views, I argue that Sorel’s adherence to them entails an

acceptance of some important components of anarchism. I also argue, how-

ever, that many Marxists could endorse these same views, provided that they

attach as much importance as Sorel does to workers’ self-emancipation as a fun-

damental Marxist commitment. Since it turns out, therefore, that Marxists

could endorse Reﬂections’ anarchist views and, as I also contend, anarchists

could adopt the Reﬂections’ Marxist views, we may safely say that Reﬂections

on Violence both combines Marxist and anarchist theses and does so in a

way that makes each group’s theses acceptable to the other group. To the

extent that this is the case, Reﬂections on Violence proves successful as a

statement of anarcho-Marxist doctrine. The ﬁnal part of the chapter brieﬂy

discusses some ways in which Marxists might beneﬁt by revisiting Sorel’s

anarcho-Marxism.

Reﬂections on Violence

Before turning to each of the themes mentioned above, it will be use-

ful to review brieﬂy the main argument in Reﬂections on Violence. As the

book’s title indicates, Sorel’s central topic is violence, but the violence that

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Renzo Llorente 81

interests Sorel is a speciﬁc manifestation of political violence, namely the

violence that workers use or administer in doing battle with the bour-

geoisie in strikes and militant labour actions. Sorel’s central claim holds that

this kind of ‘proletarian violence’– an absolutely indispensable element of

class struggle in his view – is the most effective method for establishing

socialism.

His reasoning is as follows. Following Marx, Sorel assumes that capital-

ism must produce the maximal development of the forces of production

before socialism becomes possible; in other words, capitalism will give way

to socialism only when capitalist relations of production become a fetter

on the forces of production and an impediment to their further develop-

ment. Capitalism, in short, must exhaust the possibilities for development

and expansion of the productive forces within the framework of capitalist

relations of production before we can undertake the transition to social-

ism. According to Sorel, capitalists, or the bourgeoisie, will be effective in

developing the forces of production, and hence in achieving the complete

development of capitalism, to the extent that they focus single-mindedly

on maximising proﬁt. An exclusive focus on proﬁt maximisation entails, in

turn, a refusal to grant any concessions to the workers (e.g. higher wages,

a reduced working day, measures to improve conditions in the workplace,

expansion of employee beneﬁts, or establishment of worker rights requiring

new expenditures or investments) which might hamper or retard the utmost

development of the forces of production.

What does this have to do with violence? In Sorel’s view, proletarian vio-

lence facilitates the bourgeoisie’s pursuit of proﬁt – and thus contributes

to and hastens the creation of socialism – by dissuading capitalists (and

others) from making concessions to the workers. For if workers unfailingly

‘repay with black ingratitude the benevolence of those who wish to protect

the workers’,19 that is to say, if they respond to welfare-enhancing con-

cessions from the bourgeoisie with heightened militancy (with new strikes

and more violent resistance), the capitalists will conclude that nothing is to

be gained by making such concessions and they will cease to offer them.

Consequently, instead of squandering their time, energy and resources on

measures designed to enhance the workers’ well-being, capitalists will devote

themselves single-mindedly to the pursuit of proﬁt and the development

of the forces of production. In short, proletarian violence, and consistently

militant opposition from labour more generally, helps to sustain the bour-

geoisie’s spirit or ethic of capitalist ruthlessness and antagonism; thanks

to this attitude on the part of the workers, capitalists remain capitalists,

and are prevented from succumbing to any of the impulses that might

distract them from the business of producing surplus value. To put the

same point a bit differently: acts of proletarian violence and the workers’

disposition to meet concessions with ingratitude serve to ‘reawaken’ the

bourgeoisie ‘to a sense of their own class interests’, thereby reinvigorating

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82 Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism

the bourgeoisie and ‘re-establish[ing] the division into classes’.20 As Sorel

explains:

... proletarian violence comes upon the scene at the very moment when

the conception of social peace claims to moderate disputes; proletarian

violence conﬁnes employers to their role as producers and tends to restore

the class structure just when they seemed on the point of intermingling

in the democratic morass. ...This violence compels capitalism to restrict

its attentions solely to its material role and tends to restore to it the

warlike qualities it formerly possessed. A growing and solidly organized

working class can force the capitalist class to remain ardent in the indus-

trial struggle; if a united and revolutionary proletariat confronts a rich

bourgeoisie eager for conquest, capitalist society will reach its historical

perfection.21

In short, violence promotes the optimal development of capitalism, thereby

helping to establish the material preconditions for, and accelerating soci-

ety’s advance toward, socialism. It is precisely for this reason that proletarian

violence ‘may save the world from barbarism’.22

In summarising Sorel’s argument it is important to emphasise that his

concept of ‘proletarian violence’ refers to acts of violence ﬂowing from the

resistance that forms a part of militant strikes and other labour struggles

involving intransigent opposition on the workers’ part. For Sorel, moreover,

such acts of violence, and strikes in particular, are ‘acts of war’,23 the war

in question being the class war (if revolutionary strikes are inherently vio-

lent, it is precisely because they constitute acts of war). Sorel is careful to

distinguish this type of violence from acts of violence committed by the

state: whereas the purpose of the latter is to preserve and strengthen the

state, proletarian or ‘syndicalist’ violence consists in acts of violence ‘perpe-

trated in the course of strikes by proletarians who desire the overthrow of the

State’.24 In other words, the workers’ violence does not aim at replacing one

(authoritarian) state structure with another, but rather at doing away with

the state altogether, along with the domination and exploitation which the

state makes possible.

It is also worth emphasising that Sorel defends proletarian violence not

only on account of its role in the consummation of capitalism, but also

because of its beneﬁcial effect on the workers themselves. In preparing and

executing acts of violence in strikes, proletarians develop self-conﬁdence,

acquire political independence, develop skills and abilities necessary for self-

management, and of course gain greater class consciousness.25 Andtothe

extent that acts of proletarian violence achieve one of their primary pur-

poses, namely to ‘mark the separation of classes’,26 these acts are likely

to heighten workers’ militancy and combativeness (which will of course

encourage capitalists to devote their energies exclusively to developing

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Renzo Llorente 83

the forces of production ... which should provoke, in turn, even more

proletarian violence).

Yet the greatest beneﬁt of all from acts of violence has to do with their role

in preparing workers for a revolutionary (or ‘syndicalist’) general strike, an idea

which, in Sorel’s opinion, ‘contains within itself the whole of proletarian

socialism’.27 Unlike mere political strikes (or even a political general strike),

a proletarian general strike does not produce a mere change of government,

but the destruction of the state as such: as Sorel succinctly puts it in one of

the appendices (‘Apology for Violence’) to Reﬂections on Violence, the revolu-

tionary or proletarian general strike involves ‘an overthrow in the course of

which both employers and the State will be removed by the organized pro-

ducers’.28 Besides being the event that puts an end to capitalism, the general

strike is important insofar as it functions as a myth for revolutionary work-

ers. For Sorel, myths are ‘expressions of a will to act’,29 compelling images

and conceptions of a (future) collective enterprise that serve to inspire, moti-

vate and mobilise the actors who will be engaged in this enterprise.30 Sorel

maintains that only those who embrace some such myth will prove capa-

ble of great endeavours,31 and it is the ‘myth’ of the general strike, the very

idea of which ‘produces an entirely epic state of mind’,32 which serves as an

indispensable inspiration and motivation for the revolutionary worker.

Marxist and anarchist themes in Sorel

Reﬂections on Violence is a somewhat eccentric and highly uneven work.

While it contains incisive analyses of trends and developments in ﬁn-de-

siècle socialism and many provocative arguments concerning the struggle

for a socialist society, Sorel’s text often appears rather disjointed, and his rea-

soning can be exasperatingly quirky. Moreover, some of his principal theses

are undeniably unsettling. For example, Sorel’s approach to the emancipa-

tion of the working class is, as we have seen, an incomparably robust version

of the worse, the better, albeit cast in the form of the better, the worse:themore

welfare-enhancing concessions the workers exact from capital, the poorer

the prospects for their emancipation. (Sorel’s defence of this viewpoint is,

I would suggest, one of the chief reasons that the Reﬂections ‘remains a

profoundly disturbing book’, as Jennings says in his introduction to the

text.33)

In any event, while Sorel’s Reﬂections raises numerous questions, I would

like to focus on the book’s fundamental political orientation, which, as

I shall try to demonstrate, is best interpreted as a variety of anarcho-

Marxism. My remarks will deal mainly with the anarchist dimension of

Reﬂections on Violence, for two reasons. First, as I indicate below, I believe

it is more difﬁcult for Marxists to assume Sorel’s properly ‘anarchist’ com-

mitments than it is for anarchists to assume his essentially ‘Marxist’ views.

Second, as noted earlier, the fact is that Sorel is most often classiﬁed as,

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84 Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism

if anything, a Marxist of sorts, however idiosyncratic his interpretation of

Marxism may turn out to be. In other words, the identiﬁcation of Sorel

with Marxism is somewhat less controversial than his assimilation to anar-

chism. Since my discussion centres mainly on the ‘anarchist Sorel’, let me

ﬁrst summarise very brieﬂy the grounds for regarding Sorel as a Marxist.

To begin with, one can hardly ignore the various passages in Reﬂections on

Violence and other texts in which Sorel expressly afﬁrms the Marxist afﬁlia-

tion of the ‘new school’ of theorists to which he belongs.34 The ‘new school’

(‘nouvelle école’) was a name used by the group that included, along with

Sorel himself, Edouard Berth and Hubert Lagardelle, and was associated with

Le Mouvement socialiste, a journal founded by Lagardelle in 1899. According

to Sorel, the new school ‘rejected all the formulas which came from either

utopianism or Blanquism; it thus purged Marxism of all that was not specif-

ically Marxist and it intended to preserve only what, according to it, was

the core of the doctrine’.35 Furthermore, it does ‘not in the least feel itself

bound to admire the illusions, the faults and the errors of the man [Marx]

who did so much to work out revolutionary ideas’,36 but rather seeks ‘to

remain faithful to Marx’s spirit’ and to ‘what is really true in Marxism’.37

For Sorel, what is ‘really true’ in Marxism is above all the notion that class

struggle comprises ‘the alpha and omega of socialism’.38 Sorel and the ‘new

school’ identify class struggle with a principled opposition to ‘social peace’ –

Sorel himself tends to conﬂate ‘class struggle’ and ‘class war’39 – and advance

an uncompromisingly anti-reformist, anti-parliamentarist theoretical orien-

tation and, in positive terms, a commitment to revolutionary syndicalism

and a political strategy aimed at producing the conditions necessary for

a successful revolutionary general strike (the culmination of revolutionary

praxis in the present era, according to Sorel).40 Sorel’s allegiance to these core

ideas sets him apart from ‘the ofﬁcial [i.e. parliamentary] socialists’, who,

he remarks, ‘wish to admire in Marx that which is not Marxist’.41 If Sorel’s

Marxism appears heretical, it is, he suggests, because the prevailing schools

of socialism have distorted the essential elements of Marxist doctrine, which

he and the other members of the ‘new school’ seeks to recover and renew in

a Marxist fashion.42

In addition to providing this self-identiﬁcation, and perhaps even more

important, Sorel explicitly endorses many Marxist theses and assumptions

(a few of which have already been noted) over the course of his Reﬂections.

For example, Sorel accepts many of Marx’s central assumptions regarding

the material preconditions for socialism and the philosophy of history;

he agrees, as just noted, with Marx’s emphasis on the centrality of class

struggle in social life and social development, and its role in the ﬁght for

socialism; like Marx, Sorel views the state as an instrument of class domi-

nation and advocates its abolition; he rejects utopias and utopian socialism;

Sorel acknowledges, like Marx, the primacy of production, as this notion is

understood in historical materialism; he, too, afﬁrms the desirability of a

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Renzo Llorente 85

cataclysmic socialist revolution that abolishes capitalism once and for all,

and the importance of helping workers to bring it about; as with Marx,

Sorel envisions socialist society as a classless social order in which the forces

of production are collectively owned, and managed by the workers them-

selves; and, ﬁnally, Sorel, like Marx, steadfastly adheres to the principle of

proletarian self-emancipation.43 As a matter of fact, it is precisely because of

Sorel’s commitment to Marx’s essential views and doctrines – or rather what

Sorel takes them to be – that he denounces ‘the anti-Marxist transformation

which contemporary socialism is undergoing’,44 and it is also for this reason

that theReﬂections is in part a polemic against distortions or (neutralising)

corruptions of Marx’s thought attributable to ﬁgures who claim to champion

socialism.

But what about anarchism? As it turns out, in addition to his enthusiastic

endorsement of numerous Marxist views, Sorel also defends some essentially

and indisputably anarchist positions in the pages of Reﬂections on Violence.

I will mention four of them.

The ﬁrst plainly anarchist position to note is Sorel’s uncompromising anti-

statism. He advocates the abolition of the state, and he regards the abolition

of the state as a condition of the revolution, or rather as a measure that coin-

cides with the overthrow of capitalism, and not as a more or less distant

occurrence resulting from a process of ‘withering away’. Indeed, the goal

of the general strike, and hence the ultimate end of proletarian violence, is

nothing other than the suppression or destruction of the state, or as Sorel

writes in one passage, the elimination of ‘both employers and the State’.45

Signiﬁcantly, this uncompromising stance vis-à-vis the state leads Sorel

to reject ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ – a principle which, according

to Lenin, constitutes ‘the very essence of Marx’s doctrine’.46 The dictator-

ship of the proletariat would, Sorel maintains, perpetuate a division between

‘masters’ and ‘servants’,47 and is therefore unacceptable.

A second essentially anarchist position advanced in the Reﬂections is the

condemnation of parliamentary socialism. Sorel stresses time and again in this

work the inherently anti-revolutionary, conservative nature of parliamen-

tary institutions, and their baneful effect on socialists willing to serve these

institutions. He acknowledges that the anarchists were correct in warning

that participation in bourgeois institutions, with its exposure to bourgeois

inﬂuences, would lead to a political embourgeoisement of revolutionaries.48

The ‘ofﬁcial socialists’ (Sorel’s term for parliamentary socialists) ‘boast to

the government and to the rich bourgeoisie of their ability to moderate

revolution’, for parliamentary socialism basically ‘sells peace of mind to the

conservatives’.49 A revolution that brought ofﬁcial socialists to power would

change little,50 since parliamentary socialists desire above all to preserve,

and if possible expand, their own power and that of the parties they rep-

resent, and this objective presupposes the preservation and fortiﬁcation of

the state. Proletarian violence, carried out in the proper fashion, will put an

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86 Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism

end to parliamentary socialism, which is plainly one of the reasons that the

parliamentary socialists themselves condemn it.51

A third anarchist position can be found in Sorel’s espousal of revolution-

ary syndicalism. According to the doctrine of revolutionary syndicalism,

autonomous trade unions, acting independently of political parties and

institutions, must be both the agent of revolution and the fundamental

organisational components of the future socialist society, understood as an

arrangement in which these units will control production. Unlike parlia-

mentary socialism, revolutionary syndicalism is resolutely opposed to the

state, which it aims to destroy.52

The ﬁnal important anarchist position that Sorel champions in Reﬂections

on Violence is a commitment to the revolutionary or syndicalist (or proletarian)

general strike. This form of strike is, Sorel insists, very different from a merely

‘political strike’ (whether or not it is a ‘political general strike’). The latter

does not presuppose, as does the proletarian general strike, an absolute class

confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.53 Nor do merely

‘political’ strikes pose any fundamental threat to politicians,54 since such

actions aim at reforms and improvements within the existing socio-political

order, whose fundamental legitimacy remains unquestioned by those who

organise and carry out ‘political’ strikes. The revolutionary or proletarian

general strike, on the other hand, ‘entails the conception of an irrevocable

overthrow’, followed by the creation of a new civilisation.55 Since the con-

cept of the revolutionary general strike also includes the deﬁnitive defeat

of the bourgeoisie and the destruction of the state, it is an ‘idea ...[which]

contains within itself the whole of proletarian socialism’.56

Each of the four positions that I have mentioned constitutes either an

essential anarchist commitment (anti-statism, the rejection or parliamen-

tarism), or a position that has been defended and embraced mainly by anar-

chists (revolutionary syndicalism, the general strike),57 or both (anti-statism

and the rejection of parliamentarism). Indeed, some major anarchists, such

as Rudolph Rocker and Emma Goldman, hold all four positions.58 At any

rate, even those anarchists who reject revolutionary syndicalism and the

general strike would surely acknowledge that these positions are not fun-

damentally at odds with essential anarchist values.59 Accordingly, just as few

Marxists would dismiss as essentially un- or anti-Marxist any of the ‘Marxist’

positions (listed above) that Sorel defends, few anarchists would dismiss as

un- or anti-anarchist any of the ‘anarchist’ positions that he defends.

An anarcho-Marxist synthesis?

So, in Reﬂections on Violence we ﬁnd a number of standard Marxist positions

alongside a number of standard anarchist positions. One might be inclined

to conclude, on the basis of my remarks and given the differences between

Marxism and anarchism, that the result is a rather incoherent amalgam, or at

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Renzo Llorente 87

best a very unstable synthesis of two political doctrines widely believed to be

grossly incompatible with each other. As it turns out, however, Reﬂections on

Violence is actually fairly successful as a model of anarcho-Marxism, owing

to the fact that anarchists could embrace Sorel’s Marxist commitments, while

Marxists could embrace his anarchist commitments.

Let me begin with ﬁrst of these last two claims. It is, I believe, the case

that most anarchists could subscribe to all of the theses and views that make

Reﬂections on Violence a ‘Marxist’ text, or at least to those mentioned ear-

lier. Recall that these were: i) Marx’s view of the material preconditions for

socialism; ii) his perspective on the role of class struggle in social evolu-

tion and the struggle for socialism; iii) Marx’s concept of the state as an

instrument of class domination, and his belief that it must, therefore, be

abolished; iv) Marx’s rejection of utopian socialism; v) Marx’s emphasis on

the ‘primacy of production’; vi) Marx’s support for a cataclysmic socialist

revolution, which one should help the workers to bring about; vii) Marx’s

conception of socialist society as a classless social order in which the forces of

production are collectively owned, and managed by the workers themselves;

and viii) Marx’s commitment to proletarian self-emancipation. If I am cor-

rect in claiming that anarchists could endorse all of these views, and hence

both the anarchist and Marxist commitments present in Reﬂections on Vio-

lence, it is difﬁcult to understand how they could reject, in general terms,

Sorel’s anarcho-Marxism.

What about Marxists? Could they subscribe to Sorel’s anarchist theses

and views, or at least to those discussed above? This is, in my view, the

main issue in assessing the ‘success’ of Sorel’s anarcho-Marxism. One might

naturally approach the issue by examining the works of more mainstream

Marxist theorists and thinkers, thereby determining whether or not many

other Marxists have endorsed the anarchist views defended by Sorel. I will,

however, follow a different approach, which consists in considering Sorel’s

stated rationale for defending positions that are almost invariably associated

with anarchists. This approach seems especially appropriate, considering

that Sorel himself conceives of the Reﬂections as a non-dogmatic develop-

ment and updating of Marx’s theories, but one that recovers, and draws

its inspiration from, the most essential and authentic elements in Marx’s

thought.60

Let us begin with Sorel’s commitment to revolutionary syndicalism, which

he claims is ‘on the true Marxist track’.61 Can one make a plausible Marxist

case for revolutionary syndicalism, a doctrine that is usually synonymous

with anarcho-syndicalism?

For many Marxists, revolutionary syndicalism appears suspect, and impos-

sible to embrace, owing to its decidedly anti-political character: revolutionary

syndicalism rejects political parties, condemns participation in parliament

or collaboration with governmental authorities, denies political institutions

any role in the post-revolutionary period, and so on. This stance, which

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88 Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism

gives economic struggle absolute priority over political activity, is anathema

to most Marxists, who typically accord primacy to political activity.62

Sorel, like the anarchists, insists on the primacy of economic struggle (e.g.

militant initiatives in the workplace, strikes, industrial mobilisations, direct

challenges to employers’ domination), but he suggests, in effect, that this

is in reality the more authentically Marxist view. For Sorel attaches extreme

importance to proletarian self-emancipation, and this principle, so central to

the Marxist outlook,63 can plausibly be construed as providing warrant for

privileging economic struggle over political struggle. After all, if one adheres

to the principle that the emancipation of the working class must take the

form of self -emancipation, and the sphere in which workers enjoy the best

prospects for exercising their collective agency is in the economic realm

(i.e. in the world of production), then it is hardly unreasonable to embrace

something like revolutionary syndicalism, with its emphasis on industrial

agitation, direct action, and mobilisation of the rank and ﬁle. Furthermore,

self-emancipation requires a certain degree or level of worker militancy, a

point that Marx insists on, according to Sorel: ‘Marx wishes us to under-

stand’, writes Sorel, ‘that the whole preparation of the proletariat depends

solely upon the organization of a stubborn, increasing and passionate resis-

tance to the present order of things’.64 If this spirit of resistance is as decisive

as Sorel says, and revolutionary syndicalism promotes and sustains this spirit

(or morale) better than rival doctrines, then perhaps it really is the case that

revolutionary syndicalism affords workers a ‘truly proletarian ideology’.65

Let us turn now to Sorel’s impassioned defence of the revolutionary gen-

eral strike. While it is true that Rosa Luxemburg once wrote that the strike

is ‘the external form of struggle for socialism’,66 Marxists have generally

attached considerably less importance to strikes, and the notion of the revo-

lutionary general strike, ﬁrst popularised by Bakuninites, has almost invari-

ably been associated with anarchist doctrines and movements.67 Indeed, the

German trade union leaders of Sorel’s day, whose views were shaped to one

degree or another by the ‘Marxism’ upheld by German social democracy,

were given to saying that ‘General Strike is General Nonsense’.68 Yet Sore l

holds that ‘the fundamental principles of Marxism are perfectly intelligi-

ble only with the aid of the picture of the general strike and, on the other

hand, the full signiﬁcance of this picture ...is only apparent to those deeply

versed in Marxist doctrine’.69 Moreover, in several passages in the Reﬂections

he underscores alleged similarities and afﬁnities between Marxism’s gen-

eral theoretical framework and that which justiﬁes the revolutionary general

strike.70 What are these alleged similarities and afﬁnities?

First of all, the revolutionary general strike, like Marx’s revolution, is a

‘catastrophic’ occurrence – Sorel uses ‘catastrophe’ or ‘catastrophic’ many

times in connection with the general strike71 – which evokes and sym-

bolises, but also precipitates the passage from capitalism to socialism, and

thus from oppression to liberation. Owing to the awesome, epic images

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Renzo Llorente 89

that it conjures up, the ‘catastrophic’ notion of the revolutionary general

strike serves, much like Marx’s concept of socialist revolution, to inspire

and motivate workers (which is why Sorel regards both the general strike

and ‘Marx’s catastrophic revolution’ as ‘myths’, in the sense noted above).72

What is more, ‘It is through strikes [including the general strike] that the

proletariat asserts its existence’73 : the strike is the method or strategy of

struggle most readily available to the workers, and so they naturally use

strikes in order to emerge from invisibility, establish their social presence,

and express their needs and demands. (Furthermore, to the extent that these

actions are accompanied by, or rather give rise to, a new class conscious-

ness among the workers, it may also be said that strikes help the proletariat

to become a ‘class for itself’). In this sense, an insistence of the supreme

political value of the revolutionary general strike, and strikes more generally,

seems to follow quite straightforwardly from an unqualiﬁed commitment to

proletarian self-emancipation. If Marx himself does not appreciate this, it is,

Sorel suggests, partly because Marx gave little thought to the actual organisa-

tion of workers for revolutionary struggle,74 and partly because he could not

possibly have foreseen developments that occurred after his death, develop-

ments which make it clear that adoption of the revolutionary general strike

as a political strategy represents a correct adaptation of Marxist thought to

contemporary realities.75

As for anti-parliamentarism, it would also seem clear that Sorel can derive

his position from a bedrock commitment to proletarian self-emancipation,

in that parliamentarism substitutes mediation and representation for the

workers’ own activity and initiatives, and also fosters passivity among them.

For these reasons, the acceptance of parliamentarism seems be at odds with

the principle of self -emancipation. What is more, parliamentarism is, on

Sorel’s view, inherently de-radicalising and corrupting; in a word, an obstacle

to class struggle and revolution. As noted above, Sorel contends that rev-

olutionaries and radicals who participate in parliament inevitably end up

devoting themselves to ‘preserv[ing] the old cult of the state’, from which

they beneﬁt, and limit themselves to ‘attack[ing] the men in power rather

than power itself’.76 If ‘ofﬁcial socialists’ are unable to understand proletarian

violence, it is precisely because the perpetrators of this violence wish not to

take over the state, but rather to eliminate it.77

This brings us, lastly, to Sorel’s radical anti-statism, which represents an

essentially anarchist perspective on the abolition of the state: the suppres-

sion of the state is to coincide with the advent of the revolution, and

constitutes a necessary condition of its success. ‘[T]here is an absolute

opposition between revolutionary syndicalism and the State’,78 writes Sorel,

making it clear that he departs from Marxist orthodoxy when it comes to the

fate of the state following the revolution. Sorel seems to assume, however,

that to insist on the abolition of the state as a condition of the revolution

is in fact more consistent with Marx’s basic outlook, inasmuch as Marx held

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90 Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism

that ‘the socialist revolution ought not to culminate in the replacement of

one governing minority by another’.79 (Recall that Sorel rejects the dicta-

torship of the proletariat because it would perpetuate a division between

‘masters’ and ‘servants’).80 Yet whether or not it is true that one can ﬁnd

in ‘authentic’ Marxism this type of justiﬁcation for a position that is in

essence the anarchist view on the state, one could presumably also appeal

to the principle of workers’ self-emancipation in order to justify the same

position. After all, the main impediment to self -emancipation (as well as

self-emancipation) is the state, insofar as it upholds the employers’ interests

and serves as their instrument of domination (i.e. it is the ‘central nucleus’

of the bourgeoisie).81

These are, it seems to me, the arguments available to Sorel if pressed to

explain how he can endorse his four anarchisant, or outright anarchist, posi-

tions without departing from Marxism.82 As I have tried to show, it turns out

that the key commitment in making a Marxist case for each of the positions

is the thesis of proletarian self-emancipation. To the extent that Marxists’

commitment to proletarian self-emancipation would in fact enable them to

endorse the four positions examined here (with some important qualiﬁca-

tions, perhaps, in the case of Sorel’s ‘radical anti-statism’) and assuming,

on the other hand, that most anarchists could embrace Sorel’s indisputably

Marxist convictions, it is fair to say that Sorel’s theory furnishes a fairly

coherent model of anarcho-Marxism.83

Learning from Sorel

Sorel’s anarcho-Marxism has, I believe, much to recommend it to Marxists;

but even if they do not ﬁnd his theory wholly satisfactory, Marxists can

still proﬁt from a careful consideration of Sorel’s reasons for advocating

such a theory. Consider, for example, a problem that bedevilled Marxists

throughout the twentieth century and that continues to provoke debate

among Marxists and others to this day: the failure of workers in industri-

alised nations to become the agent of socialist revolution. Whatever other

factors may have contributed to this failure, it was certainly due in part to

a lack of ‘class consciousness’ among the workers, who were, for whatever

reason(s), largely unaware of their collective capacities and true class inter-

ests, and were consequently disinclined to engage in militant forms of class

struggle to defend these interests. Although Sorel himself could hardly have

foreseen the extent to which the working class would fail to assume the

role of ‘revolutionary subject’, he was acutely aware of the challenges to the

development of a ‘revolutionary’ orientation among workers. Indeed, one

of the reasons that Sorel advocates revolutionary syndicalism arises from

his belief that this is the only approach to political action that can suc-

ceed in fostering the necessary kind and degree of ‘consciousness’ among

the workers themselves. Sorel thus represents and articulates a view that is

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Renzo Llorente 91

in some sense the very antithesis of Lenin’s inﬂuential position. Whereas

Lenin famously claims that ‘class political consciousness can be brought to

the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic strug-

gle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers’,84

Sorel maintains that ‘class political consciousness’ can only arise from within,

as it were, and that acceptance of this thesis implies a commitment to some-

thing like revolutionary syndicalism. Indeed, if revolutionary syndicalism is,

for Sorel, a ‘great educative force’,85 it is precisely because it teaches workers

to combat capitalism by asserting themselves and developing class solidarity,

while at the same time preparing them for their role in the socialist future,

with its worker-managed system of production. In any event, whether or

not Sorel’s overall estimation of revolutionary syndicalism ultimately proves

justiﬁed, it should be clear that he has good Marxist reasons for granting

the ‘economic struggle’ priority vis-à-vis the ‘political struggle’,86 and that

Marxists would therefore be well-advised to reﬂect on these reasons.

Of course, as should be clear from my earlier remarks, Marxists are not the

only ones who would beneﬁt from (re-)acquainting themselves with Sorel’s

Reﬂections on Violence: anarchists can also learn a great deal from re-reading

Sorel, if only because his work reveals that the ‘spirit of Marx’87 may in

many ways be much closer to ‘the spirit of anarchism’ than most anarchists

(and Marxists) tend to realise. If Marxists and anarchists alike do re-examine

Sorel’s contribution to socialist theory, we shall surely ﬁnd ourselves one

step closer to a much-needed reconciliation of these two formidable political

movements.

Notes

1. Maximilien Rubel, RubelonKarlMarx, J. O’Malley and K. Algozin (eds and trans.)

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 78, n. 119.

2. M. Charzat, ‘A la source du “marxisme” de Gramsci’ in M. Charzat (ed.), Georges

Sorel (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1986), pp. 213–222; David McLellan, Marxism

After Marx, 3rd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 193.

3. I. Mészáros, Lukács’ Concept of Dialectic (London: The Merlin Press, 1972), p. 21.

4. H. García Salvatecci, Georges Sorel y Mariátegui. Ubicación ideológica del Amauta

(Lima: Delgado Valenzuela, 1979); R. Paris ‘Mariátegui: un sorelismo ambiguo’ in

J. Aricó (ed.), Mariátegui y los orígenes del marxismo latinoamericano (Mexico City:

Pasado y Presente, 1978), pp. 155–161.

5. Antonio Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy, P. Piccone (trans.) (St. Louis: Telos

Press, 1980).

6. Eugene Kamenka, ‘Marxism and Ethics – A Reconsideration’ in Shlomo Avineri

(ed.), Varieties of Marxism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), p. 119.

7. John Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (New York and London:

Routledge, 1993), pp. 100–101. Leszek Kolakowski also ranks Sorel highly in com-

parison with other Marxists; see Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 2, The Golden Age,

P. S. Falla (trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 153.

8. J. C. Mariátegui Mariátegui total, Volume I (Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta S.A.,

1994), p. 1292 (my translation).

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92 Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism

9. George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random

House, 1967), p. 261; Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study, 2nd edn. (New York

and Washington: Praeger, 1965), p. 229, n. 2.

10. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in Collected Works, vol. 14 (Moscow:

Progress Publishers, 1972), p. 292.

11. Signiﬁcantly, many of the commentators who link Sorel’s thought with reac-

tionary or fascistic ideas and claim that Sorel was a right-wing thinker furnish very

little evidence to support their claim. See George Woodcock, Anarchism: A His-

tory of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (New York: Meridian, 1962), p. 323; Irving

L. Horowitz, ‘A Postscript to the Anarchists’ in Horowitz (ed.), The Anarchists

(New York: Dell Publishing, 1964), p. 592; George Lichtheim, From Marx to

Hegel (New York: The Seabury Press, 1971), p. 116; James Joll, The Anarchists,

2nd edn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 194; Peter

Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: Fontana

Press, 1993), p. 442. Woodcock’s judgement is especially puzzling, consider-

ing that he both shares Sorel’s enthusiasm for syndicalism and writes from an

anarchist perspective; cf. note 57 below. Can we cut?

12. See Jeremy Jennings, ‘Sorel, Georges’ in T. Bottomore et. al. (eds), A Dictionary of

Marxist Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 453–454;

R. A. Gorman, ‘Sorel, Georges’ in R. A. Gorman (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of

Neo-Marxism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 390–392; Kolakowski,

Main Currents of Marxism, p. 14.

13. Jennings, ‘Sorel’, p. 453.

14. J. L. Stanley, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in From Georges Sorel (New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1976), pp. 7, 17. In his ‘In Defence of Lenin’ Sorel characterises the

Reﬂections as ‘Proudhonian in inspiration’, Reﬂections on Violence, J. Jennings (ed.)

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 292.

15. ‘But one must always bear in mind that Sorel was really no Marxist, but a

Proudhonist’, Lichtheim, Marxism, p. 113.

16. Horowitz, p. 17; cf. Horowitz’s Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason (New York:

The Humanities Press, 1961), p. 160.

17. Joll, Anarchists, pp. 188–195. Just as some Marxists dispute Sorel’s Marxist cre-

dentials, some anarchists and writers sympathetic to anarchism tend to minimise

Sorel’s afﬁnities with the anarchist tradition. George Woodcock scarcely discusses

Sorel’s ideas in Anarchism, while Peter Marshall devotes but two (ill-informed)

paragraphs to Sorel in Demanding the Impossible, (p. 442).

18. D. C. Hodges, The Literate Communist: 150 Years of the Communist Manifesto

(New York: Peter Lang, 1999), p. 113.

19. Sorel, Reﬂections, p. 77; italics in the original.

20. Ibid., pp. 77, 85; cf. p. 78.

21. Ibid., pp. 78–79.

22. Ibid., p. 85; cf. p. 251.

23. Ibid., p. 279.

24. Ibid., p. 108; emphasis added.

25. Ibid., pp. 74–75.

26. Ibid., pp. 105–106.

27. Ibid., p. 150.

28. Ibid., pp. 279–280.

29. Ibid., p. 28.

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Renzo Llorente 93

30. ‘[M]en who are participating in great social movements always picture their com-

ing action in the form of images of battle in which their cause is certain to

triumph. I propose to give the name of “myths” to these constructions ... ’can

we cut? Ibid., p. 20).

31. Ibid., p. 140.

32. Ibid., p. 250.

33. Jennings, Reﬂections, p.xxi.

34. See, for example, Sorel, Reﬂections, p. 40.

35. G. Sorel, La Décomposition du Marxisme (Paris: Riviere, 1908), pp. 63–64, cited in

Jennings, Reﬂections, p. 34, note ‘p’.

36. Sorel, Reﬂections, p. 172; italics in the original.

37. G. Sorel, ‘The Socialist Future of the Syndicates’ in From Georges Sorel,ed.J.L.

Stanley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 72; ‘Préface de 1905’, in

Matériaux d’une théorie du proletariat (Paris and Geneva: Slatkine Genève-Paris,

1981), p. 67 (my translation).

38. Sorel, ‘Préface’, p. 67 (my translation).

39. See for example, Ibid., pp. 68, 75, and Sorel, Reﬂections, pp. 105, 279.

40. Sorel, Reﬂections, p. 213; cf. ‘Préface’, p. 63. This ‘Preface’ articulates many of the

‘new school’s’ characteristic views.

41. Sorel, Reﬂections, p. 172.

42. See, for example, G. Sorel, ‘Mes raisons du syndicalisme’ in Matériaux d’une théorie

du proletariat, p. 253.

43. On the material preconditions for socialism and the philosophy of history see

Sorel, Reﬂections, pp. 73, 80, 128, 129; on class struggle, pp. 34, 85, 126, 182;

the state, pp. 18, 30, 161; utopias and utopianism, pp. 28–29, 118–119, 129,

132, 224; ‘the primacy of production’, p. 138; socialist revolution, pp. 126, 140,

155; the conception of socialist society, pp. 155, 171, 238; and the principle of

proletarian self-emancipation, p. 32. All the views listed here are conventionally

ascribed to Marx and Engels. On Marx and Engels’ commitment to ‘the principle

of proletarian self-emancipation’, which is relevant to my central thesis, I furnish

some textual references in note 63.

44. Sorel, Reﬂections, p. 73.

45. Ibid., p. 279; cf. pp. 18, 107, 161, particularly as regards the suppression of the

state. Sorel’s conception of the state as an instrument of class domination would

probably not be endorsed by many anarchists, but what I wish to focus on here

are practical political commitments, rather than their theoretical justiﬁcations.

46. V. I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky in Collected Works,

vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 233.

47. Sorel, Reﬂections, p. 163.

48. Ibid., p. 34.

49. Ibid., p. 67 (italics in the original). On the failings of parliamentary socialism, see

ibid., pp. 67–68, 111, 154.

50. Ibid., p. 83.

51. Ibid., pp. 79, 118–119.

52. Ibid., pp. 107, 108.

53. Ibid., p. 151.

54. Ibid., p. 147.

55. Ibid., pp. 281, 280.

56. Ibid., p. 150; cf. pp. 110, 113, 118, and Sorel, ‘Préface’, p. 59.

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94 Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism

57. On Bakunin’s espousal of the general strike see Michael Bakunin, ‘Geneva’s

Double Strike’ in From Out of the Dustbin: Bakunin’s Basic Writings, 1869–1871,

R. M. Cutler (ed. and trans.) (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1985), pp. 149–150.

His views on the value of strikes more generally sound like an anticipation of

Sorel’s (see, for example, ‘The International and Karl Marx’, in Bakunin on Anar-

chy, S. Dolgoff (ed. and trans.) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972) pp. 304–307).

According to Emma Goldman syndicalism constitutes ‘the economic expression

of Anarchism’ in ‘Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice’ in A. K. Shulman (ed.),

Red Emma Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches by Emma Goldman (New York:

Vintage Books, 1972), p. 68. Woodcock similarly claims that ‘syndicalism

is the industrial manifestation of anarchism’, see, ‘Syndicalism Deﬁned’

in G. Woodcock (ed.), The Anarchist Reader (Fontana Paperbacks, Glasgow,

1977), p. 208.

58. See Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto Press, 1989); Goldman,

‘Anarchism: What It Really Stands For’ and ‘Syndicalism’ in Red Emma Speaks,

pp. 47–77.

59. Malatesta both criticised syndicalism – largely, it seems, because he equated it

with conventional trade unionism – and expressed reservations about the gen-

eral strike. On syndicalism, see ‘Syndicalism and Anarchism’ in Vernon Richards

(ed.), The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles 1924–1931 (London: Freedom

Press, 1995), pp. 23–27; on the strategy of the general strike, see ‘Syndicalism:

An Anarchist Critique’ in Woodcock Anarchist Reader, pp. 223–225.

60. See, for example, Sorel, Reﬂections, p. 120.

61. Ibid., p. 132.

62. The separation of ‘the political’ and ‘the economic’ is in many ways quite arti-

ﬁcial, an analytical construct – and one that often serves ‘bourgeois’ interests,

as Marxists, among others, point out. Even so, the distinction seems useful with

respect to the contrast that I wish to establish here.

63. According to the First International’s ‘Provisional Rules’, drafted by Marx in

1864, ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the

working classes themselves’. See ‘Provisional Rules of the Association’ in Karl

Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 20 (New York: International

Publishers, 1985), p. 14. Marx subsequently cited the formulation in the

‘Critique of the Gotha Program’ (Collected Works, 1989, vol. 24, p. 88) in

1875. In their 1879 ‘Circular Letter’ to Bebel, Liebknecht and others, Marx

and Engels reafﬁrm the paramount importance of this principle (Collected

Wor ks, vol. 24, p. 269), as does Engels in his ‘Preface’ to the 1888 English

edition of the Communist Manifesto (Collected Works, 1990, vol. 26, p. 517).

One of Marx and Engels’ pre-Manifesto expressions of this principle is in The

Holy Family in Collected Works, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers,

1975), p. 37. For discussion see Hal Draper, ‘The Principle of Proletarian Self-

Emancipation in Marx and Engels’ in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds),

The Socialist Register 1971 (London: The Merlin Press, 1971); Theory, vol. I,

pp. 213–234; and Theory, vol. II, pp. 147–165. For Lenin’s commitment see

Lenin, ‘Draft Programme’ in Collected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,

1972), p. 97.

64. Sorel, Reﬂections, p. 126.

65. Ibid., p. 226. Elsewhere Sorel unreservedly equates syndicalism with ‘proletarian

socialism’, which he contrasts with ‘political socialism’. See, for example, ‘Mes

raisons du syndicalisme’, in Matériaux d’une théorie du proletariat, pp. 268–269.

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Renzo Llorente 95

66. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Our Program and the Political Situation’ in P. Hudis and K. B.

Anderson (eds), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (New York: Monthly Review Press,

2004), p. 368.

67. For Marxist views on strikes, see R. Hyman, ‘Strikes’ in Tom Bottomore et al.

(eds), Dictionary of Marxist Thought, pp. 469–471; N. Harding, Leninism, pp. 68–69.

On the Bakuninite origins of the revolutionary general strike, see Hyman ‘Strikes’,

p. 470; Joll, Anarchists, p. 179.

68. Joll, Anarchists, p. 193.

69. Sorel, Reﬂections, p. 122.

70. Ibid., pp. 120, 130–131.

71. Ibid., pp. 126, 140, 182.

72. Ibid., p. 20.

73. Ibid., p. 279.

74. Ibid., p. 169.

75. Ibid., p. 213.

76. Ibid., pp. 103, 107.

77. Ibid., pp. 18–19.

78. Ibid., p. 108.

79. Ibid., p. 107.

80. Ibid., p. 163.

81. Ibid., p. 18.

82. For a detailed attempt to demonstrate that Marx upholds an essentially anar-

chist outlook on the question of the state, see Maximilien Rubel, ‘Marx,

Theoretician of Anarchism’, available at http://www.Marxists.org/archive/rubel/

1973/Marx-anarchism.htm (accessed 12 April 2011).

83. By ‘model of anarcho-Marxism’ I mean only the four political positions discussed

here, together with an adherence to the various Marxist theses enumerated earlier.

I do not include, for example, Sorel’s advocacy of ‘the ethics of the producers’

(the theme of the Reﬂections’ last chapter), his theses regarding ‘myths’, or his

conception and defence of violence.

84. V. I. Lenin, What is to Be Done? in Collected Works, vol. 5, (Moscow: Progress

Publishers, 1961), p. 422 (italics in the original).

85. Sorel, Reﬂections, pp. 243, 126.

86. E. H. Carr underscores this point. See Studies in Revolution (London: Frank Cass,

1962), p. 157.

87. Sorel, Reﬂections, p. 120.

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Antonio Gramsci, Anarchism,

Syndicalism and Sovversivismo

Carl Levy

Introduction

The relationship between Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism and the anarchist and

syndicalist traditions is complex and intriguing but it is overlooked by most

of his scholarly interlocutors. I have argued that there are a number of

elective afﬁnities between the young Gramsci’s unorthodox Marxism and

the libertarian socialist tradition, and that Gramsci’s concept of industrial

democracy, elaborated during the era of the factory councils in Turin (1919–

1920), was shaped through his encounters with anarchists, self-educated

workers and formally educated technicians employed by Fiat and others. His

relationship to the anarchists runs far deeper than an Italian variation of the

tactical political ploy, which Lenin indulged in his anarchist-sounding pro-

nouncements in revolutionary Russia during the spring and early summer

of 1917.

Here I focus on the pre- ‘Biennio Rosso Gramsci’, in order to show that

Gramsci’s amalgam of libertarian and authoritarian thought was already for-

mulated before he encountered the Leninist model. Three aspects of the

pre-Leninist Gramsci’s Marxism serve as benchmarks to evaluate the inter-

action of libertarian thought and action with Gramsci’s social thought:

voluntarism, preﬁguration and his nascent conception of hegemony as is

evident in his attitudes towards language, education and free thought.

Gramsci’s introduction to Marxism was ﬁltered through a philosophical

culture of voluntarism that permeated the Italian universities of antebel-

lum Italy, whose myriad variations on the theme were found in European

and North American philosophy (actualism, pragmatism, Bergsonism, etc.)

and were rigorously denounced by Lenin and later by Bukharin (who was

roasted for naïve materialism by Gramsci in Prison Notebooks).1The theme

of voluntarism is directly connected to Gramsci’s concept of preﬁguration.2

Simply put, preﬁguration implies that the institutions of the future social-

ist society should be foreshadowed in the democratic institutions of the

working class in civil society under capitalism. Not only does this solve the

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Carl Levy 97

dilemma of how one gets from the capitalist to socialist stage of history, it

also implies the libertarian potential of working-class self-organisation. For

Gramsci, theoretical Marxist voluntarism is embodied in self-organisation in

civil society.

Gramsci was no anarchist or syndicalist, but anarchism and syndicalism

served as foils to forge Gramscian social thought and political action. In his

arguments with the libertarians before his encounters with Lenin and what

became known as Leninism, Gramsci had already opened his thought to

a ready acceptance of the authoritarian solutions proposed in Russia. The

authoritarian aspects of the young Gramsci, however, paradoxically are

derived from the libertarian-like voluntarism of his political thought, not

from the determinism of Second Internationalist Marxism, even Lenin’s rad-

ical variant.3In the remainder of this chapter, among other things, I will

examine how the early Gramsci’s concept of preﬁguration and his master

term, hegemony, are ﬂeshed out in this dialogue with anarchist, syndicalist,

and libertarian culture more broadly conceived. But it is his form of peda-

gogical socialism, drenched in Gentilean assumptions, which demonstrates

the theoretical gulf separating his apparent libertarian socialism from the

positivist culture of the anarchists and syndicalists.

A second theme of the discussion, relevant to Gramsci’s relationship with

the anarchists, is his concept of the subaltern. The term ‘subaltern’ relates

to Gramscian keywords: common sense, good sense, and sovversivismo (‘sub-

versivism’),4and it reopens the controversy between Marxists and anarchists

concerning the class basis of revolutionary politics. Is the Gramscian con-

cept of the subaltern merely a more sympathetic but ultimately patronising

and paternalist version of that old Marxist canard, the lumpenproletariat?5

And is Gramsci’s seemingly sympathetic account of ‘primitive rebels’ just

an open-minded version of the anthropological gaze?6Indeed, the gaze Eric

Hobsbawm adopted, since he claimed Gramsci inspired his 1959 study of

‘primitive rebels’?7Were the anarchists and syndicalists merely politically

pernicious modern versions of less threatening (to Marxist political hege-

mony) earlier religious-based millenarians? Thus a discussion of Gramsci’s

encounter with anarchists and syndicalists is inherently interesting for his

intellectual biography and his type of Marxism, and echoes an earlier pattern

of encounters by Marx with Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin.8The question

of Gramsci’s take on the subaltern and the primitive rebels is also a fruitful

way of interrogating Gramsci’s relationship to the historiography of Italian

anarchism, which I have discussed elsewhere.9

Preﬁguration and the ‘libertarian Gramsci’

Gramsci, Antonio Labriola and the anarchists Gramsci employed the daily

concerns of Turin’s labour and co-operative movements as laboratories

to develop and illustrate his more complex theoretical conceptions very

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98 Gramsci and Anarchism

early in his career – one or two years before Gramsci began to promote

the ‘Sovietist’, Western European or incipient Turinese versions of Council

Communism.10

It was precisely during his discussion of the co-operative that Gramsci

carried out a sustained analysis of Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola

(1843–1904).11 It was Labriola’s reading of the philosophy of praxis that

allowed Gramsci to use a distinguished if politically marginal Marxist scholar

to challenge the orthodoxies of Second Internationalist Marxism during the

war years (1915–1918).

Although they were from different generations, their relationships with

the anarchists were strikingly similar. Both men worked with proletarian

anarchists, but just like Gramsci, Labriola differentiated between Jacobinical

‘capi’, the spostati della borghesia (bourgeois dropouts), the intellectual

proletariat, in contrast to the anarchist workers whom Labriola had helped

during the Roman builders’ strike in the early 1890s. Although Labriola

was capable of differentiating between the ‘reasonable’ anarchism of Errico

Malatesta and terrorist bombers and assassins, he never took the intellectual

premises of anarchism very seriously.

Gramsci and Labriola based the superiority of Marxism over other forms

of socialism on its ability to forge a world view that required little borrowing

from other systems of philosophical thought, and this caused them to ﬁght

against the marriage of positivism and Marxism. They denied the intellectual

validity of other systems of socialism, particularly anarchism, but in their

search for autonomous working-class institutions immersed in civil society

and with a shared hostility to state help or interventionism, they found an

appreciation in the work of Georges Sorel, a close correspondent of Labriola

in the 1890s and, in his last years, an admirer of Gramsci and his young

comrades in Turin in 1919–1920.

The young Gramsci, Sorel and the anarchists

Most accounts of Gramsci emphasise his sharp differentiation between the

trade union, a reformist institution immersed in the logic of the capital-

ist marketplace and the factory council, representative of the rank and

ﬁle, subversive of labour as a commodity, reﬂecting the productivist and

functionalist prerequisites of future socialised industry.

An article on consumer co-operatives by Gramsci, ‘Socialism and

Co-operation’ (30 October 1916, published in the local journal of the

Turinese socialist co-operative movement, L’Alleanza Co-operativa), is bathed

in Sorelian allusions and thought patterns.12 First, he made it abun-

dantly clear that socialism had to be productivist, echoing Sorel. Consumer

co-operatives were not, nor could they be, central to these politics. Socialism,

he wrote ‘is not simply to solve the distribution of ﬁnished products’, but

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Carl Levy 99

one must accelerate production, so that, ‘collectivism will serve to accelerate

the rhythm of production itself, by eliminating all those artiﬁcial factors of

productivity’.13

Socialist co-operatives had to steer clear of the meddlesome and corrupt-

ing inﬂuences of bourgeois legislation and the state. If co-operatives did not

serve the entire working class they were protectionist, parasitical organisa-

tions that gave rise to a group of privileged workers, who were successful at

freeing themselves partially from capitalist exploitation, but whose actions

were harmful to their class speciﬁcally and costly to production more gen-

erally. Thus Gramsci’s early radicalism can be placed within the cultural

context of the pre-war syndicalist wave, which enveloped the globe and

embraced a critique of crony and state capitalism. Similarly, in London the

exiled Italian anarchist, Errico Malatesta, adapted Hillaire Belloc’s critique of

a ‘Servile State’ and imported it into the Italian Left’s opposition to statist

reformism, mirroring the early Gramsci.14

Gramsci’s general tenor of discussion is linked to his earlier connections

with free-trade socialists and syndicalists in Sardinia and Turin.15 Previously,

Gaetano Salvemini, the free-trade socialist who criticised ‘the dictatorship’

of the north of Italy over the downtrodden south, had been a major inﬂu-

ence, and during the war Gramsci edited a special issue of the local Turinese

socialist newspaper, Il Grido del Popolo, devoted to the necessary connections

between free trade and socialism. Free trade, Gramsci believed, would help

to lessen the north/south divide but it was also central to the deﬁnition of

his form of socialism.

Gramsci was also attracted to the English radical liberals who founded

the Union for Democratic Control, and particularly Norman Angell, whose

wartime writings, Gramsci claimed, showed that protectionist state socialism

or state capitalism were universal evils arising from the inherent demands

of the world conﬂict. This pervasive ‘Prussianism’ (his revealing synonym

for the Servile State), Gramsci felt, threatened democratic liberties won

before the war.16 But free trade was not only the guarantor of civil rights;

free trade also served as a metaphor for Gramsci’s maximalist programme.

Concurrently, Lenin, who appreciated the mechanics of power and pro-

duction, was praising the wartime German Empire as being a step closer to

socialism: cartels, trusts and indeed state-assisted cartels and trusts prepar-

ing the way for socialism; these did not corrupt the workers, but trained

them for a future socialist industrial society. For the early free trade and

‘libertarian’ Gramsci, trusts, cartels and state capitalism undermined the

unity of the working and peasant classes in Italy and also stunted the pro-

ductivity of the capitalist economy and thus delayed the socialist stage of

history.17

He also believed that ‘reform from above’ or ‘state socialism’ had too long

been uncritically accepted within pre-war socialism and even within Marxist

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100 Gramsci and Anarchism

theory itself. This became evident in an article written on 8 April 1917 when

Gramsci argued:

Many of our comrades are still imbued with doctrines concerning the

state that were fashionable in the writings of socialists twenty years ago.

These doctrines were constructed in Germany, and perhaps in Germany

might still have their justiﬁcation. It is certain that in Italy, a country even

less parliamentary than Germany, due to the prevailing political corrup-

tion and the lack of parliamentary consciousness, the state is the greatest

enemy of citizens (of the majority of citizens) and every growth of its

powers, of its activity, of its functions, always equals a growth of corrup-

tion, of misery for citizens, of a general lowering of the level of public,

economic and moral life.18

Gramsci’s complex, and at times confused, form of anti-statism is further

shaped by his appropriation of Sorel’s concept of cleavage, namely the sharp

separation of the working-class from bourgeois culture and lifestyles.19 But

while there were similarities with Sorel, differences were also evident in the

early ‘libertarian’ Gramsci.

Gramsci and Sorel shared a belief in a non-Jacobinical transition to social-

ism based upon the daily experiences of workers in their own trade unions

and co-operatives, with Gramsci alluding to Sorel’s highly inﬂuential book

l’Avenir socialiste des syndicats, circulated by Italian left-wing socialist and

syndicalist activists before the war.20 This work predates Sorel’s departure

into myth-making and the celebration of violence, and is ﬁrmly grounded

in his encounters with Eduard Bernstein, Antonio Labriola and the former

Italian anarchist Francesco Saverio Merlino, which arose during the so-called

revisionist debate (concerning the revision of Marxism) at the turn of the

century.21 From diverse starting points these three thinkers sought institu-

tions within civil society, which might temper or suppress state socialism.

Italian anarchists became sharply critical of Sorel, especially after he

showed little regret for the execution in 1909 of Francisco Ferrer, the

anarchist Spanish educationalist (who he considered a muddle-headed

Freemason), but in any case Gramsci’s ‘Sorel’ was different from the majority

of pre-war Italian syndicalists, who remained attracted to the Frenchman’s

works, albeit, it has been argued, that a certain reading of Sorel helped

shaped Gramsci’s concept of hegemony during his prison years – the young

‘libertarian’ Gramsci’s transition to socialism relied upon the conscious, rea-

soned intervention of social actors, rather than myths. He did not share the

fascination expressed by syndicalist intellectuals with the exotic, indeed the

‘Orientalist’, imagery of raw, anti-intellectual and uneducated workers such

as the syndicalist professor Enrico Leone.22

Gramsci’s early libertarianism is not merely found in his ‘free-trade social-

ism’, as discussed previously, it can also be seen as Gramsci’s interpretation of

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Carl Levy 101

Marxist praxis, which he deployed to undermine the Second Internationalist

concept of scientiﬁc socialism – a concept embraced by social democrats

and Bolsheviks – or equally the alternative positivist determinism of

Kropotkinite anarcho-communism, which some Italian anarchists, most

notably Malatesta, believed the Russian advanced.

This led Gramsci to passionate denunciations of the division of socialism

between a leadership caste imbued with the correct formulae and follow-

ers who were easily manipulated by their ‘scientiﬁc’ magic tricks. So he

imbibed cautiously the ideas of the sociologist Robert Michels, especially

the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ from the exiled German professor of politics

at the University of Turin;23 and indeed Gramsci sometimes advanced

anarchist-like critiques of the Italian socialist party machine:

The proletariat is not an army; it does not have ofﬁcers, subalterns, cor-

porals and soldiers. Socialists are not ofﬁcers of the proletarian army, they

are part of the proletariat itself, perhaps they are its consciousness, but as

the consciousness cannot be divided from an individual, and so socialists

are not placed in duality with the proletariat. They are one, always one

and they do not command but live with the proletariat, just as blood cir-

culates and moves in the veins of a body and it is not possible for it to live

and move inside rubber tubes wrapped around a corpse. They live within

the proletariat, their force is in the proletariats’ and their power lay in this

perfect adhesion.24

We have seen how libertarian themes permeated Gramsci’s thought even

before the Council Communist phase of 1919–1920. His socialism was

anti-statist. He was suspicious and on guard against the creation of a social-

ist hierarchy: he was against Jacobinical socialism. He promoted socialism

grounded in civil society and preﬁguration. But he was also ill at ease

with syndicalist workerist arguments concerning socialist and working-class

movements. But neither should the socialist leadership patronise or order

about the rank and ﬁle, ﬂaunting their well-developed consciousness over

the less well-educated grass roots. However, that did not mean that con-

scious socialists did not have a duty to educate the movement. And it was

over the question of education and the anarchist concept of ‘free thought’

and the ‘free thinker’ that Gramsci engaged in his most extended theoreti-

cal debate with the anarchists before his clashes during the Factory Council

Movement of 1919–1920.

Free thought and educated thought

Turin, Gramsci argued, lacked a cultural organisation controlled by and

acting on behalf of workers. The Università Popolare was, he felt, a purely

bourgeois humanitarian venture. In contrast, his proposed Association of

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102 Gramsci and Anarchism

Culture would supply trained intellectuals suitably socialised for adequate

tasks within the socialist movement, to help workers in their struggles.

Although he did not quote Robert Michels directly, he was certainly thinking

of his pre-war study of German socialism, particularly Michels’ description of

the ways in which rootless intellectuals became the object of an unhealthy

hero worship within the movement.25 Gramsci equated the authoritarian-

ism of the movement with the generally low level of education enjoyed by

the rank and ﬁle of the Italian socialist movement.

Against Michels, he argued that an Italian socialist party, ﬁlled with edu-

cated comrades, would be sustainably democratic and libertarian because

it would function through the spontaneous rationality he detected in the

micro-institutions (such as the Clubs of Moral Life, the suburban circles and

newspaper editorial groups) in which he was involved in these ﬁrst years of

socialist activism.

Gramsci’s conception of socialist education and culture was democratic,

participatory and libertarian, but it had little in common with the rational-

ist free thought that dominated socialist and anarchist political culture in

Liberal Italy.26 Gramsci believed that fuzzy-minded rationalist free thought

played into the hands of the ﬁckle and bombastic leadership of the pre-war

Italian Socialist Party, because it denied the rank and ﬁle critical faculties

to control this leadership. An educated party would be more democratic

and libertarian because it would function through a spontaneous ‘socratic’

rationality acquired in such micro-institutions as the ‘Clubs of Moral Life’.

For Gramsci, the educators could not be found among the pre-war leaders

of the socialist movement – Enrico Ferri, Filippo Turati or Claudio Treves –

since they had been corrupted by positivist social thought and shared with

working-class popular culture, including anarchist culture, the misleading

assumptions of free thought. During the war Gramsci drew these concerns

together in a vitriolic attack on the favourite shibboleth of pre-war anar-

chism and socialism: Esperanto. Esperanto was prominent at the Università

Popolare and among the anarchists, for example Tolstoy.

Gramsci’s attacks on Esperanto highlighted an aspect of Gramsci’s train-

ing as a very promising student of linguistics at the University of Turin.27

Umberto Cosmo, his professor of linguistics at the University of Turin,

had taught him that languages were unique representations of national or

regional culture; thus he dismissed Esperanto as nonsense, and argued that

the attachment to Esperanto by Italian anarchists and socialists merely rep-

resented an artiﬁcial form of cosmopolitanism that was likely to prevent

Italian socialism from developing a realistic form of internationalism.28 Yet

Gramsci’s savaging of Esperanto was just part and parcel of the broader syn-

drome known as ‘free thought’, his chief target, which he associated with

the intellectual weakness of anarchist and socialist culture in Italy.

As a follower of both Croce and Sorel, who were well known for their

attacks on masonic free thought, it is not surprising that Gramsci would be

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Carl Levy 103

extremely hostile to one of the Italian Left’s most long-cherished beliefs.29

In March 1918 Gramsci’s ideal typical free-thinker happened to be the

anarchist editor of Milan’s L’Università Popolare, Luigi Molinari, who had pub-

lished in pamphlet form, a lecture he gave in 1917 on the Paris Commune

(Il dramma della Comune), which Gramsci thought was a perfect exam-

ple of the culture of free thought.30 Gramsci received a drubbing in the

anarchist press, but in response to Molinari’s ﬁnal rejoinder (he died soon

after) Gramsci revealed a deeper argument which lifted the debate from

personalities and particulars to high theory.

In ‘Libero Pensiero and Pensiero Libero’ (‘Free Thought and Liberated

Thought’),31 Molinari’s world-view is characterised as ‘libero pensiero’ (‘free

thought’): a philistine, bourgeois expression associated with Jacobin indi-

vidualism – an association ‘that’, Gramsci writes, explains ‘why we ﬁnd

grouped around it Freemasons, Radicals and ...libertarians’. Free thought

was equated with pre-war bloccardismo (the front that included the social-

ists and the free thought radicals, liberals and libertarians). In contrast, his

Marxist ‘pensiero libero’ (‘liberated thought’) was a form of libertarian his-

toricism that broke with this tradition and looked to Benedetto Croce and

Antonio Labriola for its inspiration.

Gramsci advanced the opinion that the anarchists, or at least their lead-

ers and theoreticians, were less libertarian than the Marxist socialists of the

anti-positivist historicist stamp because they were incapable of thinking crit-

ically: ‘historistically’, and dialectically, digesting contradictory arguments

and enriching their own thought by overcoming them. He argued: ‘in

as much as the libertarians are intolerant dogmatists, slaves to their own

particular opinions’, they ‘sterilize’ debate with their petty arguments’.32

The debate with Molinari also reveals that the mental apparatus behind

that key couplet found in the Notebooks (1929–1935) – senso comune (com-

mon sense as naïve sense) and buon senso (‘good sense’ meaning educated

and critical sense) – was already present by 1918 in the contrast between

pensiero libero and libero pensiero.33 Anti-positivist historicist socialism is

imbued with buon senso and libero pensiero whereas, ‘subversive’, immature

socialists and anarchists (even if they might argue between themselves about

the need for the state) shared assumptions which reﬂected their banal cul-

ture of senso comune and pensiero libero. Such mindsets could never create

counter-hegemony, which would lay the foundations for a new workers’

state and in turn this culture shared much with the superstitious folkways of

the powerless subaltern classes.

Thus Gramsci’s encounters with the free thinkers helped more clearly to

deﬁne his unique position within Italian socialist political culture. At his

best, on the one hand he refused to accept a patronising spoon-feeding of

culture to the working classes, and on the other he refused to be hood-

winked by a simple-minded celebration of populism, the provincial and

the parochial. His conclusion was that the workers needed to master the

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104 Gramsci and Anarchism

humanist and scientiﬁc codes of educated Italy in order to develop the

mental equipment and self-conﬁdence to challenge the ruling classes and

the threat of the ‘dictatorship’ of the socialist professors within the Italian

Socialist party.34 Having said this, there is more than a dose of authoritarian

condescension in Gramsci’s remedies. Gramsci dismissed Molinari’s efforts

at vulgarisation, but Molinari’s efforts in the ﬁelds of science and history

for over 20 years had been enormously inﬂuential among the less educated

socialists and trade unionists.35

Gramsci’s type of socialism was more libertarian than Lenin’s scientiﬁc

socialism, but it too assumed that an elite of educated socialists was needed

to set the tone and parameters for effective politics. Furthermore, although

Gramsci was prepared to work with and argue against the anarchists and

syndicalists in a more tolerant and engaging manner than Lenin had done,

nevertheless his attitude did have some similarities with Lenin’s vigilant

guardianship of orthodoxy. Lenin’s orthodoxy was his version of Second

Internationalist gospel – Gramsci’s odd mixture of Gentile, Croce, Sorel and

Antonio Labriola may have made him appear wildly unorthodox to other

Italian socialists, but this did not prevent Gramsci from invoking ortho-

doxy when he discussed the potential for the formation of political alliances

with the libertarians. In fact, in order to expose the muddleheaded nature

of Italian positivist socialism, he argued that his approach was more Marxist

and therefore more rigid in its conditions for accepting alliances with the

libertarians than the mainstream socialists. As we have seen, Gramsci argued

that the culture of free thought had deﬁned the pre-war socialists and the

libertarians and that his form of socialism transcended this murk and thus

there was always a limit to the alliances with anarchists and syndicalists of

which Gramsci was willing to countenance.

Gramsci and the anarchists: the barriers to alliances

During the war a new international Left arose from a fortuitous combina-

tion of formerly mutually hostile groups: some were paciﬁst, some social

democrat, some anarchists or syndicalist.36 Intellectuals and journalists such

as Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Jacques Mesnil and Max Eastman trans-

mitted ideas from one part of the network to another, sustained by reportage

in Avanti!,L’Humanité, the Liberator or the Workers’ Dreadnought,bypri-

vate correspondence, but above all by the imagery and myths surrounding

international conferences at Zimmerwald and Kienthal, as well as over the

controversies stirred by the never convened Stockholm Congress, called by

the Petrograd Soviet in 1917.

While politicians and intellectuals attempted to mould mass movements

from the initial radicalisation of 1916–1918, differences quickly reappeared.

Gramsci’s debate with the anarchists and syndicalists is symptomatic of a

broader story played out against the backdrop of events unfolding in Russia.

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Carl Levy 105

But his peculiar theoretical background presents an interesting variation on

a continental, indeed global, theme.

For the young Gramsci, the bustling working-class suburbs of Turin were

proletarian unity-in-action and one of its earliest manifestations was the

march of the suburbanites on the bourgeois centre during the Red Week

of 1914, when anarchists, syndicalists, left-wing socialists and republicans

united in a quasi-insurrectionary movement against militarism and the

Italian monarchy. Recalling the events of 1914 in an article of 1916, Gramsci

remembered how ‘our city made through military order and tradition’, a city

centre of looming piles of aristocratic townhouses, arrayed ‘like a regiment

of the army of their old Savoyard Dukes’, witnessed the march past of well-

ordered proletarian ranks.37 ‘Coarse men descended on the city boulevards

and marched in front of the closed shop shutters, past the pale little men of

the city police who were consumed by anger and fear.’38

These Sorelian images of the gruff, productive working class marching

from its suburban strongholds to challenge the clerical or parasitical café

society were present in much of Gramsci’s writings.39

However, Gramsci opposed politically inspired united fronts of socialists

and anarchists in Turin or nationally. Between 1916 and early 1918, Gramsci

took part in a debate in the Italian socialist press on this subject, sparked

off by the private and public exchanges of the anarchist Luigi Fabbri and

the leading maximalist socialist Giacinto Menotti Serrati, as well as other

discussion between anti-war anarchists, syndicalists and socialists.40 Fabbri

was inspired by a letter from Errico Malatesta to Armando Borghi (the anar-

chist leader of the Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI)) written from his exile

in London, which proposed a new international (La Mondiale) that would

include anti-war socialists, anarchists and syndicalists. It would heal the

schism caused by the expulsion of the libertarians from the Second Inter-

national in 1896 but would have had little in common with the militarised

disciplined organisation that Lenin would found in 1919.

Gramsci contested the commonly held opinion in the Italian socialist Left

that anarchists or syndicalists were more revolutionary and ‘purer’ socialists

than the socialist themselves. Gramsci also wanted to distance his socialism

from the anarchists’ heterodoxy. Here he argued that the antiparliamentar-

ianism of Malatesta and the anarchists posed an obstacle to formal unity

and, recalling his arguments against free thought, that their mentality was

ahistorical and doctrinaire. International organisations such as Malatesta’s

La Mondiale undermined Gramsci’s preﬁgurative conception of socialist pol-

itics. The concept of preﬁguration may have evolved in Gramsci’s theory by

1917, before he encountered the Soviet model, but his type of preﬁguration,

while not Leninist, was still linked to a well-organised and distinctive social-

ist party, though this was a party not founded on the culture of free thought

or positivist socialism. Rather, the consensual discipline of a party based

on the educational principles of Gramsci’s ‘clubs of moral life’, linked to

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106 Gramsci and Anarchism

the creativity of preﬁgurative institutions such as the co-operatives, would

produce a distinctive socialist politics.

The early Gramsci and the Gramsci of the Biennio Rosso

I have argued that just as Gramsci’s key conceptions were already operating

in his mind before 1918, his attitudes towards the anarchists and syndicalists

were already operationalised before he worked closely with them in L’Ordine

nuovo. Thus Gramsci’s thought before his encounter with Lenin did not sig-

nal a break between a libertarian and an authoritarian viewpoint; rather, his

youthful ‘libertarianism’ was based on ﬁrst premises, which tended towards a

critique of the ideologies of anarchism and syndicalism, even if superﬁcially

he seemed close to these camps. Thus, as I have shown elsewhere, anarchist

‘organic intellectuals’ were cultivated but anarchist ‘traditional intellectuals’,

the friends and colleagues of Molinari, were denounced as muddled dem-

agogues; anarchist workers as organically tied to the point of production,

could be saved from their misguided ideas, anarchist ideologues were beyond

redemption. Just as the Sorelian and productivist legacies were so important

to catalyse Gramsci’s preﬁgurative and civil-society-based socialism of pre-

1917–1918, his Council Communism of 1919–1920 was merely a variation

on this theme reinforced by international examples. The libertarian produc-

tivist taylorism of the anarchist engineer Pietro Mosso was the lynchpin,

which held together the Council Communism of 1919–1920; meanwhile

anarchist metalworkers in FIOM (the socialist engineers and metalworkers

union) were essential to propagate the ideas of L’Ordine Nuovo through-

out the movement in its Turinese industrial heartland. When Gramsci fell

out with his colleagues, Angelo Tasca and then Palmiro Togliatti in 1920,

over the boundaries between the trade union and factory council, his only

remaining allies were the anarchists.41 The arguments Gramsci advanced in

the early war years were merely repeated and placed in a more super-charged

and propitious atmosphere, the vehicle of preﬁguration – the factory coun-

cil came into its own, even if the theory was ﬂeshed out in his discussion of

co-operatives in 1916.

One benchmark did change, however, and is a clue to his uncritical

acceptance of Lenin’s way, even after his earlier misinterpretation of Lenin

(temporary, necessary charismatic capo of a system of soviets and workers’

councils) seemed to be discredited by the reality: Lenin as the dictator of

a monopoly party-state. The change in his attitude towards Jacobinism is

linked to his criticism of masonic free thought, which reformist socialists,

most maximalist socialists and the anarchists all suffered from. Gramsci’s

evaluation of Jacobinism changed drastically from the war years to 1920.42

At ﬁrst Jacobinism was not used in the context of Russian politics, but that

of pre-war Italian political culture. He used it in the same breath as his invo-

cation of Sorel’s and Croce’s attacks on the culture of masonic free thought.

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Carl Levy 107

Jacobinism ‘is a messianic vision of history: it always responds in abstrac-

tions, evil, good, oppression, liberty, light, shade, which exist absolutely,

generically and not in historical forms’.43 In other words, like free thought,

Jacobinism lacked grounding in historicism.

But by 1920 he associated Jacobinism with Paris heroically seeing off

the internal and external enemies of the Revolution, and ﬁnding a paral-

lel in the Bolsheviks’ civil and foreign wars with the myriad enemies of

their new state.44 Jacobinism took on another positive, different valence

when Gramsci approached the question of the city and the countryside

in Italy (in various and indeed contradictory forms appearing in his essay

on the southern question, his approach to the New Economic Policy (NEP)

and even War Communism and later forced collectivisation). Jacobins were

then cast as pitiless against the enemies of the revolution but also strength-

ened by forming alliances with those elements in the countryside willing

to accept the political hegemony of the Bolsheviks as the representatives

of the urban working class. Similarly, in the mid-1920s Gramsci argued for

the hegemony of the Italian Communist Party over peasant, syndicalist or

autonomist movements in the south, not for an open-ended co-operative

support for competitors in the rural Left: he was not a pluralist. His early

mistaken praise of Chernov was replaced by venomous attacks on the

Socialist Revolutionaries and Makhno’s ‘anarchist experiment’ in Civil-War

Ukraine.45 The anti-Jacobinical socialism of pre-1918 and the negative inter-

pretation of the Jacobins he learned from Croce, Salvemini or Sorel was

replaced by a praise of the Jacobins’ rigour and their successful linkage to the

‘healthy’ forces in the countryside. No longer socially divorced pedants, arid

ideological fanatics or the imbibers of shallow anti-clerical positivist nos-

trums, Jacobins were the models for the creative but implacable Bolshevik

elite. Gramsci did not abandon this revision before his death in 1937, even

if he probably agreed that Stalin had become a cruel tyrant, a Genghis Khan

with a telephone, as Bukharin, his former ally in the 1920s, described him.

As Gramsci endorsed all things Bolshevik, particularly the Twenty-One

Points, he became increasingly militantly anti-anarchist. However, through-

out the early 1920s, he was placed in a tactical dilemma. Before the Kronstadt

rebellion, the suppression of all factions in the Russian Communist Party,

and the failure of negotiations between various syndicalist trade unions and

the Comintern, Gramsci had to tread carefully. While he mercilessly criti-

cised the leadership of the USI, he could not burn all his bridges, since the

Russians saw merit in cultivating the Italian anarchists and syndicalists, espe-

cially when a pro-Comintern faction was formed in the USI itself. In Turin

his anarchist allies were marginalised in FIOM after the occupation of the

factories and some were murdered by the Fascists in late 1922, but before the

March on Rome, and indeed until 1925–1926, Gramsci saw the advantage in

keeping feelers open to the social interventionist Left, Gabriele D’Annunzio

and even brieﬂy with the suspiciously libertarian Arditi del Popolo,theonly

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108 Gramsci and Anarchism

anti-Fascist militia in these years which caused Mussolini and the Fascists

some concern. But while Gramsci and his comrades maintained a non-stop

tirade against the ‘child-like’ antics of Malatesta and Borghi, Zinoviev and

even Lenin, recognised in Malatesta a revolutionary and in Borghi a man to

be wooed in Moscow. Gramsci reverted to the same twin-track approach he

used in 1916 – organic intellectual anarchists good, ‘traditional’ intellectual

anarchists bad – and chose to ﬁnesse the tactical cunning of the Russians as

much as possible.46

Anarchism as the highest form of sovversivismo47

In the Notebooks, Gramsci engaged in historical and comparative sociologi-

cal examination of the modern world and particularly the collapse of liberal

Italy and the destruction of the Left within it. Thus the nature of Italian

Fascism and its enduring success was the red thread, which ran throughout

his notes. The failure of the Left and the triumph of Fascism and its transfor-

mation of the Italian state were understood through the term sovversivismo.

This term may be taken as a tool of historical and sociological analysis, but

it is drenched with highly partisan political ﬁrst premises that assume that

Gramsci’s historicist Marxism offered a master-key for unlocking the secrets

of the past as well as the solutions for the future. He may have been writ-

ing his notes for eternity, and it is unlikely he would have sanctioned their

publication in the form they were produced, but he certainly had not left

his politics at the cell door. Even if there was good deal of frustration and

perhaps justiﬁable paranoia about party comrades and the murderous ways

of the Georgian tyrant, he was still a militant Marxist who wrote in such

a spirit.48 The troubling aspect of Gramsci’s historicising Marxism is that

mere empiricism and ‘information’ is looked upon as the greatest of mortal

sins. In short, unlike the rather inelegant, plodding notes of Angelo Tasca

on utopian socialism and anarchism that are deposited in Milan’s Biblioteca

Feltrinelli, for example, Gramsci did not let facts get in the way of theory.49

Gramsci was less concerned with an in-depth account of the anarchists

and syndicalists, more in using them in his construction of the all-purpose

analytical term sovversivismo. But this had been honed from his debates

with the anarchists and syndicalists before 1922, and bore all the traces of a

political term of art or an artiﬁce of historicist metaphysics. Just as detailed

knowledge of the factory councils and soviets and the Bolsheviks did not

prevent Gramsci from creating a fantastically libertarian Lenin in the early

years of the Russian regime, lack of detailed analysis of the anarchists and

syndicalists before 1926 in Italy did not prevent him from shoe-horning

them into his neat and politically charged term, sovversivismo.Thisisfrus-

trating, because the term certainly has its uses as a tool to interrogate that

anarchist past, but as a provisional probe, an ideal-type, not as a form of

political abuse.

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Carl Levy 109

For Gramsci, the Italian concept of the subversive and sovversivismo

were based on a populist positioning of the people pitched against the

ill-deﬁned signori.Thissovversivismo was a product of Italy’s bastard moder-

nity. Subversives could come from the Left and Right, and there was even a

sovversivismo from above. Subversives could be reversible, as was the case of

the social interventionists, who interested Gramsci when he was a newspa-

per editor in Turin in 1921 and 1922. Thus, Gramsci argued, a lack of modern

political institutions, a weak ethical political culture and an incorrect reading

of Marxism or social theory, especially among the anarchist and syndicalist

subversives, characterised these currents. The touchstone of Gramsci’s early

radicalism, the Red Week of 1914, and Malatesta, one of its leaders, became

symbolic of this ‘subversive’ type of Italian radicalism. But the ghost at this

banquet was his gaoler, and Gramsci felt this personally, for he had been

drawn into politics partially by the socialist and ‘Stirnerite’ Mussolini, and

he almost spoiled his copy book by his torturous ﬂirtations with Mussolini’s

war interventionism in 1914.50

Sovversivismo, Gramsci argued, had fed off the role of volunteers from

the Risorgimento and the example of Garibaldi and ‘the Thousand’ top-

pling the Bourbon Kingdom and setting in train the Piedmont conquest

of the peninsula. The anarchists were merely one variation on this theme,

which included the republicans but also of course the Fascist militia of the

early 1920s. The Italian state was also nourished by reformed sovversivi from

Crispi to Mussolini. So, Gramsci concluded that the dependence on charis-

matic politics, reﬂected in the political culture of anarchist and socialist

leaders of pre-Fascist Italy, demonstrated the low level of education of the

Italian people and weakly constructed institutions of the socialist and labour

movement.

But contrary to Gramsci’s generalisations, Italian anarchists such as Errico

Malatesta were well aware of the dangers of hero worship.51 Malatesta

preached organisation, organisation and more organisation. Anarchism,

Malatesta argued, was not about the lack of organisation, which was essential

if anarchists were serious about dealing with the exigencies of the modern

industrial city. He may have been naïve, but Malatesta pleaded with the fac-

tory occupiers in 1920 to recommence trade with other factories without the

aid of the capitalist system. For Gramsci, the lesson one learned from the fac-

tory occupations was that ‘the spontaneity in the factory council movement

was not neglected, even less despised. It was educated, directed, purged of

extraneous contamination; the aim was to bring it into line with modern

theory.’52 But nowhere in Gramsci do we ﬁnd an open acknowledgement

of the authoritarianism of ‘modern theory’ (communism) and possibility

that socialism had failed to take another more libertarian path in the way

the tarnished Tasca (he was accused of collaboration with Vichy France dur-

ing the Second World War) did in the preface to his postwar edition of his

wonderful history of the rise of Fascism, where he invoked the libertarian

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110 Gramsci and Anarchism

potential of the pre-Fascist Chambers of Labour.53 When Gramsci recalled

another exemplar of Italian grass-roots socialism, the factory councils, their

most important contribution was not their inherent democracy, but their

contribution to ‘modern theory’.

One can ﬂesh-out a Gramscian critique of the Stalinist Soviet Union but

he never questioned the Marxist monopoly of legitimate thought and action

and he never even granted the anarchists the title of gadﬂies of the revolu-

tion, their warnings about the untrammelled powers of the new Soviet state

were never accepted by Gramsci even in his deepest pessimistic moments,

because their way of thinking was alien to his very being.

Conclusion: Gramsci in the twenty-ﬁrst century

Much of this chapter has been an exercise in historical reconstruction.

However, it is not without its contemporary applications. For the anarchist

Richard Day Gramsci is dead because the politics of hegemony can have

no place in the alter-globalisation movement.54 Day argues that the con-

cept of hegemony in both its international relations realist and Gramscian

interpretations share a similar attachment to the state as prime actor. Day’s

book is inspired by aspects of post-anarchism, which disowns the concept

of the revolutionary moment and draws on the maverick classical anar-

chist Gustav Landauer’s earlier formulation of anarchism.55 Day’s proposals

involve changes in personal relations, in casting out the spooks in our heads

and starting to build anarchism at the interpersonal level, or as the recently

deceased British anarchist Colin Ward argued,56 creating reformist projects,

which undermine the solidity of state power, or, to paraphrase another alter-

globaliser, ‘change the world without taking power’.57 But this is different

to creating counter-hegemony: the building of an alternative form of hege-

mony involves state formation or reformation. Gramsci would not have

disagreed with Day’s criticism, he would have embraced it: libertarian tools

in the Gramscian intellectual toolkit were used to create a new state and not

to abolish state power, at least until some distant point in the future when

the state would be replaced by the rather disturbing sounding formulation

in the Quaderni, ‘regulated society’.

Another aspect of Gramsci’s thought is relevant to an encounter between

varieties of post-anarchism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, Gramsci and

the ‘classical anarchists’. If the concept of hegemony has launched a thou-

sand academic Gramscian boats since the 1960s, the term subaltern, used by

the self-same school of studies from the Indian subcontinent and present

of course in the work of the Palestinian American Edward Said, revived

the study of Gramsci, so that after 1989 and the fall of State Commu-

nism, Gramscian studies outside of Italy did not miss a heartbeat, while the

increasingly moribund conditions of Gramscian studies inside Italy experi-

enced a renaissance through the importation of cultural and post-colonial

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Carl Levy 111

studies, which in turn had been supercharged by this rearranged ‘diasporic

Gramsci’.58 As I mentioned in the introduction, even if the recent popular-

ity of the concept of the subaltern in Gramsci is not without its problems,

because it is unclear whether Gramsci uses this term as a synonym for the

Italian male working-class, for those at the margins of society (women,

minorities and poor peasants) or merely as the lumpenproletariat, a certain

reading might allow one to interrogate Italian anarchist culture and history

more sympathetically – although this may merely be Gramsci’s elaborate

reworking of a mode of reasoning already evident in his early polemics with

Luigi Molinari and the ‘subversive’ advocates of Esperanto.

Gramsci is also attractive to modern thought because of his post-positivist

position. The theoretical foundations of Gramsci’s voluntarism are in sharp

contrast to the determinism of Lenin’s social thought. Lenin’s political

activism was informed by the problem of power, how to seize and con-

serve it.59 Lenin was a political voluntarist of the ﬁrst order, but his social

thought never left the straitjacket of the most rule-bound ‘scientiﬁc social-

ism’, except perhaps in the late Philosophical Notebooks. Indeed Lenin spent

an inordinate amount of time throughout his life stamping out a bewil-

dering variety of ‘heresies’, which threatened his love affair with ‘scientiﬁc

socialism’: monists, ‘God-builders’ and infantile communists were all chosen

targets.60 Unorthodox and ruthless in seizing and holding power, his polit-

ical thought was perhaps more rule-bound and orthodox than his fallen

idols’, Kautsky and Plekhanov. It should be remembered that in 1916 and

1917 Lenin (and Bukharin) argued that historical time could be sped up

precisely because of the emergence of a new stage of history: world war

that ﬂowed from the imperialist capitalist stage of historical development

sanctioned his anarchist-like heretical political behaviour in the spring of

1917. But it did not sanction a rethinking of the orthodox Marxism he

had mentally ingested before 1914 – the Marxism of historical stages was

never disavowed, imperialism was merely the highest stage of capitalism,

which sanctioned anarchist-like direct action on the part of the scientiﬁc

Bolsheviks. Karl Kautsky was a ‘social traitor’ because he had betrayed his

political principles, not because their mutually shared theory of scientiﬁc

socialism was incorrect.

Gramsci’s approach was different. He read Lenin through his own synthe-

sis of Italian neo-idealist voluntarism, which owed more to Giovanni Gentile

and Georges Sorel than early twentieth-century orthodox Marxism. Indeed

Gramsci’s ﬁrst lengthy analysis of the Bolshevik Revolution was entitled the

‘The Revolution against Capital’, that is Marx’s Das Kapital.61 Thus this anti-

capitalist revolution was also a theoretical revolution against the positivist

encrustations, which had enveloped Marxism and implicitly might have

tarnished the master himself. In Italy reformist and maximalist socialists

were outraged by this article and Gramsci earned an unsavoury reputa-

tion as a Bergsonian, which just reinforced a general suspicion about his

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112 Gramsci and Anarchism

soundness due to his earlier ﬂirtation with the pro-war interventionism of

the former Duce of Italian maximalist socialism, Benito Mussolini. In this

case, Gramsci’s behaviour might have been understandable to Lenin,62 who

liked to shape events, not to be the passive recipient of beneﬁcial outcomes;

Gramsci, it can be argued, thought that socialists could not be above the

fray in a world historical event such as world war, without becoming utterly

marginalised. Indeed, the Italian Socialist Party ended by taking a confusing

temporising position, which ill-prepared it for the tumultuous Biennio Rosso

(1919–1920).

However, if we turn the telescope around and imagine a counterfactual

history in which Gramsci had encountered Lenin’s Marxist orthodoxy before

he had successfully piloted the Bolsheviks to state power, Gramsci would

have certainly had a dim if not sarcastic reaction to it. Therefore in 1917 and

1918 Lenin was a fantastical projection of Gramsci’s radicalism, not the ﬂesh

and blood Lenin in command of the new Soviet state. In the Quaderni Lenin

is praised as the prime innovator of the concept of hegemony. While this had

led many commentators (most famously Perry Anderson)63 to discount the

myriad sources of the concept and essence of hegemony,64 which preceded

Gramsci’s deepening knowledge of Russian Marxism during his sojourn in

the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, the ‘young’ and ‘mature’ Gramsci both

thought Lenin’s most important contribution to the theory of Marxism was

Lenin’s actions in the autumn of 1917, action not thought, which is equated

to the Marxian conception of praxis. Whether this is an accurate descrip-

tion of what Marx meant by praxis is questionable: at the end of the day

it seems a case of the old adage of ‘nothing succeeds like success’. Gramsci’s

Gentilean actualism, his politics of pragmatism, were ﬁnessed by verbal acro-

batics, which were never adequately reconciled with his grander version of

what he called the philosophy of praxis. The disjunction between his polit-

ical thought and the model, which proved successful in actually gaining

power in the Soviet Union, would threaten the coherence of his project for

the rest of his life.65

Notes

1. Michelle Maggi, La ﬁlosoﬁa della rivoluzione. Gramsci, la cultura e la guerra Europea

(Rome: Edizione di storia letteratura, 2008).

2. Carl Boggs, Gramsci’s Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1976).

3. Richard Bellamy and Darrow Schecter, Gramsci and the Italian State (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1993).

4. Carl Levy, ‘ “Sovversivismo”: The Radical Political Culture of Otherness in Liberal

Italy’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 20.2 (2007), pp. 147–161.

5. Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity: Theorizing the Lumpenproletariat’,

Representations, 32 (1990), pp. 69–95.

6. Marcus Green, ‘Gramsci Cannot Speak: Deconstruction and Interpretation of

Gramsci’s Concept of the Subaltern’, Rethinking Marxism, 13.1 (2001): pp. 1–24;

K. Crehan, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 2002); K. Smith

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-113 9780230280373

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Carl Levy 113

‘Gramsci at the Margins: Subjectivity and Subalternity as a Theory of Hegemony’,

International Gramsci Journal, 2 (April 2010), pp. 39–50.

7. Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the

19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959).

8. Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1980).

9. Carl Levy, ‘Gramsci’s Cultural and Political Sources: Anarchism in the Prison

Writings’, Journal of Romance Studies, 22.3 (2012).

10. Carl Levy, ‘A New Look at the Young Gramsci’, Boundary 2, 24.3 (1986), pp. 31–48;

Carl Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists (Oxford and New York: Berg/NYU Press,

1999).

11. Paul Piccone, ‘From Spaventa to Gramsci’, Tel os, 31 (1977), pp. 35–66.

12. Darrow Schecter, ‘Two Views of Revolution: Gramsci and Sorel, 1916–1920’,

History of European Ideas, 22 (1990), pp. 636–653; Darrow Schecter, Gramsci

and the Theory of Industrial Democracy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1991), Levy,

Gramsci.

13. Antonio Gramsci, Pre-Prison Writings, edited by Richard Bellamy (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 15.

14. Carl Levy, ‘ “The Rooted Cosmopolitan”: Errico Malatesta, Syndicalism,

Transnationalism and the International Labour Movement’ in David Berry &

Constance Bantman (eds) New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour & Syndicalism:

The Individual, the National and the Transnational (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars

Press, 2010), pp. 61–79.

15. L. Michelini, ‘Antonio Gramsci e il liberismo italiano (1913–1919)’ in F. Giasi (ed.)

Gramsci e il suo tempo, Vol. 1 (Rome: Carocci, 2008), pp. 175–196.

16. Antonio Gramsci, Il nostro Marx: 1918–1919, edited by Sergio Caprioglio (Turin:

Einaudi, 1980), pp. 236–237.

17. C. Natoli, ‘Grande Guerra e rinnovamento del socialismo negli scritti del giovane

Gramsci (1914–1918)’ in F. Giasi (ed.) Gramsci e il suo tempo, Vol. 1 (Rome: Carocci,

2008), pp. 51–76.

18. Antonio Gramsci, La città futura: 1917–1918, edited by Sergio Caprioglio (Turin:

Einaudi, 1980).

19. Nicola Badaloni, Il Marxismo di Gramsci: dal mito alla ricomposizione politica (Turin:

Einaudi, 1975).

20. J. J. Roth, The Cult of Violence. Sorel and the Sorelians (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1980).

21. G. Morabito, ‘Antonio Gramsci e l’idealismo giuridico italiano. Due tesi a

confronto’, Storia e politica, 6.4 (1979), pp. 744–755.

22. Antonio Gramsci, Cronache torinesi, edited by S. Caprioglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1980),

pp. 99–103.

23. F. Lucarini, ‘Socialismo, riformismo e scienze sociali nella Torino del giovane

Gramsci (1914–21)’ in F. Giasi (ed.) Gramsci e il suo tempo (Rome: Carocci, 2008),

pp. 219–240.

24. Gramsci, La città futura, p. 332.

25. Ibid., p. 498; Carl Levy, ‘The People and the Professors: Socialism and the Edu-

cated Middle Classes in Italy, 1870–1914’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies,4.2

(2001), pp. 205–208.

26. P. Audenino, ‘Non più eterni iloti: valori e modelli della pedogogia socialista’

in L. Rossi (ed.) Cultura, istruzione e socialismo nell’età giolittiana (Milan: Franco

Angeli, 1991), pp. 37–54.

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114 Gramsci and Anarchism

27. F. Lo Piparo, Lingua intellettuali egemonia in Gramsci (Bari: Laterza, 1979); Peter

Ives, Gramsci’s Politics of Language. Engaging the Bakhtin Circle & the Frankfurt School

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Peter Ives, Language and Hegemony in

Gramsci (London: Pluto, 2004); F. Lussana & G. Pissarello (eds) La lingua/le lingue

di Gramsci e delle sue opera. Scrittura, riscritture, letture in Italia e nel mondo (Soveria

Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2008); P. Ives & R. Lacorte (eds), Gramsci, Language and

Translation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).

28. G. Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (London: NLB, 1970), pp. 74–75,

93, 104, 113: G. Bergami, Il giovane Gramsci e il marxismo: 1911–1918 (Milan:

Feltrinelli, 1977), pp. 70, 92.

29. G. B. Furiozzi, Sorel e l’Italia (Florence: D’Anna, 1975).

30. Gramsci, La città futura, pp. 751–752.

31. Gramsci, Il nostro Marx, pp. 113–117.

32. Ibid., pp. 113–114.

33. A. M. Cirese, ‘Gramsci’s Observations on Folklore’ in A. Showstack Sassoon (ed.)

Approaches to Gramsci (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative,

1982), pp. 212–247; J. Nun, ‘Elements for a Theory of Democracy: Gramsci and

Common Sense’, Boundary 2, 14.3 (1986), pp. 197–230; M. Green and P. Ives,

‘Subalternity and Language: Overcoming the Fragmentation of Common Sense’,

Historical Materialism, 17.3 (2009), pp. 3–30; G. Liguori, ‘Common Sense in

Gramsci’ in J. Francese (ed.) Perspectives on Gramsci. Politics, Culture and Social

Theory (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 122–133.

34. Levy, ‘The People and the Professors’; Deb Hill, Hegemony and Education. Gramsci,

Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy Revisited (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,

2007).

35. L. Zanardi, Luigi Molinari. La Parola, l’azione, il pensiero (Mantua: Sometti, 2003).

36. For overviews see, A. S. Lindemann, ‘The Red Years’: European Socialism and

Bolshevism, 1919–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); D. Kirby,

War, Peace and Revolution. International Socialism at the Crossroads 1914–1918

(London/Aldershot: Gower, 1986); C. Levy, ‘Anarchism, Internationalism and

Nationalism in Europe, 1860–1939’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 50.3

(2004), pp. 330–342; R. Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism.

An International Comparative Analysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

37. Levy, Gramsci, pp. 94–99.

38. Gramsci, Cronache torinesi, pp. 76–77.

39. Levy, Gramsci, pp. 63–118.

40. Ibid., pp. 102–103.

41. M. Clark, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1977).

42. Levy, Gramsci, pp. 197–206; R. Medici, ‘Giacobinismo’ in F. Frosini & G. Liguori

(eds) Le parole di Gramsci. Per un lessico di Quardern del Carcere, Vol. 1 (Rome:

Carocci, 2004), pp. 112–130; R. Shilliam, ‘Jacobinism: The Ghost in the

Gramscian Machine of Counter-Hegemony’ in A. J. Ayers (ed.) Gramsci, Politi-

cal Economy and International Relations Theory. Modern Princes and Naked Emperors

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 189–208.

43. Gramsci, Il nostro Marx, p. 149.

44. I. Tognarini, ‘Giacobinismo e bolschevismo: Albert Malthiez e l’Ordine Nuovo’,

Ricerche storiche, 6 (1976), pp. 523–549.

45. L. Paggi, Le strategie del potere in Gramsci (Rome: Riuniti, 1984).

46. Levy, Gramsci, pp. 221–228.

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Carl Levy 115

47. Levy, ‘ “Sovversivismo”’.

48. F. Benevenuti & S. Pons (eds), ‘L’Unione Sovietica nei Quarderni del Carcere’

in G. Vacca (ed.) Gramsci e il novecento (Rome: Carcocci, 1999), pp. 93–124;

A. Kolpakidi & J. Leontiev, ‘Il peccato originale: Antonio Gramsci e la fondazione

del PCd’I’ in S. Bertelli & F. Bigazzi (eds) P.C.I. La storia dimentica (Milan: Arnaldo

Mondadori, 2001), pp. 25–60; A. Rossi & G. Vacca, Gramsci tra Mussolini e Stalin

(Rome: Fazi, 2007); E. Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalin. The

Political Theory and Practice of Opposition (London: Routledge, 2008).

49. G. Berti (ed.), ‘ “Problemi del movimento operaio”. Scritti critiche e storiche

inediti di Angelo Tasca’, Annali della Biblioteca G.G. Feltrinelli, X (1968),

pp. viii–721; S. Soave, ‘Gramsci e Tasca’ in F. Giasi (ed.) Gramsci nel suo tempo,

Vol. 1 (Rome: Carocci, 2008), pp. 99–125.

50. Levy, ‘Gramsci, Anarchism’.

51. Carl Levy, ‘Charisma and Social Movements: Errico Malatesta and Italian

Anarchism’, Modern Italy, 3.2 (1998), pp. 205–217.

52. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 330.

53. A. Tasca, Nascita e avvento del fascismo (Florence: Le Monnier, 1950), Preface.

54. Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci is Dead. Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements

(London: Pluto Press, 2005).

55. Gustav Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings. A Political Reader, edited and

translated by G. Kuhn (Oakland: PM Press, 2010).

56. Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973); S. White, ‘Making

Anarchism Respectable: The Social Philosophy of Colin Ward’, Journal of Politi-

cal Ideologies, 12.1 (2007), pp. 11–28; C. Levy (ed.), ‘Colin Ward (1924–2010)’,

Anarchist Studies, 19.2 (2011), pp. 7–15.

57. John Holloway, Change the World without Taking Power (London: Pluto Press,

2002).

58. S. Chattopadhyay and B. Sarkar, ‘The Subaltern and the Popular’, Postcolonial Stud-

ies, VIII.4 (2005), pp. 357–363; T. Brennan, Wars of Position. The Cultural Politics

of Left & Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); G. Baratta, Antonio

Gramsci in contrappunto. Dialoghi al presente (Rome: Carocci, 2007); A. Davidson,

‘The Uses and Abuses of Gramsci’, Thesis Eleven, 95.1 (2008), pp. 68–94; G. Schirru

(ed.), Gramsci, le culture e il mondo (Rome: Viella, 2009).

59. Robert Service, Lenin A Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

60. C. Read, Revolution, Religion and the Russian Intelligentsia (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

1979); R. C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks. Lenin and his Critics, 1904–1919

(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986).

61. Gramsci, Pre-Prison Writings, pp. 34–42.

62. D. Settembrini, ‘Mussolini and the Legacy of Revolutionary Socialism’, Journal of

Contemporary History, 11.4 (1976), pp. 239–268.

63. Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 100,

(1976–1977), pp. 5–78.

64. P. Ghosh, ‘Gramscian Hegemony: An Absolutely Historicist Approach’, History

of European Ideas, 27 (2001), pp. 1–43; D. Boothman, ‘The Sources of Gramsci’s

Concept of Hegemony’, Rethinking Marxism, 20.2 (2008), pp. 201–215; A. D’Orsi

(ed.), Egemonie (Naples: Libreria Dante & Descartes, 2008).

65. Carl Levy, Antonio Gramsci. Machiavelli. Marxism and Modernism (Cambridge:

Polity, 2013).

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Council Communist Perspectives

on the Spanish Civil War and

Revolution, 1936–1939

Saku Pinta

Introduction

Council Communism is often regarded as a current within the revolutionary

Marxist tradition that bears a close resemblance to what some now refer to as

‘class struggle’ anarchism1and is routinely considered to belong to a broader

‘libertarian communist’ tendency.2In so far as those anarchist currents

which embrace a revolutionary class politics are delineated from individu-

alist or other variants, the common emphasis on direct action and forms

of self-organisation as the preﬁgurative organs of revolutionary change,

distrust of bureaucracy and ofﬁcialdom, and critique of both reformism

and Bolshevism all lend credence to suggestions of convergent perspec-

tives between councilism and class struggle anarchisms. Moreover, much

like the broadly deﬁned anarchist tradition, Council Communism became

submerged during the Second World War – and overshadowed during the

political climate of the postwar bipolar system3– only to resurface with the

upsurge of antisystemic movements of the new Left and the post-68 era.

However, while theoretical similarities have been acknowledged,

historically-situated examinations of the evolving relationship between

anarchist and Marxist praxis have been sorely lacking in Left and labour

historiography.4An approach sensitive to historical conditions and concrete

political manifestations may provide some insight into the relationships

between the ‘red’ and ‘black’ largely missing from what strictly analytical or

normative approaches can tell us. Moreover, they may also serve as correc-

tives to simplistic treatments counter posing a singular, ‘capital-M’ Marxist

bête noire to a more varied and robust anarchism, or vice versa. Indeed,

the view of ideologies as dynamic, conceptual products of their social,

political, and economic environments, morphing in relation to changed

circumstances, is an approach gaining ground in contemporary political

theory.5

116

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Saku Pinta 117

This chapter will examine Council Communist perspectives on anarcho-

syndicalist participation in the Spanish Civil War and Revolution 1936–1939

through the writings of the American Group of Council Communists and

its most outstanding theorists Paul Mattick and Karl Korsch. This conﬂict

represents a pivotal episode in the international working-class movement,

bookending the interwar period (1918–1939). The anti-Fascist struggle in

Spain provided the backdrop against which ideological tensions were dra-

matically played out, and one in which the political aims and objectives of

nearly all political actors involved were subject to revision: some anarchists

participated in government, Stalinists actively defended liberal democracy

and private property, and sections of the liberal bourgeoisie made com-

mon cause with self-styled socialists. The two main councilist journals of

this period – Rätecorrespondenz in the Netherlands and International Council

Correspondence in the USA – followed the events in Spain closely. In his

1969 introduction to a reprinted collection of the North American Council

Communist journal, Paul Mattick reﬂected on this period, stating that:

The anti-Fascist civil war in Spain, which was immediately a proving

ground for World War II, found the council communists quite naturally –

despite their Marxist orientation – on the side of the anarcho-syndicalists,

even though circumstances compelled the latter to sacriﬁce their own

principles to the protracted struggle against the common Fascist enemy.6

The chapter will begin with a brief outline of the origins and development of

the Dutch–German Council Communist current, before providing a sketch

of the American Group of Council Communists. It will then consider the

critical, but sympathetic, support of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists by the

American councilists, highlighting the critique of the Popular Front, the pos-

itive appraisal of anarchist collectivisation, and the main councilist critiques

of anarcho-syndicalism in Spain. In conclusion, councilist attitudes to the

performance of anarchism in Spain will be discussed in relation to simi-

lar self-critiques made by rank and ﬁle formations such as La Agrupación

de Los Amigos de Durruti (the Friends of Durruti Group). The Friends of

Durruti were an anarcho-syndicalist afﬁnity group, formally launched on

17 March 1937, named after the legendary anarcho-syndicalist militants

Buenaventura Durruti who was killed in the defence of Madrid in 1936.7The

group functioned as a Left opposition formation within the two main insti-

tutional expressions of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism in Spain, the

CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo; National Confederation of Labour)

and FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica; Iberian Anarchist Federation), and rose

to prominence during the ‘May Days’ of 1937 in Barcelona.8

Beyond strictly historical interest, the councilists’ critical appraisal of the

revolutionary movement in Spain, and its counterpart within the radical

Left of the CNT-FAI, reveals a series of common considerations between

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118 Council Communist Perspectives

revolutionary anarchisms and Marxisms with regards to the dynamics of rev-

olutionary struggle: the limitations of anti-Fascism within the framework

of liberal democracy; internationalist perspectives on the risks and beneﬁts

of extending isolated ‘national’ or regional revolutionary struggles beyond

their frontiers; the relationship between mass-based working-class organi-

sations and avant-garde political groupings in pre- and post-revolutionary

periods; and ﬁnally, the very thorny question of what, exactly, is meant by

‘taking power’?

Workers’ councils and Council Communist praxis

The Dutch–German Council Communist tendency, represents one of the

most signiﬁcant and original revolutionary Marxist tendencies of the inter-

war period. The best-known Council Communist theorists include Anton

Pannekoek, Paul Mattick, Herman Gorter and Otto Rühle, while arguably

the most famous and controversial councilist activist, Marinus van der

Lubbe, was responsible for setting the ﬁre that destroyed the Reichstag

building in February 1933 as an act of protest against the Nazis. In the

early 1920s, Council Communism had a mass audience and considerable

inﬂuence within the Dutch and German working-class movement.

The centrepiece of Council Communist theory is the notion that work-

ers’ councils constitute the main unit of revolutionary working-class struggle

and the basis on which post-capitalist arrangements should be constructed.

In his Workers’ Councils, one of the most widely read expositions of Council

Communist ideas, Anton Pannekoek described councils as forms of working-

class self-organisation rooted in the myriad organs of production. These

councils, typically created in situations in which workers attempt to wrest

control of their workplaces and communities, would replace parliamentary

political institutions and the state with collaborating bodies of recallable

delegates responsible for democratically administering production as well as

activity other spheres. This form of organisation would amount to a ‘total

revolution’ in human affairs and result in the dissolution of the separa-

tion between politics and economics under capitalism.9Like class struggle

anarchists, Council Communists believe that democracy is a sham unless

extended to the economy and other areas of social life.

From these premises, the Council Communists developed a critique of

bureaucracy and mediated forms of political action as running directly

counter to the emancipatory aims of the workers’ movement. As Rachleff

wrote in his 1976 study of councilist history and political theory:

The councilists ...rejected the party structure because it recapitulated the

capitalist division between mental and manual labor, between order-

givers and order-takers. With their emphasis on the importance of the

connection between the means and ends of the class struggle, they

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Saku Pinta 119

recognized that socialism – workers’ self-management of production

and society – cannot be achieved through a form of organization that

hindered self-emancipation. Rather than stimulating the capabilities of

workers, parties function to stiﬂe them.10

Council Communists also rejected the trade union form, for similar reasons,

arguing that conventional unions had failed as instruments of revolution,

being integrated into the functioning of advanced capitalism as agents of

social control and collaborationist capital–labour mediation. By acting above

or on behalf of the workers, the councilists reasoned that both trade union

and party ofﬁcials restrained and usurped the creative potential and agency

of the working class. In doing so, a bureaucratic stratum formed, develop-

ing and defending its own privileges and class interests as the managers,

rather than gravediggers, of capitalism. These hierarchical organisations

were argued to be obstacles to human emancipation, a goal that could only

be realised through collective social action and institutions powered ‘from

below’.

From Left radicalism to Council Communism, 1900–1924

The ideas outlined above were not considered as abstract theoretical posi-

tions. Rather, councilist ideas were informed through the study of mass

workers’ struggles – particularly in the emergence of workers’ councils

(soviets) in Russia in 1905 and again in 1917, as well as the appearance of

councils in Germany, Hungary and Italy in the uprisings, factory occupa-

tions, military mutinies, and insurrections that swept central and southern

Europe in the years immediately following the First World War.11

In Germany and the Netherlands, Council Communist praxis originated

in the early twentieth century from a radical Left minority in the German

Social Democratic Party12 and the Dutch ‘Tribunist’ group, both of whom

collaborated extensively.13 Perhaps the most important proponent of this

radical Left faction was the German–Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.

Her writings, especially Reform or Revolution,14 ﬁrst published in 1900, and

her 1906 The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions,15 helped

lay the intellectual foundations of the Left radical and, later, councilist cur-

rents. Luxemburg’s famous libertarian dictum – directed as a criticism of

Lenin in the early stages of the Russian Revolution – presaged later con-

ﬂicts between the heirs of this radical current and the Bolsheviks. ‘Freedom,’

she maintained, ‘is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks

differently ...its effectiveness vanishes when “freedom” becomes a special

privilege.’16

Frequently denounced as an ‘anarchist deviation’, Broué, in his study

of the German revolution (1917–1923), noted that ‘The German left rad-

icals had been in conﬂict for years with the authoritarian organisation

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120 Council Communist Perspectives

of their own party.’17 Intraparty divisions within the social democratic

camp came to a head during the crisis on the political Left provoked

by the First World War, and, at a later stage, the overall reconﬁguration

of the international working-class movement in the years following the

Russian Revolution in 1917. Those who had maintained anti-war posi-

tions and had welcomed the revolutionary events in Russia formed the

Communist Party of Germany (KPD, Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands).

Similar to many Western European Communists, the majority of this party

held anti-parliamentary and anti-trade union positions. Perhaps initially

taking Lenin’s early 1917 revolutionary writings at face value, like his

April Theses or State and Revolution18 – much as many Russian and inter-

national anarchists had done during the October revolution19 –workers

and intellectuals in the Dutch–German Communist movement argued that

the Russian Communists had revealed the emancipatory potential of the

workers’ councils.

A series of bureaucratic manoeuvres within the KPD by a small section

of the party was successful in capturing important positions in the cen-

tral committee, and through this inﬂuence expelled left-wing branches. The

strategic aim of these expulsions centred around efforts to attract mem-

bers of other, more moderate, parties to the KPD in the hope of building a

mass party.20 The insistence of the Communist International for all afﬁliated

parties to participate in electoral campaigns in their national parliaments

as well to work within the trade unions in order to radicalise them were

also divisive issues for many Western Communists.21 For the Dutch–German

Communist Left, the function of the trade unions and political parties had

already been called into question from their performance before, during

and after the war. In response, Lenin’s 1920 polemic, Left-Wing Communism:

An Infantile Disorder22 explicitly aimed at destroying the inﬂuence of the anti-

parliamentary and radical sections of the Communist movement in Western

Europe.23

The expelled sections of the KPD regrouped to form the Germany Com-

munist Workers Party (KAPD, Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands)in

1920, and participated as an observer group within the Communist Interna-

tional until the Third Congress of that body in 1921. Although increasingly

critical, following the KAPD exit from the Comintern councilists engaged

in a much more detailed critique of Bolshevism and the Soviet Union.24

Perhaps the two deﬁnitive councilist statements against Bolshevism include

Herman Gorter’s 1920 Open Letter to Comrade Lenin25 and Helmut Wagner’s

Theses on Bolshevism.26 Both writings express the view that conditions in

Western Europe precluded the adoption of parliamentary and unionist

methods for revolutionary ends. Wagner’s analysis of Bolshevism, which

became the standard councilist view, further argued that the Bolshevik Party

had carried out a bourgeois revolution in a predominantly agrarian society

(rather than a proletarian revolution) against the remnants of Russian feudal

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Saku Pinta 121

absolutism and a weak liberal capitalist class, and installed the revolutionary

intelligentsia as masters of a dictatorial party-state.

The programme of the KAPD explicitly stated that they were ‘not a party

in the traditional sense’. Rather than participating in the electoral process

or seeking to capture state power, the political organisation was given a

more modest role, namely, uniting and co-ordinating the efforts of the

most politically advanced segments of the working-class under a Commu-

nist programme. The factory organisations or ‘workers’ unions’ (Unionen)

were considered as constituting ‘the foundation of the communist soci-

ety to come’27 Parallel to the KAPD (peaking in 1920 with some 40,000

members) was the 200,000 strong General Workers’ Union of Germany

(AAUD Allgemeine Arbeiter Union Deutschlands), a network of factory organ-

isations modelled on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Of all

early twentieth-century labour organisations, the ‘revolutionary industrial

unionism’ of the IWW had the most signiﬁcant and lasting impact on

councilist industrial strategy.28

Differences emerged within the councilist Left in the early 1920s.29 A split

from the AAUD, led by Otto Rühle, led to the creation of the AAUE

(Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union – Einheitsorganisation), as a political-economic

‘unitary organisation’. Militants of the AAUE denied the necessity of a

revolutionary political organisation separate from workers’ economic organ-

isations.30 This underpinned the main debates within the councilist move-

ment regarding the utility of a revolutionary party. Three different positions

emerged. Rühle argued that efforts should be directly at forming work-

place groups as a synthesis of economic and political organisation, and that

attempts to form separate political organisations should be abandoned. This

position was laid out most clearly in Rühle’s pamphlet The Revolution is Not

a Party Affair31 , and in several respects, resembled that of revolutionary

syndicalism.32 Herman Gorter argued for a revolutionary party and defended

the role of the KAPD as a political organisation for militants, carrying out

propaganda work and linking members in a common organisation under a

common platform. Pannekoek and Mattick in some ways oscillated between

the two positions: with the former settling on a somewhat ‘spontaneist’

perspective which asserted that any outside intervention in working-class

struggles would ultimately be harmful,33 and the later considering these

differences (in retrospect) to be of little practical signiﬁcance.34

Despite differences, the conceptions of a Leninist-type party or activity

in parliamentary politics were strategies rejected by Council Communists.

The councilist notion of a ‘party’, as ‘a group which share[s] a general

common perspective and [seeks] to clarify and publicise the issues of class

struggle’,35 in this sense, did not fundamentally differ from some anarchist

conceptions of a revolutionary, anti-parliamentary political organisation.36

In the radical political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, historian Hans

Manfred Bock considered the German Council Communists to be, along

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122 Council Communist Perspectives

with the Föderation der Kommunistischen Anarchisten (FKAD, Federation of

Communist Anarchists of Germany) and the Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands

(FAUD, Free Workers’ Union of Germany), a part of a common, ‘relatively

widespread antiauthoritarian movement’ with ‘open borders and ﬂuid cross-

ings and interactions between’ these ‘components of the antiauthoritarian

camp’.37

Post-1924 Council Communism in the USA

By 1924 the combined membership of councilist organisations in Germany

had dwindled to some 2,700 active militants.38 Those who remained com-

mitted to advancing social revolutionary perspectives focused primarily on

developing theory and carrying out propaganda and educational work. One

such group was the American United Workers Party, later renamed the Group

of Council Communists, formed in 1934 through the initiative of Paul

Mattick. Mattick, a former KAPD and AAUD worker-intellectual, emigrated

to the USA in 1924, ﬁrst moving to Benton Harbor, Michigan, later settling

in Chicago, Illinois in 1927. Bonacchi writes that German radical émigrés

like Mattick:

...saw the U.S. as the strongest capitalist country with the most radi-

cal labor tradition (the IWW) ...providing the ideal conditions for the

rapid development of that class autonomy which in Europe had been

handicapped by capitalism’s structural backwardness and by the labor

movement’s tradition of reformism.39

Indeed, Mattick attributed the formation of autonomous councils of the

unemployed in the USA during the Great Depression as creating the con-

ditions for the emergence of a Council Communist movement in that

country.40 Prior to the formation of an explicitly councilist organisation,

organising and propaganda related to unemployment issues was conducted

through the IWW. Mattick was an active member, and drafted a German-

language revolutionary programme for the union in 1933 based on the

theories of Henryk Grossman – Die Todeskrise des kapitalistischen Systems und

die Aufgaben des Proletariats (The death crisis of the capitalist system and the

tasks of the proletariat)41 – which did not make the impact Mattick antici-

pated. In 1931 Mattick attempted to revive the Arbeiter-Zeitung newspaper in

Chicago, a German-language radical publication famously associated with

the Haymarket Martyrs.

As the movement of the unemployed declined, Mattick left the IWW42

and regrouped with other Council Communists, wobblies, members of the

left-wing faction of the American Proletarian Party, and unemployed work-

ers in 1934 to create the United Workers Party (UWP).43 This group, with

members based in Chicago, Buffalo, Washington D.C., and New York,44

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Saku Pinta 123

functioned primarily as a ‘propaganda organization advocating the self-rule

of the working class’.45 The party’s manifesto – World-wide Fascism or World

Revolution? – outlined the role of the party, similar to that of the KAPD:

The communist revolutionary party is an instrument of revolution and

as such it must serve that purpose. It has no interests separate from the

working class, but is only an expression of the fact that minorities become

consciously revolutionary earlier than the broad masses ...It does not

look for power for itself or for any bureaucracy, but works to strengthen

the power of the workers councils, Soviets. It is not interested to hold

positions, but to place the power in the hands of workers committees,

exercised by the workers themselves. It does not seek to lead the work-

ers, but tells the workers to use their own initiative. It is a propaganda

organization for Communism, and shows by example how to ﬁght in

action.46

In October 1934, the UWP began publishing International Council Corre-

spondence. Mattick, who edited the journal, characterised it as a ‘forum

for discussion, unhampered by any speciﬁc dogmatic point of view, and

open to new ideas that had some relevance to the council movement’.47

Soon after, in 1936, the UWP changed its name to the Group of Coun-

cil Communists. They explained that since the UWP ‘was not a “party”

in the traditional sense, the retention of the word has led to a lot of

needless misunderstandings’.48 In 1938 the journal changed its title to

Living Marxism, and in 1942 the title was changed to New Essays.The

name changes did not reﬂect revisions to the journal’s political orien-

tation. A membership decline prompted the ﬁrst title change to Living

Marxism as the journal ‘did not promote the growth of the organization

but was practically no more than a vehicle for the elucidation of the

ideas of Council Communism’.49 Mattick wrote that the overall decline of

radicalism with the outbreak of the Second World War ‘made the name

Living Marxism seem rather pretentious, as well as a hindrance in the

search for a wider circulation’,50 and the journal appeared as New Essays

until it ceased publication in 1943. Aside from Mattick, Karl Korsch, a

Marxist intellectual who emigrated to the USA in 1936, was perhaps the

most prominent regular contributor to the journal. The writings of key

ﬁgures in the European council movement, like Anton Pannekoek and

Otto Rühle, appeared regularly as did translations from their Dutch sis-

ter publication Rätekorrespondenz.51 In keeping with their open attitude to

other working-class groups, the journal also published contributions by

other ﬁgures on the radical Left, notably an article by Max Nomad (for-

merly a follower of Jan Wacław Machajski) and Daniel Guérin’s ‘Fascist

Corporatism’ (a translation from the revolutionary syndicalist journal La

Révolution prolétarienne).52

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124 Council Communist Perspectives

The Spanish Civil War and revolution

The events surrounding the Spanish Civil War are well-known and docu-

mented, and there is no need to go into any great detail into the causes

and outcomes of the conﬂict. Of note, however, is the way in which the

conﬂict has generally been portrayed, namely, as one between Fascism and

democracy.53 The fact that a mass-based revolutionary movement exerted

considerable inﬂuence, particularly in anarchist-dominated areas such as

Catalonia, has not ﬁgured prominently in the literature on the Spanish

conﬂict until recent times. Conversely, the existence of this revolutionary

element, at the time, was actively concealed in the interests of advancing

the aims of Soviet foreign policy. For the American councilists, the revolu-

tionary element and the tensions within the Popular Front were central to

any understanding of events in Spain.

Between October 1936 and April 1939, International Council Correspon-

dence, and its later incarnations, ran no fewer than eight articles and three

book reviews directly related to the conﬂict in Spain, in addition to a

reprinted appeal from the CNT-FAI for international class solidarity.54 Of the

articles, a total of ﬁve were written by Paul Mattick, one by Helmut Wagner

(a translation from Rätezcorrespondenz), and two by Karl Korsch. The exten-

sive coverage of the Spanish conﬂict within the pages of International Council

Correspondence is all the more notable given the lack of information – from

a revolutionary perspective – outside of Spain and in particular, North

America. The ‘conciliatory approach towards the CNT’55 positioned the

journal as a mediator between the sometimes uncritical support for the Pop-

ular Front by some anarchist groups and the routinely inﬂexible approach

displayed by some Left Communists. Unlike some councilist-oriented organ-

isations, there is no evidence to suggest that the American Group of Council

Communists had any physical presence in Spain during the war in the

militias or as journalists.56

Anti-Fascism, revolution, and the reaction

The ﬁrst full-length article on Spain appeared in October 1936, less than four

months after General Franco launched his military rebellion against the Sec-

ond Spanish Republic. Written by Paul Mattick, entitled ‘The Civil War in

Spain’, this essay constituted the full issue of International Council Correspon-

dence. It began by outlining the ‘semi-feudal’ social and political conditions

in Spain in the years prior to the outbreak of the civil war, with an empha-

sis on the powerful grip of the church, landowners, and military on the

state apparatus and economy, and an assessment of the various forces within

the anti-Fascist front.57 Semi-feudal conditions, argued Mattick, retarded the

development of capitalism in Spanish industry and agriculture as well as the

emergence of an effective liberal-democratic reform movement which could

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Saku Pinta 125

impose modern capitalist relations on the feudal interests, the working class,

and peasantry. Despite the electoral victory of the Popular Front coalition of

the liberal and parliamentary labour parties in 1936, the weakness of the

Spanish liberal bourgeoisie was further exposed. Moderate government pol-

icy in land, labour, and education reforms alienated the traditional Spanish

ruling elite and did little to ease tensions or placate the increasingly revolu-

tionary class movement. ‘The reaction,’ wrote Mattick, ‘simply realized that

any concession which the bourgeois government made to the workers had

to be made at the expense of the reactionary elements’.58 In rebelling, the

Spanish generals, and the class interests they represented, sought to impose

its own order by means of a dictatorship which, to the right-wing plotters,

was directed ‘against a government which by its previous policy seemed

liable to become the prisoner of the labor movement’.59

The conﬂict that ensued, pitting the reaction against anti-Fascist forces,

was characterised by political fragmentation, but nonetheless polarised

competing elements into two camps. Mattick asserted that:

No doubt the struggle for the power in Spain is between three different

tendencies; practically, however, the struggle has as yet been conﬁned to

the one between Fascism and Anti-Fascism ... The reactionary forces tak-

ing up for Fascism are confronted by those of a bourgeois-democratic and

social-reformist caste, tho at the same time by a movement aiming at

socialism, so that each individual group is ﬁghting against two tenden-

cies: Fascism against Democracy and Revolution, this Democracy against

Fascism and Revolution, the Revolution against Fascism and bourgeois

democracy.60

Mattick noted that while divergent trends coexisted within the anti-Fascist

camp, the immediate threat that the reaction posed compelled these forces

to unite as a matter of survival, just as the Fascists concerned themselves

with the class aspirations of workers rather than on differences in their

organisations and policies.

Neither the groups of fascists nor those of the workers are allowed the

time or opportunity to go their own special ways, and it is idle to ask

whether the Spanish workers under the present conditions should ﬁght

against fascism and for bourgeois democracy or not.61

Mattick perceptively speculated that ‘[i]n case the reaction should be struck

down, then ...the struggle of the bourgeois-democratic forces against those

which are aiming to set aside the exploitation society must again come

into the foreground’.62 In other words, the frictions within the anti-Fascist

front would, due to irreconcilable interests and objectives, come into conﬂict

sooner or later; frictions ‘which must become the greater the longer the civil

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126 Council Communist Perspectives

war is drawn out, since in such conditions the real socialisation is bound to

spread and the social-reformist forces challenged to greater resistance’.63

With these considerations, Mattick turned to an analysis of the different

factions within the anti-Fascist front. Spanish social democracy was char-

acterised as the ‘left wing of the bourgeoisie’, politically concerned with

maintaining parliamentary and capitalist institutions. The small but dis-

proportionately inﬂuential Spanish Communist Party maintained a similar

outlook having ‘given up every policy of its own, other than that of fur-

ther attenuating the workers’ struggle. Like the Social Democracy it wants

nothing more than to defend capitalist democracy against fascism.’64 If the

Spanish Socialist Party represented a centre-left position in the Popular

Front, the Communist sections were to the right of it on the political spec-

trum. Only the dissident Marxist POUM (Partido Obrero Uniﬁcación Marxista,

Workers’ Party of Marxist Uniﬁcation), of the Popular Front forces, could

be considered to be the carriers of a genuine Leninist or Bolshevik position,

advancing a programme of state ownership of the economy similar to that

of the Soviet Union.65 Of the Spanish anarchists, Mattick wrote:

Over against these ‘marxist’ organizations, which have nothing more in

common with Marxism than the name, stands the anarcho-syndicalist

movement, which, even though it has not the organizational strength

of the popular-front parties, can nevertheless be rated as their worthy

adversary, capable of bringing into question the aspirations of the pseudo-

marxist state capitalists.66

The development of anarcho-syndicalist federalism in Spain was consid-

ered by Mattick to be a product of the disorganisation of the ruling class –

divided between liberal-democratic and reactionary elements – and uneven

and regional industrial concentrations in Spain, meaning less emphasis on

centralised control and direction of the movement:

The localizing of the workers manifestations was ...an inevitable prod-

uct of the circumstance that only industrial oases existed in the feu-

dal desert ...In the course of the further industrializing of Spain, this

syndicalist movement ... will be obliged, regardless of its previous atti-

tude, to take up with more coordinated and centralized forms of orga-

nization, if it is not to go under. Or, possibly, the centralistic control

and coordination of all political and economic activity will be imposed

overnight by a successful revolution; and in these circumstances the fed-

eralistic traditions would be of enormous value, since they would form

the necessary counter-weight against the dangers of centralism.67

Combining centralism and federalism was not understood by Mattick or

other councilists as being contradictory. For example, in an earlier article

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in International Council Correspondence entitled ‘Anarchism and Marxism’

the author ‘WRB’ argued that a communist economy needed co-ordination

to satisfy human needs and desires, requiring elements of centralism and

federalism. Autarkic, totally self-sufﬁcient units were deemed at best to

be unfeasible, and at worst, could develop ‘competitive tendencies’ if

autonomous communes engaged in exchanging surplus products with other

communes. Decision-making power in a communist society would have

to be as decentralised and federative as possible as a corrective to the

formation of bureaucracy: thus, a combination of centralised industrial

co-ordination and federal decision-making and control.68 While the CNT

syndicatos unicos, or industrial unions, sought to remedy the decentralised

craft or trade union structure, Daniel Guérin and others, have also criti-

cised some of the ‘rather naive and idealistic’69 conceptions of a localist

libertarian communism, expressed by Isaac Puente70 and dominant in the

1936 Saragossa CNT conference, along the same lines.71 Guérin, in fact,

explicitly rejected Puente’s notion of libertarian communism as an ‘infan-

tile idyll of a jumble of “free communes”, at the heart of the Spanish CNT

before 1936 [...] This soft dream left Spanish anarcho-syndicalism extremely

ill-prepared for the harsh realities of revolution and civil war on the eve of

Franco’s putsch.’72

Overall, Mattick praised the self-organised nature of the CNT, its rejection

of both parliamentarism and soviet-style state capitalism. ‘In the course of

the present civil war’, he wrote, ‘anarcho-syndicalism has been the most

forward-driving revolutionary element.’73

Mattick maintained that a workers’ revolution in Spain would encounter

multiple difﬁculties. Aside of the immediate threat posed by Fascism stood

the likelihood that the Spanish revolutionary movement would be con-

fronted with Popular Front counterrevolution or foreign intervention. To be

successful, Mattick held that the revolutionary workers had to encompass an

internationalist outlook and extend the revolutionary class struggle beyond

its national boundaries, instigating insurgent movements in neighbouring

France and North Africa in particular.74 This, he reasoned, would naturally

provoke imperialist powers to protect their colonial possessions while con-

trolling domestic dissent, in effect transforming the Spanish conﬂict into

an international class war. Mattick’s view on this was nearly identical to

that of Italian anarchist militant Camillo Berneri (1897–1937).75 Chomsky

summarised Berneri’s position:

He argued that Morocco should be granted independence and that an

attempt should be made to stir up rebellion throughout North Africa.

Thus a revolutionary struggle should be undertaken against Western cap-

italism in North Africa and, simultaneously, against the bourgeois regime

in Spain, which was gradually dismantling the accomplishments of the

July revolution.76

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128 Council Communist Perspectives

In proposing such a strategy, Berneri hoped that Franco’s base of military

support in North Africa would be severely weakened and that the response

by Western capitalist nations would help ignite revolution outside of

Spain.

Aside from extending the struggle outside of Spain, according to Mattick,

a political anti-Fascist struggle would only bring limited returns, at best ush-

ering in soviet-style state capitalism, so a broader anticapitalist struggle was

necessary: ‘The workers’ struggle must be directed not exclusively against

Fascism, but against Capital in all its forms and manifestations.’77

In the next issue of International Council Correspondence, Mattick wrote a

shorter follow-up article entitled ‘What Next in Spain?’ Here Mattick under-

scored his previous assertion that the revolutionary movement in Spain

faced major obstacles and hostilities from the imperialist powers:

The extent of the civil war, the anarchist element in it, allowed for the

possibility that in Spain capitalism itself may be wiped out. This would

have meant the open intervention of many capitalist powers in Spain

and a sudden clash of imperalist interests which probably would have

marked the beginning of the world war.78

The Russian intervention, claimed Mattick, had put the anarchists at a dis-

advantage, and severely limited the scope of their activity. ‘Recognizing that

Franco would win, in case help from the outside was denied to the loyalists,

the anarchists had to accept the Russian bribe and domination of the anti-

Fascist front which automatically worked against the anarchists.’79 In this

early stage of the war, Mattick reiterated his position that a joint struggle

against Fascism was unavoidable: ‘All political organizations had to ﬁght

Franco and postpone the settlement of all other questions [...] It would be

foolish to blame the revolutionary groups for the one or the other wrong

step, as even a correct policy would have meant nothing,’ and continued

that ‘The circumstances force the policies of the anarchists, not their own

decisions.’80

Karl Korsch and anarchist collectivisation

Karl Korsch’s major contribution to the councilist perspectives on the

war and revolution in Spain was his positive assessment of the anarchist

attempts at collectivising the economy, which he outlined in two articles,

‘Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain’ and ‘Collectivization in

Spain’, both published in 1938 as the prospects of an anti-Fascist victory

appeared slim. Both of these articles were originally intended for publication

in the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research journal in New York

but disagreements between Korsch and the Institute, arising from editorial

revisions, compelled him to publish them in Living Marxism.81

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In ‘Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain’ Korsch argued that the

Spanish revolution and its achievements in collectivisation represented a

new period of class struggle worthy of serious attention and could not be

mechanically evaluated ‘with some abstract ideal or with results attained

under entirely different historical conditions’.82 Korsch maintained that the

Spanish revolution ‘should not be compared with anything which happened

in Russia after October, 1917’.83 In this assertion, Korsch sought to defend

the revolutionary movement in Spain against unnamed Leninist critics who

‘extol the revolutionary consistency of the Bolshevik leadership of 1917,

to the detriment of the “chaotic irresolution” displayed by the dissentions

and waverings of the Spanish Syndicalists and Anarchists of 1936–1938’.84

Against these critics, Korsch argued that the ‘Bolshevik leadership of 1917

was in no way exempt from those human wavering and want of fore-

sight which are inherent in any revolutionary action’.85 Speciﬁcally, Korsch

cited Lenin’s support of the Kerensky government in Russia against General

Kornilov’s counter-revolutionary rebellion showing ‘how little the minor fol-

lowers of Lenin are entitled to criticise the deﬁciencies of the syndicalist

achievements in revolutionary Catalonia’.86 Politically, Korsch’s defence of

the Spanish anarchists and syndicalists was aimed at removing the ‘deep

shadow thrown on the constructive work’ of Catalonia’s revolutionary work-

ers by Stalinists, and exposing the socialist content of collectivisation as

opposed to state capitalist nationalisation.87

Korsch’s follow-up article, ‘Collectivization in Spain’, maintained that the

Spanish workers had achieved a greater degree of success in constructing

a self-managed economy than their early twentieth-century predecessors.

Basing his account on a CNT-FAI pamphlet – Collectivisation: The construc-

tive work of the Spanish Revolution – Korsch asserted that ‘[t]he syndicalist

and anarchist labor movement of Spain’ were ‘better informed and pos-

sessed a much more realistic conception of the necessary steps to achieve

their economic aims than had been shown, in similar situations, by the

so-called “Marxist” labour movements in other parts of Europe’.88 While

anarchist and syndicalist attempts at realising workers’ self-management

were restricted by reactionary forces as well as the moderate, Soviet-backed

Popular Front government, for Korsch, despite these limitations, the his-

torical importance and lessons of the Spanish revolution were to be placed

alongside the 1871 Paris Commune, the 1918 Hungarian and Bavarian revo-

lutions, and the early revolutionary achievements of the Russian revolution

in 1917.89

Korsch emphasised that the Catalan workers were able to expropriate

vast sections of industry, transportation, and other sectors of the econ-

omy after their owners and managers, many of whom had supported the

military rebellion, ﬂed after its defeat in Barcelona and other areas. This

revolt which ‘resembled a war against an invisible enemy,’ showed the ‘rel-

ative ease with which under equally fortunate circumstances...deep and

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130 Council Communist Perspectives

far reaching changes in production management and wage payment can be

accomplished without great formal and organizational transformations’.90

Korsch concluded with an analysis of his main interest, namely, the

Spanish syndicalist form of organisation. ‘These syndicalist formations,’ he

stated, ‘anti-party and anti-centralistic, were entirely based on the free action

of the working masses.’ This feature of Spanish syndicalism was consid-

ered by Korsch to be an asset, as its activity was based on non-bureaucratic

methods, ‘managed from the outset not by professional ofﬁcialdom, but by

the elite of the workers in the respective industries’. Further, ‘[t]he energy

of the anti-state attitude of the revolutionary Spanish proletariat, unham-

pered by self-created organizational or ideological obstacles explains all their

surprising successes in the face of overwhelming difﬁculties’.91

Problems of political organisation: syndicates or soviets?

While acknowledging the difﬁcult circumstances in Spain during the years

of the civil war – and importantly, circumstances which compelled the CNT-

FAI to participate in the Popular Front government – both Mattick and

Korsch also criticised anarchist attitudes towards political organisation, or

perhaps more accurately, the separation of the political from the economic

in the revolutionary period. For Korsch, this was the single most important

lesson, not only of the Spanish revolution, but of the entire post-First World

World revolutionary period:

The very fact that the CNT and FAI themselves were ﬁnally compelled

to reverse their traditional policy of non-interference in politics under

the pressure of increasingly bitter experiences, demonstrated [...]the vital

connection between the economic and political action in every phase and, most

of all, in the immediately revolutionary phase of the proletarian class struggle.

This, then is the ﬁrst and foremost lesson of that concluding phase of

the whole revolutionary history of post war Europe which is the Spanish

revolution.92

In keeping with councilist perspectives on emergent social forms that

develop through the revolutionary process, Korsch’s critique underscored

the position that revolutionary organisations cannot be formed prior to

a revolutionary period and must develop in accordance with the tasks at

hand by placing all power in the workers’ councils, rather than maintaining

traditional leadership roles and sectional interests. In a review of anarchist

Diego Santillan’s After the Revolution, Mattick also gave a clear picture of the

function of syndicates, formed in a pre-revolutionary period, and the prob-

lems associated with maintaining this organisational form in a revolutionary

period:

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Saku Pinta 131

It must be borne in mind that syndicates, including the anarchist CNT,

are pre-revolutionary organizations which were organized principally to

wrest concessions from the capitalist class. In order to do this most

efﬁciently, a staff of organizers, an apparatus, was necessary. This staff

became the new bureaucracy, its members the leaders and guides.93

The failure of the anarchists to assert a new form of working-class politi-

cal power meant that state and capitalist power, which had largely, but not

entirely, dissolved in vast areas of Spain (particularly Catalonia) in the after-

math of Franco’s coup d’etat, was able to reassert itself and regain its former

position of dominance. This also meant that, in the absence of an alterna-

tive political-economic framework, the CNT-FAI were ultimately forced to

compromise their anti-statist principles by entering the government.

The Barcelona May Days, 1937

Ultimately, in May 1937 in Barcelona, the logical end of this compromise

between the CNT-FAI and the Popular Front government culminated in the

defeat of the workers’ movement.94 This historical moment revealed the ten-

sions within the broad ‘Republican’ camp in the struggle against Fascism,

and the divergent strategies in conducting the war and the economy. ‘No his-

torical episode,’ claimed historian Burnett Bolloten, ‘has been so diversely

reported or deﬁned.’95 For the anarchists and POUM, the May Days were sim-

ply a response from the working class to communist provocations. Bolloten

observed that few accounts of May 1937 ‘were reconcilable, which partially

explains why the May events, despite numerous attempts to clarify them,

are still ...shrouded in obscurity’.96

Tensions began in early April when the PSUC (Partit Socialista Uniﬁcat de

Catalunya, Uniﬁed Socialist Party of Catalonia, the only Comintern-afﬁliated

organisation in Catalonia) and UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores, General

Union of Workers, a union aligned politically with the PSUC) announced a

‘Victory Plan’ for Catalonia, seeking to create a regular army in the region,

nationalise war industries and transport, create an internal government secu-

rity force, and concentrate all arms and munitions into the hands of the

government: in effect, reassert state power and authority in Catalonia.97 The

political assassinations of Communist ofﬁcials Rodriquez Salas and Roldan

Cortada and Antonio Martin, the anarchist president of a revolutionary com-

mittee in Puigcerda, were quickly followed by the seizure of ‘frontier posts

along the Franco–Spanish border hitherto controlled by revolutionary com-

mittees’, dispatched by ﬁnance minister Juan Negrin from Valencia, the seat

of the Popular Front government.98 In this politically sensitive atmosphere,

May Day celebrations in Barcelona were cancelled for fear that openly

displaying political allegiances in the city could trigger violence. Finally,

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132 Council Communist Perspectives

on May 3, government forces seized the telephonica, or central telephone

exchange. The telephone exchange had been operated by a joint UGT-CNT

committee where ‘the Anarchosyndicalists were the dominant force, and

their red and black ﬂag, which had ﬂown from the tower of the building ever

since July, attested to their supremacy’.99 The people of the working-class

districts of Barcelona, where anarcho-syndicalists were ﬁrmly entrenched,

were enraged by the seizure of the telephone exchange. Strategically located

buildings were quickly occupied and barricades erected. Intense street-

ﬁghting between armed workers and government forces continued for four

days. Only after the CNT-FAI leadership appealed for a cease-ﬁre were the

barricades dismantled and the workers disarmed. Graham concluded that:

The meaning of the May Days was not, in the end, about ‘breaking the

CNT’ per se – its leadership was already a willing part of the liberal Repub-

lican alliance. Rather it was about breaking the CNT’s organizational

solidarities in Barcelona to deprive its constituencies ...of the mecha-

nisms and political means of resisting the state. ‘May’ was about a process

of forcible ‘nationalization’: in the immediate term about war produc-

tion, but ultimately about state building through social disciplining and

capitalist control of national economic production.100

Mattick commented on these developments in two articles. In ‘Civil War

in Catalonia’ he stated that ‘The clash between the Generalidad and

the Anarchists is a natural outgrowth of the politics of the “Peoples

Front” ...The logic of the Peoples Front politics dominated by Russian

diplomacy makes the shooting and suppression of revolutionary workers

inevitable.’101 Mattick’s second article on the Barcelona May Days, ‘Moscow-

Fascism: The Barricades Must be Torn Down!’, forcefully condemned the

Popular Front policy:

The workers’ revolution must be radical from the very outset, or it will

be lost. There was required the complete expropriation of the possessing

classes, the elimination of all power other than that of the armed workers,

and the struggle against all elements opposing such a course. Not doing

this, the May Days of Barcelona, and the elimination of the revolution-

ary elements in Spain were inevitable. The CNT never approached the

question of revolution from the viewpoint of the working class, but has

always been concerned ﬁrst of all with the organization. It was acting for

the workers and with the aid of the workers, but was not interested in the

self-initiative and action of the workers independent of organizational

interests.102

Mattick noted in passing that ‘The “Friends of Durrutti” split away from the

corrupted leaders of the CNT and FAI in order to restore original anarchism,

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Saku Pinta 133

to safeguard the ideal, to maintain the revolutionary tradition,’ but did so

too late.103 He concluded that the revolutionary movement would have to

reassert itself, declaring that ‘The barricades, if again erected, should not be

torn down.’104

Conclusions

The American councilists, while sympathetic to the cause of the Spanish

anarcho-syndicalists, directed two major criticisms at their performance in

a revolutionary situation. First, the anarchist workers failed to create uni-

ﬁed economic-political organs of workers’ power in areas in which they

clearly held a dominant position and suppress counter-revolutionary ele-

ments. In neglecting to do so, they allowed a weakened state power to

re-emerge, culminating in the Barcelona May Days. Second, and related to

the ﬁrst, was a theoretical weakness, which recognised the dangers of statist

bureaucracy but did not extend this understanding to the syndicates, where

the CNT-FAI leadership became gradually separated from the self-organised

activity of the working class. These attitudes were tempered by an intimate

understanding of the very difﬁcult circumstances, and isolation, in which

the Spanish anarchist movement found itself.

Within this historical juncture, these critiques rather than creating a fur-

ther gulf between Marxist-councilist and anarchist revolutionary theory,

indicate a more considerable sphere of theoretical convergence. This is par-

ticularly evident when considering the positions adopted by the Friends of

Durruti (FoD), one of the few organised elements in Barcelona in 1937 which

actively discouraged the armed workers from abandoning the barricades.

The FoD was formed primarily to combat what they regarded as the

reformist positions of the leadership of the CNT-FAI and the gradual surren-

der of the revolutionary gains of July 1936. The two of the most important

political decisions which they were opposed were the CNT-FAI entry into the

Republican central and regional Catalan governments and the acceptance of

the militarisation of the workers’ militias under the political direction of the

government. On the ﬁrst point, the rejection of CNT-FAI ‘ministerialism’,

the FoD criticised the ‘treason’ of the CNT leadership in collaborating with

elements in the state apparatus who were hostile to the main social rev-

olutionary achievements of the working-class movement: particularly the

collectivisation of large segments of industry and agriculture and the work-

ers’ patrols in place of government security or police agencies. That this

collaboration was conducted as the only viable option, for anti-Fascist unity

in the war effort, was totally rejected by the FoD. The war and the revolution

were inseparable, and to postpone the revolution was to destroy the morale

of the working-class base of support which sustained the war effort. On the

second point, the reorganisation of the workers’ militias into a regular army,

the FoD were not opposed to a co-ordinated, well-organised military. In fact,

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134 Council Communist Perspectives

the group outlined the basis for such a formation, which they referred to as

a ‘confederal army’ which they envisaged as being co-ordinated by a ‘single

collective command,’ under the guidance of working-class organisations.105

What they objected to was the hierarchy, military formalism, and above all,

the state direction of the military under the guise of being a non-political

formation.

The FoD, while a small grouping inside the CNT-FAI, might be said to have

some inﬂuence beyond their small numbers,106 and certainly, reﬂected the

opinions of the rank and ﬁle of those organisations, at least if the sponta-

neous ﬁghting of the May Days is taken as a barometer. These events were

understood as a turning point, signalling the defeat of the revolutionary

movement. During the street ﬁghting in Barcelona between government

forces and the armed working-class, the FoD openly deﬁed the appeals of

the CNT-FAI leadership for a cease ﬁre, and went one step further, agitating

for the creation of a ‘revolutionary junta’. This ‘junta’ or council was envis-

aged as an organ of working-class political power, suppressing the forces that

were in open conﬂict with the revolutionary movement. In the aftermath of

the May Days Jaime Balius, the most prominent intellectual voice of the

group, presented a critique of the CNT-FAI and outlined a proposed alterna-

tive political-economic structure in the pamphlet Towards a Fresh Revolution.

In this pamphlet, Balius sought to resolve the contradictions of ofﬁcial CNT-

FAI policy while advancing a more consistent interpretation of ‘libertarian

communism’. Balius argued that the CNT lacked a coherent vision and was

not prepared to face the tasks of building and defending the revolution.

What happened was what had to happen. The CNT was utterly devoid

of revolutionary theory. We did not have a concrete programme. We

had no idea where we were going ...By not knowing what to do, we

handed the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the marxists

who support the farce of yesteryear. What is worse, we allowed the bour-

geoisie a breathing space; to return, to re-form and to behave as would a

conqueror.107

The CNT-FAI, argued Balius, ‘collaborated with the bourgeoisie in the

affairs of state, precisely when the State was crumbling away on all

sides [...] It breathed a lungful of oxygen into an anaemic, terror-stricken

bourgeoisie.’ CNT-FAI collaboration with the state, then, not only violated

anti-statist principles but allowed the Popular Front forces time to revive

state power and limit collectivisation in Barcelona and other areas. Balius

argued that ‘One of the most direct reasons why the revolution has been

asphyxiated and the CNT displaced, is that it behaved like a minority group,

even though it had a majority in the streets.’108 The proposed ‘revolution-

ary junta’ of the FoD was not envisaged as a ‘substitionist body’, separate

from the working-class, but rather an elected body drawn exclusively from

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Saku Pinta 135

working-class organisations with the tasks of managing the war effort, main-

taining public order, international affairs, and conducting revolutionary

propaganda. The council would include a recall process and a regular rota-

tion of members to prevent a bureaucratic class from developing, and would

be subordinate to the unions in economic affairs. Syndicates would thus

be the main organ from which the council would draw its political power

and legitimacy, and would have the responsibility of directing the econ-

omy on the principles of workers’ self-management. As Balius noted at a

later stage, the FoD advocated ‘all power to the syndicates,’ or unions, rather

than soviets, as the revolutionary committees of the CNT were regarded as

possessing the organisational attributes necessary for carrying out libertarian

communist reconstruction.

We did not support the formation of Soviets; there were no grounds in

Spain for calling for such. We stood for ‘all power to the trade unions’.

In no way were we politically oriented. The junta was simply a way out,

a revolutionary formula to save the revolutionary conquests of July 1936.

We were unable to exercise great inﬂuence because the Stalinists, helped

by the CNT and FAI reformists, undertook their counter-revolutionary

aggression so rapidly.109

The FoD differed slightly with the councilists on this point, however, in

other ways their self-criticism were nearly indistinguishable from the views

of Mattick and Korsch. ‘Taking power’ would mean nothing less than the

direction of the economy, war effort, and all other areas by workers’ organ-

isations and the suppression of counter-revolutionary groups by workers’

militias directly tied and accountable to these organisations. Halfway mea-

sures and compromises with social forces hostile to social revolution would

only result in defeat.

In terms of the signiﬁcance of these historical revolutionary movements

towards anarchist-Marxist convergences, these may be considered to have

underscored a common emphasis on working-class self-organisation as both

method and non-dogmatic source of inspiration. Mattick, in reﬂecting on

Korsch’s contributions to revolutionary Marxism, perhaps best sums up this

attitude:

Korsch turned to the anarchists without giving up his Marxist concep-

tions; not to the petty-bourgeois anarchists of laissez faire ideology, but

to the anarchist workers and poor peasants of Spain who had not yet

succumbed to the international counter-revolution which now counted

among its symbols the name of Marx as well ...The anarchist empha-

sis on freedom and spontaneity, on self-determination, and, therefore,

decentralisation, on action rather than ideology, on solidarity more than

on economic interest were precisely the qualities that had been lost to

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136 Council Communist Perspectives

the socialist movement in its rise to political inﬂuence and power in

the expanding capitalist nations. It did not matter to Korsch whether his

anarchistically-biased interpretation of revolutionary Marxism was true to

Marx or not. What mattered, under the conditions of twentieth-century

capitalism, was to recapture these anarchist attitudes in order to have a

labour movement at all.110

It is on this level that we begin to see some of the broad outlines of a

libertarian communist politics in the interwar period, expressed less as a doc-

trinal system or tradition, but rather as a series of common considerations

and political commitments forged during heightened revolutionary periods,

and further developed upon reﬂection in defeat. The workers’ councils of

the Dutch–German councilists, the ‘revolutionary junta’ of the Friends of

Durruti, as well as the ‘free soviets’ and calls for more coherent forms of polit-

ical organisation by the Makhnovschina in an earlier period, amongst others,

reﬂect a common organisational focus on forms of workers’ autonomy and a

view to generalising these emergent social forms as the basis for a free society.

Notes

1. For example B. Franks, Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contempo-

rary British Anarchisms (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press and Dark Star, 2006),

pp. 12–16; W. Price, The Abolition of the State: Anarchist and Marxist Perspectives

(Bloomington/Milton Keynes: Authorhouse, 2007), pp. 3–5.

2. For example R. Hahnel, Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition

to Cooperation (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 392–393, n. 1 and n. 2;

D. Guérin, Towards a Libertarian Communism (1988): http://libcom.org/library/

towards-libertarian-communism-daniel-guerin (accessed 8 February 2010); and

N. Chomsky, Government in the Future (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005),

pp. 23–30.

3. Steve Wright notes that ‘if anything, the climate of the Cold War would be even

more inhospitable for those who saw the rival blocs as simply different forms of

capitalist imperialism’. ‘Radical traditions: Council Communism’, Reconstruction

4 (1995): www.libcom.org/library/radical-traditions-council-communism-steve-

wright (accessed 04 August 2009).

4. A notable exception to this is the deﬁnitive though largely unknown out-

side of a German readership: H. Bock, Syndicalismus und Linkskommunismus von

1918 bis 1923. Zur Geschichte und Soziologie der Kommunistischen Arbeiterpartei

Deutschlands (K.A.P.D.), der Allgemeinen Arbeiterunion (A.A.U.D.) und der Freien

Arbeiterunion (F.A.U.D.) (Meisenheim: Verlag Anton Hain, 1969). On the rela-

tionship of German syndicalism to Council Communism in the Weimar

Republic, see H. Bock, ‘Anarchosyndicalism in the German Labour Move-

ment’ in W. Thorpe and M. van der Linden (eds.), Revolutionary Syndicalism:

An International Perspective (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), pp. 59–79.

5. M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1996).

6. P. Mattick, ‘Introduction’, New essays: a quarterly dedicated to the study of modern

society (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Reprint Corporation, 1969), viii–ix. As will

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Saku Pinta 137

be discussed below, this journal changed its title twice between 1934 and 1943:

International Council Correspondence,thenLiving Marxism and ﬁnally New Essays.

These will be referred to collectively hereafter as New Essays.

7. For a discussion of the ‘deaths’ of Durruti, see A. Paz, Durruti in the Spanish

Revolution (Edinburgh, Oakland, AK Press, 2007), pp. 637–681.

8. The two most important studies are A. Guillamón, The Friends of Durruti

Group: 1937–1939 and the deﬁnitive Spanish-language treatment M. Amorós,

La revolución traicionada: La verdadera historia de Balius y los Amigos de Durruti

(Barcelona: VIRUS editorial, 2003). See also G. Fontenis, The Revolutionary Mes-

sage of the ‘Friends of Durruti’ (1983), available online: www.ﬂag.blackened.

net/revolt/spain/FODtrans/intro.html (accessed 09 July 2010); P. Sharkey, The

Friends of Durruti – A Chronology (1984), available online: www.ﬂag.blackened.

net/revolt/spain/fod_chron.html (accessed 09 July 2010); and B. Bolloten, The

Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill: The University

of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 420;428;866–867, n.49.

9. A. Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils (Oakland/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003),

pp. 44–50.

10. P. Rachleff, Marxism and Council Communism: The Foundation for Revolutionary

Theory for Modern Society (Brooklyn: Revisionist Press, 1976), p. 207.

11. See P. Rachleff, Marxism and Council Communism, p. 106; Mattick, ‘Introduction’

in New essays, v.; A. Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils, pp. 76–77.

12. For a summary of the left, right, and centrist currents in German pre-war

social democracy, represented by Luxemburg, Euard Bernstein, and Karl Kautsky

respectively see R. Gombin, The Radical Tradition: a study in modern revolutionary

thought (London: Methuen & Co Ltd., 1978), pp. 93–94.

13. Bourrinet writes that ‘There is not on the one hand a German Left and on the

other a Dutch Left, but truly a German-Dutch Communist Left, with Gorter as

its leading political ﬁgure.’ P. Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left: a

contribution to the history of the revolutionary movement (London: Porcupine Press,

2001), p. 9.

14. R. Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (New York: Gordon Press, 1974). Karl Korsch

and Paul Mattick regarded this as a central text, and in general, Luxemburg as

a key ﬁgure in the development of the councilist current. See K. Korsch, ‘The

Passing of Marxian Orthodoxy’, New Essays 3:11/12 (December 1937), pp. 7–11;

P. Mattick, ‘Luxemburg vs. Lenin’, New Essays 2:8 (July 1936), pp. 17–35.

15. R. Luxemburg, The mass strike, the political party, and the trade unions and The

Junius pamphlet (London: Harper and Row, 1971).

16. R. Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution (1918): http://www.marxists.org/archive/

luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch06.htm (accessed 28 September 2010).

17. P. Broué, The German Revolution 1917–1923 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006),

p. 39.

18. V. Lenin, April Theses (1917): www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/

apr/04.htm (accessed 15 October 2010) and V. Lenin, State and Revolution

(1918): www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev (accessed 15 Octo-

ber 2010).

19. G.P. Maximoff, wrote that ‘The slogans formulated by the Bolsheviks (Com-

munists) voiced, in a precise and intelligible manner, the demands of the

masses in revolt, coinciding with the slogans of the Anarchists: “Down with the

war,” “Immediate peace without annexations or indemnities, over the heads

of the governments and capitalists,” “Abolition of the army,” “Arming of the

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138 Council Communist Perspectives

workers,” “Immediate seizure of land by the peasants,” “Seizure of factories by

the workers,” “A Federation of Soviets,” etc. [...] Wasn’t it natural for the Anar-

chists to be taken in by these slogans, considering that they lacked a strong

organisation to carry them out independently? Consequently, they continued

taking part in the joint struggle.’ G.P. Maximoff, Syndicalists in the Russian Revo-

lution (n.d., c.1940): www.libcom.org/library/syndicalists-in-russian-revolution-

maximov (accessed 24 August 2009). See also P. Avrich, The Russian Anar-

chists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 128–129;171–203;

M. Bookchin, The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era,

Volume 3 (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 199; K. Zimmer, ‘Premature Anti-

Communists?: American Anarchism, the Russian Revolution, and Left-Wing

Libertarian Anti-Communism, 1917–1939’, Labor: Studies in Working-Class His-

tory of the Americas, 6:2 (Summer 2009), pp. 45–71; I. de Llorens, The CNT and the

Russian Revolution, trans. Paul Sharkey (London/Berkeley: Kate Sharply Library,

2007); D. Berry, ‘Sovietism as Council Anarchism’ in A History of the French Anar-

chist Movement, 1917 to 1945 (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2009), pp. 55–83;

R. Gombin, The Radical Tradition, p. 34.

20. P. Broué, The German Revolution 1917–1923, pp. 393–491.

21. See the ‘Conditions of Admission into the Communist International’ in Minutes

of the Second Congress of the Communist International (1920): www.marxists.org/

history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch07.htm (accessed 24 October

2009).

22. V. Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920): www.marxists.org/

archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ (accessed 12 October 2010).

23. P. Mattick, ‘Introduction’, New Essays,vi.

24. See for example ‘What was the USSR? Towards a Theory of the Deformation

of Value under State Capitalism Part III: Left Communism and the Russian

Revolution’, in Aufheben 8 (Autumn 1999): http://libcom.org/library/what-was-

ussr-aufheben-left-communism-part-3 (accessed 05 August 2009).

25. See H. Gorter, Open Letter to Comrade Lenin, A Reply to ‘Left-wing’ Communism,

an Infantile Disorder (1920): www.marxists.org/archive/gorter/1920/open-letter/

index.htm (accessed 23 June 2009).

26. H. Wagner, ‘Theses on Bolshevism’, New Essays 1:3 (December 1934),

pp. 1–18.

27. Programme of the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) (1920): www.

libcom.org/library/programme-communist-workers-party-germany-kapd-1920

(accessed 06 July 2009).

28. See P. Rachleff, Marxism and Council Communism, p. 172. As early as

1912, Pannekoek had regarded the principles of the IWW as ‘perfectly cor-

rect’: P. Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, p. 78. See also

A. Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils’, pp. 65–66. John Gerber writes that ‘Famil-

iarity with the IWW came from the Hamburg left radical Fritz Wolffheim,

who had edited an IWW publication in the USA, and from the activi-

ties of American IWW sailors in the ports of Bremen and Hamburg.’ John

Gerber, ‘From Left Radicalism to Council Communism: Anton Pannekoek

and German Revolutionary Marxism’, Journal of Contemporary History 23

(1988), 169–189: www.libcom.org/library/left-radicalism-council-communism-

anton-pannekoek-german-revolutionary-marxism-john-gerb (accessed 21

September 2009); Broué also notes the inﬂuence of the IWW on Wolffheim and

the KAPD/AAUD, P. Broué, The German Revolution, p. 66.

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Saku Pinta 139

The ideas of the Dutch–German Left Radicals found a major platform for an

American audience in the International Socialist Review. This journal was pub-

lished by the Chicago-based Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company between 1900

and 1918 and was politically close to both the left-wing of the Socialist Party of

America and the IWW. The International Socialist Review regularly published arti-

cles by Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Pannekoek and other major voices within the

radical and Zimmerwald lefts.

29. For a more detailed discussion of these divisions see M. van der Linden, On Coun-

cil Communism (2004) www.kurasje.org/arkiv/15800f.htm (accessed 5 July 2009);

M. Shipway, ‘Council Communism’ in M. Rubel and J. Crump (eds.), Non-Market

Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: MacMillan Press,

1987), pp. 104–126; R. Gombin, The Radical Tradition, pp. 104–114.

30. See O. Rühle, From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution (1924) www.marxists.

org/archive/ruhle/1924/revolution.htm (accessed 05 August 2009).

31. O. Rühle, The Revolution is Not a Party Affair (1920): www.marxists.org/archive/

ruhle/1920/ruhle02.htm (accessed 01 August 2009).

32. Bock writes that ‘The contacts between the AAUE and the FAUD [a German

syndicalist union] were never wholly severed; AAUE representatives, for exam-

ple, participated regularly as guests at the congresses of the FAUD.’ Bock,

‘Anarchosyndicalism in the German Labour Movement’, p. 66. Thorpe spec-

ulates that the ‘policy of admitting only one afﬁliate from each country

also prevented the councilist AAUE from joining [the syndicalist international

IWMA], as the FAUD was the German IWMA section.’ W. Thorpe, Revolutionary

Syndicalism: An International Perspective, p. 250.

33. M. van der Linden, On Council Communism.

34. Mattick wrote that ‘History bypassed both groups; they argued in a vac-

uum. Neither the Communist Workers Party nor the anti-party section of the

General Labor Union overcame their status of being “ultra-left” sects. Their

internal problems became quite artiﬁcial for, as regards activities, there was

actually no difference between them.’ Paul Mattick, ‘Anti-Bolshevist Commu-

nism in Germany’, Telos 26 (Winter 1975–1976): www.libcom.org/library/anti-

bolshevist-communism-germany-paul-mattick (accessed 8 August 2009). See

also Mattick’s correspondence with members and supporters of the British Anti-

Parliamentary Communist Federation on the question of revolutionary parties,

‘Party and Class’ in Class War on the Home Front (1998): www.libcom.org/library/

apcf-class-war-home-front-4 (accessed 26 August 2009).

35. P. Rachleff, Marxism and Council Communism, p. 208.

36. This is particularly true of the conclusions of the ‘platformist’ current of

anarchist-communism which developed out of the experiences of several for-

mer Makhnovist militants in the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917–1921).

Wolodomyr Holota, in the most comprehensive account of the Makhnovist

movement, argued that the Council Communist conception of the ‘party’

closely resembled platformist conceptions of revolutionary organisation, and

were also similarly devised as anti-statist alternatives to Bolshevism with a

basis in workers’ councils. Le Mouvement machnoviste ukrainien 1918–1921 et

l’évolution de l’anarchisme européen à travers le débat sur la plate-forme 1926–

1934 (Unpublished PhD, Strasboug Université des sciences humaines, 1975),

pp. 513–514.

It bears mention that the questions surrounding the role of a speciﬁc revo-

lutionary political organisation has remained a recurring, often divisive, and

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140 Council Communist Perspectives

arguably unresolved issue for many groups on the anti-statist revolutionary

Left – cutting across ‘anarchist’ and ‘Marxist’ lines – as have issues of ‘boring

from within’ traditional unions rather than forming independent ‘dual unions’

or autonomous workers’ groups.

37. H. Bock, ‘Anarchosyndicalism in the German Labour Movement’, pp. 63–64.

38. M. van der Linden, On Council Communism.

39. G. Bonacchi, ‘The Council Communists Between the New Deal and Fas-

cism’ (1976): www.libcom.org/library/council-communism-new-deal-fascism

(accessed 15 August 2010).

40. Paul Mattick, ‘Introduction’, New Essays,vi.

41. P. Mattick, Die Todeskrise des kapitalistischen Systems und die Aufgaben des

Proletariats (1933): www.workerseducation.org/crutch/pamphlets/todeskriese.

html (accessed 20 July 2009).

42. Mattick still maintained correspondence and good relations with IWW mem-

bers. See for example the letter from Industrial Worker editor Fred Thompson to

Paul Mattick, Dec. 6, 1946, Paul Mattick Papers, International Institute for Social

History.

43. P. Mattick, ‘Introduction’ New Essays,xi.

44. New Essays, 1:1 (October 1934), p. 9.

45. P. Mattick, ‘Introduction’ New Essays,i.

46. United Workers Party of America, World-wide Fascism or World Revolution? Man-

ifesto and Program of the United Workers Party of America (1934): www.marxists.

org/archive/mattick-paul/1934/fascism-revolution.htm (accessed 20 July 2009).

47. P. Mattick, ‘Introduction’ New Essays, vii.

48. New Essays, 2:2 (January 1936), 9.

49. P. Mattick, ‘Introduction’ New Essays, vii.

50. Ibid.

51. Formed in 1927, the Dutch Group of International Communists (GIC; Groep van

Internationale Communisten) was the other leading councilist organisation in the

post-1924 period.

52. See M. Nomad, ‘The Masters of Tomorrow’, International Council Correspon-

dence 2:9&10 (September 1936), pp. 16–42 and D. Guérin, ‘Fascist Corporatism’

International Council Correspondence 3:2 (February 1937), pp. 14–26.

53. Perhaps the standard and authoritative historical work is H. Thomas, The Spanish

Civil War (London: Penguin, 1990).

54. CNT-FAI, ‘To All the Workers of the World’, New Essays 2:11 (October 1936),

p. 41.

55. P. Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, p. 297.

56. Ethel MacDonald and Jane Patrick of the British United Socialist Movement,

an organisation which included Guy Aldred and was politically close to the

councilists, worked with the propaganda sections of the CNT-FAI in Barcelona

during the war. See ‘The Civil War in Spain’ in Class War on the Home Front

(1988): http://libcom.org/library/apcf-class-war-home-front (accessed 28 August

2009). The Dutch GIC also had one member who joined the anarchist militias

ﬁghting on the Aragon front, see P. Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist

Left, pp. 295, 299.

57. P. Mattick, ‘The Spanish Civil War’, New Essays 2:11 (October 1936), 1.

58. Ibid. 9.

59. Ibid. 10.

60. Ibid. 14.

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Saku Pinta 141

61. Ibid. 13.

62. Ibid. 14.

63. Ibid. 15.

64. Ibid. 13.

65. Of the POUM, Bolloten writes: ‘A vigorous advocate of Socialist revolution and

the dictatorship of the proletariat, an unrelenting critic of the Popular Front and

of Stalin’s trials and purges, the POUM was denounced as “trotskyist.” Although

some of its leaders, including Andres Nin and Juan Andrade, had once been dis-

ciples of Leon Trotsky and after the outbreak of the Civil War had favored giving

him political asylum in Catalonia, the POUM was not a trotskyist party, and it

frantically attempted to prove that it was not in numerous articles and speeches.

Nevertheless, in accordance with the tactic used by Stalin at the Moscow trials of

amalgamating all opponents under a single label, the communists denounced

the dissidents of the POUM as Trotskyist agents of Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini.’

Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War, p. 405.

66. P. Mattick, ‘The Spanish Civil War’, New Essays 2:11 (October 1936), p. 18.

67. Ibid. p. 21.

68. WRB, ‘Anarchism and Marxism’, Ibid. pp. 1–6.

69. D. Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press,

1970), p. 121.

70. I. Puente, Libertarian Communism (1932): http://ﬂag.blackened.net/liberty/

libcom.html (accessed 18 September 2009).

71. See V. Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, pp. 24–27.

72. D. Guérin, ‘Preface’ in G. Fontenis, The Revolutionary Message of the ‘Friends

of Durruti’ (1983): http://ﬂag.blackened.net/revolt/spain/FODtrans/preface.html

(accessed 01 October 2009).

73. P. Mattick, ‘The Spanish Civil War’, New Essays 2:11 (October 1936), p. 21.

74. Ibid. pp. 21–22.

75. Berneri helped to organise the ﬁrst group of Italian volunteers to ﬁght in the

Spanish Civil War, and politically, positioned himself between the CNT-FAI and

the Friends of Durruti. Berneri was executed during the May Days in Barcelona

in 1937.

76. N. Chomsky, ‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship’ in American Power and the New

Mandarins (Middlesex/Victoria: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 91–92.

77. Ibid. p. 38.

78. P. Mattick, ‘What Next in Spain?’, Ibid. p. 16.

79. P. Mattick, ‘The Spanish Civil War’, New Essays 2:11 (October 1936).

80. Ibid. p. 17.

81. W. D. Jones, The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism

(Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999), p. 97.

82. K. Korsch, ‘Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain’, New Essays 4:3 (May

1938), p. 76.

83. Ibid.

84. Ibid. p. 77.

85. Ibid. p. 80.

86. Ibid.

87. Ibid. p. 81.

88. K. Korsch, ‘Collectivization in Spain’, New Essays 4:6 (April 1939), 179.

89. Ibid. p. 178.

90. Ibid. p. 180.

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142 Council Communist Perspectives

91. Ibid. p. 181.

92. K. Korsch, ‘Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain’, New Essays 4:3 (May

1938), p. 79.

93. P. Mattick, Review of D.A. Santillan ‘After the Revolution’, New Essays 3:9&10

(October 1937), p. 29.

94. For discussions of the Barcelona May Days see H. Graham, ‘ “Against the State”:

A Genealogy of the Barcelona May Days (1937)’, European History Quarterly,29

(1999) pp. 485–542; B. Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War, pp. 414–461. For a ﬁrst

hand account and analysis, see G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, pp. 101–131;

216–248.

95. B. Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: revolution and counterrevolution, p. 429.

96. Ibid. p. 430.

97. Ibid. p. 422.

98. Ibid. pp. 425–427.

99. Ibid.

100. H. Graham, ‘ “Against the State” ’, p. 531.

101. P. Mattick, ‘Civil War in Catalonia’, New Essays 3:5&6 (June 1937), p. 41.

102. P. Mattick, ‘Moscow Fascism in Spain: The Barricades Must be Torn Down!’, New

Essays 3:7&8 (August 1937), p. 28.

103. Ibid. p. 26.

104. Ibid. p. 29.

105. See excerpts from the FoD articles ‘The problem of militarisation’ and

‘A Confederal Army’ in G. Fontenis, The Revolutionary Message of the ‘Friends

of Durruti’ (1983): http://ﬂag.blackened.net/revolt/spain/FODtrans/fod_main2.

html (accessed 15 September 2010).

106. In 1937, the FoD numbered some four to ﬁve thousand members. Balius claimed

that the second issue of their main organ El Amigo del Pueblo (Friend of the

People, which appeared in 12 issues between May 1937 and February 1938) had

a distribution of nearly 15,000 copies. See letter from Jaime Balius to Burnett

Bolloten, 24 June 1946 (Box 5, Folder 9 – Balius, Jaime, 1946–1949, Bolloten

Collection, Stanford University).

107. Jaime Balius, Towards a Fresh Revolution (1938): www.ﬂag.blackened.net/revolt/

fod/towardshistory.html (accessed 16 August 2010).

108. Ibid.

109. Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1979), p. 381, n. 1.

110. P. Mattick, Karl Korsch: His Contribution to Revolutionary Marxism (1967): www.

marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1962/korsch.htm (accessed 20 July 2009).

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A ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

C.L.R. James, His Early Relationship

to Anarchism and the Intellectual

Origins of Autonomism

Christian Høgsbjerg

In April 1940, in a private letter written amid a ﬁerce faction ﬁght then

engulﬁng US Trotskyism, Leon Trotsky would refer in passing to Cyril Lionel

Robert James (1901–1989), one of his leading comrades hailing originally

from Trinidad, as a ‘Bohemian freelancer’.1No doubt such an appellation

would have caused distress to James had he heard of it at the time, for his

political and intellectual evolution had owed much to Trotsky’s Marxism

ever since his reading of the ﬁrst volume of History of the Russian Revolu-

tion in 1932. Yet such an appellation would, for many, both within and

outside orthodox Trotskyism, seem to be vindicated by James’s subsequent

development as a political thinker, which would see him leave the ofﬁcial

Trotskyist movement in 1951. Indeed, many commentators have gone much

further than Trotsky, and associated James’s mature political thought as

much with anarchist thinking as with revolutionary Marxism. In 1981, Paul

Berman declared he thought James had ultimately come up with ‘a version of

socialism that wittingly or unwittingly incorporates elements of anarchism

within a larger Marxist framework’.2In 1987, James D. Young, subsequently

author of The World of C.L.R. James, asserted ‘James was always a dissi-

dent with a touch of anarchist disaffection’.3In 1989, after James’s passing,

Robin Blackburn in an obituary declared him an ‘Anarcho-Bolshevik’, while

E.P. Thompson apparently went as far as to speak of James’s writing not

just being ‘infused with a libertarian tendency’ but of James’s ‘instinctive,

unarticulated anarchism’.4

Yet there is a problem here, since James’s anarchism was not simply

‘unarticulated’. Rather, his writings explicitly display a casual and tradi-

tional Marxist dismissiveness of anarchism as irredeemably ‘petty-bourgeois’

in both theory and practice. In 1948, in Notes on Dialectics,Jamesnoted

143

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144 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

that ‘the Proudhonists and Bakuninists represented the petty-bourgeois cap-

italistic inﬂuences in the proletariat’ at the time of the First International

which lost out to Marxism after ‘the mass upheaval of the [Paris] Commune

defeated the Proudhonists’ because of ‘the decline of the petty-bourgeois

individualism in capitalism as a whole’. During the ‘proletarian uprising’

of the Spanish civil war, James in Notes on Dialectics noted that the ‘the

petty-bourgeois anarchist and socialist bureaucracies’ allied themselves with

Stalinism, which ‘delivered the proletariat to Franco’, commenting that ‘the

whole Popular Front Manoeuvre was part of the organic movement of the

new petty bourgeoisie toward Stalinism’.5Moreover, as Berman admitted, in

one of the only sustained and detailed discussions of James and anarchism

in the existing scholarship, James:

...has always called himself, in spite of everything, a Leninist ... as to

anarchism, in all of his writings he condemns it forcefully. But I must say,

James’s forcefulness on this point reminds me of nothing so much as Rosa

Luxemburg’s similar forcefulness in the opening pages of The Mass Strike –

an instance of protesting too much.6

The debate over James’s relative intellectual afﬁnity with or distance from

anarchism is unlikely to be resolved in the near future. Given the com-

plexity of his political and intellectual evolution, which ranged widely over

both time and space, it is certainly beyond the boundaries of what is pos-

sible in one chapter to even attempt such a feat. Rather this chapter will

attempt to clarify an important aspect of this question through a concrete

historical exploration ﬁrst of James’s early relationship to anarchism and

his growing openness to the idea that the Soviet Union under Stalin was

‘state-capitalist’ rather than socialist, and second, a briefer discussion of how

his more mature political thought came to inspire and inﬂuence strands

of ‘autonomist’ thinking during the 1950s and beyond. In making such

an examination, however, it is perhaps worth stating that we will begin

from the premise that James is best recognised and understood from the

outset not as an anarchist thinker, but as a Marxist. Indeed, as I have sug-

gested elsewhere, James was one of the twentieth century’s most original

and outstanding contributors to what Hal Draper has termed the revolution-

ary democratic tradition of ‘socialism from below’.7For Paul Buhle, James’s

original and authorised biographer, James was ‘one of the few truly creative

Marxists from the 1930s to the 1950s, perhaps alone in his masterful synthe-

sis of world history, philosophy, government, mass life and popular culture’.

Buhle thought any reference to James’s politics as ‘anarchist’ in ‘its treatment

of party and state’ was ultimately a ‘sincere but mistaken’ position.8

The aim of this chapter however is to illuminate the evolution and intel-

lectual inﬂuence of James’s creativity as a ‘dissident Marxist’, to use the

phrase of another biographer of James’s, David Renton, not to attempt to

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Christian Høgsbjerg 145

demonstrate in detail his intellectual distance from anarchism.9Indeed,

anarchists helped shape the political thought and historical imagination

of the young James, and his life and work in 1930s Britain in particular

offers a fascinating glimpse into an almost forgotten subterranean world of

far-Left politics, a story of heretics and renegades, from surrealist poets to

Jewish printers and anarchist booksellers. The empirical focus of the article

will therefore ﬁrstly examine how the seeds of James’s ‘dissident Marxism’

were arguably ﬁrst sown in this early period, before making a brief outline

of how it ﬂowered during his US sojourn and then came to fertilise thinking

on the European far-Left during the 1950s and subsequently. In the process

it is hoped that some of the creative overlaps which do exist between the

two traditions of Marxism and anarchism will be illuminated.

C.L.R. James’s early bohemianism

Rather than being an ‘instinctive anarchist’, the early politics of James, such

as they were while a young teacher, journalist and writer in the British

Crown Colony of Trinidad were distinctly of the gradual, practical, statist,

reformist variety. He was a democrat in a country without any meaningful

democracy, a parliamentary socialist in a country without a meaningful par-

liament. James’s hero at the time, and the subject of his ﬁrst book in 1932,

was Captain Arthur Andrew Cipriani, the former Commanding Ofﬁcer of

the British West Indies Regiment in the First World War and then leader

of the mass social democratic nationalist Trinidad Workingmen’s Associ-

ation (TWA). Inspired in part also by Gandhi and Marcus Garvey, James

became a campaigner for ‘West Indian self-government’, but at this stage

he was very far from the revolutionary Marxist and ‘class struggle Pan-

Africanist’ he would become. If ‘[c]onservatism unprodded hardens into

tyranny, radicalism unchecked degenerates into chaos,’ he wrote in one 1931

article.10 If anything, James was a liberal humanist who aspired to live by the

tenets of the Victorian thinker and cultural critic Matthew Arnold, but his

attempt to sincerely follow Arnoldian ideals led him to ﬁrst implicitly, and

then explicitly, criticise British colonial rule. He joined up with other writ-

ers around two literary journals, Trinidad and then The Beacon, the latter of

which the editor Albert Gomes recalled ‘became the focus of a movement

of enlightenment spearheaded by Trinidad’s angry young men of the Thir-

ties. It was the torpor, the smugness and the hypocrisy of the Trinidad of the

period that provoked the response which produced both the magazine and

the deﬁant bohemianism of the movement that was built around it.’11

In this early period, then, James seems to have been something of an

‘instinctive Bohemian freelancer’.12 Arriving in Britain in 1932, witnessing

the Lancashire cotton textile workers strike while up in Nelson, and then

reading Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution amid the conditions of the

Great Depression and the triumph of Hitler’s Nazis in 1933 led James to

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146 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

politically radicalise while working as the Manchester Guardian’s cricket cor-

respondent. In 1934, James left the British Labour Party which he had joined

in solidarity with Cipriani’s TWA and joined the tiny British Trotskyist move-

ment, in particular the section of it inside the Independent Labour Party

(ILP), the Marxist Group.

James orientated to Trotskyism largely through his own critical indepen-

dent reading, but it was while searching out Marxist classics in London in

1933 that he happened to visit a bookshop on 68 Red Lion Street, Lahr,

owned by an anarchist from Germany, Charlie Lahr. Lahr was, accord-

ing to David Goodway, ‘very probably the last’ in the line, ‘stretching

back to the late eighteenth-century’, of ‘great London radical booksellers-

cum-publishers’.13 During the 1930s, Jonathan Rose argues, his bookshop

was ‘a mecca for down and out Nietzscheans and scruffy poets’.14 James

remembers Lahr soon ‘got interested in what I was doing and would put

aside a book or pamphlet for me he knew or thought would interest me’.15

The two soon formed what James describes as ‘a curious partnership’, with

Lahr helping James become acquainted with knowledge of the reactionary

nature of individual Labour leaders and British trade union bureaucrats.

In particular, James learned much about contemporary Germany and Hitler’s

rise to power.16

C.L.R. James’s reading of Peter Kropotkin

One might surmise that it was Lahr who also recommended James read

the great anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s masterful The Great French Revolution

(1909), a pioneering volume of ‘history-from-below’ that was admired by

Lenin and Trotsky, as part of his ongoing research on the Haitian Revo-

lution.17 In 1938, in his majestic classic The Black Jacobins, James praised

Kropotkin for having a ‘more instinctive understanding of revolution than

any well-known book’ on the subject of the French Revolution.18 For

Kropotkin, the ‘true fount and origin of the Revolution’ was ‘the people’s

readiness to take up arms’, noting that it was this that previous ‘historians

of the Revolution had not done justice – the justice owed to it by the his-

tory of civilisation’.19 In particular, Kropotkin’s stress on the revolutionary

violence of the peasantry in The Great French Revolution seems to have inﬂu-

enced James when he came to understanding and analysing the liberation

struggle of the enslaved black masses of French colonial Saint Domingue.

For Kropokin, ‘the insurrection of the peasants for the abolition of the feu-

dal rights and the recovery of the communal lands’ in the summer of 1789

was, ‘the very essence, the foundation of the great Revolution’ and ‘the

great rising of the rural districts’, the jacquerie, which ‘lasted ﬁve years, was

what enabled the Revolution to accomplish the immense work of demolition

which we owe to it’.20

When James described the open revolt and indeed insurrection on the

North Plain in Saint Domingue in August 1791, when the enslaved blacks

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Christian Høgsbjerg 147

‘neglected and ignored by all the politicians of every brand and persua-

sion’ had ‘organised on their own and struck for freedom at last’ he

effectively brought out the way in which their uprising resembled the

contemporaneous struggles of the French peasantry:

The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants every-

where, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors ...the slaves

destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie...they were seek-

ing their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they

knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was

because they had suffered much.21

By 1803, after 12 years of ﬁghting for national independence and social lib-

eration, James noted that the black rebel slave army had been forced to burn

Saint Domingue ‘ﬂat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert’:

Why do you burn everything? asked a French ofﬁcer of a prisoner.

We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right

to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist.22

If other writers, above all Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution,had

helped James understand the way in which the enslaved blacks acted like a

‘proto-proletariat’ during the Haitian Revolution, then Kropotkin’s The Great

French Revolution must have been critical to helping James understand the

way in which the rebellious slave army acted like a ‘proto-peasantry’.23

Another way in which James seems to have been inﬂuenced by Kropotkin

was through his discussion of events in revolutionary France itself, particu-

larly the ‘Communism’ in Paris between March 1793 and July 1794.24 ‘In the

streets of Paris, Jacques Varlet and Roux were preaching Communism, not in

production but in distribution, a natural reaction to the proﬁteering of the

new bourgeoisie’, a comment that essentially summarises Kropotkin’s more

detailed discussion of ‘the Communist movement’ in The Great French Rev-

olution.25 It is possible that James’s admiration and respect for Kropotkin’s

great work may have encouraged later assessments of his ‘instinctive’ anar-

chism. In 1963, in the revised edition of The Black Jacobins, James would

certainly continue to praise ‘Kropotkin’s brief history of over ﬁfty years ago’

as ‘the best general book in English [on the French Revolution] ...Kropotkin

thought the Revolution was a wonderful event and was neither afraid nor

embarrassed to say so’.26

C.L.R. James, anarchists in Britain and the Spanish Civil War

While James’s sense of fair play and critical thinking abilities led him to

read widely and absorb a lot of different ideas, his political thought was also

profoundly affected by the whole environment of far-Left politics in 1930s

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148 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

Britain, and the eclectic milieu around the ILP, with its various traditions

including Council Communism and diverse other forms of non-Leninist

socialisms.27 Moreover, fast emerging as the intellectual driving force of

British Trotskyism during the 1930s, James was on reasonably good terms

with one of the leading anarchists in Britain during this period, as well

as anti-Stalinist communist activists like the veteran Guy Aldred who he

met in Glasgow.28 Almost by accident, James had crossed paths with Vernon

Richards, a young anarchist from Italy who was editor of Spain and the World,

the main British anarchist paper of the day (previously and subsequently

called Freedom) which Richards had launched in London in late 1936 in soli-

darity with the eruption of the Spanish Revolution while only 21 years old.29

As the editor of the Trotskyist journal Fight (launched in October 1936),

James met Richards on one of his regular visits to the printers at Narod Press

in 129/131 Bedford Street, Whitechapel, which was run by a team of Jewish

apprentices under ‘Papa Naroditsky’ and his three sons. As Richards remem-

bered, ‘apart from the boys themselves ...one had the opportunity to meet

other editors supervising their journals’, including ‘the gentle-speaking West

Indian marxist C.L.R James who was producing his Fight! No punch-ups,

political or otherwise.’30

James would on occasion rally to the side of the British anarchist move-

ment against the ILP and Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in Fight.

For example, in November 1937, James took issue with leading ILP ﬁgure

Fenner Brockway in Fight for forbidding ILP speakers to stand on the anar-

chist platform during the May Day celebrations in Britain that year in order

to appease the CPGB In the context of the Spanish Civil War then rag-

ing, James noted that in Spain ‘the ILP, the Trotskyists and the Anarchists,

are in their different ways, on one side of the barricade and the Stalinists

on the other’; reﬂecting on the British context he asked rhetorically of

Brockway, ‘will he propose [a] united front, actively in defence of the Spanish

Revolution, between the ILP, the Trotskyists and the Anarchists?’31

Richards’s publication Spain and the World suggests something about the

wider connection between anarchists and the tiny Pan-Africanist movement

in Britain in the 1930s. In May 1937, James with his compatriot and boy-

hood friend, George Padmore, launched the International African Service

Bureau (IASB) in London, and the title at least of the IASB’s 1937 newslet-

ter, Africa and the World, seems a little inspired by Spain and the World.

The presence among the patrons of the IASB of the ILP afﬁliated social-

ist free-thinker F.A. Ridley, who called for an ‘anarcho-marxist alliance’

in 1938, is perhaps signiﬁcant.32 There are tantalising glimpses in Ethel

Mannin’s satirical 1945 novel Comrade O’ Comrade of one key Pan-Africanist

in Britain during this period, the Barbadian veteran anti-colonialist and

organiser of the Colonial Seamen’s Association – Chris Braithwaite – better

known under his pseudonym ‘Chris Jones’ – speaking alongside Emma

Goldman on meetings on the Spanish Revolution in London during this

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Christian Høgsbjerg 149

period.33 Such contacts and meetings meant George Padmore would later

recall the period ‘immediately before the outbreak of the Second World

War’ as ‘one of the most stimulating and constructive in the history of Pan-

Africanism’, noting that black intellectuals made what he called a ‘detailed

and systematic study of European political theories and systems’ including

anarchism.34

Together with the Spanish Civil War the Moscow Trials were of importance

in explaining James’s later break with orthodox Trotskyism. In exposing the

counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism, both events led James to question

Trotsky’s characterisation of the Soviet Union. The same events were also to

be critical for the political evolution of James’s key intellectual collaborator

during the 1940s, Raya Dunayevskaya. As Peter Hudis has suggested, the

Spanish Civil War in particular:

...presented revolutionaries with what Dunayevskaya was later to call the

‘absolute contradiction’ of our age – the emergence of counter-revolution

from within revolution. It was not only the Stalinists, however, whose

role was compromised by these events. For the various anti-Stalinist

tendencies, be they Trotskyist, anarchist or independent, failed to suc-

cessfully combat the new phenomenon of counter-revolution emerging

from within revolution.35

In response to the apparent intellectual and political failure to have fully pre-

pared for the new reality of Stalinist counter-revolutionary terror in Spain,

Dunayevskaya, Trotsky’s Russian language secretary from 1937–1938, later

recalled how she ﬁrst became critical of the limitations of Trotsky’s analysis

of the Soviet Union as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ during this tumul-

tuous period. ‘Out of the Spanish Civil War there emerged a new kind of

revolutionary who posed questions, not only against Stalinism, but against

Trotskyism, indeed against all established Marxisms.’36

James similarly began to ask questions of Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet

Union in The Revolution Betrayed, a work which Trotsky had completed

in June 1936 and so before the Moscow Trials and the Stalinist suppres-

sion of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Uniﬁcation (POUM)and anarchists

in Barcelona. Indeed, by the time James wrote his pioneering anti-Stalinist

Marxist history of ‘the rise and fall of the Communist International’, World

Revolution, published in April 1937, while still formally accepting Trotsky’s

analysis he was already showing an openness to those arguing that the Soviet

Union had become a state capitalist society. According to Special Branch

operatives, when James spoke in London in defence of Trotsky after the

ﬁrst Moscow Trial on 9 September 1936, ‘he compared the conditions of the

British and Russian workers, adding that a form of capitalism was creeping

into the Soviet State’.37 In the course of researching World Revolution,James

read the works of a number of people who felt the Soviet Union was now

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150 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

state-capitalist including two former leading German Communists, Arthur

Rosenberg and Karl Korsch – the latter James apparently met in 1936.38

Another inﬂuence was the former leading French Communist Boris

Souvarine. Born Boris Liefschitz in 1885 in Kiev, Souvarine, who clearly had

some sort of anarchist sympathies early on as he took his name from the

Russian anarchist bomb-planter in Emile Zola’s Germinal – had been a found-

ing member of the French Communist Party. Having known Trotsky since

meeting him in Paris during the Great War, Souvarine had spoken bravely

against Stalin in Moscow. Though Trotsky had high hopes of Souvarine form-

ing a viable French Trotskyist movement, since 1929, Souvarine had broken

off good relations with Trotsky, attacking Leninism and describing the Soviet

Union as ‘state capitalist’. Souvarine’s 1935 biography of Stalin maintained

that ‘the Federation of Socialist Soviet Republics, the very name a fourfold

contradiction of the reality, has long ago ceased to exist’, and ‘Soviet state

capitalism’, ‘so-called Soviet society’ rests ‘on its own method of exploita-

tion of man by man’.39 James seems to have met up with Souvarine in Paris

in 1938 and would translate his Staline into English in 1939, generously

describing it as ‘a book with an anarchist bias against the dictatorship of the

proletariat but irreproachably documented, very fair, and full of insight’.40

Indeed, while James himself in World Revolution remained loyal to Trotsky’s

characterisation of the Soviet Union in The Revolution Betrayed,healsopre-

sented much evidence which suggested that Stalinist Russia could not in any

way be described as a ‘workers’ state’, even a ‘degenerated’ one. As James

noted, ‘the ﬁction of workers’ control, after 20 years of the revolution, is

dead. But the bureaucracy fears the proletariat. It knows, none better, the

temper of the people it so mercilessly cheats and exploits.’41 For Trotsky,

the bureaucracy was a brutal oppressor, but was not actually exploiting the

working class.42 Yet for James, the ﬁrst Five Year Plan meant that ‘the rem-

nants of workers control were wiped away’.43 ‘The Russian proletariat, after

its Herculean efforts, seems to have exchanged one set of masters for another,

while the very basis of the proletarian state is being undermined beneath

its feet.’ James declared that the methods of Stalin’s industrialisation drive

seemed to be just ‘discovering what the capitalists knew hundreds of years

ago ...where will all this end?’44

Such ideas were in the air on the far-Left during the 1930s, and so James’s

criticisms, of the idea that state ownership of the means of production nec-

essarily meant socialism, were not unique.45 After writing World Revolution,

for example, James would in 1937 write an introduction for Red Spanish Note-

book, an eyewitness account of revolutionary Spain through the eyes of two

surrealist poets who had gone to ﬁght for the POUM, Mary Low and the

Cuban Trotskyist Juan Breá. Breá had concluded by pondering the motives

of the Soviet Union with respect to revolutionary Spain, noting ‘let us sup-

pose that Russia is no longer a proletarian state but is making her ﬁrst steps

towards capitalism’.46 One other witness to Stalinist counter-revolution in

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Christian Høgsbjerg 151

Spain was George Orwell, who seems to have met up with James in the

summer of 1937 after returning to Britain and who once described World

Revolution as a ‘very able book’. In his 1938 classic work of revolutionary jour-

nalism, Homage to Catalonia, Orwell described the ‘socialism in one country’

being built in Russia by Stalin as little more than ‘a planned state-capitalism

with the grab-motive left intact’.47

On 3 September 1938, at the founding conference of the Fourth Interna-

tional, James intervened forcefully in the debate challenging the orthodox

position that Trotskyists should call for the defence of the USSR in case of

war.48 A month later, James would travel to North America, meet Trotsky

himself for discussions on the strategy and tactics of the black liberation

struggle in the USA, and steadily establish himself as an original and creative

thinker inside the US Trotskyist movement during the 1940s.49 Trotsky’s

1940 comment on James as a ‘bohemian freelancer’ therefore has to be

seen in the context of the split in US Trotskyism, and the position James

took in this split which saw him side against Trotsky and with the minority

around Max Shachtman – rather than as a comment by Trotsky on James’s

developing ideas on the class nature of the Soviet Union. Indeed, James’s

subsequent embrace and development of the theory of state capitalism after

Trotsky’s death would steadily enable him and others to help clarify Marx’s

meaning of socialism itself as the self-emancipation of the working class

anew, where state ownership of the means of production was not recognised

as any kind of end in itself, to be equated with ‘socialism’, but merely a

means for achieving the end goal of the emancipation of the working class

through the creation of what Lenin in The State and Revolution had called the

‘Commune-State’.50

James’s reading of Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution and fraternal

relationship with such anarchists as Charlie Lahr and Vernon Richards in

Britain should not then detract from the fundamental importance of the

towering revolutionary ﬁgure of Leon Trotsky and Trotskyism for James dur-

ing the 1930s in shaping and informing his entire world view. Any criticisms

of Trotskyism that James had that may have been informed in part by anar-

chism were not going to lead him to fundamentally break with Marxist ways

of thinking. After exploring some of the ways in which James politically

evolved from parliamentary socialism to a politics based on the revolution-

ary democratic tradition of ‘socialism from below’ during the 1930s, we shall

now examine how his later intellectual development in the United States

from 1938 to 1953 would come to inﬂuence one currently inﬂuential strand

of autonomist political theory.

The evolution of C.L.R. James’s mature Marxism

In Beyond a Boundary, James’s 1963 semi-autobiographical classic cultural his-

tory of cricket in its colonial context, he had this to say when he looked

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152 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

back at his political evolution after arriving from Trinidad to encounter a

Europe devastated by the First World War and the economic slump and now

witnessing the alarming rise of fascism:

Fiction-writing drained out of me and was replaced by politics. I became

a Marxist, a Trotskyist. I published large books and small articles on

these and other kindred subjects. I wrote and spoke. Like many others,

I expected war, and during or after the war social revolution. In 1938 a

lecture tour took me to the United States and I stayed there 15 years.

The war came. It did not bring soviets and proletarian power. Instead the

bureaucratic-totalitarian monster grew stronger and spread. As early as

1941 I had begun to question the premises of Trotskyism. It took nearly a

decade of incessant labour and collaboration to break with it and reorgan-

ise my marxist ideas to cope with the post-war world. That was a matter

of doctrine, of history, of economics and politics.51

To attempt to do justice to this ‘reorganisation’ of Marxism by James is

impossible here, but a few words on its most crucial aspects is essential.

Using his Trotskyist pseudonym, ‘J.R. Johnson’, James, together with Raya

Dunayevskaya, or ‘Freddie Forest’ as she was known, and Grace Lee Boggs

and others, became known collectively as the ‘Johnson-Forest Tendency’

inside 1940s US Trotskyism. It is noteworthy that during the Second World

War and its aftermath they drew inspiration from Lenin’s attempts to come

to terms with the disaster that had engulfed the working class movement

during the First World War. So for example, just as the exiled Lenin in 1914

turned in despair to the library and a serious study of hegelian dialectics to

produce his ‘Philosophical Notebooks’, so James, Dunayevskaya and Lee in

their search to ﬁnd a philosophy of revolution now also spent hours engaged

in serious study of the German philosopher. One product of this was James’s

1948 work Notes on Dialectics (subtitled Hegel, Marx, Lenin).

Though a systematic exposition is impossible, it is vital to have some sense

of how the Johnson-Forest Tendency attempted to, in James’s own words

‘work through Leninism’ in order to try to come to terms with the crisis

that had overcome not just Marxism but the wider working class movement

in a period dominated by Stalinism and Fascism.52 This ‘working through’

Leninism necessitated a break with the theory and practice of ‘orthodox

Trotskyism’, a movement James had been committed to since becoming an

organised revolutionary in 1934. However, this break was conceived as a

conscious attempt to not only return to classical Marxism as understood by

Marx and Lenin – but also to develop that tradition so it ﬁtted with the new

realities of the post-War world. It was to make, as James put it grandly, ‘our

own leap from the heights of Leninism’.53

For Trotsky the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 represented

the solution to what he called the historic ‘crisis of revolutionary leadership’

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Christian Høgsbjerg 153

gripping the ofﬁcial political organisations of the working class movement.

Against this perspective, the Johnson-Forest Tendency during the 1940s felt

the critical crisis of the age was instead what they called the ‘crisis of the self-

mobilisation of the proletariat’, and so argued for a greater stress and focus

on what James called ‘free creative activity’ and ‘disciplined spontaneity’,

the self-activity of the working class itself autonomous of ofﬁcial political

parties and trade union bureaucracies.54

Yet James, writing while still a member of the ofﬁcial Trotskyist movement,

still felt in an important sense that the struggle to build a Fourth Interna-

tional amid a period of world-historic defeats for the international working

class movement had at least preserved the honour and the tradition of rev-

olutionary communism associated with Marx and Lenin. The new-found

stress on the self-activity of the working class in the work of the Johnson-

Forest Tendency, James insisted, had not come from anarchism. As James put

it in Notes on Dialectics,

...we have arrived, are arriving at Marxist ideas for our time out of

Trotskyism. We would not come out of Stalinism, or social democracy,

or anarchism. Despite every blunder, and we have not spared them,

Trotskyism was and remains in the truly dialectical sense, the only the-

oretical revolutionary current since Leninism ... we came from there and

could have only come from there.55

However, James and the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s ‘Marxist ideas for our

time’, developed inside 1940s US Trotskyism, would ultimately come to

inﬂuence the origins of a new and different current of political thought to

either anarchism or Marxism in its classical forms – autonomism. As Steve

Wright suggests, ‘the core premises of autonomist Marxism were ﬁrst devel-

oped in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s’ when militants ﬁrst sought to

confront Marx’s Capital with ‘the real study of a real factory’ in 1960s Italy,

beginning with Romano Alquati’s pioneering 1961 ‘Report of the new forces’

at F.I.A.T. However, as Wright and others including Harry Cleaver have

noted, the intellectual origins of such a research project and ‘autonomist

Marxism’ in general lie outside Italy and date back to before the 1960s.56

During the momentous year of 1956 and for two years subsequently,

for example, Daniel Mothé, a member of the French revolutionary group

Socialisme ou Barbarie around Cornelius Castoriadis and a milling machine

operator at the Renault Billancourt vehicle factory, kept a diary. This was

subsequently published as Journal d’un Ouvrier, 1956–58, and translated into

Italian in 1960. Even earlier, in 1954, Danilo Montaldi, a ‘dissident Marxist’

sociologist had published in Battaglia Communista a translation of a 1947

work entitled The American Worker by a member of the Johnson-Forest Ten-

dency Phil Singer (who used the pseudonym Paul Romano). This work had

ﬁrst been translated into French by the comrades of Socialisme ou Barbarie

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154 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

who published it in their journal in parts from 1949 onwards, before being

translated from the French by Montaldi.57 It therefore seems important to

explore in detail the circumstances in which Phil Singer’s highly inﬂuential

work came to be written.

C.L.R. James and the making of The American Worker

Phil Singer was an American car worker at a General Motors plant who in his

late twenties had kept a diary, which, with the help of Grace Lee Boggs, he

had written up in order to portray ‘Life in the Factory’, ‘what the workers are

thinking and doing while actually at work on the bench or on the line’.58 For

Singer, most signiﬁcant was his recording of not simply the degrading expe-

rience of factory work but also the everyday attempts by workers to resist

at the point of production through struggles for dignity and a meaningful

existence:

This pamphlet is directed to the rank and ﬁle worker and its intention is

to express those innermost thoughts which the worker rarely talks about

even to his fellow workers. In keeping a diary, so to speak, of the day

to day reactions to factory life, I hoped to uncover the reasons for the

workers deep dissatisfaction which has reached a peak in recent years and

has expressed itself in the latest strikes and spontaneous walkouts.59

The contribution made by Singer himself to the making of The American

Worker , was then clearly profound – yet it would be mistaken to assume

this was not essentially also a ‘collective work’ of the Johnson-Forest Ten-

dency, with James himself playing a particularly critical role. As Grace Lee

Boggs, who under her pseudonym Ria Stone wrote a lengthy piece of com-

mentary entitled ‘The Reconstruction of Society’ as an afterword to Singer’s

commentary in The American Worker, recalled:

...because CLR could not be publicly active, we acted as his transmis-

sion belt to the larger American community ...one of CLR’s great gifts

was that he could detect the special abilities and interests of individu-

als and encourage them to use these to enrich the movement and at the

same time enlarge themselves .... Phil Singer, a young GM worker, was

always talking about the frustrations of the rank-and-ﬁle worker in the

plant. CLR proposed that he keep a journal of his experiences. These were

subsequently published in The American Worker.60

In a sense this does not sound that original, as attempting to understand

society from the standpoint of working class experience at the point of pro-

duction had, ever since Marx’s own Workers Inquiry of 1880 if not before,

at least been nominally at the heart of classical Marxism. A few months

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Christian Høgsbjerg 155

after launching Pravda in 1912, for example, Lenin noted that ‘the chron-

icle of workers’ life is only just beginning to develop into a permanent

feature of Pravda ...the workers’ newspaper is a workers’ forum. Before the

whole of Russia the workers should raise here, one after another, the various

questions of workers’ life in general and of working-class democracy in par-

ticular.’ Though the repressive conditions of Tsarist Russia meant Lenin’s

Pravda only lasted for a couple of years at a time of rising class struggle

(1912–1914), one study of the paper by Tony Cliff noted that over 11,000

letters and items of correspondence from workers were published in a single

year, or about 35 items per day.61 As James had noted in his discussion of

‘Lenin and Socialism’ back in 1937 in World Revolution:

The creative capacity of the masses – he [Lenin] believed in it as no other

leader of the workers ever did .... The Soviet system based on the masses

in the factories was to organise this creativeness not only for purpose of

government but also for production, linking the two closer and closer

together until ultimately the all-embracing nature of production by the

whole of society rendered the State superﬂuous.62

Indeed, the British Trotskyist journal Fight, which James had edited in the

1930s, had carried a regular series entitled ‘On the Job’ in 1937, featur-

ing, for example, ‘The Building Worker’ by a young member of the Marxist

Group who was a carpenter, Arthur Alexander Ballard, and then ‘From the

Engineer’s Bench’ by a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union.63

Trotsky himself in 1939 famously criticised the US Trotskyist paper, Socialist

Appeal, on the grounds that ‘[it] is a paper for the workers’ and not a workers’

paper .... You do not hear at all how the workers live, ﬁght, clash with the

police or drink whisky ...the task is not to make a paper through the joint

forces of a skilled editorial board but to encourage the workers to speak for

themselves.’64

Yet if James’s encouraging of a fellow member of the Johnson-Forest Ten-

dency to keep a diary detailing his experience at work was then not so

original – the group’s distinctive perspectives, particularly that of a shift

towards ‘state capitalism’ from the 1930s on not simply in Russia but inter-

nationally, profoundly shaped what became The American Worker. As the

leaders of the Johnson-Forest Tendency put it themselves in 1947:

...the Russian question is only a part of the world crisis. The decisive

stage of economic development is statiﬁcation of production. Statiﬁcation

of production is not a phrase or a description. It marks the capitulation

of anarchic capitalist society to the planning of the invading socialist

society. The planning, however, torn by class contradictions, repeats the

fundamental features of capitalist antagonisms in their most barbarous

form. Statiﬁcation carries in itself the most profound social awareness of

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156 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

the proletariat, and its social structure repeatedly propels the proletariat

on the road to the complete transformation of society .... The barbarism

of capitalism was concretely demonstrated in Russia. But it was the

American proletariat which concretised for us the necessarily abstract

conception of the creative power of the proletariat in industry as a force

for the social regeneration of society. The work of American industrial

psychologists and the observations of proletarian comrades whom we had

developed opened this door to us. The Johnson-Forest Tendency will soon

publish a pamphlet by Phil Romano and Ria Stone which will deal fully

with this question from both a practical and a theoretical point of view.65

The American Worker then was about reafﬁrming and re-emphasising

the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s ‘conception of the creative power of the

proletariat in industry as a force for the social regeneration of society’ at

a time when ‘socialism’ had come to be seen merely as state ownership

without any accompanying revolutionary democracy or workers’ control.66

In particular, James’s individual contribution to developing this conception

should be noted. As the American Trotskyist Stanley Weir recalled:

...James was the ﬁrst and only leader in the entire Trotskyist movement,

from which I heard discussion of the special form of workers’ control

which develops in every workplace naturally and informally. He knew of

the existence of informal cultures and that they were the basis from which

to broach the entire question of workers’ control ...For me, he introduced

the ideas which demonstrated the value of what is done socially from

below on the job to get out production and to survive.67

C.L.R. James, The American Worker and Italian workerism

We can now tentatively assess the impact of the Johnson-Forest Tendency

as expressed through The American Worker on Italian workerism, some-

thing which as we have seen was possible thanks in no small part to the

translations of Danilo Montaldi.68 As Montaldi noted, The American Worker

expressed:

...with great force and profundity, the idea – practically forgotten by the

marxist movement after the publication of Capital Volume 1 – that before

being the adherent of a party, a militant of the revolution or the sub-

ject of a future socialist power, the worker is a being who lives above

all in capitalist production and the factory; and that it is in production

that the revolt against exploitation, the capacity to construct a superior

type of society, along with class solidarity of other workers and hatred for

exploitation and exploiters – both the classic bosses of yesterday and the

impersonal bureaucrats of today and tomorrow – are formed.69

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Christian Høgsbjerg 157

Moreover, for those on the anti-Stalinist far-Left in France and especially

Italy during the 1950s, The American Worker was even more remarkable given

the anti-Americanism of the Communist-dominated ofﬁcial Left in the con-

text of the Cold War. As Ferrucio Gambino, a sociologist from the University

of Padua and co-founder of two 1960s Italian workerist journals Quaderni

Rossi (Red Notebooks), and Potero Operaio (Workers Power) recalls, after the

brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Russian tanks:

...tiny groups and individuals in Southern Europe discovered and read

‘the American comrades’ – two words that at long last it was possible

to put together again – ‘the American comrades’ who contributed to

Socialisme ou Barbarie ...The conditions of the working class looked strik-

ingly similar throughout the so-called First World – and, we argued at that

time, it could not be dissimilar in the Second World. State capitalism was

a living category whereby we could relate in solidarity to the people who

were bearing the brunt of the opposition to ‘actuated socialism’.70

In the 1960s, Gambino and another historian of US labour, Bruno Cartosio

from Milan – would eventually establish relations with James and his loyal

disciple Martin Glaberman, and the publishing of James himself into Italian

began with The Black Jacobins in 1968 – and continued subsequently.71 Links

were established with the Jamesians in Detroit at the heart of the League

of Revolutionary Black Workers while the translation of other US Jamesians

followed in the 1970s.72 As Cleaver noted in 1979, ‘works by C.L.R. James,

James Boggs, George Rawick, and Martin Glaberman, among others, have

been translated into Italian and probably received wider circulation and

discussion in Italy than in the United States’.73

Overall, though it has not been possible here to examine James’s inﬂu-

ence on Italian autonomism more fully, it might still be possible to draw

a few conclusions. In one sense it is a pity that after helping to provide a

critical focus on the self-activity of the working class at the point of pro-

duction, a stress on the possibilities which ﬂowed from wildcat strikes and

other unofﬁcial industrial action, that more of James’s writings were not

translated into Italian during the 1960s. It is possible that they might have

ensured less of a subsequent retreat from revolutionary Marxism towards an

ultimately elitist substitution of the actions of a minority for the mass action

of the working class among many in the Italian autonomists. From joining

the Trotskyist movement in 1934 up until his death in 1989, James – unlike

say some of the current ‘thought leaders’ of autonomism such as Michael

Hardt and Antonio Negri – never lost sight of either the central importance

of working class struggle or the need for some sort of revolutionary Marxist

organisation.74 Moreover, as Chamsy El-Ojeili has noted, compared to the

majority of early Italian workerist theorists who failed adequately to con-

sider the lives of workers outside of the purely economic battles at the point

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158 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

of production, James was more ‘attentive to the wider cultural aspects of

such an investigation of proletarian working life’.75

However, that said, James’s own reiﬁcation of spontaneity, and own grad-

ual abandonment of the rich classical Bolshevik legacy of strategy and

tactics, after his 1951 break with ofﬁcial Trotskyism, were not without conse-

quences of their own. They meant that his subsequent groups of supporters,

like even the best elements of the Italian autonomists, were unable to ever

really satisfactorily develop a new form of revolutionary organisation able

to adequately relate to the key insight of ‘working class autonomy’.76 It is

possible that this was because that insight in itself, without an adequate

material understanding of the wider economic and political context outside

the factory, and the wider, uneven consciousness among the working class

where forms of reformist politics are inevitably almost always dominant –

even inside the most militant factory itself – can only reveal so much. Yet

though James, the ‘bohemian freelancer’, ultimately failed to make his great

leap forward ‘from the heights of Leninism’, his creative, revolutionary and

democratic ‘dissident Marxism’ nonetheless deserves critical appreciation

and study by anti-capitalist scholars and activists today.

Conclusion

When one looks back over the last 20 years to those men who are most far

sighted, who ﬁrst began to tease out the muddle of ideology in our times,

who were at the same time Marxist with a hard theoretical basis, and close

students of society, humanists with a tremendous response to and under-

standing of human culture, Comrade James is one of the ﬁrst one thinks of.

So spoke E.P. Thompson in 1967 at a ‘National Conference on Workers

Control and Industrial Democracy’, after ‘Comrade James’ had introduced

himself to the gathered assembly at Coventry in a contribution from the

ﬂoor.77 Of course, Thompson could arguably have gone further and dated

James’s contribution to ‘teasing out the muddle of ideology in our times’

back not just 20 years to 1947 but 30 years, from the publication in 1937

of James’s history of the ‘rise and fall of the Communist International’,

World Revolution, a pioneering critique of Stalin’s ideology of ‘Socialism

in One Country’ and its consequences for the international working class

movement.

Nevertheless, Thompson’s eloquent 1967 tribute and acknowledgement

of the ‘hard theoretical basis’ of James’s Marxism arguably serves as a more

accurate remembrance than his later apparent suggestion of James’s ‘instinc-

tive, unarticulated anarchism’. This chapter has tried to demonstrate not

simply why this is the case but also some of the complexities involved in

any discussion of James’s relationship to anarchism. While acknowledg-

ing that James’s reading of Kropotkin and meeting individual anarchists

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Christian Høgsbjerg 159

made an impact on his early political thought, the ‘Marxism for our time’

developed by James and his co-thinkers in the Johnson-Forest Tendency dur-

ing the 1940s was fundamentally shaped within the theoretical parameters

of Marxism in order to overcome the limitations of orthodox Trotskyism in

facing up to the new realities of the post-War world. The Johnson-Forest

Tendency’s stress on the changing nature of the worker’s experience of

exploitation and revolt at the point of capitalist production both anticipated

and, through ‘the observations of proletarian comrades’ such as Phil Singer

in The American Worker, also helped shape the ideas driving Italian workerism

in the 1960s and 1970s.

James’s distinctive stress on the ‘free creative activity’ and ‘disciplined

spontaneity’ of the working class has often led commentators to detect an

anarchist bent to his political thought. Paul Berman felt that ‘anyone who

has read Dolgoff’s or Lehning’s editions of Bakunin’s writings will recognise a

Bakuninist resonance to James’s anti-state proletarianism’, which was in full

ﬂow in for example the 1958 co-written work Facing Reality.78 A Bakuninist

resonance to James’s mature political thought cannot be discounted, and

here it is worth recalling that James himself in 1948 regarded Bakunin as ‘the

anarchist who believes in the spontaneous uprising of all the people to estab-

lish socialism forthwith’.79 However, despite the assertions of E. San Juan Jr.,

who has suggested that ‘James’s belief in permanent world revolution ulti-

mately committed him to a radical-popular democracy almost anarchic and

utopian in temper and motivation’, James’s vision of revolutionary socialism

was always shaped more by Marxism than any strand of anarchic or utopian

thinking.80 Whatever the contribution of the early anarchist thinkers to the

struggle for socialism, for James, as he put it in Notes on Dialectics,whatwas

of critical importance was that Marx ‘sees further’ than the likes of Bakunin,

‘an aristocrat’, and Proudhon, ‘the petty-bourgeois economist of a capital-

ism controlled by the state’. ‘He [Marx] settles down to a patient systematic

preparation for the fusion of the economic and political struggles of the

workers, the integration of day-to-day and revolutionary struggles. He will

give the formless labour movement form’.81

Finally, E.P.Thompson’s thoughts on the great revolutionary socialist

William Morris may make for one ﬁtting conclusion, for they are words that

seem also applicable to C.L.R. James, perhaps the ‘William Morris of the

Twentieth Century’. As Thompson noted, ‘we have to make up our minds

about William Morris’:

Either he was an eccentric, isolated ﬁgure, personally admirable, but

whose major thought was wrong or irrelevant and long left behind by

events. This could be so ...on the other hand, it may be that Morris was

a major intellectual ﬁgure [who] may be assimilated to Marxism only in

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160 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

the course of a process of self-criticism and re-ordering within Marxism

itself.82

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to David Goodway for some of the material quoted in this

chapter, while I would also like to thank Ian Birchall, David Howell and

the three anonymous reviewers of this piece in draft for their constructive,

critical comments.

Notes

1. Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pathﬁnder Press, 1976),

p. 164.

2. P. Berman, ‘Facing Reality’, in Paul Buhle (ed.), C.L.R. James: His Life and Work

(London: Allison & Busby, 1986), p. 211. Berman’s piece focuses on James’s 1958

work Facing Reality, co-written with Cornelius Castoriadis and Grace Lee Boggs, a

work which politically shares much common ground with Council Communism.

3. J.D. Young, ‘C.L.R. James’, Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society, 22 (1987),

pp. 38–39. See also J.D. Young, The World of C.L.R. James: His Unfragmented Vision

(Glasgow: Clydeside Press, 1999).

4. On Robin Blackburn’s obituary in the Independent of 8 June 1989, see Ian Birchall’s

letter in Revolutionary History, 2:3 (1989), online at ‘http://www.marxists.org/

history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol2/no3/birchall.html’. For Thompson’s obituary,

see F. Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New

Society (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), p. 26.

5. C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (London: Allison & Busby,

1980), pp. 60–61, 197–199, 215. This was a document written strictly for his

supporters and not a work that was published in his name while a member

of the ofﬁcial Trotskyist movement – indeed it was not ﬁrst published in a

widely available format until 1980. In the co-written 1950 work State Capital-

ism and World Revolution, a work which was published while James and his

comrades were still in the ofﬁcial Trotskyist movement, anarchism was casually

included alongside liberalism, social democracy and Stalinism as an ideology of

‘counter-revolution within the revolution’. See C.L.R. James, R. Dunayevskaya

and G. Lee, State Capitalism and World Revolution (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986),

p. 132.

6. Berman, ‘Facing Reality’, p. 208.

7. See Christian Høgsbjerg, ‘C.L.R. James: The Revolutionary as Artist’, Interna-

tional Socialism, 112 (2006); and Hal Draper, The Two Souls of Socialism (London:

Bookmarks, 1996). For my brief critical discussion of two pieces of recent James-

scholarship, see Christian Høgsbjerg, ‘Remembering C.L.R. James, Forgetting

C.L.R. James’, Historical Materialism, 17:3 (2009), pp. 221–234

8. Paul Buhle, ‘Marxism in the USA’, in S. McLemee and P. Le Blanc (eds), C.L.R.

James and Revolutionary Marxism; Selected Writings of C.L.R. James, 1939–49 (New

Jersey: Humanity Books, 1994), pp. 55–56.

9. David Renton, Dissident Marxism: Past Voices for Present Times (London: Zed Books,

2004); David Renton, C.L.R. James; Cricket’s Philosopher King (London: Haus Books,

2007).

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Christian Høgsbjerg 161

10. C.L.R. James, ‘Michel Maxwell Philip: 1829–1888 [1931]’, in S.R. Cudjoe (ed.),

Michael Maxwell Philip; A Trinidad Patriot of the 19th Century (Wellesley: Calaloux,

1999), pp. 102–103.

11. Quoted in R.W. Sander, ‘Introduction: The Beacon and the Emergence of West

Indian Literature’, in B. Samaroo (ed.), The Beacon, Volumes I–IV, 1931–1939

(New York: Kraus, 1977), p. xvii.

12. The American labour historian George Rawick, who knew James from the 1960s,

thought him a ‘Victorian hippy’. Personal information from Marcus Rediker,

6 November 2007.

13. David Goodway, ‘Charles Lahr’, London Magazine (June/July 1977).

14. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (London: Yale

University Press, 2001), p. 303.

15. C.L.R. James, ‘Charlie Lahr’ [1975], unpublished manuscript in the possession of

David Goodway, pp. 2–3.

16. James, ‘Charlie Lahr’, pp. 3–4, 7. James’s chapter on the rise of the Nazis in

Germany in his 1937 pioneering anti-Stalinist Marxist history of ‘the rise and

fall of the Communist International’, World Revolution, would owe much to

Lahr’s inﬂuence and would depart somewhat from Trotsky’s analysis. See C.L.R.

James, ‘Discussions with Trotsky’, in C.L.R. James, At the Rendezvous of Victory;

Selected Writings, Vol. 3 (London: Allison & Busby, 1984); and also James, Notes on

Dialectics, pp. 38, 149.

17. As Alfred Rosmer recalled in his 1953 work Moscou sous Lenine, Lenin praised

The Great French Revolution as Kropotkin ‘well understood and demonstrated

the role of the people in that bourgeois revolution’. See A. Rosmer, Lenin’s

Moscow (London: Bookmarks, 1987), p. 117. Trotsky is also said to have preferred

Kropotkin’s history to Jaurès’. See Daniel Guérin, Le feu du sang: autobiographie

politique et charnelle (Paris: B. Grasset, 1977), p. 133. Thanks to Ian Birchall for

these references.

18. See C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins; Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo

Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938), p. 320.

19. It might be noted in passing that Kropotkin’s book was translated into Italian by

one Benito Mussolini, then a young revolutionary socialist – and, incidentally,

Kropotkin thought Mussolini’s translation ‘brilliant.’ Peter Kropotkin, The Great

French Revolution (Quebec: Black Rose Books, 1989), pp. xv, 15.

20. Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution, p. 95.

21. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins; Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo

Revolution (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 68–69, 71.

22. ibid., p. 291.

23. For further discussion of Trotsky’s critical inﬂuence on James here, see

C. Høgsbjerg, ‘C.L.R. James and the Black Jacobins’, International Socialism, 126

(2010), pp. 95–120

24. James, The Black Jacobins, p. 112.

25. ibid., p. 144; Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution, pp. 484–492.

26. See James, The Black Jacobins, p. 332. One should also note James’s respect for

and subsequent friendship with Daniel Guérin, and his unﬁnished attempt to

translate into English what in 1963 he described as Guérin’s ‘brilliant, orig-

inal and well documented iconoclastic study’ of the French Revolution, La

Lutte de classes sous la première république, bourgeois et ‘bras nus’, 1793–1797

(1946). For more on James and Guérin, see Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary,

p. 149.

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162 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

27. G. Cohen, The Failure of a Dream; The Independent Labour Party from Disafﬁliation

to Wo rld War II (London: Taurus Academic Studies, 2007), p. 111.

28. Young, The World of C.L.R. James, pp. 82–83.

29. David Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and

British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (Liverpool: Liverpool University

Press, 2006), p. 126.

30. Vernon Richards, ‘Printers We Have Known: 1936–1986’, in Freedom; Anarchist

Magazine,Centenary Edition, 47:9 (October, 1986). Freedom, the main British

anarchist publication, then called Spain and the World used the Narod Press

from October 1936–December 1936 and then from June 1937–September 1938.

On Richards, see Goodway, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow, p. 126.

31. ‘The Struggle for the Fourth International’, Fight, 1:11 (November, 1937).

32. F.A. Ridley, ‘Anarchism and Marxism’, Controversy, 2:23 (August 1938). On Ridley,

see R. Morrell, The Gentle Revolutionary; The Life and Work of Frank Ridley, Socialist

and Secularist (London: Freethought History Research Group, 2003).

33. E. Mannin, Comrade O Comrade; or, Low-Down on the Left (London: Jarrolds, 1947),

p. 118. On Braithwaite, see B. Bush, Imperialism, Race and Resistance; Africa and

Britain, 1919–1945 (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 222. On Mannin, see A. Croft,

‘Ethel Mannin: The Red Rose of Love and the Red Flower of Liberty’, in A. Ingram

and D. Patai (eds), Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals; British Women Writers, 1889–

1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), pp. 205–225.

34. George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa

(London: Dennis Dobson, 1956), p. 151. On 26 February 1943, Braithwaite was

billed to speak on ‘Colonial Blacks on the move’ at the anarchist-run Freedom

Press Rooms on 27 Belsize Road in London. See New Leader, 6 February 1943.

35. Raya Dunayevskaya, The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism (Chicago:

News and Letters, 1992), pp. x–xi.

36. ibid.

37. From the Special Branch ﬁle on C.L.R. James. The National Archives, London,

KV/2/1824/1z. ‘Stalin, he said, was striving for National Socialism, while Trotsky

was upholding International Socialism.’

38. C.L.R. James, World Revolution 1917–1936; The Rise and Fall of the Commu-

nist International (New Jersey: Humanity Books, 1994), pp. 168, 175, 178, 185.

A. Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism; From Marx to the First Five Years’ Plan

(London: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. viii, 236–237. James’s meeting

with Korsch is recorded by Kent Worcester, from an interview in 1981 with

American historian George Rawick. K. Worcester, C.L.R. James; A Political Biog-

raphy (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 30. On Korsch’s

analysis of state capitalism, see the discussion in M. van der Linden, Wes tern

Marxism and the Soviet Union; A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917

(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), pp. 41–44.

39. Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (London: Secker & Warburg,

1940), pp. 564, 570. See also C. Phelps, ‘C.L.R. James and the Theory of State Cap-

italism’, in N. Lichtenstein (ed.), American Capitalism; Social Thought and Political

Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

2006), p. 165.

40. James, World Revolution, p. 140, and Worcester, C.L.R. James, p. 45.

41. James, World Revolution, p. 371.

42. Trotsky felt the Stalinist bureaucracy was a ‘temporary’ phenomenon, and in

1939 argued ‘Might we not place ourselves in a ludicrous position if we ﬁxed

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Christian Høgsbjerg 163

to the Bonapartist oligarchy the nomenclature of a new ruling class just a few

years or even a few months prior to its inglorious downfall?’ See Alex Callinicos,

Trotskyism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 21.

43. James, World Revolution, p. 296.

44. ibid., pp. 17, 415.

45. The best general survey and discussion of state capitalist theories is Marcel van der

Linden’s Western Marxism and the Soviet Union. One former comrade of James’s

from the Marxist Group, Dr Ryan L. Worrall in 1939 would put forward a sub-

stantial and sophisticated state capitalist analysis in the ILP journal Left. Phelps,

‘C.L.R. James and the Theory of State Capitalism’, pp. 165–166, 331–332.

46. M. Low and J. Breá, Red Spanish Notebook; The First Six Months of the Revolution and

the Civil War (London: Secker & Warburg, 1937), pp. 254–255.

47. P. Davison (ed.), The Complete Works of George Orwell,Vol.11(London:Secker

& Warburg, 1998), p. 87. L. Cripps, C.L.R. James; Memories and Commentaries

(London: Cornwall Books, 1997), p. 21. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

(London: Penguin, 1989), p. 83. As Orwell noted of the Soviet Union in 1939,

‘Is it Socialism, or is it a peculiarly vicious form of state capitalism? All the polit-

ical controversies ...for two years past really circle round this question.’ Quoted

in J. Newsinger, ‘Destroying the Myth: George Orwell and Soviet Communism’,

in P. Flewers (ed.), George Orwell: Enigmatic Socialist (London: Socialist Platform,

2005), p. 138.

48. Socialist Platform, C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism; An Interview (London:

Socialist Platform, 1987), p. 10. See also I. Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast; Trotsky:

1929–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 419–421.

49. For my take on these discussions, see Christan Høgsbjerg, ‘The Prophet and Black

Power:TrotskyonraceintheUS’,International Socialism, 121 (2008), pp. 99–119

50. In 1956, James would borrow ‘Every cook can govern’, a phrase of Lenin’s, as

a title for a Correspondence pamphlet on ‘democracy in Ancient Greece’. Ian

Birchall has reminded me that it is worth remembering that Lenin’s own rela-

tions with anarchism were rather more complex than is often acknowledged.

The State and Revolution was widely accused of ‘anarchism’ when it was ﬁrst pub-

lished, and Lenin made considerable efforts to engage with visiting anarchists in

Moscow, particularly at the Second Congress of the Communist International in

the summer of 1920. See, for example, Rosmer, Lenin’s Moscow, pp. 51–65.

51. C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1969), p. 149.

52. James, Notes on Dialectics, p. 135.

53. ibid., 150.

54. James et al., State Capitalism and World Revolution, pp. 58–59. James, Notes on

Dialectics, p. 118.

55. James, Notes on Dialectics, p. 151.

56. Steve Wright, Storming Heaven; Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist

Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 1, 3.

57. ibid.; H. Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979),

pp. 50, 53, 183. On Mothé, see I. Birchall, ‘Nineteen Fifty-Six and the French

Left’, Revolutionary History, 9:3 (2006), pp. 160–181.

58. P. Singer, The American Worker (Part 1: Life in the Factory), online at http://www.

prole.info/texts/americanworker1.html, p. 1. (accessed 25 April 2011)

59. Singer, The American Worker,p.1.

60. Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 62.

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164 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

61. T. Cliff, Lenin: Building the Party, 1893–1914 (London: Bookmarks, 1994), p. 342.

62. James, World Revolution, p. 123.

63. Fight, 1:3 (January, 1937) and Fight, 1:4 (February, 1937).

64. Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism, p. 112.

65. J.R. Johnson, F. Forest and M. Harvey, Trotskyism in the United States, 1940–47:

Balance Sheet; The Workers Party and the Johnson-Forest Tendency (Detroit: Johnson-

Forest Tendency, 1947), pp. 8–9. See also Worcester, C.L.R. James, pp. 88–89,

Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary, p. 71; P. Buhle, C.L.R. James:The Artist as

Revolutionary (London: Verso, 1993), p. 70.

66. The work was heralded as being highly original at the time. As Castoriadis later

recalled, ‘for the ﬁrst time there was something that was absent totally from

the entire Marxist tradition and from Karl Marx himself except in the Economic

and Philosophical manuscripts of 1844: that is the acknowledgement that being a

worker does not mean that one is just working or that one is just being exploited.

Being a worker means living with workers, being in solidarity with other workers,

living in working class quarters of the city, having women who are either work-

ers themselves or, if they are not, their predicament is the same or even worse

than that of the men.’ C. Castoriadis, ‘C.L.R. James and the fate of Marxism’, in

S.R. Cudjoe and W.E. Cain (eds), C.L.R. James; His Intellectual Legacies (Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. 283.

67. S. Weir, ‘Revolutionary Artist’, in P. Buhle (ed.), C.L.R. James: His Life and Work

(London: Allison & Busby, 1986), pp. 183–184. It is a pity Weir never seems to

have had the chance to hear the Palestinian Trotskyist Tony Cliff, based in Britain,

as James was not quite so unique in this. See for example, Cliff’s discussion in The

Employers’ Offensive (1970) of how the ‘demand for workers’ control’ is ‘the most

important fact about modern industrial capitalism – for the “bloody-mindedness”

of workers, and the thousand and one ways in which they express their demand,

implicitly and explicitly, for control over their own lives, is the embryo of work-

ers’ power, of socialism.’ See T. Cliff, In the Thick of Workers’ Struggle: Selected

Writings, Vol. 2 (London: Bookmarks, 2002), p. 290.

68. ‘A young participant in the Resistance in Cremona, Montaldi became the bridge-

man between Socialisme ou Barbarie and its intercontintal ramiﬁcations on the

one hand and the Italian non-Stalinist groups on the left of the Italian CP and SP

on the other.’ See F. Gambino, ‘Only Connect’, in P. Buhle (ed.), C.L.R. James: His

Life and Work (London: Allison & Busby, 1986), p. 199.

69. Quoted in Wright, Storming Heaven, pp. 23–24.

70. Gambino, ‘Only Connect’, pp. 197–198.

71. M. Glaberman (ed.), Marxism for Our Times: C.L.R. James on Revolutionary Organisa-

tion (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), p. xxii. Paul Buhle, ‘Political

Styles of C.L.R. James: An Introduction’, in Paul Buhle (ed.), C.L.R. James: His

Life and Work (London: Allison & Busby, 1986), p. 26. Gambino was especially

inspired by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit – a Jamesian

group whose ﬁrst interview abroad was with Potere Operaio around the same

time as The Black Jacobins – which had inspired the League of Revolutionary Black

Workers – appeared in Italian. As Gambino recalled, ‘the interview of the League

[of Revolutionary Black Workers] in Potero Operaio led to more than the well-

known slogan of Potere Operaio: “Turin, Detroit, Togliattigrad, class struggle will

win”. It signalled the death knell of the isolated within the narrow conﬁnes of

the ofﬁcial left’s “Italian road to socialism”.’ Gambino, ‘Only Connect’, p. 198.

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-165 9780230280373

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Christian Høgsbjerg 165

72. George Rawick published with others including Antonio Negri – Operai e stato

[Workers and the state] (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972); Lo schiavo americano dal tramonto

all’alba (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973), with Harold Baron and Hubert Gutman, Da schi-

avo a proletario (From slave to proletarian) (Turin: Musolini, 1973). In 1976 Martin

Glaberman published Classe operaia, imperialismo, rivoluzione negli USA [Working

class, imperialism, and revolution in the USA] (Turin: Musolini), with an intro-

duction by Bruno Cartosio. See F. Fasce, ‘American Labor History, 1973–1983:

Italian Perspectives’, Reviews in American History, 14:4 (1986), pp. 602, 610–611.

See also C. Taylor, ‘James and those Italians’, http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2008/

09/james-and-those-italians.html (accessed 25 April 2011); P. Buhle, ‘From a Biog-

rapher’s Notebook: The Field of C.L.R. James Scholarship’, in S.R. Cudjoe and

W.E. Cain (eds), C.L.R. James; His Intellectual Legacies (Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. 449.

73. Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, p. 184. A. Lichtenstein, ‘George Rawick’s

“From Sundown to Sunup” and the Dialectic of Marxian Slave Studies, Reviews

in American History, 24:4 (1996), pp. 712–725. See also the excellent comparative

discussion by Nicola Pizzolato, ‘Transnational radicals: labor dissent and political

activism in Detroit and Turin (1950–1970)’, International Review of Social History

56 (2011), pp. 1–30.

74. J. Fuller, ‘The New Workerism; The Politics of the Italian Autonomists [1980]’,

International Socialism, 92 (2001), pp. 63–76. For some brief discussion of the pos-

sible inﬂuence of James on Hardt and Negri, see P. Hudis, ‘Workers as Reason: The

Development of a New Relation of Worker and Intellectual in American Marxist

Humanism’, Historical Materialism, 11:4 (2003), p. 290.

75. C. El-Ojeili, ‘Book Review: “Many Flowers, Little Fruit”? the Dilemmas of

Workerism’, Thesis Eleven, 79 (2004), pp. 114–115. After they left the ofﬁcial

Trotskyist movement, the Johnson-Forest Tendency in their newspaper Correspon-

dence noted that ‘From the stories we get everyday from the shops, we can see a

new form of struggle emerging. It never seems to be carried to its complete end,

yet its existence is continuous. The real essence of this struggle and its ultimate

goal is: a better life, a new society, the emergence of the individual as a human

being .... This is the struggle to establish here and now a new culture, a work-

ers’ culture .... It is this that we must be extremely sensitive to. We must watch

with an eagle eye every change or indication of the things that these changes

reﬂect’.

76. For my discussion of James’s failed attempt to build a ‘Marxist Group’ in Britain

during the tumult of 1956 after he was forced to leave McCarthyist North America

in 1953, see C. Høgsbjerg, ‘Beyond the Boundary of Leninism? C.L.R. James and

1956,’ Revolutionary History, 9:3 (2006), pp. 144–159. This article explores the

republication of the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s 1950 work State Capitalism and

World Revolution in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, with a

new preface by James, through an anarchist publisher in London, Philip Sansom.

The republication of State Capitalism and World Revolution after the Hungarian

Revolution was a collaboration by James’s ‘Marxist Group’ with Castoriadis and

Theo Massen from Socialisme ou Barbarie in France and Cajo Brendel, a Dutch

‘Council Communist’, then researching autonomous class struggles in Britain for

a book.

77. T. Topham (ed.), Report of the 5th National Conference on Workers’ Control and Indus-

trial Democracy held at Transport House, Coventry on June 10th and 11th, 1967 (Hull:

Centre for Socialist Education, 1967), p. 55.

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-166 9780230280373

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166 C.L.R. James, a ‘Bohemian Freelancer’?

78. Berman, ‘Facing Reality’, p. 209. James at times in this work certainly seems to

have an almost mystical fear of the state in itself, as opposed to a rational analysis

of how the state is tied up with modern capitalist society. Raya Dunayevskaya

criticised the ‘stateism’ of Facing Reality. See Worcester, C.L.R. James, p. 141.

79. James, Notes on Dialectics, p. 197.

80. E. San Juan Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998),

p. 249.

81. James, Notes on Dialectics, p. 197.

82. E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin Press,

1976), pp. 801–802.

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July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-167 9780230280373

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‘White Skin, Black Masks’:

Marxist and Anti-racist Roots

of Contemporary US Anarchism

Andrew Cornell

As in other parts of the world, anarchists, socialists and Marxists based in

the USA have frequently inﬂuenced and borrowed from one another over

the past century and a half of struggles. More research into these lines of

inﬂuence is certainly called for. However, any thorough investigation of

the cross-pollination of radical traditions in the USA must also consider the

many ways in which the autonomous freedom struggles of people of colour

have co-mingled with European-origin traditions such as Marxism and anar-

chism. In fact, I would suggest that it has frequently been on the terrain

of campaigns opposed to white supremacy and colonialism that anarchists,

socialists and Marxists have found common ground to collaborate and to

develop synthetic theoretical and tactical paradigms.

In this essay, I consider the historical lineage of two tactical approaches

to mass action frequently deployed by anarchist activists in the USA since

the infamous anti-World Trade Organization demonstrations of 1999:

1) consensus-driven non-violent direct action, and 2) black bloc property

destruction. Searching for the origins of these tactics leads us back to

moments in the mid- twentieth century when support for African-American

freedom struggles by US anarchists brought them into conversation with

three distinct forms of socialist politics. First, mass non-violent blockading at

economic summit protests – and the idea that the methods of planning and

carrying out such actions exemplify the movement’s ideology and vision –

can be traced to the use of civil disobedience tactics by opponents of racial

segregation in the 1940s and 1950s. In the years following the Second World

War, anarchists and democratic socialists collaborated to forge a politics of

‘revolutionary non-violence’ that signiﬁcantly inﬂuenced the tactical and

organisational orientation of this early phase of the civil rights movement

in the southern USA.

167

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168 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’

Second, the practice of challenging police authority and trashing commer-

cial centres, often in anonymous ‘black blocs’, owes inspiration to the exam-

ple of black urban insurrections which broke out across the USA between

1964 and 1967. In the mid-1960s, a cohort of young US anarchists looked

to the heterodox Marxism of the Facing Reality group, led by ﬁgures such

as C.L.R. James, to help make sense of and defend the political signiﬁ-

cance of these ‘race riots’. Shortly thereafter, the embrace of ‘Third World

Marxism’ by many national liberation movements, inside and outside the

USA, inspired inﬂuential counter-cultural anarchists to again embrace insur-

rectionary tactics in the late 1960s. Though they have been reworked by a

variety of radical formations in the intervening decades, the tactical logics

of non-violent direct action and trashing popularised by mid-century anti-

racist insurgencies continue to deeply inform the strategic perspectives of

many contemporary North American anarchists.

Anarchism, civil rights and non-violent direct action

Between the First and Second World Wars, US anarchism had largely cleaved

into a syndicalist wing inﬂuenced by the journals Vanguard and Il Martello

(The Hammer), and an insurrectionist wing represented by the newspapers

Man! and L’Adunata dei Refretarri (The Summoning of the Unruly). Both fac-

tions shared the traditional anarchist view of the political state and capitalist

class relations as the primary sources of oppression in the modern world,

but they disagreed over tactics and issues of organisation, especially whether

labor unions had the potential to serve as emancipatory forces in the

modern world.1Despite these differences, US anarchists remained ﬁercely

anti-Communist and viewed members of the Socialist Party as reformists

who had accommodated themselves to New Deal liberalism. The outbreak

of the Second World War delivered a sharp blow to both tendencies, but out

of this ﬁnal dénouement of the ‘classical’ anarchism a new form arose that

adopted paciﬁsm, cultural revolution and preﬁgurative community-building

as its strategic touchstones. A small, but intellectually vital, radical milieu

developed during the war, based in large measure on formative encounters

between anarchist and Gandhian war resisters. Anarchists and socialists of

this milieu later collaborated to contribute important ideas and resources to

the struggle for African-American civil rights, and their theories of political

power and strategies for social change were transformed in the process.

The ﬂowering of anarchist paciﬁsm

In 1942 a half-dozen young anarchists from New York City who had been

mentored by the syndicalist Vanguard Group, launched a new newspaper,

Why?. Whereas the eminent German émigré anarchist Rudolf Rocker had

persuaded most of the Vanguard Group to endorse the Allies, Why? soon

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Andrew Cornell 169

adopted an anti-war stance and later began questioning the possibility of

bringing about an anarchist society through a violent seizure of the means

of production. The editors were ﬁrst inﬂuenced by the positions taken by

L’Adunata die Refratari and the British anarchist newspaper War Commentary,

both of which denounced the sincerity of the Allies anti-Fascist intentions

and called for workers in England, Italy and elsewhere to turn the crisis con-

ditions of the war to revolutionary ends, as the Russians had done in 1917.2

However, the Why? Group progressed towards a radical paciﬁsm under the

inﬂuence of Bart de Ligt, a Dutch anarchist who chaired the War Resisters

International and collaborated with Mahatma Gandhi. De Ligt’s 1937 trea-

tise, The Conquest of Violence, argued that ‘the underlying cause of modern

war is the character itself of modern society [ ...] Our society is violent

just as fog is wet.’ Therefore, a far-reaching social revolution was required,

but means were of the essence. ‘The more violence,’ he claimed, ‘the less

revolution.’3

Why?’s position on the war was more than a question of editorial line for

the young men of the group; it directly affected their decisions about how

to respond to the draft. In 1943, David Thoreau Wieck, who contributed to

Why? while studying philosophy at Columbia University, was sentenced to

three years at Danbury Prison after he refused to enlist.4Why? editors David

Koven and Cliff Bennett also served time for their anti-war beliefs and draft

resistance. The incarceration of anarchist draft resisters during the Second

World War proved fortuitous for the future direction of the movement in

the USA.

Anarchists were among the nearly 6,000 conscientious objectors (COs) and

war resisters imprisoned during the Second World War. Historian James Tracy

explains that, ‘Of these, 4,300 were Jehovah’s Witnesses with little or no

political agenda. [ ...] The remaining seventeen hundred, however, consti-

tuted the most militant distinct group of paciﬁsts in the country.’5Many COs

were afﬁliated with the country’s leading paciﬁst organisations, the Fellow-

ship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the War Resisters League (WRL). During the

depression years of the 1930s, the FOR had broadened its agenda to combat

racial and economic inequality under the guidance of its socialist chairman,

A.J. Muste, who, like other members, was inspired by Gandhi’s campaigns of

non-violent direct action in India.6Shortly after Wieck arrived, 18 Danbury

COs, all of them white, launched a successful strike against racial segregation

in the prison. Wieck took part in the four-month strike – refusing to work,

to take his allotted time in the prison yard, or to eat meals in the segre-

gated cafeteria. Through the strike he befriended other radical inmates, such

as Jim Peck and Ralph DiGia. The Danbury strike set off a wave of similar

actions in prisons and CO camps across the country, including strikes led by

African-American paciﬁsts Bill Sutherland and Bayard Rustin in Lewisburg,

Pennsylvania and Ashland, Kentucky, respectively. The COs experimented

with Gandhian techniques such as hunger strikes and passive resistance,

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170 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’

winning considerable media attention and support from paciﬁsts and black

political organisations outside the prisons. Besides successfully desegregating

and liberalising the polices of federal penitentiaries, the wave of non-violent

direct action united participants and prompted them to discuss the potential

for a broad movement of ‘revolutionary non-violence’ against war, racism

and economic inequality in the USA.7

Imprisonment also led the dissenters to modify their beliefs. Wieck later

wrote, ‘I did not go to prison as a paciﬁst but rather as an objector to war and

conscription. It was in prison that I learned the methods of non-violence.’

Afterwards, he considered himself an ‘anarchist-paciﬁst’.8In turn, the inﬂu-

ence of anarchist prisoners such as Wieck and Lowell Naeve helped move

other paciﬁst war resisters, including DiGia, Sutherland, David Dellinger,

Roy Finch and Igal Roodenko in the direction of anarchism. David Dellinger,

who would later become a leading light of the New Left, kept up a lively

correspondence with Holley Cantine, editor of the anarchist-paciﬁst jour-

nal Retort.9In letters from prison, he voiced his growing scepticism about

the methods of the Socialist Party, to which he belonged. Dellinger was

impressed with Cantine’s assertion that revolutionaries should seek to model

in the institutions they create, and in their daily lives, the type of social

relations they are ﬁghting to promote in the world at large. The impris-

oned paciﬁst suggested that a revolutionary organisation’s ‘full-time workers

should be men who have left their other work for 6 months, a year, or so,

and will return to it again’. Not only would this avoid ‘some of the problems

of a centralized “leadership” [ ...] but others would be developed who are

now kept undeveloped or are alienated’.10 After receiving his release date,

Dellinger wrote to Cantine that he was eager to meet in person so that

they might discuss in more detail ‘the kind of left-wing libertarian social-

ist movement in which we are both interested’. As his biographer Andrew

Hunt asserts, ‘once a Christian socialist, Dellinger had evolved into a secular

anarchist in Lewisburg’.11

Anarchists and socialists become non-violent revolutionaries

Most of the militant war resisters were released in the months surrounding

the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the USA. Horriﬁed by the

scale of callous violence unleashed by the bomb, they expected a mass move-

ment to arise in opposition to its use. In the August 1945 issue of Politics,

which maintained close ties to Why? and Retort, editor Dwight MacDonald

argued that the USA’s willingness to use atomic weapons meant, simply,

‘We must “get” the modern national state, before it “gets” us.’12 MacDonald

began his political career in the Trotskyist movement and was later consid-

ered a major ﬁgure among the ‘New York Intellectuals’. The war and the

bomb, however, had pushed him into the anarchist-paciﬁst camp.13 Many

former-COs concurred with MacDonald’s anti-statism, as well as his assertion

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Andrew Cornell 171

that to prevent another war, the entire society, structured in violence as it

was, had to be transformed.

One key to such a transformation, they agreed, was continuing the ﬁght

against segregation and other manifestations of white supremacy. As early

as 1942, the socialist radical paciﬁsts Bayard Rustin, George Houser and

James Farmer had launched the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to put

Gandhian techniques into play to combat the segregation of restaurants,

swimming pools and other public facilities. In 1947, CORE organised a Jour-

ney of Reconciliation, in which an interracial team of volunteers – including

Rustin, the anarchist Igal Roodenko and Wieck’s cellmate Jim Peck – travelled

by bus through southern states to test compliance with a 1946 Supreme

Court decision outlawing segregation in interstate transportation facilities.

Some of the riders faced beatings and were sentenced to work on the chain-

gang for their breach of racial protocol, but their treatment was much less

severe than that encountered by participants in CORE’s iconic 1961 Freedom

Rides, modelled on the 1947 trip.14

After their release, former-COs such as Dellinger, DiGia and Sutherland

also launched the Committee for Non-violent Revolution (CNVR). Two years

later, in 1948, they regrouped with additional radical paciﬁsts such as Muste

and MacDonald, changing their name to Peacemakers.15 In the late 1940s,

many radical paciﬁsts continued to maintain membership in the Socialist

Party. Differences between anarchists and socialists involved with CNVR and

Peacemakers were subsumed under the mantle of an emerging politics of

revolutionary non-violence. The abstract question of whether a stateless soci-

ety was possible, and what it would look like, took a back seat. However,

members of both groups determined that ‘decentralized democratic social-

ism,’ a version of worker self-management, was their economic ideal and

agreed that direct action, rather than electoral campaigns, should be the

primary means used to force a fundamental transformation of the modern

war-making nation-state. Peacemakers also sought to synthesise socialist and

anarchist models of organisation: the group structured itself as a network

of small cells that elected a steering committee, but operated autonomously

from one another in pursuit of the organisation’s deﬁned goals. Sympathisers

were encouraged to join and participate as small groups, rather than as indi-

viduals. As historian Scott Bennett writes, Peacemakers believed this form

of organisation ‘could challenge and eventually replace centralized, hierar-

chical institutions’.16 Peacemakers, then, appears to be the ﬁrst organisation

in the USA in which anarchists adopted the consensus method of decision

making – a process promoted by Quakers, such as Bayard Rustin, involved in

the organisation.

In 1947 the militant paciﬁsts gained control of the executive board of the

War Resisters League, seating Dellinger, MacDonald, Roy Finch, Roy Kepler

and other anarchists, with hopes of transforming its 10,000 person mem-

bership into non-violent revolutionaries. Although they found only modest

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172 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’

support for their far-reaching program during the repressive McCarthy era,

their presence made possible a fortuitous development in the civil rights

struggle. In 1951, Rustin was ﬁred from the staff of the Fellowship of Recon-

ciliation and nearly drummed out of the movement, when he was arrested

for having sex with two other men in the back of a parked car. Instead

of accepting his resignation from the War Resisters League, the anarchists

sitting on the executive board voted to hire Rustin as the organisation’s full-

time program director. In that capacity he would serve as a leading advisor

on non-violent strategy to Martin Luther King, Jr. and other southern civil

rights leaders as the struggle expanded at the end of 1955.17

Revolutionary non-violence and the black freedom struggle

Despite the importance of decades of previous struggles, the 1955–1956

Montgomery Bus Boycott is often seen as marking the beginning of a new

and heroic phase of the black freedom movement in the USA. Provoked by

the arrest of the activist Rosa Parks, the successful year-long boycott grew

to include thousands of participants and launched into national promi-

nence the campaign’s young spokesperson, Martin Luther King, Jr. Since

the 1920s, many African-Americans had drawn inspiration from the Indian

decolonisation struggle lead by Mahatma Gandhi, who was himself inﬂu-

enced by the anarchists Peter Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy and Bart de Ligt. King

ﬁrst learned of Gandhi’s methods from talks delivered by Howard University

president Mordecai Johnson and Peacemakers member A.J. Muste at Crozier

Seminary in 1949 and 1950. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, expe-

rienced non-violent revolutionaries – most notably Rustin – helped King

translate Gandhian principles into a strategic plan of civil disobedience

geared to the conditions of the US south.18

Concurrent with the launch of the bus boycott, Dellinger, Muste, Finch

and Rustin collaborated to found Liberation magazine, which promoted their

brand of libertarian socialist and paciﬁst politics. In its ﬁrst editorial, the

editors noted that:

We do not conceive the problem of revolution or the building of a bet-

ter society as one of accumulating power, whether by legislative or other

methods, to ‘capture the state,’ and then, presumably, to transform soci-

ety and human beings as well. The national, sovereign, militarised and

bureaucratic State and bureaucratic collectivist economy are themselves

evils to be avoided or abolished.19

Liberation quickly became an important platform for participants in the civil

rights movement to debate strategy. King contributed articles regularly, as

did ofﬁcials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peo-

ple (NAACP) and advocates of armed self-defence, such as Robert F. Williams.

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Andrew Cornell 173

Anarchists such as Wieck, Dellinger and Paul Goodman wrote frequently for

the publication, encouraging the movement to adopt strategies that relied

on popular resistance rather than legal manoeuvring or the military might

of the federal government.

In 1962, the governor of Mississippi attempted to block the black activist

James Meredith from enrolling at the all-white state university. Pressured

to respond, President John F. Kennedy deployed federal marshals to ensure

Meredith’s entrance. Dellinger and Rustin criticised Kennedy’s true motives

and claimed the incident as missed opportunity for the movement. They

co-authored an essay which concluded, ‘The temptation for shortsighted

men and women of good will is to rely on the Federal government to take

up the slack created by their own failure to act responsibly and in social sol-

idarity. But in the long run the Federal government must act in accord with

its own nature, which is that of a highly centralised political, military, indus-

trial and ﬁnancial bureaucracy.’20 Dellinger had earlier written in Liberation,

‘The power of the government is not the integrating power of love but the

disintegrating power of guns and prisons.’21

Much preferable to the deployment of troops, according to the editors

of Liberation, was the strategy of direct resistance to racism by ordinary

people emblematised by the student sit-in movement that had erupted in

February 1960. The movement began as a local action when four black col-

lege students asked for service and refused to move from the segregated

lunch counter of a Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s department

store. The protests spread and by June an estimated 50,000 students had

joined the fray in more than 100 towns throughout the southern states.22

As a contributor to the anarchist journal Views and Comments wrote at the

time, the student sit-ins demonstrated ‘how a genuine people’s movement

arose spontaneously, produced its own organisation, devised its own tactics

and inspired everyone to participate creatively and valiantly in a common

cause’. Instead of counselling reliance on a great leader, ‘it arouses people

from apathy and restores their belief in their own power’.23

Direct action, participatory democracy

and New-Left anarchism

In 1960 the experienced anti-racist organiser Ella Baker helped the stu-

dent sit-in leaders develop a political organisation, the Student Non-violent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which modelled anarchist principles in

its means of operation, though members never self-identiﬁed as anarchists.

In its early years, SNCC distinguished itself from existing civil rights organ-

isations such as the NAACP and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Con-

vention by its dedication to the use of non-violent direct action and through

its efforts to invent egalitarian forms of organisation, participatory decision-

making processes, and what Baker termed ‘group-centred leadership’. Baker

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174 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’

concurred with Dellinger’s remarks to Cantine that the mark of a good leader

was his or her ability to share responsibility and develop leadership capaci-

ties in others. ‘Strong people,’ Baker claimed, ‘don’t need strong leaders.’24

The historian Clayborne Carson explains that early SNCC activists

‘strongly opposed any hierarchy of authority such as existed in other civil

rights organisations’.25 Instead of carrying out a program designed by a few

leaders, SNCC members collectively engaged in long discussions in which

those not used to speaking up were supported and gently urged to partic-

ipate alongside the more loquacious. The organisation attempted to reach

consensus on major programme and strategy decisions – a technique intro-

duced by participants such as James Lawson, who were afﬁliated with CORE

and inﬂuenced by Peacemakers.26

As SNCC shifted its energies from direct action against segregation to

organising poor black men and women to register to vote, staff members

such as Bob Moses sought ways to extend the process of perpetual lead-

ership development beyond the organisation itself to all the people SNCC

staff members worked with in voter registration efforts. In this way, SNCC

developed in its day-to-day organising work an ideal of participatory democ-

racy that demanded ordinary people be able to make the decisions that

affect their lives. SNCC organisers mobilised the poorest and least educated

African-Americans to demand rights from an exclusionary racial state. How-

ever, their method of building the capacities of local people to direct their

own organisations in pursuit of political and economic self-determination

belied an increasingly radical vision that, at least implicitly, had much in

common with the various forms of direct democracy and libertarian social-

ism discussed throughout this book. The anarchist precepts of direct action,

decentralised organisation and belief in the leadership capabilities of ordi-

nary people, formed one signiﬁcant and overlooked, but not overriding,

current within the larger wellspring of religious and political traditions that

shaped the black freedom movement.

The inﬂuence cut in both directions. The black freedom movement, and

especially SNCC, came to serve as a new historic example of a successful

mass movement that functioned in accordance with anarchist principles.

Civil rights struggles also helped to break down traditional anarchist ideas

about the primacy of class oppression and the revolutionary primacy of the

working class. Recognising the power of African-Americans to create fun-

damental social changes by organising around both racial and class identity,

was an important step in anarchists grasping the centrality of ‘race’ as a social

phenomenon that fundamentally structures social inequalities and everyday

life. This recognition helped them to theoretically expand the object of their

critique and opposition from capitalism and ‘the state’ to all forms of social

domination.

The anti-racist campaigns of the 1940, 1950s and 1960s form a clear point

of embarkation for the political sensibility that combines non-violent direct

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Andrew Cornell 175

action, non-hierarchical forms of organising, and consensus-based decision-

making, which contemporary anarchists continue to celebrate as central

to their particular political vision. These methods, as well as the ideal of

participatory democracy, were championed throughout the 1960s and early

1970s by Students for a Democratic Society and the early women’s liber-

ation movement.27 In the 1970s and 1980s groups heavily inﬂuenced by

anarchism, such as Movement for a New Society and the Clamshell Alliance,

carried the tradition forward in movements against nuclear power plants,

US intervention in Central America, and environmental destruction.28 Expe-

rienced organisers from these campaigns, such as Starhawk and David Solnit,

played central roles in planning and training participants in the mass

demonstrations and blockades that shut down central Seattle during the

World Trade Organization meetings in 1999 and re-energised the anarchist

movement in the USA.29 In turn, veterans of the global justice movement

carried the tradition forward to the Occupy Wall Street encampments of

2011–2012.

Beats, counter-culture and urban insurrection

Black blocs, like non-violent direct action and consensus, claim a relatively

long lineage within the anarchist tradition. Their use can be traced to the

autonomous movements of Italy, Germany and other European countries,

spanning the late-1970s to the 1990s, many of which maintained deep ties

to the international anarchist-punk community and other radical youth

counter-cultures.30 These movements were themselves signiﬁcantly inﬂu-

enced by the North American counter-culture of the 1960s, however, and

that counter-culture was, at its core, structured around the appreciation

and appropriation of African-American hip culture and, later, the celebra-

tion by white youth of forms of Marxist-inspired African, Latin American

and Asian political militancy.31 To unpack this complex lineage, it is useful

to ﬁrst examine the reciprocal inﬂuence of mid-century anarchist-paciﬁsm

and the writers of the Beat Generation, and to then consider the ways a

variety of additional radical intellectual and political currents – especially

expressions of black radicalism – contributed to the explosive growth of a

heavily-anarchistic youth counter-culture by 1967.

Anarchism, jazz and the Beat generation

The anarchist-paciﬁsts of Liberation magazine and the campaigns of SNCC

comprise one current through which libertarian socialist ideas were trans-

mitted to members of Students for a Democratic Society and other New

Leftists. However, anarchist ideas, themes and strategies were also promoted

in the 1960s by small circles of writers, activists and cultural producers

that include Chicago’s Rebel Worker Group, New York’s Black Mask, the

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176 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’

Diggers of San Francisco, and the Detroit radical milieu surrounding the

Fifth Estate newspaper, the White Panther Party, and the political rock

group The MC5. Although collectively these formations were instrumental

in developing the style of politics that historian Toby Boraman has termed

‘carnival anarchism’, none claimed purely anarchist origins or desired to

promote themselves as such.32 Instead, they integrated elements of anarcho-

syndicalism, anti-vanguardist Marxism, the European avant-garde tradition,

African-American resistance cultures, and emergent forms of Third World

Marxism into a novel form of cultural radicalism ﬁrst nourished by the Beat

subculture.

Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg provided an entry

point to radical politics for many young adults across the USA in the late

1950s and early 1960s. The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, credited with

launching the Beats onto an international stage, was built in large measure

by anarchist-paciﬁsts, including many Second World War draft resisters, who

formed a Libertarian Circle and a poetry forum there as early as 1946.33

Drawing on Zen Buddhism, the Jewish mysticism of Martin Buber, and an

emerging ecological consciousness, San Francisco anarchists such as Kenneth

Rexroth and Robert Duncan focused on creating art and a community of

like-minded dissenters, while counselling disengagement from the world

of the A-Bomb and mass consumer culture.34 Ironically, the obscenity trial

against Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the commercial success of Kerouac’s On the

Road spread these ideas beyond the coastal cities to nearly every high school

in North America.

In the working-class Chicago suburb of Maywood, Illinois, high school

sophomore Franklin Rosemont learned of Jack Kerouac from a magazine

article at the dentist’s ofﬁce in 1958. After devouring On the Road and

The Dharma Bums (Kerouac’s ode to Gary Snyder and the other Bay Area

anarchist poets), Rosemont and his friends launched a high-school literary

magazine, The Lantern, which earned them reputations as communists and

beatniks. Rosemont preferred to think of his multiracial circle as ‘high school

hipsters’. He recalled that although The Lantern community was supportive

of the civil rights movement, ‘only with my discovery of the Beat poets,

did I begin to appreciate the vitality and richness of African-American cul-

ture, and particularly jazz’.35 Appreciation of jazz was concomitant to the

Beat lifestyle, as bebop musicians provided a towering example of disdain

for white bourgeois culture, and their music seemed to incarnate the anti-

rationalist impulse behind Beat dissent. As literary scholar Scott Saul notes,

‘The hipster was in some sense the civil rights movement’s less charitable

double, the face of a deﬁance that did not unconditionally turn the other

cheek. He plugged into long-running debates in the black community about

whether social protest should take direct or more evasive forms, whether

it should be easily legible in its aims or should adopt the slyness of the

trickster.’36

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Andrew Cornell 177

The Beats also lead Rosemont to explore the French surrealists – cultural

revolutionaries who, beginning in the 1920s, had declared their support for

decolonisation struggles and argued that revolutionaries must seek to create

a world in which life is lived intensely and ecstatically, in pursuit of the

sublime and the marvellous. With the discovery of surrealism, Rosemont

felt that he had found a set of ideas that tied together his love of poetry,

jazz and his growing interest in radical politics. ‘As early as the 1950s,’ he

later claimed, ‘some of us recognized the new jazz as the auditory equivalent

of surrealism in painting [ ...] Our most extravagant revolutionary dreams

were summed up, renewed and expanded in the untrammeled loveliness’ of

the music of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Archie Shepp.37 These

connections helped cement a conception of musical counter-culture as an

expression and method of revolutionary politics, which was expanded upon

later in the decade by The MC5, and extends through the anarcho-punk

scene to the present.38

Workerism, rock’n’roll and urban insurrection

Poetry and revolution also absorbed students at Chicago’s Roosevelt College

such as Tor Faegre, Robert and Judy Green and Penelope Bartik (soon to be

Penelope Rosemont). These young poets and students, most from working-

class backgrounds, met aging members of the Industrial Workers of the

World (IWW) at the union’s General Headquarters, became members, and

proceeded to organise migrant farm workers in southwest Michigan. In 1964

they used the IWW mimeograph machine to launch a journal, The Rebel

AQ1 Worker , which broke new ground by pairing traditional workerist politics

with considerations of the revolutionary potential of art and popular cul-

ture. The young Rebel Workers learned about revolutionary unionism from

long-time IWW members like Fred Thompson, but their growing analysis

of capitalism and unionism also beneﬁtted from friendly interactions with

the Detroit-based heterodox Marxist organisation Facing Reality, and the

British libertarian socialist organisation Solidarity. As described by Christian

Hogsbjerg in this volume, Facing Reality was an organisational offshoot of

the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a dissident caucus within the US Trotskyist

movement during the 1930s and 1940s, grouped around the Trinidadian

Marxist C.L.R. James, the Russian-American theorist Raya Dunayevskaya,

and the Chinese-American philosopher Grace Lee.39 The Johnson-Forest

Tendency exchanged ideas with the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie,

which had likewise broken with Trotskyism in the 1940s.40 In the after-

math of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, James, Lee and one of Socialisme

ou Barbarie’s leading intellects, Cornelius Castoriadis, co-authored a trea-

tise on anti-Stalinist and non-vanguardist Marxism, Facing Reality,from

which the US group drew its name.41 In the 1960s Castoriadis was the

strongest inﬂuence on the political positions of the British group Solidarity,

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178 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’

which translated, reprinted and commented on many of his articles.42

Each of these organisations developed a criticism of ‘democratic central-

ist’ vanguard revolutionary parties, argued that labor unions had become

incorporated into the postwar capitalist production system, and promoted

forms of worker self-management and council democracy.43 This constella-

tion of mid-century libertarian socialists would deeply inform the ideas of

the Situationist International (SI) and the Italian traditions of operaismo and

autonomist Marxism.

The inﬂuence of Facing Reality and Solidarity was apparent in Rebel Worker

articles critical of the role mainstream union ofﬁcials played in policing

workers’ shop ﬂoor resistance. However, the group also celebrated diverse

forms of resistance that they saw cropping up outside the factory gates.

The journal featured articles such as Franklin Rosemont’s ‘Mods, Rockers,

and the Revolution’, which defended rock and roll music as an expres-

sion of working-class youth’s ‘refusal to submit to routinized, bureaucratic

pressures’.44 The Chicago radicals also kept expressions of African-American

resistance to white supremacy sharply in view. July 1964 saw the ﬁrst of a

series of massive riots in the black ghettos of northern and western cities,

usually touched off by incidents of police brutality, but expressive of the

generalised hostility of communities suffering from segregation, discrimina-

tion and unemployment. The Rebel Worker published a ﬁrst-hand account

of the ‘Harlem insurrection’ of 1964, and hailed the similar rebellion that

broke out in Chicago two years later. Drawing again on the analysis pro-

vided by James, Castoriadis and their collaborators, Rosemont noted, ‘Just

as our labor perspective focused not on “leaders” but on “actions by the

workers themselves, in or out of the unions” so too we identiﬁed ourselves

strongly with the masses of black proletarian youth who outgrew the increas-

ingly conservative older civil-rights groups and took up direct action in the

streets.’45

Art, anti-imperialist armed struggle and anarchism

The editors of the Rebel Worker recognised as political compatriots the small

group of New York artists who produced the magazine Black Mask.Black

Mask was founded by Ben Morea, a working-class Italian-American painter

and agitator who developed his anarchist politics in a trajectory similar to

that of Franklin Rosemont. Morea grew up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighbour-

hood of Manhattan, home to Thelonius Monk and other leading bebop jazz

musicians. He immersed himself in the jazz community until he picked up

a heroin habit and was arrested for possession. In a prison art therapy class,

he determined to take his life in a different direction. Still, he appreciated

the instinct for rebellion that the jazz scene had imbued in him. ‘Culturally,

it was subversive,’ Morea asserted:

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Andrew Cornell 179

The dominant culture, which I’ve never been comfortable with, could

not understand jazz. It was a subculture. And so I gravitated towards sub-

cultures. The beatniks picked up on all of that. After I quit heroin, I was

about 18, I already had this subcultural context, so I struck a friendship

with a lot of beatniks. Especially, ﬁrst, The Living Theatre. Judith Malina

and Julian Beck – they’re the ones that put the name to the way I felt,

[and gave me] the term anarchist.46

Malina and Beck had become anarchists in the late 1940s after attending dis-

cussions held by the Why? Group and protesting cold war air-raid drills with

anarchist-paciﬁsts from the War Resisters League and other organisations.47

Their Brechtian theatre troupe served as an important connective tissue

linking young beatniks to older New York City anarchists. Over the next

few years, Morea attended meetings of a small group of old-line anarcho-

syndicalists known as the Libertarian League, as well as the ‘Anarchos’ study

group formed by ecology-oriented anarchist Murray Bookchin in the early

1960s. Meanwhile he exhaustively studied the European avant-garde art tra-

dition, including the Dada, Surrealist and Futurist movements. While the

black jazz scene of the late 1950s served as a point of entry to New York’s

bohemian anarchist community, the explicitly political and increasingly

militant black freedom movement became a key reference point and source

of inspiration for Morea and his friends by the mid-1960s.

In the spring of 1965, SNCC did away with its decentralised structure and

practice of consensus decision-making. Declaring the need for ‘black power’

the next year, the organisation also shed its commitment to non-violence

and an interracial staff.48 These shifts marked a response to the violent

intransigence of southern racists and the federal government’s unwilling-

ness to defend and support civil rights organisers. Seeking an adequate

response to such conditions, SNCC leaders such as James Foreman, Stokely

Carmichael and H. Rap Brown increasingly looked for guidance to national

liberation struggles in Africa, Asia and Latin America.49 From writers such as

Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, they ingested

a ‘Third World Marxist’ politics that counselled tighter forms of organisa-

tion, strong leadership and, eventually, the pursuit of a strategy of armed

struggle. Third World Marxist theorists shared the commitment to abol-

ish capitalism with orthodox Marxist-Leninists, but they focused greater

attention on the means by which the system of imperialism politically subju-

gated and derived massive proﬁts from ‘oppressed nations’, overwhelmingly

peoples of colour, around the world. Strategically, Third World Marxists

focused less on the spread of radical unionism among industrial workers,

and promoted modes of armed struggle that could simultaneously achieve

the national liberation of formerly colonised territories and institute forms

of state socialism.50

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180 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’

While some older anarchists, such as Wieck and Finch, were highly critical

of these developments, many in the new generation welcomed the victo-

ries of insurgents such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as harbingers of an

international revolutionary upsurge. They saw the growing militancy among

African-American activists, who looked to these models, as entirely justiﬁed.

In 1966, Morea and his friend Ron Hahne launched a four-page broadsheet

devoted to avant-garde art and radical politics titled Black Mask.ForMorea,

the name had a number of resonances: ‘There was a book written by Franz

Fanon, Black Faces, White Masks. Well, I always thought, “white faces, black

masks.” I was also friends with the black nationalists, and some of them

used an African mask as a symbol. The colour black was an anarchist sym-

bol, but the mask ﬁt the art side more, say, than Black Flag. So it was all of

these things, but Franz Fanon was a big part of it.’51 For Morea, the promo-

tion of novel and authentic expressions of rebellion that had traction in the

contemporary world took precedence over notions of theoretical purity and

analytical consistency.

From the beginning Black Mask declared its support for the emergent

forms of black radicalism. ‘A new spirit is rising. Like the streets of Watts

we burn with revolution [ ...] The guerrilla, the blacks, the men of the

future, we are all at your heels,’ read an early statement. The magazine’s ﬁrst

issue also reprinted a ﬂier from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization,

the SNCC-organised project that was the ﬁrst to adopt the Black Panther as

its symbol.52

In February 1967, Black Mask contributors and their friends literalised the

publication’s name when they marched through New York City’s ﬁnancial

district donned completely in black, wearing black ski masks, and carrying

skulls on poles and a sign that read ‘Wall Street is War Street’. This stark

and provocative demonstration against the war in Vietnam appears to have

been the ﬁrst recorded deployment of the black bloc aesthetic. Like the Rebel

Worker group, the Black Mask editors communicated, visited and traded

publications with creative and militant radicals from around the world,

including French Situationists, Dutch Provos and the Zengakuren of Japan.53

In 1967, Morea and Hahne collaborated with other artists on New York

City’s Lower East Side to organise an ‘Angry Arts’ week. Police arrested par-

ticipants at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday as they unveiled posters

denouncing the cardinal’s endorsement of the Vietnam War. In the after-

math of Angry Arts week, the Black Mask ‘family’ grew to include 10 to

15 core members, primarily white and male, including Osha Neumann, the

stepson of the celebrated critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. Early in 1968,

the group organised a theatrical demonstration in front of the Lincoln Cen-

ter for Performing Arts, signing an explanatory leaﬂet, ‘Up Against the Wall,

Motherfucker’. The line was drawn from a poem penned by black nationalist

LeRoi Jones during ‘race riots’ that had convulsed Newark, NJ the previous

year.54 The name stuck and the group remade itself accordingly.

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Andrew Cornell 181

Jones had contemptuously declared:

[...] you can’t steal nothin from a white man, he’s already stole it he owes

you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will

say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall mother

fucker this is a stick up.55

The uncompromising position of Jones and other black militants appealed to

Up Against the Wall/Motherfuckers (UAWMF). Calling themselves an ‘anar-

chist street gang’ or, alternatively, ‘a street gang with an analysis’, UAWMF

organised hippies, drop-outs, bums and Puerto Rican youth on the Lower

East Side, created a free store, squatted empty buildings and regularly insti-

gated small scale riots and brawls with the police. The group’s basic strategy

was to push members of the white counter-culture to increase the level of

their confrontation with institutions of authority, as a means of forging

another ‘front’ in the struggles being waged by oppressed racial groups in

the USA and anti-colonial forces in southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Morea proudly recalled, ‘We stormed the entrance to the Pentagon – the

only people in history to actually penetrate into the building. And we cut

the fences at Woodstock. So here you’ve got this hippie cultural [thing], and

this [other thing]. And that was us.’56 As Neumann put it, ‘We advocated a

politics of rage and tribal bonding, “ﬂower power with thorns.” ’57

Both the Rebel Worker group and Black Mask/UAWMF were relatively

short-lived formations. By 1967 members of the Rebel Worker group shifted

their focus elsewhere. Penelope Rosemont joined the national staff of Stu-

dents for a Democratic Society, while working with Franklin and others

to develop a greater surrealist presence in the USA. The core members of

UAWMF left New York City in 1971 to escape the escalating cycle of incar-

ceration and violent protest they found themselves increasingly trapped in,

dissolving soon afterwards. However, groups of radicals with similar inﬂu-

ences, but slightly different patterns of development, such as the White

Panther Party in Michigan and a variety of pro-Situationist groups in

California, bridged the gap between the counter-culture of the 1960s and

the US anarchist movement in 1970s and 1980s.58

In summary, the Beat subculture of the late 1950s inured many young

white North Americans to ‘hip’ jazz culture, which helped convince them

of the desirability and possibility of cultural revolution, prompting some to

embrace anarchism. They grew up watching and reading about the early,

predominantly non-violent, phase of the black freedom movement. But as

black anger in response to white reactionary violence lead to urban ‘race

riots,’ and the inﬂuence of national liberation movements gave rise to the

black power movement, some anarchists grew to identify people of colour

willing to engage in property destruction and political violence as a rad-

ical vanguard worthy of emulation. This lead to an ideologically messy,

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182 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’

heterodox politics that sought to combine anti-authoritarian cultural revo-

lution with Third World Marxist-inspired armed struggle. Although paciﬁsm

predominated among anarchists in the USA between 1940 and 1965, that

commitment was challenged and abandoned over the next ﬁve years. While

the non-violence of Gandhi and black southerners inspired the anarchist-

paciﬁsm of the early period, the rioting and turn to armed self-defence by

African-Americans (and, later, groups such as the Puerto Rican Young Lords

and the American-Indian Movement) in northern and western USA revived

the insurrectionist current in US anarchism by the end of the 1960s.

Through the circulation of people, publications and struggles between

North America and Europe, this new sensibility mutated and multiplied

over the following decades, even after the struggles against white supremacy

and colonialism that had provided a key impetus had subsided. The avant-

garde critique of the banality of everyday life, urban street ﬁghting and

the demand for self-management and worker’s councils fused indelibly in

Paris during the events of May 1968, giving the Situationists an interna-

tional cache still far from being exhausted.59 Heatwave – a British counterpart

to The Rebel Worker – and the UK section of the SI were succeeded by

King Mob, which, indebted to Black Mask/UAWMF, sought to practice

an ‘active nihilism’ in early 1970s England.60 They proved inﬂuential to

the ﬁrst wave of British punk. In 1977, what has become known as the

‘autonomist Marxist’ tradition emerged in Italy through a convergence of

counter-cultural groups, such as the Metropolitan Indians (the inﬂuence of

decolonial politics evident even in their name) and workerist organisations

inﬂuenced by the Johnson-Forest/Socialisme ou Babarie/Solidarity tradi-

tion.61 Each of these strands of political radicalism fed into the international

anarchist-punk movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which solidiﬁed sartorial

youth cultures of resistance, pranks, squatting, and militant street demon-

strations using the black bloc tactic as deﬁning elements of contemporary

anarchism around the globe. Despite the circuitous way in which black bloc

tactics developed, some contemporary anarchists and autonomists continue

to defend the practice of political trashing in small, loosely organised groups

by pointing to the semi-spontaneous uprisings of racialised urban communi-

ties as models of radical activity worthy of emulation. The widely circulated

pamphlet The Coming Insurrection, for example, suggests radical intellectuals

should take tactical and organisational inspiration from the French banlieue

riots of the mid-2000s.62

Conclusion

The anarchist-paciﬁsts of the 1940s and 1950s and the cultural revolutionists

of 1960s both marked fundamental departures from the traditional, class-

struggle based anarchism that existed in the USA prior to the Second World

War. They contributed overlapping, often contradictory, anti-authoritarian

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Andrew Cornell 183

sensibilities to radical social struggles in the ﬁnal decades of the twentieth

century and the ﬁrst decade of the twenty-ﬁrst. Clearly, it is impossible to

fully trace and evaluate the complex pathways upon which anarchism has

developed in the past half-century in a brief essay such as this. I have tried,

instead, to hold a magnifying glass up to two particular moments in this

history, and to then locate those moments within the broader pattern of

development. What that level of magniﬁcation reveals, I hope, is the perva-

sive inﬂuence of a complex variety of socialisms and Marxisms, as well as

many forms of people of colour-initiated struggles against white supremacy,

on the political analyses, visions and strategies of contemporary anarchist

movements. It likewise indicates ways that anarchist ideas and efforts have

informed and bolstered black freedom struggles and other anti-racist move-

ments. Such an analysis helps elucidate historical precedents – and therefore

provides a tool for evaluating the transformative potential and possible

pitfalls – of a variety of efforts aimed at reinventing the struggle for a free

and equal, or libertarian socialist, world today.

Notes

1. For more on differences between syndicalist (or mass) and insurrectionary anar-

chism, see, M. Schmidt and L. van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class

Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2009).

2. See, for example, the Why? Group’s translation of a pamphlet prepared by

L’Adunata, no author, ‘War or Revolution: An Anarchist Statement’ (New York:

Why? Publications Committee, 1944).

3. B. de Ligt, The Conquest of Violence: An Essay on War and Revolution (London: Pluto

Press, [1937]), pp. 58, 64, 162.

4. D. T. Wieck, Woman from Spillertown: A Memoir of Agnes Burns Wieck (Carbondale

and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), p. 203.

5. J. Tracy, Direct Action: Radical Paciﬁsm from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 16.

6. J. K. Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Non-violence and Modern American Democ-

racy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

7. Tracy, Direct Action; S. Bennett, Radical Paciﬁsm: The War Resisters League and

Gandhian Non-violence in America, 1915–1963 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University

Press, 2003).

8. Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, David Thoreau

Wieck Papers, 1942–1969, memo by D. T. Wieck, ‘Peace-related activities, post

World War II,’ no date.

9. D. Dellinger, From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter (New York:

Pantheon, 1993); A. Hunt, David Dellinger: The Life and Times of a Non-violent

Revolutionary (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

10. Dachine Rainer Papers, Uncat MSS 139, Box 8, ‘D-E,’ letter, D. Dellinger to

H. Cantine, 4 February 1945.

11. A. Hunt, David Dellinger, p. 86.

12. Dwight MacDonald, no title, Politics, 2:8 (August 1945).

13. M. Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight

MacDonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

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184 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’

14. R. Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2006); D. Catsam, Freedom’s Main Line: The Journey of

Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,

2009).

15. Tracy, Direct Action, pp. 47–75; Bennett, Radical Paciﬁsm, pp. 145–55.

16. Bennett, Radical Paciﬁsm, pp. 148–149.

17. J. D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: University

of Chicago, 2003), pp. 191–210.

18. J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism (New York:

Routledge, 1997), pp. 88–92.

19. Editors, ‘Tract for the Times,’ Liberation, 1:1 (1956), pp. 2–6.

20. Editors, ‘Mississippi Muddle,’ Liberation, 7:9 (1962), pp. 9–12. Reprinted with

credit given to David Dellinger and Bayard Rustin in Paul Goodman (ed.), Seeds

of Liberation (New York: George Braziller, 1964), pp. 306–316.

21. D. Dellinger, ‘Are Paciﬁsts Willing to be Negroes?’ Liberation, 4:6 (1959), 3.

22. C. Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 11; Farrell, Spirit of the Sixties, p. 97.

23. E.W., ‘The “Civil Rights” Struggle,’ Views and Comments, 38 (May 1960).

24. B. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 188–190.

25. Carson, In Struggle, p. 30.

26. F. Polletta, Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 82.

27. Ibid,pp. 120–175; W. Brienes, Community and Organization in the New Left: The

Great Refusal, 1962–1968 (New Brunswick, NJ Rutgers University Press, 1989).

28. A. Cornell, Oppose and Propose! Lessons from Movement for a New Society (Oakland:

AK Press and Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2001); B. Epstein, Political Protest

and Cultural Revolution: Non-violent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1991).

29. Starhawk, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising (Gabriola Island: New Soci-

ety Publishers, 2002); D. Solnit and R. Solnit (eds), The Battle of the Story of ‘the

Battle of Seattle’ (Oakland: AK Press, 2009).

30. F. Dupuis-Déri, ‘The Black Blocks Ten Years after Seattle: Anarchism, Direct

Action, and Deliberative Practices,’ Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 4:2 (2010),

pp. 45–82; G. Katsiaﬁcas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social

Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland: AK Press, 2006);

S. Lotringer and C. Marazzi, Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles:

Semoitext(e), 2007).

31. On the transnational circulation of counter-cultures, see J. MacPhee and

D. Greenwald, Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures, 1960s to Now (Oakland:

AK Press, 2010); G. McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since

the Sixties (London and New York: Verso, 1996); R. Lumley, States of Emergency:

Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London and New York: Verso, 1990).

32. T. Boraman, Rabble Rousers and Merry Pranksters: A History of Anarchism in

Aotearoa/New Zealand from the Mid 1950s to the Early 1980s (Christchurch: Kapito

Books and Irrecuperable Press, 2007).

33. L. Hamalian, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 149–156;

P. Frank, ‘San Francisco 1952: Painters, Poets, Anarchism,’ Drunken Boat, 2 (1994),

pp. 136–153.

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Andrew Cornell 185

34. J. Brown, ‘The Zen of Anarchy: Japanese Exceptionalism and the Anarchist Roots

of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance,’ Religion and American Culture: A Jour-

nal of Interpretation, 19:2 (2009), 207–242; K. Knabb, ‘The Relevance of Rexroth,’

in K. Knabb (ed.), Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb: 1970–1997

(Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1997), pp. 310–356.

35. F. Rosemont, ‘To Be Revolutionary in Everything: The Rebel Worker Story, 1964–

1968’ in F. Rosemont and C. Radcliffe (eds) Dancin’ in the Streets! Anarchists,

IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s as Recorded in the Pages of

The Rebel Worker and Heatwave (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2005), pp. 5–6. Also

see, P. Rosemont, Dreams and Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker,

SDS & the Seven Cities of Cibola (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2008).

36. S. Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 33. On the concept of ‘hipness’ and the rela-

tion between bebop jazz and the Beats, see J. Leland, Hip: The History (New York:

Harper Collins, 2004).

37. Rosemont, ‘To be Revolutionary,’ p. 45.

38. John Sinclair, manager of the MC5 and a founder of the White Panther Party,

tellingly named his book about the Detroit milieu Guitar Army.J.Sinclair,Guitar

Army: Rock and Revolution with the MC5 and the White Panther Party (Los Angeles:

Process, 2007 [1972]). See also G. McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty;G.McKay,DiY

Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain (London and New York: Verso, 1998).

39. F. Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Soci-

ety (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008); G.L. Boggs, Living for Change:

An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

40. A. Hirsch, The French Left: A History and Overview (Montreal: Black Rose Books,

1982), pp. 108–135; H. Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Leeds and San

Francisco: Anti/Theses and AK Press, 2000), pp. 59–64.

41. C.L.R. James, G. Lee and C. Castoriadis, Facing Reality: The New Society, Where to

Look for It and How to Bring it Closer (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2006 [1958]).

42. D. Goodway (ed.), For Workers’ Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton

(Oakland: AK Press, 2004).

43. M. Glaberman, Punching Out and Other Writings, ed. S. Lynd (Chicago: Charles

H. Kerr, 2002); George Rawick, Listening to Revolt: Selected Writings, ed. D. Roediger

and M. Smith (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2010).

44. F. Rosemont, ‘Mods, Rockers and the Revolution,’ in F. Rosemont and C. Radcliffe

(eds) Dancing in the Streets, pp. 127–131.

45. Rosemont, ‘To be Revolutionary,’ p. 45.

46. Ben Morea, interview with author, New York, NY, 29 March 2009.

47. J. Malina, The Diaries of Judith Malina, 1947–1957 (New York: Grove Press, 1984).

48. Polletta, Freedom, 88–119; Carson, In Struggle, pp. 133–211; P. Joseph, Waiting ‘t il

the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry

Holt, 2006).

49. J. Foreman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: University of Washington

Press, 1997 [1972]); S. Carmichael with M. Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The

Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) (New York: Scribner, 2003);

J. Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), Die, Nigger, Die! A Political Autobiography (New York:

Dial Press, 1969]).

50. See R. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001);

L. Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley:

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-186 9780230280373

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186 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’

University of California Press, 2006); M. Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties

Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (New York: Verso, 2002).

51. B. Morea, interview.

52. R. Hahne, Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: The Incomplete Works

of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea and the Black Mask Group (Oakland: PM Press, 2011),

pp. 7–12. On the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, see H. Jeffries, Bloody

Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York

University Press, 2010).

53. Morea, interview.

54. O. Neumann, Up Against the Wall Motherf∗∗ker: A Memoir of the ‘60s, with Notes for

Next Time (New York: Seven Stories, 2008), pp. 53–67. LeRoi Jones later changed

his name to Amiri Baraka. On Baraka and the Newark uprising, see K. Woodard,

A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

55. L. Jones/A. Baraka, ‘Black People!’ in W. J. Harris (ed.) The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka

Reader (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), p. 224.

56. Morea, interview.

57. Neumann, Up Against the Wall, p. 66.

58. The Diggers, the Fifth Estate and the pro-Situationist groups are among the most

important of these. On the Diggers, see J. Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest:

Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press, 1998); T. Hodgdon, Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in

Two Counter-Cultural Communities, 1965–1983 (New York: Columbia Univer-

sity Press, 2008). On the Fifth Estate, see P. Werbe, ‘The History of the Fifth

Estate’, Fifth Estate, 368–369 (2005), 8–19; S. Millett, ‘Technology is Capital: Fifth

Estate’s Critique of the Megamachine’ in J. Purkis and J. Bowen (eds) Chang-

ing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2004). On the pro-Situationist groups, see K. Knabb,

Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb, 1970–1997 (Berkeley: Bureau

of Public Secrets, 1997).

59. S. Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age

(London: Routledge, 1992); K. Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: Chicago

University Press, 2002).

60. D. Wise and S. Wise, ‘The End of Music’ in S. Home (ed.) What is Situationism?

AReader(Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996), pp. 63–102.

61. R. Lumley, States of Emergency; G. Katsiaﬁcas, The Subversion of Politics; S. Wright,

Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism

(London: Pluto Press, 2002).

62. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),

2009).

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-186 9780230280373

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IMPORTANT NOTE: Please mark your corrections and answer to these

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Chapter 9

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The Search for a Libertarian

Communism: Daniel Guérin and the

‘Synthesis’ of Marxism and

Anarchism

David Berry

I have a horror of sects, of compartmentalisation, of people who are sep-

arated by virtually nothing and who nevertheless face each other as if

across an abyss.

Daniel Guérin1

Concerned that his reinterpretation of the French Revolution, La Lutte de

classes sous la Première République (1946),had been misunderstood, Daniel

Guérin wrote to the socialist Marceau Pivert in 1947 that the book was to be

seen as ‘an introduction to a synthesis of anarchism and Marxism-Leninism

I would like to write one day’.2This paper aims to analyse exactly what

Guérin meant by this ‘synthesis’, and how and why he came to be convinced

of its necessity.

It must however be noted from the outset that Guérin had no pretensions

to being a theorist: he saw himself ﬁrst and foremost as an activist and sec-

ond as a historian.3Indeed, from the day in 1930 when he abandoned the

poetry and novels of his youth, all his research and writings were concerned

more or less directly with his political commitments. His developing cri-

tique of Marxism and his later interest in the relationship between Marxism

and anarchism were motivated by his own direct experience of and active

participation in revolutionary struggles on a number of fronts.

Although, in some of his autobiographical writings, Guérin had a ten-

dency to divide his life into more or less distinct ‘phases’, and despite the

fact that his political or ideological trajectory may seem to some to be rather

protean, I would argue that there was in fact an underlying ideological con-

sistency – even if changing circumstances meant that his ‘organisational

options’ (as he put it) changed in different periods of his life. A historical

materialist all his life, he remained attached to a revolutionary socialism

187

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188 Daniel Guérin and the Search for a Libertarian Communism

with a strong ethical or moral core. Although it was many years before he

found an organisation which lived up to his expectations, he was always

at heart a libertarian communist, developing an increasingly strong belief

in the need for a ‘total revolution’ which would attach as much impor-

tance to issues of race, gender and sexuality as to workplace-based conﬂict.

Whether speciﬁcally in his commitment to a libertarian communism, to

anti-colonialism or to sexual liberation, or more generally in his emphasis

on what today would be called intersectionality, Guérin was undoubtedly

ahead of his time.

Early inﬂuences

Despite coming from the ‘grande bourgeoisie’ – a background which he

would come to reject – Guérin owed much to the inﬂuence of his branch

of the family: humanist, liberal and cultured, both his parents had been pas-

sionately pro-Dreyfus, both were inﬂuenced by Tolstoy’s ethical and social

ideas, and his father’s library contained the Communist Manifesto as well as

works by Benoît Malon, Proudhon and Kropotkin.4The young Daniel seems

to have been particularly inﬂuenced by his father’s paciﬁsm, and was also

deeply affected by his own reading of Tolstoy’s Diaries and Resurrection.Inthe

context of the increasingly polarised debates of the interwar period between

the Far Right and Far Left (‘Maurras versus Marx’), he identiﬁed with the

‘Marxist extreme Left’ from a relatively early age.5His later ‘discovery’ of the

Parisian working class and of the concrete realities of their everyday exis-

tence (to a large extent through his homosexual relationships with young

workers) reinforced a profound ‘workerism’ which would stay with him for

the rest of his life.6

The bankruptcy of Stalinism and of social democracy

This workerism would lead him in 1930–31 to join the syndicalists grouped

around the veteran revolutionary Pierre Monatte: typically, Guérin’s ﬁrst

real active involvement was in the campaign for the reuniﬁcation of the

two major syndicalist confederations, the Confédération Générale du Tra-

vail (General Labour Confederation) and the Confédération Générale du

Travail Unitaire (United General Labour Confederation). His workerism was

also responsible for a strong attraction towards the French Communist Party

(PCF), far more ‘proletarian’ than the Socialist Party (the Section Française de

l’Internationale Ouvrière, SFIO), despite his ‘visceral anti-Stalinism’ and what

he saw as the Party’s ‘crass ideological excesses, its inability to win over

the majority of workers, and its mechanical submission to the Kremlin’s

orders’.7Yet Guérin was no more impressed with the SFIO, which he

found petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded, dogmatically anti-communist, and

obsessed with electioneering:

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David Berry 189

The tragedy for many militants of our generation was our repugnance at

having to opt for one or the other of the two main organisations which

claimed, wrongly, to represent the working class. Stalinism and social

democracy both repelled us, each in its own way. Yet those workers who

were active politically were in one of these two parties. The smaller, inter-

mediate groups and the extremist sects seemed to us to be doomed to

impotence and marginalisation. The SFIO, despite the social conformism

of its leadership, at least had the advantage over the Communist Party

of enjoying a certain degree of internal democracy, and to some extent

allowed revolutionaries to express themselves; whereas the monolithic

automatism of stalinism forbade any critics from opening their mouths

and made it very difﬁcult for them even to stay in the party.8

Hence his decision to rejoin the SFIO in 1935, shortly before the creation by

Marceau Pivert of the Gauche révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Left) tendency

within the party, of which he would become a leading member. Guérin was

attracted by Pivert’s ‘Luxemburgist’, libertarian and syndicalist tendencies.9

He was consistently on the revolutionary wing of the Gauche révolutionnaire

and of its successor the Parti socialiste ouvrier et paysan (PSOP, Workers’

and Peasants’ Socialist Party, created when the Gauche révolutionnaire was

expelled from the SFIO in 1938), and, in the Popular Front period, he drew

a clear distinction between what he called the ‘Popular Front no. 1’ – an

electoral alliance between social democracy, Stalinism, and bourgeois liber-

alism – and the ‘Popular Front no. 2’ – the powerful, extra-parliamentary,

working-class movement, which came into conﬂict with the more moderate

(and more bourgeois) Popular Front government.10 He viewed the ‘entryism’

of the French Trotskyists in these years as a welcome counterbalance to the

reformism of the majority of the Socialist Party.11

Indeed, in the 1930s, Guérin agreed with Trotsky’s position on many

issues: on the nature of fascism and how to stop it; on war and revolutionary

proletarian internationalism; on opposition to the collusion between ‘social-

patriotism’ (i.e. mainstream social democracy) and ‘national-communism’

(i.e. the PCF) as well as any pact with the bourgeois Radicals; and on the

need to ﬁght actively for the liberation of Europe’s colonies. As Guérin com-

ments after recounting in glowing terms his sole meeting with Trotsky in

Barbizon in 1933: ‘On a theoretical level as well as on the level of political

practice, Trotsky would remain, for many of us, both a stimulus to action

and a teacher.’12

Ultimately, Guérin’s experience of the labour movement and of the Left in

the 1930s – as well as his research on the nature and origins of fascism and

Nazism13 – led him to reject both social democracy and Stalinism as effec-

tive strategies for defeating fascism and preventing war. Indeed, the left –

’divided, ossiﬁed, negative, and narrow-minded’ in Guérin’s words – bore its

share of responsibility and had made tragic errors.14 The SFIO was criticised

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190 Daniel Guérin and the Search for a Libertarian Communism

by Guérin for its electoralism and for allowing its hands to be tied by the

Parti radical-socialiste, ‘a bourgeois party whose corruption and bankruptcy

were in large part responsible for the fascist explosion’; for its incompre-

hension of the nature of the capitalist state, which led to the impotence

of Léon Blum’s 1936 Popular Front government; for its failure to take fas-

cism seriously (and to aid the Spanish Republicans), despite the warnings,

until it was too late; and for its obsessive rivalry with the PCF. The PCF

was equally harshly criticised by Guérin – for what seemed to him to be its

blind obedience to the Comintern, the criminal stupidity of the Comintern’s

‘third period’ and for its counter-revolutionary strategy both in Spain and in

France.15

As for Trotsky, Guérin disagreed with him over the creation of the Fourth

International in 1938, which seemed to him premature and divisive. More

generally, Guérin was critical of what he saw as Trotsky’s tendency contin-

ually to transpose the experiences of the Russian Bolsheviks onto contem-

porary events in the West, and of his ‘authoritarian rigidness’. Trotskyism,

Guérin argued, represented ‘the ideology of the infallible leader who, in an

authoritarian fashion, directs the policy of a fraction or of a party’.16 What

Guérin wanted to see was ‘the full development of the spontaneity of the

working class’.17 Writing in 1963, Guérin would conclude with regard to

such disputes over revolutionary tactics:

The revolutionary organisation which was lacking in June 1936 was not,

in my opinion, an authoritarian leadership emanating from a small group

or sect, but an organ for the coordination of the workers’ councils, grow-

ing directly out of the occupied workplaces. The mistake of the Gauche

Révolutionnaire was not so much that it was unable, because of its lack of

preparation, to transform itself into a revolutionary party on the Leninist

or Trotskyist model, but that it was unable [...] to help the working class

to ﬁnd for itself its own form of power structure to confront the fraud

that was the Popular Front no.1.18

So as Guérin summarised the state of the Left in the 1930s: ‘Everything made

the renewal of the concepts and methods of struggle employed by the French

left both indispensable and urgent.’19

The break from Trotskyism

Despite Guérin’s reservations about Trotskyism, his analysis of the nature of

the Vichy regime was very similar to that put forward by the Fourth Inter-

national, and he was also impressed with Trotsky’s manifesto of May 1940,

‘La guerre impérialiste et la révolution prolétarienne mondiale’, including

it in a collection of Trotsky’s writings on the Second World War he would

edit in 1970.20 He worked with the Trotskyists in the resistance, not least

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David Berry 191

because they remained true to their internationalism and to their class

politics, rejecting, for instance, what Guerin saw as the PCF’s demagogic

nationalism.21

However, an extended study tour of the USA in 1946–1949, which

included visits to branches or prominent militants of the Socialist Work-

ers’ Party and the breakaway Workers’ Party, represented a turning point

in Guérin’s ‘Trotskyism’. In a 1948 letter to Marceau Pivert, he commented

on his unhappiness with the Trotskyists’ tendency to ‘repeat mechanically

old formulae without rethinking them, relying lazily and uncritically on the

(undeniably admirable) writings of Trotsky’.22 Looking back 30 years later,

he would conclude: ‘It was thanks to the American Trotskyists, despite their

undeniable commitment, that I ceased forever believing in the virtues of

revolutionary parties built on authoritarian, Leninist lines.’23

The ‘Mother of us all’

Unlike many on the Left associated with postwar ideological renewal, most

of whom would focus on a revision or reinterpretation of Marxism, often at

a philosophical level, Guérin the historian began with a return to what he

saw as the source of revolutionary theory and praxis: in 1946, he published

his study of class struggle in the First French Republic (1793–1797).24 The

aim of the book was to ‘draw lessons from the greatest, longest and deep-

est revolutionary experience France has ever known, lessons which would

help regenerate the revolutionary, libertarian socialism of today’, and to

‘extract some ideas which would be applicable to our time and of direct use

to the contemporary reader who has yet to fully digest the lessons of another

revolution: the Russian revolution’.25 Applying the concepts of permanent

revolution and combined and uneven development, inspired by Trotsky’s

History of the Russian Revolution, Guérin argued that the beginnings of a con-

ﬂict of class interest could already be detected within the revolutionary camp

between an ‘embryonic’ proletariat – the bras nus (manual workers), repre-

sented by the Enragés – and the bourgeoisie – represented by Robespierre and

the Jacobin leadership. For Guérin, the French Revolution thus represented

not only the birth of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, but also the emer-

gence of ‘a new type of democracy’, a form of working-class direct democracy

as seen, however imperfectly, in the ‘sections’ (local popular assemblies), pre-

cursors of the Commune of 1871 and the Soviets of 1905 and 1917. In the

second edition of the work, he would add ‘the Commune of May 1968’ to

that genealogy.

Guérin emphasised the political ambivalence of the bourgeois Jacobin

leadership which ‘hesitated continually between the solidarity uniting it

with the popular classes against the aristocracy and that uniting all the

wealthy, property-owning classes against those who owned little or noth-

ing’.26 The essential lesson to be drawn from the French Revolution was

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192 Daniel Guérin and the Search for a Libertarian Communism

thus the conﬂict of class interest between the bourgeoisie and the working

classes. Bourgeois, social democratic, and Stalinist interpretations of the

Revolution – like those of Jean Jaurès, Albert Mathiez, and so many others –

which tended to maintain the ‘cult of Robespierre’ and to reinforce the

labour movement’s dependence on bourgeois democracy, were thus to be

rejected.27

La Lutte de classes sous la Pemière République has been described by Eric

Hobsbawm as ‘a curious combination of libertarian and Trotskyist ideas – not

without a dash of Rosa Luxemburg’.28 It not only shocked many academic

historians of the Revolution – especially those with more or less close links to

the PCF (Georges Lefebvre, and especially Albert Soboul and Georges Rudé) –

but also those politicians who, in Guérin’s words, ‘have been responsible

for perverting and undermining true proletarian socialism’.29 The ensuing

debate lasted for many years.30 The political signiﬁcance was that the Rev-

olutionary Terror had been used as a parallel to justify Bolshevik repression

of democratic freedoms and repression of more Leftist movements. Stalin

had been compared to Robespierre. The Jacobin tradition of patriotism and

national unity in defence of the bourgeois democratic Republic has been

one of the characteristics of the dominant tendencies within the French

Left, and therefore central to the political mythologies of the Popular Front

and the Resistance. Guérin, as Ian Birchall has put it, ‘was polemicizing

against the notion of a Resistance uniting all classes against the foreign

invader’.31

What is more, the PCF had been campaigning since 1945 for unity at the

top with the SFIO, and in the 1956 elections called for the re-establishment

of a Popular Front government. At a time when fascism in the form of

Poujadism looked as if it might once more be a real threat, Guérin argued

that what was needed was a ‘genuine’ Popular Front, that is, a grass-roots

social movement rather than a governmental alliance, a truly popular move-

ment centred on the working classes that would bring together the labour

movement and all socialists who rejected both the pro-American SFIO and

the pro-Soviet PCF: ‘Only a combative Popular Front, which dares to attack

big business, will be able to halt our middle classes on the slope which leads

to fascism and to their destruction.’32

The developing critique of Leninism

Guérin’s friend and translator, C.L.R. James wrote in 1958 of Guérin’s

reinterpretation of French Revolution:

It is impregnated with the experience and study of the greatest event of

our time: the development and then degeneration of the Russian Revo-

lution, and is animated implicitly by one central concern: how can the

revolutionary masses avoid the dreadful pitfalls of bureaucratisation and

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David Berry 193

the resurgence of a new oppressive state power, and instead establish a

system of direct democracy?33

In an important essay of 1959, ‘La Révolution déjacobinisée’, Guérin argued

that the ‘Jacobin’ traits in Marxism and particularly in Leninism were the

result of an incomplete understanding on Marx and Engels’ part of the

class nature of the Jacobin dictatorship, to be distinguished according to

Guérin from the democratically controlled ‘contrainte révolutionnaire’(‘revo-

lutionary coercion’) exercised by the popular sections.34 Thus by applying a

historical materialist analysis to the experiences of the French revolution-

ary movement, Guérin came to argue, essentially, that ‘authentic’ socialism

arose spontaneously out of working-class struggle, that it was fundamen-

tally libertarian, and that authoritarian conceptions of party organisation

and revolutionary strategy had their origins in bourgeois or even aristocratic

modes of thought.

Guérin insisted that Marx and Engels envisaged the ‘dictatorship of the

proletariat’ as being exercised by the working class as a whole, rather than

by an avant-garde, but that they did not adequately differentiate their

interpretation from that of the Blanquists. This made possible Lenin’s later

authoritarian conceptions: ‘Lenin, who saw himself as both a “Jacobin” and

a “Marxist,” invented the idea of the dictatorship of a party substituting itself

for the working class and acting by proxy in its name.’35 This, for Guérin, was

where it all started to go badly wrong:

The double experience of the French and Russian Revolutions has taught

us that this is where we touch upon the central mechanism whereby

direct democracy, the self-government of the people, is transformed, grad-

ually, by the introduction of the revolutionary ‘dictatorship’, into the

reconstitution of an apparatus for the oppression of the people.36

Guérin’s critique clearly had its sources both in his reinterpretation of

the Revolution and in the conditions of his time. La Révolution française et

nous was informed by Guérin’s critique of social-democratic and Stalinist

strategies before, during, and after the war. La révolution déjacobinisée was

written at a signiﬁcant historic moment for socialists in France: after the

artiﬁcial national unity of the immediate postwar years had given way to

profound social and political conﬂict; as Guy Mollet’s SFIO became increas-

ingly identiﬁed with the defence of the bourgeois status quo and the Western

camp in the cold war; as the immensely powerful postwar PCF reeled under

the effects of Hungary and the Khrushchev revelations; and as the unpopular

and politically unstable Fourth Republic collapsed in the face of a threat-

ened military coup. It was this situation which made renewal of the Left

so necessary. In 1959, Guérin also picked up on the results of a survey of

the attitudes of French youth towards politics, which indicated to him two

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194 Daniel Guérin and the Search for a Libertarian Communism

things: ﬁrst, that what alienated the younger generation from ‘socialism’ was

‘bureaucrats and purges’, and second, that, as one respondent put it, ‘French

youth are becoming more and more anarchist.’37 Ever the optimist, Guérin

declared:

[T]he time has come for the French left to begin again from zero, to

rethink its problems from their very foundations. [ ...] The necessary

synthesis of the ideas of equality and liberty [ ...] can and must only

be sought within the framework of socialist thought [ ... ]. The failure of

both reformism and stalinism imposes on us the urgent duty to ﬁnd a

way of reconciling (proletarian) democracy with socialism, freedom with

Revolution.38

From Trotskyism to New Left to anarchism

What Guérin would thus do which was quite remarkable in post-Liberation

France was endeavour to separate Marxism from Bolshevism – his continued

friendly and supportive relations with Trotskyists notwithstanding – and it is

noteworthy that he had contact in this period with a number of prominent

non-orthodox Marxists. After 1945, especially, he was involved (centrally

or more peripherally) in a number of circles or networks, and according to

the sociologist Michel Crozier (who regarded Guérin as a mentor) Guérin

self-identiﬁed in the late 1940s and early 1950s – ‘the golden age of the left

intelligentsia’ – as an ‘independent Marxist’.39

C.L.R. James has already been mentioned. He and Guérin appear to have

met in the 1930s; they became good friends, Guérin visited him while in the

USA in 1949, and they corresponded over many years. James even translated

La Lutte de classes into English, and described the book as ‘one of the most

important modern textbooks in [ ...] the study of Marxism’ and ‘one of the

great theoretical landmarks of our movement’.40

Similarly, Guérin had ﬁrst met Karl Korsch in Berlin in 1932, and visited

him in his exile in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1947, where according

to Guérin they spent many hours together.41 The two would collaborate a

decade later in their bibliographical researches on the relationship between

Marx and Bakunin.42 Also during his time in the USA, Guérin became

friendly with a group of refugee Germans in Washington D.C., dissident

Marxists, ‘as hospitable as they were brilliant’, connected with the so-

called Frankfurt School: Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer and Herbert

Marcuse.43

In France, Guérin already knew the leading ﬁgures in the Socialisme ou

Barbarie group from their days in the Parti Communiste Internationaliste

together: Guérin’s papers contain a number of texts produced by the so-

called Chaulieu-Montal Tendency in the late 1940s.44 It is interesting to

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David Berry 195

note that the Socialisme ou Barbarie group’s theses on the Russian revolution

feature in the list of theories and authors discovered by the Algerian nation-

alist and revolutionary, Mohammed Harbi, thanks to his ﬁrst meeting with

Guérin (at a meeting of the PCI discussion group, the ‘Cercle Lénine’) in

1953.45 In 1965 Guérin took part, with Castoriadis, Lefort and Edgar Morin,

in a forum on ‘Marxism Today’ organised by Socialisme ou Barbarie (whose

work Morin would describe a few years later as itself representing ‘an orig-

inal synthesis of Marxism and anarchism’46). Guérin also contributed to

Morin’s Arguments (1956–1962), an important journal launched in response

to the events of 1956 with a view to a ‘reconsideration not only of Stalinist

Marxism, but of the Marxist way of thinking’,47 and he had been centrally

involved with the French ‘Titoists’ around Clara Malraux and the review

Contemporains (1950–1951).48

In short, Guérin was at the heart of the Left-intellectual ferment which

characterised these years, that he had an address book, as his daughter Anne

recently put it49, as fat as a dictionary and that he shared many of the

theoretical preoccupations of many leading Marxists in the 20 years or so fol-

lowing the Second World War, be it the party-form, bureaucracy, alienation

or sexual repression.

In the mid- to late 1950s, like other former or ‘critical’ Trotskyists, as well

as ex-members of the FCL (the Libertarian Communist Federation, banned in

195650), Guérin belonged – though ‘without much conviction’ – to a series

of Left-socialist organisations: the Nouvelle Gauche, the Union de la Gauche

Socialiste, and, brieﬂy, the Parti Socialiste Uniﬁé.51 But it was also around 1956

that Guérin ‘discovered’ anarchism. Looking back on a 1930 boat trip to

Vietnam and the small library he had taken with him, Guérin commented

that of all the authors he had studied – Marx, Proudhon, Georges Sorel,

Hubert Lagardelle, Fernand Pelloutier, Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi, and oth-

ers – ‘Marx had, without a doubt, been preponderant.’52 But having become

increasingly critical of Leninism, Guérin discovered the collected works of

Bakunin, a ‘revelation’ which rendered him forever ‘allergic to all versions of

authoritarian socialism, whether Jacobin, Marxist, Leninist, or Trotskyist’.53

The discovery of Bakunin coincided with the appearance of the Hungarian

workers’ committees in 1956. Guérin was thus provoked into studying the

councilist tradition.54 It was also during the 1950s that Guérin, moving on

from his study of the French Revolution, had begun to research the conﬂicts

within the First International and more generally the relationship between

Marxism and anarchism.

Guérin would describe the following ten years or so (i.e. the mid 1950s

to the mid 1960s) – which saw the publication notably of the popular

anthology Ni Dieu ni Maître and of L’Anarchisme, which sold like hot cakes at

the Sorbonne in May 1968 – as his ‘classical anarchist phase’.55 He became

especially interested in Proudhon, whom he admired as the ﬁrst theorist

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196 Daniel Guérin and the Search for a Libertarian Communism

of autogestion,orworkerself-management

56; Bakunin, representative of

revolutionary, working-class anarchism, close to Marxism, Guérin insisted,

yet remarkably prescient about the dangers of statist communism; and Max

Stirner, appreciated as a precursor of 1968 because of his determination to

attack bourgeois prejudice and puritanism.

Guérin and anarchism

Guérin had had no contact with the anarchist movement before the Second

World War, other than to read E. Armand’s individualist anarchist organ L’e n

dehors.57 According to Georges Fontenis, a leading ﬁgure in the postwar anar-

chist movement, Guérin began to have direct contact with the Anarchist

Federation (FA) in 1945, when the second edition of Fascism and Big Busi-

ness was published. Le Libertaire reviewed Guérin’s books favourably, and he

was invited to galas of the FA and (from 1953) of the FCL to do book sign-

ings. He got to know leading anarchist militants and would drop in at the

FCL’s ofﬁces in Paris. Fontenis described him as being ‘an active sympathiser’

at that point.58 His new-found sympathies were sufﬁciently well known for

the US embassy in Paris to refuse him a visa to visit his wife and daughter

in 1950 on the grounds that he was both a Trotskyist and an anarchist.59

The ideological stance of the FCL (‘libertarian Marxism’) and its position

on the Algerian war (‘critical support’ for the nationalist movement in the

context of the struggle against French bourgeois imperialism) proved doubly

attractive to the anti-colonialist Guérin.60 In part for these reasons, 1954 (the

beginning of the Algerian war of independence) represented the beginning

of a relationship, notably with Fontenis (leading light of the FCL), which as

we shall see would ultimately take Guérin into the ranks of the ‘libertarian

communist’ movement.

In 1959, Guérin published a collection of articles entitled Jeunesse du

socialisme libertaire. This represented both a continuation of the critique of

Leninism begun during the war, and Guérin’s ﬁrst analysis of the nineteenth-

century anarchist tradition. Signiﬁcantly, a copy of this collection has been

found with a handwritten dedication to Maximilien Rubel, ‘to whom this lit-

tle book owes so much’.61 A few years later, in 1965, he would publish both

Anarchism. From Theory to Practice and the two volume anthology No Gods

No Masters. The purpose was to ‘rehabilitate’ anarchism which ‘suffered from

an undeserved disrepute’, and the anthology represented the ‘dossier of evi-

dence’ against some common misconceptions or misrepresentations: ﬁrst,

the claim that ‘it has no place in the modern world, a world characterised

by centralisation, by large political and economic entities’; second, that it

is ‘essentially individualistic, particularistic, hostile to any form of organisa-

tion. It leads to fragmentation, to the egocentric withdrawal of small local

units of administration and production. It is incapable of centralizing or of

planning. It is nostalgic for the “golden age”. [ ...] It suffers from a childish

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David Berry 197

optimism; its “idealism” takes no account of the solid realities of the material

infrastructure’; and third, that anarchism is synonymous with terrorism and

assassination.62

Although, as we have seen, he referred to his ‘classical anarchist’ phase,

and despite his assertion that the basics of anarchist doctrine were relatively

homogeneous, elsewhere he was very clear that both books focused on a par-

ticular kind of anarchism. To begin with, ‘[t]he fundamental aspect of these

doctrines’ was, for Guérin, that ‘[a]narchy, is indeed, above all, synonymous

with socialism. The anarchist is, ﬁrst and foremost, a socialist whose aim is

to put an end to the exploitation of man by man. Anarchism is no more

than one of the branches of socialist thought [ ...]. For Adolph Fischer, one

of the Chicago martyrs, ‘every anarchist is a socialist, but every socialist is

not necessarily an anarchist’.63

In Pour un marxisme libertaire (1969), Guérin described himself as com-

ing from the school of ‘antiStalinist Marxism’, but as having for some

time been in the habit of ‘delving into the treasury of libertarian thought’.

Anarchism, he insisted, was still relevant and still very much alive, ‘pro-

vided that it is ﬁrst divested of a great deal of childishness, utopianism

and romanticism’.64 He went on to comment that because of this open-

ness towards the contribution of anarchism, his book, Anarchism, had been

misunderstood by some, and that it did not mean that he had become an

‘ecumenical’ anarchist, to use Georges Fontenis’ term.65 In Anarchisme et

marxisme (written in 1973), Guérin emphasised that his book on anarchism

had focused on ‘social, constructive, collectivist or communist anarchism’

because this was the kind of anarchism which had most in common with

Marxism.66

The reason Guérin gave for focusing on this kind of anarchism, as opposed

to individualist anarchism, was that it was entirely relevant to the problems

faced by contemporary revolutionaries: ‘[l]ibertarian visions of the future

[...] invite serious consideration. It is clear that they fulﬁl to a very large

extent the needs of our times, and that they can contribute to the building

of our future.’67

But is this really ‘classical anarchism’, as Guérin put it, given the

insistence on ‘constructive anarchism, which depends on organisation, on

self-discipline, on integration, on federalist and noncoercive centralisation’;

the emphasis on experiments in workers’ control in Algeria, Yugoslavia and

Cuba; the openness to the idea that such states could be seen as socialist

and capable of reform in a libertarian direction?68 This was not the conclu-

sion of English anarchist Nicolas Walter, whose review of Ni dieu ni maître

and L’Anarchisme, though sceptical about the attention paid to Gramsci,

Yugoslavia or Algeria, concluded that these two books were ‘the expression

of an original and exciting view of anarchism’.69

So Guérin’s take on anarchism represented an original departure, and it

is worth picking up on two taboos mentioned by Patrice Spadoni – who

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198 Daniel Guérin and the Search for a Libertarian Communism

worked alongside Guérin in different libertarian communist groups in the

1970s and 1980s – when commenting on Guérin’s ‘non-dogmatism’:

The young libertarian communists that we were [ ...] turned pale with

shock when he sang the praises of a Proudhon, of whom he was saying

‘yes and no’ while we said ‘no and no’; then we would go white with

horror, when he started quoting a Stirner whom we loathed – without

having really read him ...70

Proudhon and the fundamental importance of self-management

Proudhon had already ceased to be an ideological reference for any section

of the French anarchist movement by at least the time of the Great War,

except for a small minority of individualists opposed to any kind of col-

lective ownership of the means of production. Most anarchists referred to

either Kropotkin or Bakunin. This was partly because of the perceived ambi-

guities in Proudhon’s own writings regarding property, and partly because

of the increasingly reactionary positions adopted by some of his ‘mutualist’

followers after his death in 1865.

The fact that Proudhon is so central to Guérin’s ‘rehabilitation’ of anar-

chism is thus surprising and tells us something about what he was trying

to do and how it is he came to study anarchism in such depth: whereas

Proudhon had already for many years been commonly referred to as the

‘father of anarchy’, Guérin refers to him as the ‘father of self-management’.

This is the crux of the matter: Guérin was looking for a way to guarantee

that in any future revolution, control of the workplace, of the economy and

of society as a whole would remain at the base, that spontaneous forms of

democracy – like the soviets, in the beginning – would not be hijacked by

any centralised power.71 Marx, Guérin insisted, hardly mentioned workers’

control or self-management at all, whereas Proudhon paid it a great deal of

attention.72 Workers’ control was, for Guérin, ‘without any doubt the most

original creation of anarchism, and goes right to the heart of contempo-

rary realities’.73 Proudhon had been one of the ﬁrst to try to answer the

question raised by other social reformers of the early nineteenth century.

As Guérin put it: ‘Who should manage the economy? Private capitalism?

The State? Workers’ organisations? In other words, there were – and still

are – three options: free enterprise, nationalisation or socialisation (i.e. Self-

management).’74 From 1848 onwards, Proudhon had argued passionately for

the third option, something which set him apart from most other social-

ists of the time, who, like Louis Blanc, argued for one form or another of

State control (if only on a transitional basis). Unlike Marx, Engels and oth-

ers, Guérin argued, Proudhon saw workers’ control as a concrete problem

to be raised now, rather than relegated to some distant future. As a con-

sequence, he thought and wrote in detail about how it might function:

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David Berry 199

‘Almost all the issues which have caused such problems for present-day

experiments in self-management were already foreseen and described in

Proudhon’s writings.’75

Stirner the ‘father of anarchism’?

As for Stirner – generally anathema to the non-individualist wing of the anar-

chist movement – the answer lies in what Guérin perceived to be Stirner’s

latent homosexuality, his concern with sexual liberation and his determina-

tion to attack bourgeois prejudice and puritanism: Stirner was ‘a precursor

of May 68’ and ‘the voice of all those who throw down a challenge to nor-

mality’.76 It was Guérin’s personal experience of the endemic homophobia

in the labour movement and many Marxists’ exclusive concern with class

that accounts in large part for his sympathy with Stirner.77

So to the extent that Guérin insists that every anarchist is an

individualist – at the same time as being a ‘social’ anarchist (‘anarchiste

sociétaire’) – to the extent that he approves of Stirner’s emphasis on the

uniqueness of each individual, it is because he admires the determination to

resist social conformism and moral prejudice. Guérin certainly had no truck

with the precious ‘freedom of the individual’ which was the stock mantra of

those anarchists who rejected any attempt to produce a more ideologically

and organisationally coherent revolutionary movement or who wished to

ground their action in a realistic (or in Guérin’s words ‘scientiﬁc’) analysis of

social conditions.

For a ‘synthesis’ of Marxism and anarchism

So having called himself a ‘libertarian socialist’ in the late 1950s before

going through an ‘anarchist phase’ in the 1960s, by 1968 Guérin was

advocating ‘libertarian Marxism’, a term he would later change to ‘liber-

tarian communism’ in order not to alienate some of his new anarchist

friends (though the content remained the same). In 1969, with Fontenis

and others Guérin launched the Mouvement communiste libertaire (MCL),

which attempted to bring together various groups such as supporters of

Denis Berger’s Voie communiste, former members of the FCL and individu-

als such as Gabriel Cohn-Bendit who had been associated with Socialisme

ou Barbarie.78 Guérin was responsible for the organisation’s paper, Guerre

de classes (Class War). In 1971, the MCL merged with another group to

become the Organisation communiste libertaire (OCL). In 1980, after complex

debates, notably over the question of trade union activity, Guérin – who

rejected ultra-Left forms of ‘spontanéisme’ which condemned trade unionism

as counter-revolutionary – would ultimately join the Union des travailleurs

communistes libertaires (UTCL), created in 1978. He would remain a member

until his death in 1988.79

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200 Daniel Guérin and the Search for a Libertarian Communism

Looking back on those years, Fontenis would write: ‘For us [the FCL], as for

Guérin, “libertarian Marxism” was never to be seen as a fusion or a marriage,

but as a living synthesis very different from the sum of its parts.’80 How

should we interpret this?

Guérin was always keen to emphasise the commonalities in Marxism and

anarchism, and underscored the fact that, in his view at least, they shared

the same roots and the same objectives. Having said that, and despite the

fact that Rubel seems to have inﬂuenced Guérin, Guérin’s study of Marx led

him to suggest that those such as Rubel who saw Marx as a libertarian were

exaggerating and/or being too selective.81 Reviewing the ambivalent but pre-

dominantly hostile relations between Marx and Engels, on the one hand,

and Stirner, Proudhon, and Bakunin, on the other, Guérin concluded that

the disagreements between them were based to a great extent on misunder-

standing and exaggeration on both sides: ‘Each of the two movements needs

the theoretical and practical contribution of the other’, Guérin argued, and

this is why he saw the expulsion of the Bakuninists from the International

Working Men’s Association congress at The Hague in 1872 as ‘a disastrous

event for the working class’.82

‘Libertarian communism’ was for Guérin an attempt to ‘revivify every-

thing that was constructive in anarchism’s contribution in the past’. We have

noted that his Anarchism focused on ‘social, constructive, collectivist, or

communist anarchism’.83 Guérin was more critical of ‘traditional’ anar-

chism, with what he saw as its knee-jerk rejection of organisation and

simplistic, Manichean approach to the question of the ‘state’ in modern,

industrial and increasingly internationalised societies. He became inter-

ested particularly in militants such as the Spanish anarchist Diego Abad

de Santillán, whose ideas on ‘integrated’ economic self-management con-

trasted with what Guérin insisted was the naïve and backward-looking

‘libertarian communism’ of the Spanish CNT advocated at its 1936 Saragossa

conference.84 Such a policy seemed to Guérin to take no account of the

nature of modern consumer societies and the need for economic planning

and co-ordination at national and transnational level. In this connection,

Guérin also became interested in the ideas of the Belgian collectivist socialist

César de Paepe – who had argued against the anarchists of the Jura Fed-

eration in favour of what he called an ‘an-archic state’ – on the national

and transnational organisation of public services within a libertarian frame-

work.85

On the other hand, Guérin’s libertarian Marxism or communism did not

reject those aspects of Marxism which still seemed to Guérin valid and

useful: (i) the notion of alienation, which Guérin saw as being in accor-

dance with the anarchist emphasis on the freedom of the individual; (ii) the

insistence that the workers shall be emancipated by the workers them-

selves; (iii) the analysis of capitalist society; and (iv) the historical materialist

dialectic, which for Guérin remained:

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David Berry 201

... one of the guiding threads enabling us to understand the past

and the present, on condition that the method not be applied rigidly,

mechanically, or as an excuse not to ﬁght on the false pretext that the

material conditions for a revolution are absent, as the Stalinists claimed

was the case in France in 1936, 1945 and 1968. Historical material-

ism must never be reduced to a determinism; the door must always

be open to individual will and to the revolutionary spontaneity of the

masses.86

Indeed, following his focus on anarchism in the 1960s, Guérin returned

in the 1970s to his earlier researches on Marxism, and in his new quest

for a synthesis of the two ideologies he found a fruitful source in Rosa

Luxemburg. She was for Guérin the only German social democrat who had

stayed true to what he called ‘original’ Marxism, and in 1971 he published

an anthology of her critical writings on the pre-1914 SFIO, as well as a study

of the notion of spontaneity in her work.87 The following year he took part

in a debate with Gilbert Badia, Michael Löwy, Madeleine Rebérioux, Denis

Vidal-Naquet and others on the contemporary relevance of Luxemburg’s

ideas.88 Guérin saw no signiﬁcant difference between her conception of rev-

olutionary working-class spontaneity and the anarchist one, nor between

her conception of the ‘mass strike’ and the syndicalist idea of the ‘gen-

eral strike’. Her criticisms of Lenin in 1904 and of the Bolshevik Party

in the spring of 1918 (regarding the democratic freedoms of the working

class) seemed to him very anarchistic, as did her conception of a social-

ism propelled from below by workers’ councils. She was, he argued, ‘one

of the links between anarchism and authentic Marxism’, and for this rea-

son she played an important role in the development of Guérin’s thinking

about convergences between certain forms of Marxism and certain forms of

anarchism.89

Guérin was convinced that a libertarian communism which represented

such a synthesis of the best of Marxism and the best of anarchism would be

much more attractive to progressive workers than ‘degenerate, authoritarian

Marxism or old, outdated, and fossilised anarchism’.90 But he was adamant

that he was not a theorist, that libertarian communism was, as yet, only an

‘approximation’, not a ﬁxed dogma:

It cannot, it seems to me, be deﬁned on paper, in absolute terms. It can-

not be an endless raking over of the past, but must rather be a rallying

point for the future. The only thing of which I am convinced is that the

future social revolution will have nothing to do with either Muscovite

despotism or anæmic social-democracy; that it will not be authori-

tarian, but libertarian and rooted in self-management, or, if you like,

councilist.91

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202 Daniel Guérin and the Search for a Libertarian Communism

Conclusion

To what extent, then, can we say that Guérin succeeded in producing a

‘synthesis’? Assessments by fellow revolutionaries have varied. Guérin him-

self used to complain that many militants were so attached to ideological

pigeonholing and that quasi-tribal loyalties were so strong that his pur-

pose was frequently misunderstood, with many who identiﬁed as anarchists

criticising him for having ‘become a Marxist’, and vice versa.92 Yet Guér in

was clear that there have been many Marxisms and many anarchisms,

and he also insisted that his understanding of ‘libertarian communism’

‘transcended’ both anarchism and Marxism.93

Walter, apparently struggling to characterise his politics, described Guérin

as ‘a veteran socialist who became an anarchist’ and as ‘a Marxist writer

of a more or less Trotskyist variety’ who had gone on to attempt a synthesis

between Marxism and anarchism before ﬁnally turning to ‘a syndicalist form

of anarchism’.94

George Woodcock, in a review of Noam Chomsky’s introduction to the

English edition of Guérin’s Anarchism, insisted that ‘neither is an anarchist

by any known criterion; they are both left-wing Marxists’ – their failing hav-

ing been to focus too narrowly on the economic, on workers’ control, on

an ‘obsolete’, ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ perspective.95 Such a judgement is clearly

based on a particular and not uncontentious conception of anarchism.

The opposite conclusion was drawn by another anarchist, Miguel Chueca,

who has argued that if we look at all the major issues dividing anarchists

from Marxists, then ‘the ‘synthesis’ results, in all cases, in a choice in favour

of the anarchist position’.96 Chueca seems to have based his conclusion on

an essentialist view of anarchism and of Marxism, and on an identiﬁcation

of Marxism with Leninism. He also disregards some signiﬁcant issues, such

as Guérin’s insistence on the historical materialist dialectic and the need for

centralised (albeit ‘non-coercive’) economic planning.

Writing from a sympathetic but not uncritical, Trotskyist perspective,

Ian Birchall suggests that ultimately Guérin’s greatest achievement was his

practice as a militant:

Guérin’s greatness lay in his role as a mediator rather than as a synthe-

sist. Over six decades he had a record of willingness to cooperate with any

section of the French Left that shared his fundamental goals of proletarian

self-emancipation, colonial liberation and sexual freedom. He was a vig-

orous polemicist, but saw no fragment of the left, however obscure, as

beneath his attention. [ ... ] He was also typically generous, never seeking

to malign his opponents, however profoundly he disagreed with them.

[...] He was always willing to challenge orthodoxy, whether Marxist or

anarchist. [ ...] Yet behind the varying formulations one consistent prin-

ciple remained: ‘The Revolution of our age will be made from below – or

not at all.’97

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David Berry 203

Others have embraced Guérin’s theoretical contribution and it is clear that

his ideas on a ‘libertarian Marxism’ or ‘libertarian communism’ were enor-

mously inﬂuential from the 1960s onwards, and many today (notably, but

not only, those in France close to the organisation Alternative libertaire98)see

in him a precursor and are admiring of his theoretical and practical contri-

bution to the search for a libertarian communism – albeit as a contribution

which needed further development in the context of the social struggles of

the 1980s and beyond. Indeed Guérin was the ﬁrst to accept that he had not

yet seen the ‘deﬁnitive crystalisation of such an unconventional and difﬁ-

cult synthesis’, which would ‘emerge from social struggles’ with ‘innovative

forms which nobody today can claim to predict’99:

It would be pointless today to try to paper over the cracks in the more

or less crumbling and rotting ediﬁce of socialist doctrines, to plug away

at patching together some of those fragments of traditional Marxism and

anarchism which are still useful, to launch oneself into demonstrations

of Marxian or Bakuninian erudition, to attempt to trace, merely on paper,

ingenious syntheses or tortuous reconciliations. [ ...] To call oneself a lib-

ertarian communist today, does not mean looking backwards, but towards

the future. The libertarian communist is not an exegete, but a militant.100

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the British Academy, whose Small Research Grant scheme

enabled me to study Guérin’s papers in the Bibliothèque de Documenta-

tion Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC, Nanterre) and the Internationaal

Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG, Amsterdam).

Notes

1. Daniel Guérin, Front populaire, Révolution manquée. Témoignage militant (Arles:

Editions Actes Sud,1997), p. 29. All translations are mine unless otherwise indi-

cated. I would like to thank Anne Guérin and Editions Agone (who will be

publishing a new edition of Front populaire, Révolution manquée in 2013) for

permission to use this quotation as an epigraph.

2. Letter to Marceau Pivert, 18 November 1947, BDIC, Fonds Guérin, F◦Rés

688/10/2. La Lutte de classes sous la Première République, 1793–1797 (Paris:

Gallimard, 1946; 2nd edition 1968).

3. Daniel Guérin, A la recherche d’un communisme libertaire (Paris: Spartacus, 1984),

pp. 10–11.

4. On Malon, see K. Steven Vincent, Between Marxism and Anarchism: Benoît Malon

and French Reformist Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

5. Daniel Guérin, Autobiographie de jeunesse, d’une dissidence sexuelle au socialisme

(Paris: Belfond, 1972), pp. 126–127. Charles Maurras was the leader of the right-

wing movement, Action Française.

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204 Daniel Guérin and the Search for a Libertarian Communism

6. See my “Workers of the World, Embrace!’ Daniel Guérin, the Labour Move-

ment and Homosexuality’ in Left History, vol.9, no.2 (Spring/Summer 2004),

pp. 11–43; and Peter Sedgwick, ‘Out of Hiding: The Comradeships of Daniel

Guérin’, Salmagundi 58:9 (June 1982), pp. 197–220.

7. Guérin, À la recherche,p.9;Front populaire, p. 23.

8. Guérin, Front populaire, p. 147.

9. See Thierry Hohl, ‘Daniel Guérin, ‘pivertiste’. Un parcours dans la Gauche

révolutionnaire de la SFIO (1935–1938)’ in Dissidences 2 (2007), pp. 133–149.

‘Luxembourgisme’ was an identiﬁable current on the French Left opposed to both

Bolshevism and social-democracy from around 1928–1931 – see Alain Guillerm’s

preface to Rosa Luxembourg, Marxisme et Dictature: La démocratie selon Lénine et

Luxembourg (Paris: Spartacus, 1974).

10. Guérin’s Front populaire is a classic ‘revolutionist’ interpretation of the Popular

Front experience.

11. ‘Entryism’, originally ‘the French turn’, was a new tactic proposed by Trotsky in

response to the growing Fascist threat, and ﬁrst implemented in June 1934 in

France in order to contribute to the development of a more radical current

within the party. Daniel Bensaïd, Les trotskysmes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 2002), pp. 31–32; Alex Callinicos, Trotskyism (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 18–19.

12. Guérin, Front populaire, p. 104. Guérin’s Fascisme et grand capital (Paris:

Gallimard, 1936) was inspired by Trotsky.

13. Guérin, La Peste brune a passé par là (Paris: Librairie du Travail, 1933), translated

as The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany (Durham &

London: Duke University Press, 1994); Fascisme et grand capital (Paris: Gallimard,

1936), trans. Fascism and Big Business (New York: Monad Press, 1973). Fascism

has been criticised by some for tending towards reductionism: see Claude Lefort,

‘L’analyse marxiste et le fascisme’, Les Temps modernes 2 (November 1945),

pp. 357–362. Others regard Guérin’s methodology as fundamentally correct: see

Alain Bihr’s introduction to the 1999 edition of Fascisme et grand capital (Paris:

Editions Syllepse and Phénix Editions), pp. 7–14.

14. Guérin, ‘Quand le fascisme nous devançait’ in La Peste brune (Paris: Spartacus,

1996), pp. 21–22. This was originally commissioned for an issue of Les Temps

Modernes on the state of the Left, but was rejected by Sartre for being too critical

of the PCF. Letter from Guérin to C.L.R. James, 10 August 1955, BDIC, Fonds

Guérin, F◦721/60/5.

15. Guérin, ‘Quand le fascisme’, p. 25.

16. Guérin, Front populaire, pp. 150;156–157;365.

17. Ibid., p. 157.

18. Ibid., p. 213.

19. Ibid., p. 23.

20. L. Trotsky, ‘La guerre impérialiste et la révolution prolétarienne mondiale’ in

D. Guérin (ed.), Sur la deuxième guerre mondiale (Brussels: Editions la Taupe,

1970), pp. 187–245; Jean van Heijenoort, ‘Manifeste: La France sous Hitler

et Pétain’, in Rodolphe Prager (ed.), Les congrès de la quatrième internationale

(manifestes, thèses, résolutions) (Paris: La Brèche, 1981) Vol.II, pp. 35–44.

21. Interview with Pierre André Boutang in Guérin, television documentary by

Jean-José Marchand (1985; broadcast on FR3, 4 & 11 September 1989). See my

“Like a Wisp of Straw Amidst the Raging Elements’: Daniel Guérin in the Sec-

ond World War’ in Hanna Diamond and Simon Kitson (eds), Vichy, Resistance,

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-205 9780230280373

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David Berry 205

Liberation: New Perspectives on Wartime France (Festschrift in Honour of H. R.

Kedward) (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2005), pp. 143–154.

22. Letter to Marceau Pivert, 2 January 1948, BDIC, Fonds Guérin, F˚Rés 688/9/1.

23. Guérin, Le Feu du Sang. Autobiographie politique et charnelle (Paris: Editions

Grasset & Fasquelle, 1977), p. 149. Guérin’s researches led to the publica-

tion of the two-volume Où va le peuple américain? (Paris: Julliard, 1950–1951),

published in sections as Décolonisation du Noir américain (Paris: Minuit, 1963),

Le Mouvement ouvrier aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Maspero, 1968), La concentration

économique aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Anthropos, 1971) – with a preface by the

Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel – and De l’Oncle Tom aux Panthères: Le

drame des Noirs américains (Paris: UGE, 1973). Translations: Negroes on the March:

A Frenchman’s Report on the American Negro Struggle, trans. Duncan Ferguson

(New York: George L. Weissman, 1956), and 100 Years of Labour in the USA,

trans. Alan Adler (London: Ink Links, 1979). See Larry Portis, ‘Daniel Guérin et

les Etats-Unis: l’optimisme et l’intelligence’ in Agone 29–30 (2003), pp. 277–289.

24. Guérin, Lutte de classes. See Denis Berger, ‘La révolution plurielle (pour

Daniel Guérin)’ in E. Balibar, J.-S. Beek, D. Bensaïd et al.,Permanences de la

Révolution. Pour un autre bicentenaire (Paris: La Brèche, 1989), pp. 195–208;

David Berry, ‘Daniel Guérin à la Libération. De l’historien de la Révolution

au militant révolutionnaire: un tournant idéologique’, Agone 29–30 (2003),

pp. 257–273; Michel Lequenne, ‘Daniel Guérin, l’homme de 93 et le problème

de Robespierre’, Critique communiste 130–131 (May 1993), pp. 31–34; Julia

Guseva, ‘La Terreur pendant la Révolution et l’interprétation de D. Guérin’,

Dissidences 2 (2007), pp. 77–88; Jean-Numa Ducange, ‘Comment Daniel Guérin

utilise-t-il l’œuvre de Karl Kautsky sur la Révolution française dans La Lutte de

classes sous la première République, et pourquoi?’, ibid., pp. 89–111. Norah Carlin,

‘Daniel Guérin and the working class in the French Revolution’, International

Socialism 47 (1990), pp. 197–223, discusses changes made by Guérin to La Lutte

de classes for the 1968 edition.

25. Guérin, La Révolution française et nous (Paris: Maspero, 1976), pp. 7–8.

26. Guérin, La Lutte de classes (1968), vol.I, p. 31.

27. Guérin, La Lutte de classes (1968), vol.I, p. 58.

28. E.J. Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French

Revolution (London: Verso, 1990), p. 53.

29. Guérin, La Révolution française et nous,p.7.

30. See Olivier Bétourné and Aglaia I. Hartig, Penser l’histoire de la Révolution. Deux

siècles de passion française (Paris: La Découverte, 1989), esp. pp. 110–114; Antonio

de Francesco, ‘Daniel Guérin et Georges Lefebvre, une rencontre improbable’, La

Révolution française, http://lrf.revues.org/index162.html, date accessed 28 March

2011.

31. Ian Birchall, ‘Sartre’s Encounter with Daniel Guérin’, Sartre Studies International,

2:1 (1996), p. 46.

32. Guérin, ‘Faisons le point’, Le Libérateur politique et social pour la nouvelle gauche

(12 February 1956). A populist, reactionary and xenophobic anti-taxation move-

ment of small shopkeepers founded by Pierre Poujade in 1953, ‘Poujadisme’ had

‘more than a hint of fascism’ – Rod Kedward, La Vie en Bleu. France and the French

since 1900 (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 376.

33. C.L.R. James, ‘L’actualité de la Révolution française’, Perspectives socialistes:

Revue bimensuelle de l’Union de la Gauche Socialiste 4 (15 February 1958),

pp. 20–21.

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-206 9780230280373

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206 Daniel Guérin and the Search for a Libertarian Communism

34. Guérin, ‘La Révolution déjacobinisée’, in Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire (Paris:

Rivière, 1959), pp. 27–63.

35. Guérin, ‘La Révolution déjacobinisée’, p. 43.

36. Ibid., pp. 43–44.

37. Guérin, ‘Preface’, in Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire, pp. 7–8.

38. Guérin, ‘La Révolution déjacobinisée’, pp. 30–31.

39. Michel Crozier, Ma Belle Epoque. Mémoires. 1947–1969 (Paris: Fayard, 2002),

pp. 79;86.

40. Guérin, Le Feu du sang, p. 218; Kent Worcester, C.L.R. James. A Political Biography

(Albany: SUNY, 1996), p. 201; James, letter to Guérin, 24 May 1956, BDIC, Fonds

Guérin, F◦721/57/2.

41. Guérin, Le Feu du sang, p. 189. In his account, Guérin refers positively to the col-

lection La Contre-révolution bureaucratique (Paris: UGE, 1973), which contained

texts by Korsch, Pannekoek, Rühle and others taken from International Council

Correspondence,Living Marxism and International Socialism. The councilists had

previously republished in translation an article of Guérin’s from the French

syndicalist journal Révolution prolétarienne: ‘Fascist Corporatism’, in International

Council Correspondence, 3:2 (February 1937), pp. 14–26. (I am grateful to Saku

Pinta for bringing this to my attention.) See Douglas Kellner (ed.), Karl Korsch:

Revolutionary Theory (Austin & London: University of Texas Press, 1977).

42. Guérin/Korsch correspondence, April–June 1954, Karl Korsch Papers, IISG,

Boxes 1–24.

43. Guérin, Le Feu du sang, p. 156.

44. Guérin Papers, IISG, Box 1, Folder 14.

45. The list included James Guillaume’s history of the IWMA, Victor Serge’s Mémoires

d’un révolutionnaire, Voline’s La Révolution inconnue, Makhno, and the many pub-

lications of the Spartacus group created by René Lefeuvre. Mohammed Harbi,

Une Vie debout. Mémoires politiques, Tome I: 1945–1962 (Paris: La Découverte,

2001), pp. 109–112. Harbi incorrectly describes the Cercle Lénine as being con-

nected to the PCF; see La Vérité, 1 January 1954. On the different analyses of the

nature of the USSR, see Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet

Union. A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917 (Chicago: Haymarket

Books, 2007); on Castoriadis and Lefort, see pp. 116–118.

46. Edgar Morin, ‘L’Anarchisme en 1968’, Magazine littéraire 19 (1968), available at

www.magazine-litteraire.com/archives/ar_anar.htm, accessed 6 October 2002.

47. See Edgar Morin, ‘La réfome de pensée’, in Arguments, 1956–1962 (Toulouse:

Privat, 1983), vol.I, p. ix.

48. For an explanation of why Yugoslavia’s break with the soviet bloc in 1948 was

so important to the extreme Left in the West, see Le Trotskisme. Une histoire

sans fard (Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2005) by Guérin’s friend and comrade Michel

Lequenne.

49. Anne Guérin, ‘Les ruptures de Daniel Guérin. Notice biographique’, in Daniel

Guérin, De l’Oncle Tom aux Panthères noires (Pantin: Les bons caractères, 2010),

p. 9.

50. See Georges Fontenis, Changer le monde: Histoire du mouvement communiste

libertaire, 1945–1997 (Paris: Alternative libertaire, 2000); Philippe Dubacq,

Anarchisme et marxisme au travers de la Fédération communiste libertaire (1945–

1956),Noir et Rouge 23 (1991).

51. Guérin, Le Feu du sang, p. 233.

52. Guérin, À la recherche,p.9.

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-207 9780230280373

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David Berry 207

53. Ibid.

54. See Guérin’s 1969 article, ‘Conseils ouvriers et syndicalisme révolutionnaire.

L’exemple hongrois, 1956’ in A la recherche, pp. 111–115; republished as

‘Syndicalisme révolutionnaire et conseillisme’ in Pour le communisme libertaire,

pp. 155–162.

55. Ibid., p. 10. L’Anarchisme, de la doctrine à la pratique (Paris: Gallimard, 1965); Ni

Dieu ni Maître, anthologie de l’anarchisme (Lausanne: La Cité-Lausanne, 1965).

Both have been republished several times since, and L’Anarchisme has been

translated into more than 20 languages. They have been published in English

as Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970),

introduced by Noam Chomsky; No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism

(Edinburgh: AK Press, 1998).

56. This is not uncontentious – indeed Ernest Mandel takes issue with Guérin over

this question in his anthology Contrôle ouvrier, conseils ouvriers, autogestion (Paris:

Maspero, 1970), p. 7.

57. Letters to the author, 12 and 26 February 1986.

58. Georges Fontenis, ‘Le long parcours de Daniel Guérin vers le communisme

libertaire’, special number of Alternative Libertaire on Guérin (2000),

p. 37.

59. Guérin, Le Feu du sang, p. 228.

60. It is also noteworthy that Guérin would include a section on decolonisation in

his Anarchism and found material from Proudhon and Bakunin which supported

the FCL’s position. See Sylvain Pattieu, Les camarades des frères: Trotskistes et lib-

ertaires dans la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Syllepse, 2002); Sidi Mohammed Barkat

(ed.), Des Français contre la terreur d’Etat (Algérie 1954–1962) (Paris: Editions

Reﬂex, 2002); Sylvain Boulouque, Les anarchistes français face aux guerres colo-

niales (1945–1962) (Lyon: Atelier de création libertaire, 2003); David Porter, Eyes

to the South. French Anarchists and Algeria (Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore: AK

Press, 2011).

61. Editors’ note in Guérin, Pour le communisme libertaire (Paris: Spartacus, 2003),

p. 5. Rubel (1905–1996) had links with the councilist movement and published

‘Marx théoricien de l’anarchisme’ in his Marx, critique du Marxisme (Paris: Edi-

tions Payot, 1974; new edition 2000); since republished as Marx théoricien de

l’anarchisme (Saint-Denis: Vent du ch’min, 1983; Geneva: Editions Entremonde,

2011). Rubel: ‘Under the name communism, Marx developed a theory of anar-

chism; and further, that in fact it was he who was the ﬁrst to provide a rational

basis for the anarchist utopia and to put forward a project for achieving it.’

‘Marx, Theoretician of Anarchism’, Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.

org/archive/rubel/1973/marx-anarchism.htm, date accessed 29 March 2011.

62. Preface of 1970 to Guérin (ed.), Ni Dieu ni Maître. Anthologie de l’anarchisme

(Paris: La Découverte, 1999), vol. I, pp. 6–7.

63. L’Anarchisme, p. 21.

64. Daniel Guerin, Pour un marxisme libertaire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1969), p. 7.

65. Fontenis, ‘Le long parcours’, p. 38.

66. ‘Anarchisme et marxisme’, p. 237, in L’An archi sme (1981), pp. 229–252. Pub-

lished in English as Anarchism & Marxism (Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos Press,

1981), and ‘Marxism and Anarchism’, in David Goodway (ed.), For Anarchism.

History, Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 109–126.

67. L’Anarchisme, pp. 13–14.

68. Anarchism, p. 153.

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-208 9780230280373

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208 Daniel Guérin and the Search for a Libertarian Communism

69. Nicolas Walter, ‘Daniel Guerin’s anarchism’, Anarchy 8:94, 381.

70. Patrice Spadoni, ‘La synthèse entre l’anarchisme et le marxisme: «Un point de

ralliement vers l’avenir»’, Alternative Libertaire (2000), p. 43. Guérin, Proudhon

oui et non (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).

71. See his ‘1917–1921, de l’autogestion à la bureaucratie soviétique’, in De la

Révolution d’octobre à l’empire éclaté: 70 ans de réﬂexions sur la nature de l’URSS

(Paris: Alternative libertaire/UTCL, n.d.); ‘Proudhon et l’autogestion ouvrière’ in

L’Actualité de Proudhon (Bruxelles: Université libre de Bruxelles, 1967), pp. 67–87;

‘L’Espagne libertaire’, editorial introduction to Autogestion et socialisme,special

issue on ‘Les anarchistes et l’autogestion’ 18/19 (janvier-avril 1972), 81–82;

‘L’autogestion contemporaine’, Noir et rouge 31/32 (octobre1965 – février 1966),

pp. 16–24.

72. See similarly critical remarks by Castoriadis: ‘Marx aujourd’hui. Entretien avec

Cornelius Castoriadis’ Lutter! 5 (May 1983), pp. 15–18.

73. L’Anarchisme, p. 16.

74. ‘Proudhon père de l’autogestion’ (1965) in Proudhon oui et non, p. 165.

75. ‘Proudhon père de l’autogestion’, p. 191.

76. Guérin, Ni Dieu ni Maître, vol.I, p. 12 and ‘Stirner, «Père de l’anarchisme»?’, p. 83.

Guérin began his anthology with the ‘precursor’ Stirner and added an appendix

on him to the 1981 edition of L’An arc hi sme . See also Guérin, Homosexualité et

Révolution (Saint-Denis: Le Vent du ch’min, 1983), p. 12, and ‘Stirner, «Père de

l’anarchisme»?’, La Rue 26 (1er et 2ème trimestre 1979), pp. 76–89.

77. See my “Workers of the World, Embrace!”.

78. See Fontenis, Changer le monde, pp. 161–162 and 255–256.

79. The UTCL’s manifesto, adopted at its Fourth Congress in 1986, was republished

(with a dedication to Guérin) by the UTCL’s successor organisation, Alternative

Libertaire: Un projet de société communiste libertaire (Paris: Alternative libertaire,

2002).

80. Fontenis, Changer le monde, p. 80, note 1. See also my ‘Change the world without

taking power? The libertarian communist tradition in France today’, Journal of

Contemporary European Studies 16:1 (Spring 2008), pp. 111–130.

81. Guérin, ‘Anarchisme et Marxisme’ in L’An archi sme (1981), p. 250.

82. Ibid., p. 248.

83. Ibid., p. 237.

84. On Abad de Santillan, see the section on ‘L’Espagne libertaire’ in Les anarchistes

et l’autogestion.

85. See Guérin, Ni Dieu ni Maître, vol.I, 268–291.

86. Guérin, ‘Anarchisme et Marxisme’ in L’An archi sme (1981), p. 252.

87. Rosa Luxemburg, Le socialisme en France, 1898–1912 (Paris: Belfond, 1971),

with an introduction by Guérin, pp. 7–48; Rosa Luxemburg et la spontanéïté

révolutionnaire (Paris: Flammarion, 1971).

88. Gilbert Badia et al., ‘Rosa Luxemburg et nous: Débat’, Politique aujourd’hui:

Recherches et pratiques socialistes dans le monde (1972), 77–106.

89. Guérin, ‘Anarchisme et Marxisme’, p. 233. As the co-editor (with Jean-Jacques

Lebel) of a collection entitled ‘Changer la Vie’ for the publisher Pierre Belfond,

Guérin took the opportunity to republish Trotsky’s Our Political Tasks (1904), in

which the young Trotsky was very critical of Lenin’s ‘Jacobinism’ and of what he

called the ‘dictatorship over the proletariat’: Léon Trotsky, Nos tâches politiques

(Paris: Belfond, 1970). Luxemburg’s ‘Organizational Questions of Russian Social

Democracy’ is included in this as an appendix.

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-209 9780230280373

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David Berry 209

90. Guérin, ‘Anarchisme et Marxisme’, p. 252.

91. Guérin, À la recherche, pp. 10–11.

92. Guérin, ‘Pourquoi communiste libertaire?’, in A la recherche, p. 17.

93. Guérin, ‘Un communisme libertaire, pour quoi?’, A la recherche, pp. 123–125.

94. Walter, ‘Daniel Guerin’s anarchism’, pp. 376–382.

95. George Woodcock, ‘Chomsky’s Anarchism’ in Freedom, 16 November 1974,

pp. 4–5.

96. Miguel Chueca, ‘Anarchisme et Marxisme. La tentative de Daniel Guérin d’unir

les deux philosophies et ‘l’anarchisme’ de Marx vu par Maximilien Rubel’

in Réfractions 7, available at http://www.plusloin.org/refractions/refractions7/

chueca1.htm (accessed 29 August 2006).

97. Ian Birchall, ‘Daniel Guérin’s Dialogue with Leninism’ in Revolutionary History

vol.9, no.2, pp. 194–222 (194–195).

98. See Irène Pereira, Un nouvel esprit contestataire. La grammaire pragmatiste du

syndicalisme d’action directe libertaire (Unpublished PhD, Ecole des Hautes Etudes

en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2009); Patrice Spadoni, ‘Daniel Guérin ou le projet

d’une synthèse entre l’anarchisme et le marxisme’ in Contretemps 6(Febru-

ary 2003), 118–126. Guérin’s daughter Anne has claimed recently that Guérin

was the ‘Maître à penser’ of both Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the Trotskyist Alain

Krivine – preface to Guérin, De l’Oncle Tom aux Panthères noires,p.8.Christophe

Bourseiller also comments that ‘the politics of the Mouvement communiste

libertaire derived largely from the theoretical reﬂexion of Daniel Guérin.’ Histoire

générale de ‘l’ultra-gauche’ (Paris: Editions Denoël, 2003), p. 484. In 1986 Guérin

also contributed to the UTCL’s ‘Projet communiste libertaire’, which was repub-

lished by Alternative Libertaire in 1993 and again in 2002. The ‘Appel pour

une alternative libertaire’ of 1989 (which ultimately led to the creation of AL)

was also co-written by Guérin: see Guérin, Pour le communisme libertaire (Paris:

Spartacus, 2003), pp. 181–186.

99. Guérin, A la recherche, p. 10.

100. Guérin, ‘Un communisme libertaire, pour quoi?’, in A la recherche, p. 123.

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July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-210 9780230280373

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Socialisme ou Barbarie or the Partial

Encounters Between Critical Marxism

and Libertarianism

Benoît Challand

For many, the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie remains associated with

the name of the political theorist and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis

(1922–1997). While Castoriadis played a pivotal role in the group, it also

included a number of other prominent intellectuals over the course of

its publishing lifetime, such as Claude Lefort (1924–2010), Jean-François

Lyotard (1924–1998) and Guy Debord (1931–1994). The group’s eponymous

journal, published between 1949 and 1965, was dedicated to an increasingly

unorthodox Trotskyist critique and it provided an important platform for

debating Marxism with other strands of the ultra-Left, some of them closely

associated with Left-libertarian thinking. One line of division inside the

group discussed here (though to be sure, there are many others to analyse)

was based on divergent views about the model of organisation and the place

to be given to ideas of spontaneous self-organisation within the working

class, which was inﬂuenced by precisely this Left-libertarian thinking. These

issues were particularly contentious for the group and this essay will unpack

the reasons why, and why they caused so many splits within SouB. The pri-

mary aim of the chapter is to show that despite Castoriadis’s evident legacy

of Left-libertarian thinking and his radical break with orthodox Marxist-

Leninism, these splits owe most to Castoriadis’s original attachment to

Trotskyist vanguardism. In the long run, as this chapter will illustrate, these

ideological and organisational splits impeded any convergence between

critical Marxism and Council Communism – Council Communism here

understood as the closest SouB came to radical Left-libertarian thinking

during its lifetime.

Though little space is formally dedicated to anarchism in this chapter, the

analysis touches on the themes explored in this book by examining the ten-

sions (organisational and ideological) that arise between a Leninist-inspired

form of political militancy (critical Trotskyism) and a libertarian communist

210

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-211 9780230280373

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Benoît Challand 211

view of workers’ organisations (Council Communism). The Council Com-

munist position was elaborated by intellectuals such as Anton Pannekoek

(1873–1960) and discussed and published by SouB. Over the course of its

existence, SouB engaged in dialogue with very different political groups of

the ultra-Left, but the articulations and fault-lines that emerged in the debate

between Castoriadis and Pannekoek, the so-called Chaulieu–Pannekoek cor-

respondence of 1953–1954 (Chaulieu being an alias for Castoriadis), force-

fully illustrates the problems of synthesis which this collection examines.

Castoriadis’s own philosophy also moved from a critical Marxist–Leninist

framework to a libertarian Marxist one in the 1960s and eventually became

anti-Marxist in position from the 1970s onwards. At each stage Castoriadis

refused a closer collaboration with Left-libertarian thinking and it is the

purpose of this paper to explain why.

To this end, there are two main reasons for reinterpreting key episodes

in SouB’s activity in the light of the tension between Marxist and Left-

libertarian schools of thought. First, Council Communism represented an

important historical attempt to straddle the Marxism – anarchism divide.1

Though Council Communism does not have the same centrality to anar-

chism as, say, federalism, there are historical overlaps between the two move-

ments: both adopted an oppositional position to the orthodox Marxism

of the Second International and there were important mutual contacts in

German syndicalism. Council Communists tried to develop new means to

accommodate centralism within a syndicalist framework and the fact that

they are sometimes referred to as libertarian communists illustrates this

bridging role they occupy in the history of socialism. The debate turned on

the key question of workers’ self-management and the role of the vanguard

in revolutionary organisations. Ultimately, within SouB at least, it was the

latter that won out.

In the context of SouB’s editorial development, this tension can be seen in

the difﬁcult relationship of Castoriadis and Lefort, two of the group’s tower-

ing ﬁgures. It is well known that the strain between these two individuals,

which grew over the years and led to Lefort’s departure from SouB in 1958

(after a ﬁrst brief resignation in 1952), contributed to the consolidation of

the positions adopted by SouB, which were originally inﬂuenced by critical

Trotskyism.2Other militants within the group, such as Henri Simon, who

were equally sympathetic to the idea of workers’ self-management, played

an important role in disclosing more detailed information about the failed

merger of critical Marxism and libertarian communism.3But the theoretical

roots of this tension are perfectly illustrated in the disagreement between

Castoriadis and Pannekoek and their debates about the form that revolu-

tionary movements should take – an exchange that assumes a central place

in this analysis.

However, this intellectual and ideological tension within the group is best

explained by the severe political exigencies of the cold war, anti-communist

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-212 9780230280373

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212 Socialisme ou Barbarie

movements and the need for organisational and intellectual fortitude in the

face of huge opposition. The intransigence of Castoriadis’s position and the

conﬂict within the group can be seen as a direct response to these conditions.

However, alongside this public orthodoxy, Castoriadis was also developing

a radical version of critical Marxism, one which was to be hugely signiﬁ-

cant in terms of the development of socialist thought in the second half of

the twentieth century. Inﬂuencing situationist writers such as Guy Debord

and the autonomist tradition more widely, the contrast between these two

faces of SouB is a historical puzzle worth investigating because it shows

us that ideology and organisation matter as much as, if not more than,

theory.

Castoriadis is now known, in large part, as the philosopher of auton-

omy and the question of ‘auto-institution’. The intellectual puzzle here is

to understand how he married these ideas with a Leninist view of the rev-

olutionary vanguard (based on democratic centralism) and why he kept

Left-libertarian ideas at arm’s length when active in SouB. Ultimately it was

Castoriadis’s inability to reform SouB or to abandon notions of the vanguard

which ultimately consigned him to the Marxist–Leninist side of the debate.

Ironically, it was only after SouB eventually dissolved that Castoriadis’s ideas

developed along increasingly Left-libertarian lines, in particular in his criti-

cism of the Marxists’ economism and their failure to grasp the signiﬁcance

of political change and the constitutive role of the social imaginary in the

political process.4

The ﬁrst substantive part of the paper will reﬂect on the historical con-

ditions that made the contribution of SouB so important in the French

intellectual scene and how these conditions structured the range of possi-

ble positions SouB could take. Like many groups born in the shadow of the

Fourth International and the cold war, SouB experienced many splits and the

paper will explore why this was the case by underlining the inherently criti-

cal nature of Trotskyism and the usefulness that this line of thinking might

have had in the battle against Stalinism. The second section of the paper

turns to developments and debates inside SouB and looks at Castoriadis and

the internal form of the group to try explain other reasons for the failed syn-

ergies with more Left-libertarian trains of thought. The third section explores

the Chaulieu–Pannekoek correspondence, using it to illustrate the interplay

between ideological tensions and historical–organisational issues. Central to

this discussion is the immediate post-1945 context and the period follow-

ing the Hungarian crisis of 1956, as the notion of workers’ self-management

became very important in the evolution of critical Marxism. The fourth part

of the paper returns to wider debates, Castoriadis’s intellectual evolution in

his ﬁnal years and the demise of SouB. The conclusion will reﬂect on the

signiﬁcance of SouB for our understanding of the historiography of the Left

in general. It is, without question, a singular but highly signiﬁcant marker

in this regard.

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Benoît Challand 213

I. The shadows of Trotskyism AQ1

The political context of the origins of SouB illustrates how two different gen-

erations of activists were recruited to this small Paris-based militant group.5

While the Fourth International gave qualiﬁed support to the USSR in the

second half of the 1940s, a small dissident group emerged inside the Parti

Communiste Internationaliste (PCI), the French section of the Fourth Inter-

national, refusing to support the USSR and adopting a new reading of the

nature of the Soviet Union. This minority group was called the ‘Chaulieu–

Montal tendency’ after two of its leaders, Chaulieu being the militant name

of Cornelius Castoriadis and Montal that of Claude Lefort. It crystallised

in 1946 and 1947 and, after the support given by the PCI to Yugoslavia in

August 1948, it turned from a tendency into a new movement named after

its mouthpiece Socialisme ou Barbarie (a phrase taken from Rosa Luxemburg’s

writings) whose ﬁrst issue was published in March 1949.6

The main contribution of SouB at its inception was its slightly modiﬁed

Trotskyist critique of the USSR which it deﬁned as a form of state bureau-

cratic capitalism, premised not on the exploitation of the propertyless by

owners of the means of production, but on the control of a subordinate

labour class of executants by a class of directors. As the manifesto printed in

the ﬁrst issue of Socialisme ou Barbarie put it:

...[the] management of production by the workers themselves assumes

an additional importance in modern society. The entire evolution of the

modern economy tends to replace the old opposition between owners

and the propertyless with a new opposition between directors and exe-

cutants in the productive process. If the proletariat does not immediately

abolish, together with the private ownership of the means of production,

the management of production as a speciﬁc function permanently carried

out by a particular social stratum, it will only have cleared the ground

for the emergence of a new exploiting stratum, which will arise out of

the ‘managers’ of production and out of the bureaucracies dominating

economic and political life.7

This analysis was a radical break with the traditional economistic focus of

Marxism–Leninism. In the course of its 16-year history, from 1949 to 1965,

SouB, attracted many adherents and experienced a good deal of dissatisfac-

tion within its ranks too. Members had a variety of different motives for

leaving the organisation. For the sake of our argument, at least two differ-

ent generations of militants involved in SouB need to be distinguished.8The

ﬁrst generation, that of Chaulieu and Montal, can be identiﬁed on the basis

of what French historian Jean-François Sirinelli termed the élément fonda-

teur.9In the case of this ﬁrst generation of SouB, this founding event was the

Second World War and the role Stalin played in defeating Hitler. Other key

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214 Socialisme ou Barbarie

militants included Henri Simon, Daniel Mothé (the pseudonym of Jacques

Gautrat, who worked in close connection with the workers of the Renault

factories), Claude Lefort and Maurice Rajfus. For many of this generation

the expectation of an imminent Third World War justiﬁed a radical break

with the Fourth International and gave a sense of urgency to the action they

thought needed to be undertaken. With the onset of the cold war and as

the outbreak of a Third World War appeared to be increasingly unlikely, a

second generation of militants joined SouB. For them, the élément fondateur

took multiple forms: the 1953 East German rebellion, the Algerian war, the

series of strikes in France in the summer of 1955, and the Budapest upris-

ing of 1956. All these events gave further credence to SouB’s call for more

workers’ self-management.10 Among this second generation, J.-F. Lyotard

(1924–1998), Pierre Souyri (1925–1979) and Guy Debord (1931–1994) were

its most famous members.

This second series of founding events (in particular the 1953 and 1956

revolts) ushered in a more libertarian approach to Left-wing organisation

that was increasingly critical of Leninism and argued for a stronger role

for workers’ councils. Contrary to the Leninist idea of a ‘consciousness

inculcated from without’, SouB maintained in its columns that revolu-

tionary ideals and self-organisation should stem instead from within the

workers’ community. As SouB gradually began to be described by some as

anti-Marxist,11 and as some of its members (Claude Lefort in particular) con-

tributed to the discussion of anti-totalitarianism in the 1970s, it is worth

remembering that a certain radical Left critique of Stalinism became an asset

in the cold war battle against communism in general.

In this difﬁcult political and social context of the post-1945 period, the

Trotskyist critique of the Soviet Union regained prominence. In general,

radical Marxists either supported ‘progressive’ forces in the name of ‘social-

ism in one country’, or criticised Stalin’s autocratic style of governing. But

this was a difﬁcult issue for many Left-wing activists and intellectuals.12

In a context deﬁned by international tension and the nascent cold war, the

image that ‘Trotskyism cuts both ways’ encapsulates the critical potential

of this ideology in breaching the hegemonic inﬂuence of Stalinist parties

while dividing further radical groups. On the one hand, Trotskyism emerged

as a powerful critique of Stalinism and of the bureaucratic degeneration

of the Soviet Union, appealing to radical leftists unhappy with the path

that the leader of ‘socialism in one country’ had imposed. On the other

hand, Trotskyism remained committed to Leninist ideas of the vanguard

and structured party-organisation premised on democratic centralism and

the limitation on pluralist ideological debates.13

As it turned out, the new contradictions within the different Trotskyist tra-

ditions (bureaucratic degeneration, permanent arms revolution, managerial

society, entrism etc.) proved too much and paved the way to historical

splits. These splits illustrate both the centrifugal and centripetal forces inside

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Benoît Challand 215

Trotskyism, since creating splits has always been a way to gain new militants

(entrism), while on the other hand, the defence of some of these concepts

was a means to preserve ideological purity and exclude other militants.14

We have here a ﬁrst indication of the way in which the organisational pri-

orities and logics of SouB might have frustrated the interchange between

less orthodox Marxist and libertarian ideas. In essence, doctrinal adher-

ence to Trotskyism constrained as much as it enabled this new generation

of Left-wing thinkers, but the ideological inﬂuence of Leninism ham-

strung organisational development by demanding democratic centralism, or

vanguardism.

The context for the continued adherence to doctrinal purity and demo-

cratic centralism can also be explained by reference to the post-1945

anti-communist struggle across the world. Even within the Trotskyist move-

ment the split became pronounced with what Hannah Arendt called

‘ex-communists’ and ‘former communists’ and their differentiated role in

organising splits in the ultra-Left. ‘Former communists’ were those who did

not have a leading position in a Communist Party and who were mostly

fellow travellers, like Picasso or Sartre. When they left the orbit of the Com-

munist Party, their life moved on and was not centrally determined by this

previous afﬁliation. ‘Ex-communists’, on the other hand, included those

who had been much more engaged in the formal hierarchies of a Communist

Party, for whom ‘communism ...remained the chief issue of their life’ once

they left it.15 Communism remained central because this group decided to

ﬁght communist ideology using their insider’s knowledge. James Burnham

(1905–1987), author of the Managerial Revolution and an inﬂuential conser-

vative intellectual during the cold war,16 and Arthur Koestler (1905–1983),

the ex-leader of the German Communist Party (KPD) and later author of

bestselling novels against the totalitarian Gulag, are two prime examples of

the trajectories of ‘ex-communists’ Arendt describes.

It is notable that among the ex-communists, Trotskyists featured promi-

nently. They did so for two reasons. First, many Trotskyists became

Trotskyists because of their disillusionment with either the Moscow trials of

the 1930s or with Stalin’s inaction in the face of Fascism, or because of the

post-1945 silence of communist parties in the face of Soviet repression dur-

ing the popular uprisings in Central and Eastern Europe between 1953 and

1968. Second, their intellectual equipment as Trotskyists was built precisely

around the criticism of the Soviet Union and was informed by a deep knowl-

edge of the nature of its bureaucratic degeneration. It is therefore no surprise

that so many ex-Trotskyists were recruited to the anti-Soviet battle of the

post-1945 period. Trotskyism was both the chief method of radical critique of

the trajectory of the Soviet Union and a tool in the armoury of the capitalist

West against all that was worth preserving in the Soviet experiment.

Thus, many ex- and former Trotskyists voluntarily embraced anti-

communism. In the USA in particular the list of Trotskyist ‘defectors’ is

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216 Socialisme ou Barbarie

impressive and signiﬁcant: Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, Sol Levitas, Melvin

Lasky and James Burnham (who became active in the powerful secretly

funded CIA-front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)).17 In Europe,

it was rather ex-communists that featured on the list of important anti-

communist ideologues: people like Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone and Boris

Souvarine all had a formal role in their communist parties (Germany, Italy

and France respectively) but none of them were Trotskyists, while people like

Raymond Aron (Claude Lefort’s PhD mentor), Francois Furet (to quote two

inﬂuential French intellectuals in the battle against communists) were only

‘former communists’ in Arendt’s classiﬁcation.18

The point to be made here is that while US ex-Trotskyists joined the

anti-communist battle,19 dozens of other small splinter groups inspired by

Trotskyism arguably made an indirect contribution to anti-communism in

Europe by constantly splitting the ultra-Left political spectrum. This climate

also made any intersections between Trotskyism and anarchism even more

remote – despite sharing key ideological positions as described in other chap-

ters of this volume. Small Trotskyist factions contributed to hindering the

emergence of broad Left alliances, since their declared enemies were less the

bourgeois camp than orthodox communist factions and reformist socialist

parties. This intellectual and historical context is vital for understanding the

debates that took place within SouB.

II. Ideological coherence or innovation?

Cornelius Castoriadis, the leading force of SouB, perfectly illustrates the

AQ2 ambiguous relation between Trotskyism and anti-communism. Castoriadis,

who grew up in Athens, was active in the Greek Trotskyist party and ﬂed his

homeland for Paris at the end of 1945 where he joined the PCI, created a

year earlier. Despite his very active militancy in the PCI and then as founder

of SouB, he managed to work from 1949 until 1970 at the Organisation for

European Economic Co-operation (OEEC, soon to become the OECD), an

institution working initially for the distribution of the Marshall Plan aid,

and which played an essential role in the anti-communist battle through

the so-called ‘counterpart’ funds.20 One wonders how he managed to remain

unnoticed inside an institution working to promote capitalism and becom-

ing, in parallel, the leader of a revolutionary group. The fact is he did, and

although he frequently used the beneﬁts of being an international civil ser-

vant by secretly using much of his salary for the publication of Socialisme ou

Barbarie,21 Castoriadis took signiﬁcant measures to hide his true identity. For

example, until his naturalisation as a French citizen in 1970, he only signed

his political texts with one of his pseudonyms (the most frequent ones being

Chaulieu, Cardan or Coudray).22 Moreover, he never took part in the public

events organised by SouB. And ﬁnally, he applied for French citizenship only

in 1968 when all his formal political activities were over, because this type of

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Benoît Challand 217

administrative practice generally required a police inquiry into the private

life of the applicant and would have jeopardised his cover.23

This digression on anti-communism and on the prominent role of

Trotskyism in the postwar context served to highlight how external spon-

sors could have generated splits (for example, by providing ﬁnancial means

to create new organisations). In the case of SouB there is no evidence

of such instrumentalisation. One therefore needs to turn to their inter-

nal discussions and their organisational debates to understand why splits

happened. Alternative explanations could be found in organisational issues

(group dynamics) or in a quest for theoretical improvement, and the innate

tension in such a radical group looking to develop the ultimate theoret-

ical innovation that would give it the edge over competing groups. The

historian Gottraux provides a useful starting point for such analysis. He

notes that:

SouB remained trapped between the need to overtly showcase its origi-

nality and its ‘purity’ on the one hand, and on the other hand, its desire

to be open towards other groupings, albeit not in a very successful man-

ner and by provoking disarray at times. In its attempts to open up, SouB

ﬁnally adopted a line which aimed at maximizing proﬁts and minimizing

the costs: the group never departed a single second from its ideological

coherence even as it declared itself ready to discuss with others.24

This duality illustrates perfectly the political exigencies of the period, but

it overlooks the internal discord over the outward image SouB presented.

Two examples are worth discussing. The ﬁrst relates to the modality of

the group’s organisation. For most of its life the subtitle of Socialisme ou

Barbarie was Organe de critique et d’orientation révolutionnaire.Sobeyond

the critical dimension of SouB’s writings, the publication was also meant

to orientate its readers on how to become a revolutionary organisation.

Its ﬁrst issue and its ﬁrst programmatic article are rather clear on this

objective:

Presenting ourselves today, by means of this review, before the avant-

garde of the manual and intellectual workers, we know we are alone

in responding in a systematic way to the fundamental problems con-

fronting the contemporary revolutionary movement: we believe we are

alone in taking up and pursuing the Marxist analysis of the modern

economy; in placing the problem of the historic development of the

workers’ movement and its meaning on a scientiﬁc footing; in provid-

ing a deﬁnition of Stalinism and of the ‘workers” bureaucracy in general;

in characterising the Third World War; and, lastly, in proposing a revolu-

tionary perspective, taking into account the original elements created by

our epoch.25

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218 Socialisme ou Barbarie

It this way, SouB remained dedicated to the Leninist idea of a vanguard party

whose role was to help the working class in their autonomous organisa-

tion (‘autonomous’ here in the sense of independent from any bureaucratic

Bolshevik party), geared towards the abolition of private ownership and the

realisation of a socialist society, even if it criticised some of Lenin’s ideas,

such as inculcating revolutionary ‘consciousness’ from without.26 For exam-

ple, Lefort, wrote an early vitriolic piece against Trotsky, criticising him for

being one of the main instigators of the bureaucratic degeneration of the

Bolshevik party by virtue of his authoritarian leanings.27 He was also the

ﬁrst to oppose the idea of an organised vanguard and ‘placed the systematic

support for workers’ control at the centre of his considerations.28 He argued

that the greatest risk for this vanguard in a post-revolutionary order is to fall

into the same authoritarian and bureaucratic trap as that which it seeks to

replace – a reading akin to anarchism. Van der Linden suggests that:

Castoriadis saw a dual task for the revolutionary socialists: On the one

hand they should help build independent workers’ organizations and

papers, similar to those starting to come to the fore at Renault and at

other ﬁrms; at the same time there would have to be a co-ordination of

the various resistance committees and a national workers’ paper. On the

other hand the revolutionaries, now spread out all over the country and

in numerous groups (the ‘diffused vanguard’), would have to be brought

together in one organization – a new type of party, based on experiences

since 1917.29

For the ﬁrst ten years of SouB this organisational debate between what

Michels would have termed the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ and the need for a

revolutionary party vanguard created tensions between the majority van-

guardists spearheaded by Castoriadis and a minority critical grouping under

Lefort. Lefort eventually decided to leave SouB for a few months in 1952,

when it became clear that the vanguardists were the majority.30 This issue,

coupled with a growing unhappiness with the Marxist vision of history,31 led

Lefort to leave the movement deﬁnitively in 1958, along with Henri Simon,

who, in addition, supported the need for truly autonomous working classes.

Lefort, who never described himself as an anarchist,32 Simon and a few oth-

ers went on to create the new publication called Informations et Liaisons

Ouvrières (ILO, soon becoming Informations et Correspondance Ouvrières), pro-

viding a ‘forum for workers themselves to chronicle their struggles and

express their pre-occupations’.33 This autonomist line of argument was never

taken up within SouB, forcing the split.

III. The Chaulieu-Pannekoek correspondence

Two Dutch Council Communist militants, who had attended many of SouB’s

meetings in the 1950s, mapped these splits in their published observations.

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Benoît Challand 219

Their accounts help clarify the range of positions within SouB and establish

the extent to which members tried to straddle a Leninist–libertarian divide.

This report, published in a Dutch militant journal, speaks of three cur-

rents within SouB:a ‘Right wing’ inspired by Leninism, the ‘Centre’ around

Castoriadis, and the ‘Left’ around Lefort.34 This is signiﬁcant as it highlights

that the majority (Centre–Right) were committed to the necessity of organ-

ising the vanguard party along increasingly centralist lines while the ‘Left’

members’ arguments were gradually marginalised and eventually excluded.

Their report is worth quoting at length:

It is not the left wing which completed the break, but the right and centre,

which deliberately steered for it. So deliberately, that the break came

before the congress where left, centre and right were to discuss their differ-

ences of opinion. This congress was to take place in Paris on Saturday, 27

and Sunday, 28 September 1958. [ ...] Both right and left had prepared a

text which would serve as a point of departure for the discussion. Both of

these texts [ ...] naturally had an entirely different character; one could

clearly discern the fundamental differences which had existed between

the two currents for a long time: but there was nothing which indicated

that the existing situation, in which the left and right worked in a single

group, would shortly come to an end. [ ...The] differences were in no way

brought to a head in the bulletin, which had been compiled by a member

of the left wing. [ ...] The debate on both texts, which started on Thurs-

day, 18 September, consequently had a vehement but at the same time

friendly character. On Wednesday, 24 September something unexpected

happened. The centre published a sequel to its text, which especially

concerned the position and presentation of the left. The accent of this

second paper was extremely sharp. The left were accused of propounding

their theory ‘while knowing better’, and of ‘knowingly misleading the

workers’. Its behaviour was even described as ‘dishonest’, while the criti-

cism of the right and the centre by the left, was turned into a downright

caricature. Under these circumstances the preparatory meeting of Thurs-

day, 25 September lost every semblance of geniality. The left expected

that, at the very least, certain statements, like those concerning ‘deceit’

and ‘deception’ would be dropped immediately because upholding them

would naturally make any discussion impossible. The most important

spokesman of the centre refused. He declared that it was not his habit

to be swayed by his emotions and that he had calmly considered every

word and did not wish to take back a single word or sentence. At that the

comrades of the left stood up and left the room. On Friday, 26 September

they met separately and took the decision that they would not be present

at the congress, which started on the 27th. Thus came the break-up.35

So by accusing the Left of deceit, the ‘Centre–Right’ managed to evict the

group around Simon and Lefort, thereby destroying the potential for SouB to

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220 Socialisme ou Barbarie

engage in a dialogue with the Dutch councilists. But throughout its history

SouB had tried to open communication with different critical communist

organisations. Anton Pannekoek, another councilist, was one of these inter-

locutors. Not only was he an inﬂuential theoretician of workers’ councils, he

also had historical experience as an activist in Germany and with the Second

International before 1914. His best-known book is De Arbeidersraden (Work-

ers’ Councils), published in 1941 under the pseudonym P. Aartsz.36 Like other

Council Communists (such as Otto Ruehle, Karl Korsch or Paul Mattick),

Pannekoek opposed the diktats of the Third International and evaluated

anarchism sympathetically. In the interwar period, the Council Commu-

nists broke with social democracy and Bolshevism, while maintaining the

necessity of organising the revolution by the direct control of the working

class over the means of production.37 In that sense the councilists remained

Marxists and distanced themselves from the anarchist preference for federal-

ism as a means of organisation. One sentence by Pannekoek illustrates this

new orientation: ‘socialism is self-direction of production, self-direction of

the class-struggle, by means of workers’ council’.38

From 1953 onwards the theme of workers’ councils featured in some

of Socialisme ou Barbarie’s articles and the group’s internal debates. The

debate surrounding whether these workers’ councils or the vanguard party

were the correct revolutionary form also featured in the exchange of let-

ters between Anton Pannekoek and Pierre Chaulieu (one of Castoriadis’s

aliases), which has since generated many conﬂicting interpretations about

the nature of the Russian revolution and about theorising the organisation

of the revolutionary movement.39

The substance of the debate revolves around the issue of how to organise

the revolutionary movement. Castoriadis argued for an organised vanguard,

while Pannekoek refused this ‘Bolshevik conception of the party’. The

divergence also dealt with the nature of the 1917 Revolution. Castoriadis

defended the idea that it was a true proletarian revolution, while Pannekoek

saw in the Soviet revolution only a bourgeois revolution. In other words the

disagreements could not be greater between the two authors. Castoriadis,

who felt that the ideological priority for SouB should be focused else-

where, managed to put an end to this debate, albeit only temporarily as

the polemics resumed in the early 1970s.

The exchanges and debate range from the ﬁrst months of 1953 to 1974.40

The starting point came when Cajo Brendel, a militant of the Dutch

Spartacus group brought issues 1–11 of Socialisme ou Barbarie from Paris

to show to Pannekoek. The ﬁrst exchange of letters at the end of October

1953 was between the two Dutch militants. This was followed a few weeks

later by a letter from Pannekoek to Castoriadis, who replied personally in

early 1954. The letter from Pannekoek, with Chaulieu’s reply, was pub-

lished in Socialisme ou Barbarie in the April–June 1954 issue (issue 14). The

Dutch leader sent a second and third letter in August and September 1954,

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Benoît Challand 221

but these were not published. Castoriadis replied only to the second letter

(August), but in the early months of 1955 Cajo Brendel states that SouB

promised to publish the end of the correspondence between Pannekoek and

Castoriadis.41 This was never done.

The exchange between Pannekoek and Castoriadis is signiﬁcant not only

because of the content of their debate but also because of the way in

which SouB handled the publication of the correspondence. Some accused

Castoriadis of deliberately hiding the second letter from his companions,

while in issue 15–16 (October–December 1954) SouB stated that Chaulieu

had clearly shown the limits of Pannekoek’s arguments and that there was

therefore no need to continue the dialogue. Pannekoek wrote in the second

letter that it was not meant to be published, and Castoriadis used this as a

justiﬁcation for not doing so. Yet Pannekoek’s caution was probably more a

caveat, because the text needed some editing and he was actually quite will-

ing to continue the debate.42 In private exchanges between Pannekoek and

Brendel, both disagreed with SouB’s claim that Chaulieu had won the argu-

ment,43 and both would have liked the dialogue to go on. Pannekoek even

went on to say, in the October 1953 letter, that ‘[t]here remain some diver-

gences [between me and SouB]. They have not set themselves free of the

Bolshevik virus with which they have been infected by Trotsky. The virus

of the revolutionary party’s vanguardism which must lead the revolution.

On this subject, we are much ahead here in Holland.’44

While Pannekoek makes Castoriadis look like an old Leninist, and com-

pared to Debord he looks like an old-fashioned second internationalist

(an economist), the truth of the matter is that by this time Castoriadis

had already begun to move decidedly beyond an orthodox Marxism and

neither is the case. Unfortunately, it was his position within SouB and the

principles that that movement originally sought to defend, with him as its

ﬁgurehead, which made the interchange with both Lefts impossible. Fur-

thermore, Castoriadis did not want to get involved in a long and protracted

debate about revolutionary forms and the priority of self-organisation as

he had by this time become engrossed in the analysis of the fundamental

transformations underway within modern capitalism.

Indeed, Castoriadis began to express a deep dissatisfaction with all rev-

olutionary organisations. Two inﬂuential articles published in 1960 and

1961 dealt with ‘Le mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme mod-

erne’.45 Castoriadis here analysed the classical Marxist theme of political

alienation but considered the depoliticisation of Western societies as a

‘co-substantial part of modernization’ and due to the increasing bureaucrati-

sation of social life.46 He concluded that mainstream Marxism fails to fully

grasp social change when it concentrates its attention on economic factors,

thus tending to overlook the political transformation of advanced capitalist

societies, the irrationality of bureaucratic management,47 and the increasing

role of so-called ‘technocrats’ and ‘experts’ leading to the gradual apathy

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222 Socialisme ou Barbarie

of Western societies now living in abundance.48 These transformations and

the false trail taken by mainstream Marxism makes it, so Castoriadis argues,

even more difﬁcult for a revolutionary movement to exist and perform its

task since political processes are not only economic but also social, cultural

and psychological. Buried in this theoretical debate, the last thing he wanted

was to be distracted by an argument about organisation.

All Castoriadis’s themes inﬂuenced the subsequent generation of militants

and in particular the groups that emerged in 1968 and in the 1970s: a gen-

eration keen to chant libertarian slogans, to dispute the political apathy and

alienation of capitalist society, and to suggest more libertarian strategies to

disrupt the dominant bourgeois order and break the Stalinist hegemony on

the Left. Their view was that the proletariat no longer existed as it had done

in the nineteenth century and that they were part of a transformed ‘society

of the spectacle’. It is no coincidence that in 1960–1961, precisely when

Castoriadis made his diagnosis of working-class and revolutionary move-

ments at a time of full employment and rapid economic growth, Guy Debord

was active in the ranks of SouB. Debord took these themes to another level,

that of spontaneist theory, but the intellectual ﬁliations of Debord’s ideas

as part of this ultra-Left milieu that also gradually became anti-Marxist,

is undisputed. Debord’s new critique of the société du spectacle, discussed

elsewhere in this volume, remains a frame of analysis in part based on inter-

sections of red and black ideas. As in Castoriadis’s 1960 and 1961 reﬂexions,

his brand of Marxist thinking should not simply be reduced to economic

and political features alone, but also explores the imaginary dimension of

capitalist domination, interlinked with the continuing centrality of workers’

councils in the Internationale Situationniste. It was the organisational imper-

atives of a movement originally inﬂuenced by Trotskyism that alienated

Debord as much as it had done Pannekoek. Thus, in the last ten years of

its existence, SouB was less a melting pot of new ideas than a springboard

for their development outside of its organisation.

IV. Castoriadis’ ultimate control and later evolution

Castoriadis’s attempts to recapture the organisational purity of the original

Leninist organisations exhibits the conﬂuence of ideology and context, but

the central role played by Castoriadis himself goes a long way to explain-

ing the successes and failures of the group. For example, recruitment took

place only by personal co-optation, limiting the capacity of the movement

to expand and transform. Gottraux, on the basis of interviews and analysis of

internal documents, has demonstrated that Castoriadis was what we might

now call a ‘control freak’, constantly steering the course of the debates and

imposing his personal will on the rest of the group. Castoriadis admitted that

his status as international civil servant gave him a privileged amount of free

time to write his militant texts. Gottraux also notes that in all the available

minutes it turns out that Castoriadis never missed any of SouB’s meetings.49

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Benoît Challand 223

The most prominent example of Castoriadis’s central (and centralising)

role comes from the internal scission in 1958. In the tormented context of

the dying days of the Fourth Republic, strong disagreements emerged inside

SouB regarding the nature of De Gaulle’s election and which interpretation

to give to the PCF’s ambiguous stance vis-à-vis what has been dubbed ‘De

Gaulle’s permanent coup d’état’. Castoriadis, and with him the Centre and

the Right wing (as discussed above), invoked ‘collective discipline’, and man-

aged thus to silence the Left minority, as we have seen from the Dutch

militants’ reports. Lefort saw in this attitude of Castoriadis an ‘avatar of

democratic centralism’50 and decided to leave the organisation in Septem-

ber 1958. In this context, Gottraux also observed that the minority Left had

made contact with Pannekoek and the Dutch council movement, illustrat-

ing that they felt at odds and uneasy with the ways in which Castoriadis

wanted to reform the organisation.51

In fact, some SouB positions were also premised on councilist ideas.

For example, the possibility of revoking some of the rotating representa-

tion in leading committees (like the Comité Responsable) or the importance

of the workers controlling and organising the means of production and of

self-organisation.52 The problem was that the substance and inﬂuence of

Pannekoek’s ideas and the idea of workers’ councils did not trickle down

into the organisational life of SouB itself. In theory, Castoriadis promoted

autonomy and criticised the bureaucratic degeneration of many Marxist

organisations, but in reality, the rhythm of life and the range of ideas

discussed inside SouB were animated almost solely by Castoriadis. For exam-

ple Castoriadis remarked during the strikes in the Renault factory in 1955

and 1956: ‘We have to be alert, decide who must attend the TO [Tribune

Ouvrière] meetings. These comrades must decide in advance the critiques to

be made and hand in texts to TO.’53

It is not a coincidence that most of those who were militants and

have since become inﬂuential intellectuals (such as Lefort, Debord and

Lyotard) all decided to leave the organisation because of disagreements with

Castoriadis. There could only be one leader and one organisational form for

SouB.54 But intellectually, again, Gottraux notes that Lefort’s criticisms in

the late 1950s seems to have been taken on board by Castoriadis in his read-

ing of the events surrounding May 1968,55 as much as Lefort also seems to

acknowledge that Henri Simon was right on certain issues ten years after dis-

cussions inside ILO.56 In certain texts from the post-SouB period, Castoriadis

seems to have continued some of the dialogues that took place under the

banner of SouB.57 Despite a form of historical revisionism, it can even be

argued that Castoriadis took inspiration from Pannekoek, as his 1976 reap-

praisal of the Hungarian revolt in Tel os suggests. The ‘Hungarian Source’58

can be read at different levels. In part it is a vitriolic text against Ernest

Mandel, the leader of the Fourth International (United Secretariat), and

classical Marxism.59 But above all, it is a cornerstone of Castoriadis’s new

philosophy and political theory in which autonomy becomes paramount

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224 Socialisme ou Barbarie

in his elaboration of social consciousness, developed in later philosophical

works, and in particular around the theme of the social imaginary.60

In this text, Castoriadis deﬁnes the autonomy of a society as its capacity

for ‘auto-institution’ (a distinct phrase of Castoriadis’s that does not derive

directly from the anarchist idea of self-organisation).61 The process of auto-

institution implies the capacity of societies to openly ‘call into question their

own institution, their representation of the world, their social imaginary

signiﬁcations’.62 Closure and openness are the key for Castoriadis’s under-

standing of autonomy, envisaged as a radical project. Here, closure means

the fact that it is not possible for a given society to choose the ways and

means in which it reﬂects on itself, implying a form of heteronomy – that is,

the law of others imposed on this particular society. Openness, on the other

hand, is important not only in terms of a given society choosing its institu-

tional setting but also on an ‘informational and cognitive’ level, in choosing

the vocabulary or symbolic repertoires to express an autonomous political

project.63

While people who remained faithful to historical materialism failed to

see what was still Marxist in this new theory,64 Castoriadis maintained that,

beyond his commitment to a revolutionary praxis, at the heart of his new

theoretical elaboration was the classical Marxist theme of alienation, but one

also attuned to a more socially-constructed and language-mediated vision of

the political, one far from the strictures of historical determinism.65 It could

even be claimed that some of Pannekoek’s arguments, developed in the non-

published correspondence, seem to have been integrated into Castoriadis’s

theory of the spontaneous capacity of society (with the difference that back

in the 1950s the central actor was the working class) for self-organisation.

With a historical sleight of hand, Castoriadis here argues that the Hungarian

revolution is fundamentally different from the previous forms of communes

or council revolutions. Being of a new kind, it puts the previous communist

revolts in a situation of damnatio memoriae – or removal from remembrance –

thus realising a form of historical revisionism. This is very different from

the views he expressed in the 1950s, when he argued the need for intellec-

tuals and a revolutionary vanguard. Echoing Pannekoek, Castoriadis now

states that:

If the opposite of spontaneity (that is, of self-activity and self-

organization) is hetero-organization (that is, organization by politicians,

theoreticians, professional revolutionaries, etc.) then, clearly, the opposite

of spontaneity is counter-revolution, or the conservation of the existing

order. The revolution is exactly that: self-organization of the people.66

It is as if, 22 years later, Castoriadis has turned on his head. When going

back to Pannekoek’s second and third letters, one cannot but be struck by

the parallel between the Dutch councilist’s ideas and the ‘new’ Castoriadis:

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Benoît Challand 225

What I am claiming is that the result of the often violent struggle is

not determined by accidental circumstances, but by what is vital in the

workers’ thought, as the basis of a solid consciousness acquired through

experience. [ ...] We cannot beat them [the communist parties] by fol-

lowing their methods. It is possible only if we follow our own methods.

The true form of action for a struggling class lies in the strength of argu-

ments, based on the fundamental principle of autonomy of decision.[... ]

The main condition for the conquest of freedom for the working class

is that the concepts of self-government and the self-management of the

means of production both need to be rooted in the consciousness of the

masses.67

There are certainly areas of convergence between the two authors, even if

more than 20 years had passed since the writing of these lines by Pannekoek.

Castoriadis had also distanced himself from a stage-based vision of class

struggle, because he went through its anti-Marxist period, the liquidation

of historical materialism and of a rigid theory of economy as the basis of his-

torical transformation. He remains, though, a Castoriadis dedicated to the

same reﬁned commitment to understanding how new hierarchical structures

‘replaced the traditional twofold division of capitalist society into two main

classes’.68 Whether this is enough to be still considered a Marxist remains a

matter for debate.

V. Conclusion: Legacy beyond the organisation

SouB eventually evolved into an ultra-Left anti-Marxist movement.69 Its

inﬂuence, overall, is certainly more important for the intellectual and aca-

demic scene than the practical, political level, where its impact has remained

minimal (although this is true of almost all ultra-Left organisations). That

SouB achieved the notoriety and inﬂuence that it did is signiﬁcant given it

had such a very low number of militants, ranging from between 20 mem-

bers in 1951 and 87 a decade later.70 However, its publications inﬂuenced

the work of many other French intellectual journals, and numerous French,

British and US intellectuals cut their teeth in revolutionary politics while

members of the group, before moving on.71

There are both typical and idiosyncratic elements to the story of the evo-

lution of SouB, but neither is visible enough without the context we have

given here. Ideology is not enough. As we have shown, Trotskyism in general

had serious problems despite its compelling ideological critique of Stalinism,

its demand for the internationalisation of political struggle, and its reading

of the Soviet Union as a bureaucratic degeneration, or state capitalism. The

ideological commitment to democratic centralism and a revolutionary van-

guard nevertheless prohibited a fuller integration with wider Left-libertarian

strands of thinking. While SouB often provided a platform for opening new

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226 Socialisme ou Barbarie

avenues for political participation on the far-Left, at other times it split the

political spectrum further.

We have argued that despite the substantial distancing of SouB from

Trotskyism, it kept the indirect mark of its intellectual origins, in particu-

lar Castoriadis’s strict (if critical) following of party discipline in the context

of the ideological battles of the cold war. The need to keep a sense of intellec-

tual purity and originality, in order to ward off detractors and to sustain the

movement into the future, generated a series of splits detrimental to mutual

borrowings. Intellectual cross-fertilisation took place only when members

were not bound by the group’s inner working logic or the power struggles

between dominant and more passive ﬁgures. We have noted how Lefort and

Castoriadis parted company over the group’s inner organisation and over

their mutual philosophy of history. Yet, as individuals, they continued their

dialogue on politics and theory. There was disagreement on certain topics,

but on many subtle elements it is as if Lefort and Castoriadis kept developing

mutual borrowings into their own independent lines of thinking.

Castoriadis’s later reﬂections on society are caught in a battle against het-

eronomy on the part of an externally instituted political, social and cognitive

order – a view that echoes Lefort’s simultaneous work and writings against

totalitarianism.72 Both authors converge in their form of mild historical revi-

sionism about what revolution is or should be.73 So while SouB as a formal

institution prevented creative borrowings, SouB as an informal community

of intellectuals has allowed for profound and long-lasting borrowings and

generated deep processes of cross-fertilisation of political ideas. This denotes

the presence of strong personal ties and intellectual afﬁnities despite the

stark ideological differences which ought to be considered as the engine of

subsequent theoretical innovation. Socialisme ou Barbarie is a case study of

mid- to late twentieth-century socialism in its own right. Its lasting legacy,

however, is intellectual, not organisational.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for

their comments. Thanks to Sara Farris, Jérémie Barthas, Paul Mattick Jr. and

Chiara Bottici for sharing some ideas during the writing of this chapter. All

have helped to push me into rethinking in more depth what ‘Red and Black’

means. I obviously bear sole responsibility for remaining errors.

Notes

1. For an overview of such elaborations inside Council Communism, see Anton

Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2002).

2. Liebich is one of the ﬁrst to thematise this tension. See A. Liebich, ‘Socialisme

ou Barbarie: A Radical Critique of Bureaucracy’, Our Generation 12:2 (1977),

pp. 55–62; M. Van der Linden, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French Revolutionary

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-227 9780230280373

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Benoît Challand 227

Group (1949–65)’, Left History 5:1 (1997) at www.left-dis.nl/uk/lindsob.htm

[accessed June 2010]; and for the most detailed analysis, see P. Gottraux,

‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’. Un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de

l’après-guerre (Lausanne: Payot, 1997).

3. See H. Simon, Correspondance de Pierre Chaulieu (Castoriadis) et Anton Pannekoek

1953–1954 (Paris: Échanges et Mouvement, 2002). The text, with an introduc-

tion and comments, from Henri Simon is available at www.mondialisme.org/spip.

php?rubrique86 (accessed July 2010).

4. See, e.g. Castoriadis, L’institution imaginaire de la société (Paris: Seuil, 1975) and

Domaines de l’homme. Le carrefour du labyrinthe (Paris: Seuil, 1986).

5. For a detailed description, see Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, pp. 31–40, or

P. Mattick Jr., ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, in R. A. Gordman (ed.), Biographical Dictio-

nary of Neo-Marxism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 387–389, for a

brief overview.

6. Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, pp. 21–23.

7. Translation from Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, Vol. 1: 1946–1955,ed.

and trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),

p. 97. See also in Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, pp. 23–30, and ‘An interview

with Cornelius Castoriadis’, Telos 23 (1975), pp. 131–155.

8. Gottraux (see ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, pp. 377–383), who provides the most

detailed account of SouB life, distinguishes three generations: the war generation,

the intermediary, and the Algerian war generations.

9. See J.-F. Sirinelli, Histoire culturelle de la France (Paris: Seuil, 2005).

10. Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, pp. 58ff.

11. See Mattick, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, p. 389.

12. See P. Grémion, Intelligence de l’Anticommunisme. Le Congrès pour la liberté de la

culture à Paris 1950–1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1995); and V. R. Berghahn, America and

the Intellectual cold wars in Europe: Shepard Stone Between Philanthropy, Academy and

Diplomacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

13. This is obviously a matter of debate, and there have been Marxist intellec-

tuals considering themselves Leninists who have nonetheless developed anti-

authoritarian ideas, in primis Gramsci and his revised dichotomy of civil v. polit-

ical society to distinguish the sphere of spontaneous association v. oppression of

the bourgeois state’s institutions. Moreover, Lih has recently argued that Lenin’s

élitist and manipulating attitude towards the workers has been overstated in the

course of the last century. See L. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered. What Is to Be Done?

in Context (Amsterdam: Brill University Press, 2006). Yet, the tragic upheaval of

Kronstadt is a reminder of the little space for debate that Trotsky himself would

allow inside the party.

14. There are of course counter-examples of constructive openings to other commu-

nist trends, as certain sections of the Fourth International have been in alliance

with larger communist factions, as was the case of Bandiera Rossa in Italy until

recently. Yet it is difﬁcult to argue that the story of the Fourth International is not

replete with internal divisions.

15. H. Arendt, ‘The Ex-Communists’, Commonweal 57: 24 (20 March 1953),

pp. 595–599.

16. D. Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life (Washington, DC:

ISI Books, 2008).

17. See G. Scott Smith, ‘A Radical Democratic Political Offensive. Melvin J Lasky, Der

Monat and the CCF’, Journal of Contemporary History 35:2 (2000), pp. 265–268;

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-228 9780230280373

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228 Socialisme ou Barbarie

Scott Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the

CIA and Post-war American Hegemony (London and New York: Routledge, 2002);

F. S. Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters

(New York: New Press, 2001), pp. 47–56.

18. Our point is not to suggest that all ex-communists or ex-Trotskyists have been

complacent and aware of the CIA activities in the name of anti-communism,

but that there were some ties. For example, Aron was critical of these exter-

nal manipulations by the CIA, as Grémion has documented in his Intelligence

de l’Anticommunisme, pp. 429–474.

19. See Scott Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture.

20. On how a certain amount of these counterpart funds of the Marshall Plan could

be used for secret operations of the US Government and in particular by the

CIA, see A. Carew, ‘American Labor Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union

Committee and the CIA’, Labor History 39:1 (1998), pp. 25–42.

21. See Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, note 38, p. 334: For a detailed trajectory of

his function inside the OECD, see note 47, p. 337.

22. The full list is given on http://www.agorainternational.org/englishworksb.html.

In the famous 1968 book Castoriadis, next to E. Morin and C. Lefort, signs as

Jean-Marc Coudray. See Edgar Morin, Claude Lefort and Jean-Marc Coudray, Mai

68: la brèche. Premières réﬂexions sur les événements (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard,

1968). It was in 1968 that Castoriadis signed a text under his real name for

the ﬁrst time; however it was not a political text, but an article dealing with

psychoanalysis. See Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, p. 336.

23. See Castoriadis, ‘An interview’. See Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, note 49,

p. 337.

24. See Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, p. 253, my translation. Notes 219 and

226 also illustrate this vision of SouB thinking of itself as super partes.See

note 219: ‘Michel, approved by Chaulieu, underlines the originality of SouB’s

position. We do not represent a tendency polemicising from within “worker”

organisations, we are outside, against them.’ (Trans. DB)

AQ3 25. Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, p. 23.

26. See, e.g. Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, pp. 96–97.

27. C., Lefort, ‘La contradiction de Trotsky et le problème révolutionnaire’, Les Temps

Modernes 4:39 (1948–1949), pp. 46–69.

28. Van der Linden, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’.

29. Van der Linden, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’.

30. See Castoriadis, ‘An interview’, p. 134.

31. For a clear description of how their approach gradually became anti-Marxist,

see both Castoriadis, ‘An interview’ (esp. pp. 144–150), and ‘An interview with

Claude Lefort’, Telos 30 (1976), pp. 173–192, esp. pp. 181–183. Lefort expressed

strong disagreement with Castoriadis over the fact that the latter shared the views

of Raya Dunayevskaya, a militant in the Johnson-Forest tendency in the USA,

whose selection of texts were published in SouB in the ﬁrst half of the 1950s.

Lefort criticised these views as ‘vaguely Hegelian’ and noted that ‘the close rap-

port between Castoriadis and Rya Stone [Raya Dunayevskaya] made me aware for

the ﬁrst time of profound conceptual differences between us that underlay our

political differences’ (177). Note that in his interview, Lefort confused Rya Stone

(i.e. Grace Lee Boggs) with Raya Dunayevskaya.

32. See C. Lefort, ‘Alain Sergent et Claude Harmel. Recension du livre Histoire de

I’Anarchie, vol. I’, Les Temps Modernes 5:56 (1950), pp. 269–274.

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Benoît Challand 229

33. Liebich, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, p. 58. Lefort describes the bulletin of ILO/ICO

as ‘as unprogrammatic as possible’ (Lefort, ‘An Interview’, 179). Simon developed

views closer to libertarian communism and was therefore very open to the sug-

gestions made by Pannekoek, as some of his later publications demonstrated, in

particular his side commentary in Simon, Correspondance de Pierre Chaulieu.

34. Translated and reproduced by Marcel van der Linden, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’,

note 49. The report was originally published as ‘Splitsing in de Franse groep

“Socialisme ou Barbarie”: Brieven uit Frankrijk’, Spartacus 18 (October–December

1958), pp. 21–25.

35. Ibid.

36. For an English imprint, see Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils.

37. See P. Mattick Jr., ‘Ruehle, Otto’, in R. A. Gordman (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of

Neo-Marxism (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press), p. 365.

38. See Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils, p. 206. Pannekoek also had a non-deterministic

reading of modern capitalism. So rather than seeing capitalism as containing the

seeds of its own demise, he saw in capitalism an innate capacity of continuous

adaptation allowing it to survive difﬁcult times and transform itself into an ever

stronger ideology.

39. See Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, pp. 241–242; Van der Linden, ‘Socialisme

ou Barbarie’; and Simon, Correspondance de Pierre Chaulieu. Henri Simon, who was

an actor of this period, also points the ﬁnger at Castoriadis’s slightly manipulat-

ing capacities. The most virulent accusation against Castoriadis can be found in

Cahier du Communisme de Conseils, 8 (1971). Castoriadis gave his own version of

the polemic in L’expérience du movement ouvrier (Paris: 10–18 ed. Bourgeois, 1974),

pp. 261ff.

40. This chronology is adapted in large parts from Simon, Correspondance de Pierre

Chaulieu.

41. Ibid. (see doc. ‘Les voiles commencent à se lever’).

42. Pannekoek’s original formulation in the third letter is as follows: ‘It was not my

intention to see it published, or rather I had not thought when writing it that it

was for publication; if I remember rightly, I did not put much care into writing

it. If, however, you believe that certain passages could provide some clariﬁcation,

then I think you should select passages such that my remarks do not take up too

much space in the review. I have the impression that what is said in the book Les

Conseils Ouvriers could provide a much broader and more general base.’ (Trans.

DB). Quoted in Simon, Correspondance de Pierre Chaulieu (see doc. ‘Encore sur la

question du parti’).

43. In a note ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie à l’étranger’ published in Socialisme ou Barbarie

15–16 (October–December 1954), it states that ‘The discussion between Anton

Pannekoek [ ...] and Pierre Chaulieu is of great importance from the view-

point of the elaboration of revolutionary theory. One cannot but agree with the

ﬁrm and brilliant critique which the latter provides of Pannekoek, whose posi-

tions vis-à-vis the Comintern are, or rather were, historically justiﬁed, but which

today are as outdated as the theses against which they were a healthy reaction’

(Trans. DB).

44. Simon, Correspondance de Pierre Chaulieu (doc. ‘Premiers contacts’).

45. Part 1 of the article is published in SouB 31 (1960–1961), pp. 51–81 and part 2 in

SouB 32 (1961), pp. 84–111.

46. Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, pp. 135–136.

47. Ibid, pp. 137–138.

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230 Socialisme ou Barbarie

48. SouB 31 (1960–1961), p. 63.

49. Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, p. 333 or n. 37, p. 334.

50. Ibid., p. 91.

51. Ibid., pp. 89–92.

52. Ibid., p. 34

53. Ibid., p. 67.

54. Mattick, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, p. 388.

55. Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, p. 348.

56. See Lefort, ‘An Interview’, p. 185.

57. For example, Castoriadis writes: ‘Things are even clearer when one considers the

revolution as self-organized activity aiming at the institution of a new order,

rather than an explosion and destruction of the old order. (The distinction is, of

course, a separating abstraction.)’ The parenthesis seems a personal aside directed

against the undeterministic Lefort to tell him that the does not really believe in a

before and an after of the revolutionary moment. See Castoriadis, ‘The Hungarian

Source’, Telos 26 (1976), pp. 4–22 (13).

58. The text was written and published ﬁrst in English and a French version was

published a year later: ‘La Source Hongroise’ Libre 1 (1977), pp. 51–85.

59. Mandel is openly quoted in many places (e.g. ‘The Hungarian Source’, 6), but

some indirect criticism against Mandel’s thinking can also be found throughout

the text (e.g. 11).

60. In particular see Castoriadis, L’institution imaginaire, and Domaines de l’homme.

61. See, e.g., Castoriadis, Domaines de l’homme, p. 518.

62. Castoriadis, C., World in Fragments. Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis,

and the Imagination, ed. and trans. David Ames Curits (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 1997), p. 17.

63. Castoriadis, Domaines de l’homme, p. 513.

64. See for example the sarcastic remarks of Henri Simon about Castoriadis’s new

idea of the social imaginary in Simon, Correspondance de Pierre Chaulieu.See

also A. Callinicos, Trotskyism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990),

Section 4.3 ‘Castoriadis and the triumph of the will’.

65. For a succinct presentation of Castoriadis’s commitment to a revolutionary praxis

and the ‘conscious transformation of society by the autonomous activity of men’

(i.e. a non-alienated society), see Castoriadis, L’institution imaginaire, pp. 90–92.

Translation from The Imaginary Institution of Society (London: Polity Press, 1987,

trans.K.Blamey),p.62.

66. See Castoriadis, ‘The Hungarian Source’, p. 11. His emphases.

67. Pannekoek’s 15 June 1954 letter to Chaulieu, reproduced in Simon,

Correspondance de Pierre Chaulieu (doc. ‘Deuxième lettre de Pannekoek’). Our

emphases.

68. See Castoriadis, ‘La Source Hongroise’, p. 73.

69. Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, pp. 360–361, where Gottraux also notes how

the Gulag effect (i.e. publication of Soljenitsin’s main piece) and anti-totalitarian

writings in the 1970s contributed in making Castoriadis’s theories appealing.

70. Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, pp. 40; 104.

71. Gottraux, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, pp. 255–314.

72. See note 70. The journal Constellations held a conference shortly after

the death of Lefort in 2010. Original texts presented then can be found

at http://constellationsjournal.blogspot.com/search/label/Claude%20Lefort%20

Memorial%20-%20TEXTS. A. Kalyvas’ comparison of Castoriadis and Lefort is for

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Benoît Challand 231

our discussion illuminating but has not been included in the ﬁnal publication

(Constellations 2012, Volume 19, Issue 1).

73. For a discussion of Lefort’s historical revisionism, see J. Barthas, ‘Machiavelli in

political thought from the age of revolutions to the present’, in J. Najemy (ed.),

The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2010), pp. 269–270.

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Beyond Black and Red:

The Situationists and the Legacy

of the Workers’ Movement

Jean-Christophe Angaut

Introduction

Over the last 20 years, the situationists have often been reduced to a mere

group of artists criticising everyday life, detached from any social struggle.

The common description of their contribution to the events of 1968 in

France was symptomatic of this reduction: either the so-called cultural ori-

entation of these events was attributed to them, or it was said that, because

the role of the situationists had been over-emphasised, these events were

reduced in the collective memory to their cultural aspect.1Nevertheless,

this understanding tends to weaken with a close reading of the situationists’

texts (consisting of articles, letters, pamphlets and theoretical books).2From

this literature, it appears that the situationists were linked with and/or

opposed to most of the revolutionary groups of the 1960s.3For example,

Debord was brieﬂy a member of ‘Pouvoir ouvrier’, a group belonging to

‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ in the early 1960s, and in 1966 he had connec-

tions with members of the French Anarchist Federation, which subsequently

excluded the members of what was regarded as a situationist conspiracy

inside the organisation. It also appears that since the beginning of the

1960s, in the two main texts of situationist theory (The Society of the Spec-

tacle by Debord and The Revolution of Everyday Life by Vaneigem4)aswellas

in their journal Internationale Situationniste and during the events of 1968,

the situationists pointed up slogans of the workers’ councils,5celebrating

this spontaneous revolutionary structure and its recurrence in Budapest in

1956.6Last but not least, they considered the events of May and June 1968 in

France to be a revolutionary event, being the ﬁrst general wildcat strike of

workers in history, rather than a student event.7It is therefore interesting to

investigate their relations with the history of the workers’ movement, a his-

tory which led to a split between two main trends, Marxism and anarchism,

or statist communism and libertarian socialism.8

232

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Jean-Christophe Angaut 233

This chapter studies the way the situationists are linked to this legacy,

how they might have provided a way of going beyond this division between

Marxism and anarchism and what the limits of their perspective might

be. This attempt is considered in two directions. First, the situationists

presented a critique of the separation between anti-capitalist and anti-

hierarchical struggles as an ideological split rather than an objective distinc-

tion. In their relations with other revolutionary groups, this led to harsh

criticisms directed at Marxist and libertarian organisations that prospered

from this division. This part of the history of the situationists is beginning

to be better known, but the relation of the practice to their theories is not

always systematically explained. By revisiting the concepts and themes of

the Young Hegelian movement – a movement to which both Marx and

Bakunin belonged – the chapter then continues by showing that this attempt

to go beyond the separation between black and red brings us back to a point

before that separation. In other terms, the situationist claim to go beyond

the Marxist and anarchist traditions is not a negation of the history of the

workers’ movement, but an attempt to renew this movement on the basis of

its original theoretical sources.

The critique of the separation between black and red

It is important to keep in mind that the theoretical attempts of the

situationists during the 1960s cannot be isolated from their political and

social context: this seems to me the best way to maintain the critical dis-

tance missing in the work of the so-called ‘pro-situs’ (‘pro-situationists’)

who were attacked by Debord in 1972.9First of all, Debord’s participation

in ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, mentioned above, meant that he and other

members of the group had common reference points in left communism

in general, with authors such as Karl Korsch, Anton Pannekoek and Rosa

Luxemburg. Furthermore, some groups close to the Situationist International

(SI), especially the ‘Enragés’ at Nanterre University,10 maintained links with

libertarian groups, such as ‘Noir et Rouge’,11 and with Council Communist

groups, such as ‘Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières’.12 Moreover, in

the early 1960s, the situationists were close to the philosopher, sociologist

and heterodox Marxist, Henri Lefebvre, until their relationship broke down

acrimoniously amid reciprocal accusations of plagiarism.13 Situationist the-

ories are a meeting point of at least three trends. First, a Left communist

tradition which was critical of the Leninist trends in the workers’ movement

(in short, those who believed that the Russian revolution was betrayed by the

Bolsheviks and not just by Stalin) and which promoted the workers’ councils

as direct democratic organisations. Second, a tradition of anti-authoritarian

critique of capitalism and so-called socialist societies. And ﬁnally, a trend of

sociological reﬂexion about modern urban life as alienated. Keeping this rela-

tion in mind does not minimise the originality of the situationist theories,

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234 Beyond Black and Red

but helps to understand them better, and particularly to understand the dual

critique of Marxism and anarchism.

It may seem difﬁcult to accept that the situationists were criticising the

bureaucratic tendencies in the history of Marxism as well as what they saw

as the historic inefﬁcacy of anarchism, because the main references they

used seemed to be more Marxist than libertarian. For example, during the

summer of 1968, the group protested: ‘Despite the obvious fact that the

Situationist International developed a historical view deriving from Hegel

and Marx, the press kept on mixing up situationists and anarchism.’14 They

also claimed ﬁliations with what they called ‘revolutionary Marxism’, an

expression that excluded such statist interpretations of Marxism as Leninism

and social democracy. Furthermore, like Council Communists, they may

also appear to be Marxists with libertarian tendencies rather than anarchists

integrating Marxist scientiﬁc contributions. Moreover, even when they are

dealing with social and historical experiments they agree with, where anar-

chists have played the main role, they refuse to reduce these experiments to

the expression of anarchism as a particular trend within the workers’ move-

ment. This is made quite clear with their discussion of the 1936 Spanish

revolution. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord recognised that on the

one hand, ‘in 1936 anarchism did indeed initiate a social revolution, a rev-

olution that was the most advanced expression of proletarian power ever

realised’; but he argued that on the other hand, the uprising was not an anar-

chist initiative, it was a defensive reaction against a military coup, and they

were unable effectively to defend the revolution against the bourgeois, the

Stalinists and Fascism. Some of them even became government ministers, he

noted.15

In The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem seems to be closer than

Debord to libertarian ideals, for example when he explains that ‘from now

on, no revolution will be worthy of the name if it does not involve, at the

very least, the radical elimination of all hierarchy’.16 However, the words

‘anarchism’ or ‘anarchy’ cannot be found anywhere in the book. Vaneigem

clearly speaks about anarchists (quoting for example Makhno and Durruti)

but never about anarchism; as if individuals were worth more than their

particular ideology and more than the political trend they belonged to.

Nevertheless, despite this seeming proximity to Marxism and Marxist

tropes, there is very real and open critique of Marxism in these same

situationist texts, a critique which not only attacks the progressive degenera-

tion of Marxism, but also points out the germs of that degeneration in Marx’s

personality and work. In The Revolution of Everyday Life, where Marx is quoted

less and in a more critical way than in Debord’s texts, Vaneigem speaks, for

example, about ‘Marx’s authoritarian attitudes in the First International’.17

However, this criticism is also developed further in The Society of the Spec-

tacle, the book which is nevertheless known as the closest to revolutionary

Marxism. In Chapter IV of the book, Debord at ﬁrst gives the impression,

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Jean-Christophe Angaut 235

like other French left-wing Marxists of the time,18 that his criticisms are of

the incorrect use of Marx by those who claimed ﬁliation with him. But

Debord goes on to explain that in Marx’s thought, there is a ‘scientiﬁc-

determinist aspect’ which ‘made it vulnerable to ideologisation’.19 That drift

towards economism (for, as Marx put it, economics is ‘the historical science

par excellence’) always postpones the moment of revolutionary practice and

the advent of the historical subject by claiming that the correct objective

conditions are not present. For Debord, Marxism as it evolved emphasised a

tendency which was already there in embryo in Marx, consisting principally

in separating the theory (especially the economics) from the revolutionary

practice, just as Marx isolated himself ‘by cloistered scholarly work in the

British Museum’.20 According to Debord, that lack in Marxist theory also

has its roots in the fact that this theory was the faithful expression of the

revolutionary movement at that time, and also of the insufﬁciencies of this

movement. This movement missed something that could not come from

the theory, but had to emerge from the concrete form of organisation that

arose spontaneously from the proletarian struggles: the workers’ councils,

the soviets.

When Marx elaborated his theory, the working class organisation he pro-

moted could be nothing other than that which was in accord with his

separate theoretical work, and that form has two failures. First, it mimics

the bourgeois revolutions, in the sense that the main task of the proletariat

would be to take power as it exists in bourgeois society: Debord explains

that ‘the theoretical shortcomings of the scientiﬁc defence of proletarian rev-

olution (both in its content and in its form of exposition) all ultimately

result from identifying the proletariat with the bourgeoisie with respect to

the revolutionary seizure of power’.21 The self-criticism contained in Marx’s

work on the Paris Commune, which corrects some formulations of the

Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), seems here to be clearly recognis-

able. According to the, Communist Manifesto, the proletariat was supposed

to seize the State machine as it was in order to make it work for the ben-

eﬁt of the proletariat. In Chapter II, we read: ‘The proletariat will use its

political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to

centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the

proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive

forces as rapidly as possible’.22 Later, in The Civil War in France, which was

written just after the end of the Paris Commune (1871), Marx argues that

‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machin-

ery, and wield it for its own purposes’, but has to destroy it immediately,

replacing it with the Commune, which is ‘the political form at last discov-

ered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour’.23

However, Debord does not repeat the praise of the Commune as ‘the politi-

cal form at last discovered’, and even when he praises the workers’ councils,

he does not speak about them as ‘political forms’. To understand this point,

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236 Beyond Black and Red

it is therefore important to consider his critique of political parties, which

takes us to the second failure in Marxism.

This second failure is the lack of a conception of the organisation which

would have been truly revolutionary, that is, without any echo of statist or

bourgeois forms. In summary, Marxism (and all Marxist groups) had failed

in their thinking about what the revolutionary organisation should be. The

following passage deserves quoting at length:

The proletarian class is formed into a subject in its process of organ-

ising revolutionary struggles and in its reorganisation of society at the

moment of revolution [...]. But this crucial question of organisation was

virtually ignored by revolutionary theory during the period when the

workers’ movement was ﬁrst taking shape – the very period when that

theory still possessed the unitary character it had inherited from historical

thought (and which it had rightly vowed to develop into a unitary his-

torical practice). Instead, the organisational question became the weakest

aspect of radical theory, a confused terrain lending itself to the revival of

hierarchical and statist tactics borrowed from the bourgeois revolution.

The forms of organisation of the workers’ movement that were devel-

oped on the basis of this theoretical negligence tended in turn to inhibit

the maintenance of a unitary theory by breaking it up into various spe-

cialised and fragmented disciplines. This ideologically alienated theory

was then no longer able to recognise the practical veriﬁcations of the uni-

tary historical thought it had betrayed when such veriﬁcations emerged in

spontaneous working-class struggles; instead, it contributed to repressing

every manifestation and memory of them.24

With this quotation, which describes the process of degeneration of

Marxism, we understand the relative legitimacy of the anarchist critique for

the situationists. At its foundation (deeply rooted in an original relation with

the Hegelian current in both Marx and in Bakunin, as we shall see), revolu-

tionary theory was ahead of the time of the revolutionary practice it infers –

and that is part of the original theory of the avant-garde the situationists

developed at that time. Initially, that theory was unitary, but because of

the lateness of the revolutionary practice, a revolutionary conception of

the organisation as the junction of practice and theory was lacking. Revolu-

tionary theory thus adopted bourgeois and statist patterns of organisation.

Obviously, Debord has the party system in mind, in which the different pow-

ers are separated as if the parties were small states and where parties compete

for power like states, and his critique has to be seen in relation to that devel-

oped by socialist and trade union thinkers at the beginning of the twentieth

century, especially in Germany.25 But Debord also suggests something more

difﬁcult to understand about the link between the internal organisation of

the political parties and the separations that occurred inside what he called

revolutionary theory. Indeed, following Debord, it seems that the separation

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Jean-Christophe Angaut 237

of different powers (the classical division into a legislature, an executive and

a judiciary), that was available inside political parties, in turn inﬂuenced

the theory, separating the theory from the practice, and the theory itself in

different ﬁelds, so that the unitary character of the theory could not be main-

tained, giving way to specialisation and bureaucratism. And ﬁnally, when in

historical practice there arises a form of organisation which is in accord with

the originally unitary theory, the latter, which is alienated in the division

of labour involved in activism, crystallised in bureaucratic organisations and

sometimes submitted to a state, is unable to recognise this right form and

prevents its manifestation.

The emergence of the workers’ councils during the Hungarian uprising of

1956 is a key contextual fact to explain Debord’s praise of the workers’ coun-

cils and the reasons why he does not repeat Marx’s praise of the Commune.

As a merely political form, the Commune would imply a separation of pol-

itics as a particular activity. As a goal to attain, it would imply a separation

between the form of organisation that is desired and the form of organisa-

tion by which the goal is supposed to be attained. In short, the Commune

could maintain a separation between the revolutionary subject and their

representation.26 On the other hand, the workers’ councils compensate for

the two failures of the organisation promoted by Marxism. Workers’ coun-

cils are indeed organisations of struggle and preﬁgurations of the coming

social organisation. In a workers’ council based on direct democracy, there

is neither hierarchy nor separate function, and that is why it is a form of

organisation radically different from the State. This explains why, in an arti-

cle written for the last issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste,René

Riesel wrote that ‘the victory of the councils has its place not at the end,

but at the very beginning of the revolution’.27 The councils are not an aim

which could be contemplated as the dreamt for political form for the day

following the revolution: they are a way of organising which is effective in

the very process of the revolution and which prevents the harmful action

of bureaucratic organisations (parties and trade unions). The Commune was

thus not an adequate revolutionary instrument.

In May and June 1968 the situationists formed a Council for the Main-

tenance of the Occupations (Conseil pour le maintien des occupations, or

CMDO) with the Enragés, and in several situationist texts, one can detect the

ambition of making the SI into an organisation that would preﬁgure such

a coming organisation. It is particularly clear in a text which is both the

testament and the obituary of the SI, namely the Theses on the Situationist

International and Its Time written by Debord in 1972 and published the same

year in The Veritable Scission in the International.28 The Theses are particularly

remarkable in their deﬁnition of revolutionary organisations:

The revolutionary organisation of the proletarian age is deﬁned by dif-

ferent moments of the struggle, where it must succeed each time, and

in each of these moments, it must succeed in never becoming a separate

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238 Beyond Black and Red

power. [ ... ] Whenever it is able to act, the revolutionary organisation

unites practice and theory, which constantly proceed together, but it

never believes that it can accomplish this through a mere voluntarist

proclamation of the necessity of their total fusion. When the revolu-

tion is still distant, the major task of the revolutionary organisation is

above all the practice of theory. When the revolution begins, its major task

increasingly becomes the theory of practice, but then the revolutionary

organisation has taken on an entirely different character. In the former

circumstances, very few individuals are avant-garde, and they must prove

it by the coherence of their general project, and by the practice that

enables them to know and communicate this project; in the latter sit-

uation, the mass of workers are of their time, and must remain so as its

only possessors by mastering the totality of their theoretical and prac-

tical weapons, notably by refusing all delegation of power to a separate

avant-garde. In the former circumstances, a dozen effective people can

be enough to begin the self-explanation of an age that contains in itself a

revolution that it still does not yet know about, and that seems to it every-

where to be absent and impossible; in the latter, the vast majority of the

proletarian class must hold and exercise all power by organising itself into

permanent deliberative and executive assemblies, which allow nothing to

remain in the form of the old world and the forms that defend it.29

First, it appears from the above that the main theme of the revolution-

ary organisation is negative: something has to be avoided, namely the

separation of the organisation as an autonomous power. That signals the

opposition of the situationists to any Leninist or social democratic concep-

tion of the organisation. Nevertheless, revolutionary organisation cannot be

deﬁned once and for all and admits of two main stages, which form a chi-

asmus, constituted by the ‘practice of theory’ and the ‘theory of practice’.

‘Practice of theory’ deﬁnes the ‘avant-garde’ stage of revolutionary organ-

isation, and means not only that the practice of the avant-garde consists

only in the theoretical explanation of the revolution, which is contained

as a virtuality in a certain society at a certain time, but also that its prac-

tice is determined by the theory it builds. Therefore, the main task of the

avant-garde is to experiment with a new kind of life, in harmony and coher-

ence with the revolutionary project. The avant-garde is no ruling elite, but a

preﬁguration of future organisation. ‘Theory of practice’, which deﬁnes the

second stage of revolutionary organisation, signiﬁes that theory is no longer

in advance of practice and from then on only has to be in harmony with

revolutionary practice – in other terms, theory becomes somehow minor,

and the main task is to practically prevent the emergence of a separate

power. The most remarkable characteristic of this deﬁnition of revolution-

ary organisations is the conception of the avant-garde it promotes. Against

the Leninist conception of organisation, developed for instance in What is

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Jean-Christophe Angaut 239

to be done? (1902) and criticised by Rosa Luxemburg, the situationists built

an original theory of the avant-garde which results from the importing of

an artistic conception of avant-garde into the ﬁeld of politics. Therefore, in

so far as it is not a general staff, the avant-garde does not lead, but conducts

experiments, expresses what is still unsaid and preﬁgures the coming social

organisation.

One can therefore understand the critical description of the split between

anarchism and Marxism around this very question of the organisation’s form

that can be found in The Society of the Spectacle. Debord explicitly turns

back to the conﬂict between Marx and Bakunin inside the International

Workingmen’s Association and describes it as the opposition between two

ideologies, ‘each containing a partially true critique, but each losing the

unity of historical thought and setting itself up as an ideological authority’.30

Those two criticisms are partially true because they apply on two differ-

ent ﬁelds: the power inside a revolutionary society and the organisation of

the revolutionary movement. Bakunin and his friends are right when they

see the threat of a bureaucratic dictatorship behind the idea of a tempo-

rary proletarian state, but Marx and his friends are also right when they

denounce Bakunin’s conspiracy plans. If we stand at this point, this double

criticism could be qualiﬁed as libertarian as it denounces the authoritarian

tendencies in both theories. But this libertarian criticism is paired with a his-

torical criticism which owes a lot to Marx but targets the two organisations

which followed these two main orientations, the Black and the Red: the

Spanish FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica, Iberian Anarchist Federaion) and

the German SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Social Democratic

Party of Germany).

§92–94 of The Society of the Spectacle are devoted to anarchism but must

AQ1 be read in the context of the tense relations between the SI and libertar-

ian organisations, since young members of the French Anarchist Federation

had declared their great interest in the situationist theses around 1966 and

1967.31 The French Anarchist Federation was obsessed at that time with the

possible inﬁltration of Marxist elements into its ranks, since it had already

split a few years earlier with the departure of the libertarian communists.

The young libertarians were forced to quit the Federation and The Society

of the Spectacle perhaps echoes this episode, especially in §92 when Debord

explains why the anarchist critique remains only partial. In particular, he

claimed, the criticism of the political struggle by the anarchists remained

abstract as they promoted a purely economic struggle based on the pattern

of the instantaneous general strike – which means that Debord is thinking

here of anarcho-syndicalism. According to Debord, anarchists only see strug-

gle as the realisation of an ideal, opposed to reality, without questioning the

practical means of realisation of this ideal, and in each struggle, they con-

stantly repeat the same things, which leads to their presenting themselves as

guardians of the temple and self-proclaimed specialists of freedom (§93).

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240 Beyond Black and Red

The meaning of this criticism is clear: the theoretical basis of the libertar-

ian organisations, theoretical anarchism, is an outdated stage in the history

of revolutionary theory, the stage of the ideological conﬂict with author-

itarian socialism, which is also the stage of the separation between black

and red and between the proletariat and its representation. Therefore lib-

ertarian organisations such as the French and (later) the Italian Anarchist

Federations and the rebuilt Spanish CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo,

National Confederation of Labour) are, for Debord,32 remnants of the past,

small churches having no relation with the contemporary revolutionary

movement, seeking to perpetuate themselves by constantly repeating the

same ideological antitheses (which is why those who proclaimed their afﬁn-

ity with situationist theses were expelled). On the contrary, according to

the situationists, workers’ councils, as they arose spontaneously (that is to

say: independently of any preconceived theory) in revolutionary Russia and

spread in Germany and Spain, as a unitary practice, are supposed to be in

accord with the unity of revolutionary theory. And this theoretical unity is

to be found before the separation between black and red, before the split

which gave birth to Marxism and anarchism as two partial truths, which

means in revolutionary theory as expressed in the 1840s.

Before black and red: the situationists

and the Young Hegelians

In this section, I provide a critical reconstruction of the situationist attempt

to theorise the antecedent theory to the separation between Marxism and

anarchism and from that examine the parallels between their theoretical

practices and those of the Young Hegelian movement of the 1840s. This

means showing the proximity between the two movements in their rela-

tion to Hegel, questioning the knowledge the situationists had about the

Young Hegelians and seeing which Young Hegelian themes are reactivated

by situationist theories.

According to §78 of The Society of the Spectacle, the unity of the revolu-

tionary theory is to be found in an original critical relation with Hegelian

thought among the Young Hegelians in the 1840s: ‘All the theoretical cur-

rents of the revolutionary working-class movement – Stirner and Bakunin as

well as Marx – grew out of a critical confrontation with Hegelian thought.’33

The situationists reactivate this critical confrontation which characterises

Young or Left Hegelianism, and they do it, ﬁrst, by using some Hegelian

texts which also found favour with the Young Hegelians. Each of the

two main situationist books written by Debord contains a quotation from

the Phenomenology of the Spirit, which was, among Hegel’s works, the one

the Young Hegelian movement, from its very beginnings, admired the

most.34

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Jean-Christophe Angaut 241

The ﬁnal chapter of The Society of the Spectacle, which describes what a

society beyond the society of the spectacle could be, is introduced with this

sentence: ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact

that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged’.35

In accordance with the situationist concept of ‘détournement’ (misappropria-

tion or twisting), the Hegelian theory of acknowledgment, once moved onto

the appropriate ﬁeld (from an idealistic description of the development of

self-consciousness to a prospective description of a desired society), gains

its real meaning: such expressions as ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘acknowledg-

ment’ cannot ﬁnd their meaning inside the society of the spectacle, which

is rather characterised by alienation and the lack of any self-consciousness.

La véritable scission dans l’Internationale36 (The Veritable Scission in the

International) begins with another Hegelian quotation:

One party proves itself to be victorious by the fact that it breaks up into

two parties; for in that fact it shows it possesses within it the principle it

combats, and consequently shows it has abolished the one-sidedness with

which it formerly made its appearance. The interest which was divided

between it and the other, now falls entirely within it, and forgets the

other, because that interest ﬁnds lying in it alone the opposition on which

its attention is directed. At the same time, however, the opposition has

been lifted into the higher victorious element, where it manifests itself in

a clariﬁed form. So that the schism that arises in one party, and seems a

misfortune, demonstrates rather its good fortune.37

Initially, Hegel was describing the victory of the Enlightenment in its

struggle against superstition, and the best proof of this victory was that

superstition had disappeared and that, instead of a struggle between Enlight-

enment and superstition, there was from then on a struggle inside the

Enlightenment between two opposite principles, pure thought and pure

matter. In 1972, Debord uses this quotation in order to describe the split

inside the SI. The SI has accomplished its historical task as avant-garde, and

the best proof of this accomplishment is the split, not between Marxists

and Bakuninists, but between two trends concerning the very question of

the spectacle: the SI begins to be contemplated by spectators who describe

themselves as ‘pro-situs’ (‘pro-situationist’), and that is why it has to disap-

pear.38 This manner of using Hegel is one of the ways in which situationists

can be compared with Young Hegelians.39

It is difﬁcult to determine precisely what knowledge the situationists had

of the Young Hegelian movement, beyond the young Marx’s writings. Nev-

ertheless, we know that in 1973 Debord published a translation (by Michel

Jacob) of one of the ﬁrst texts of that movement, August Cieskowski’s

Prolegomena to a Historiosophy40 (1838), and ten years later even wrote a pref-

ace for a possible republication of the book.41 In this text, he considers the

Polish philosopher as ‘the dark point around which all historical thought

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242 Beyond Black and Red

has turned for the last century and a half’. Moreover, in Debord and in

Vaneigem, we can ﬁnd hidden quotations of Young Hegelian texts – in

particular of Die Reaktion in Deutschland (The Reaction in Germany, 1842),

Michael Bakunin’s seminal article, which has not yet been entirely translated

into French.42

What the situationists take from Young Hegelianism is the fact that

Marxist communism and individualistic and collectivist variants of anar-

chism both have their roots in an original confrontation with Hegelian

thought. I will brieﬂy study three Young Hegelian themes, reactivated,

updated and sometimes ‘twisted’ by the situationists: the connections

between theory and practice, the primacy of the negative moment in the

dialectical process, and ﬁnally the theme of alienation. I do not claim, in

doing so, to exhaust the philosophical content of situationist writings, or

the meaning of their relation with Marx or Hegelian thought. I would just

like to show how the situationist conception of the unity of revolutionary

theory relates to the history of philosophy and therefore support the hypoth-

esis of a speciﬁc situationist attempt to renew revolutionary thought beyond

the separation between black and red from the common source of both

currents.

Now, their conception of theory (and the postulation of its unity with a

historical practice) is already the reactivation of a Young Hegelian theme.

For example, when Debord characterises Hegel as ‘the philosophical culmina-

tion of philosophy’,43 he reactivates a theme that can be found in three main

ﬁgures of Young Hegelianism. First in Cieskowski for whom a thought of his-

tory, a philosophy of practice (the ‘historiosophy’), has to go beyond the split

between being and thought which characterises the old philosophy: Hegel’s

philosophy of history is a philosophy of the past, while historiosophy is a

philosophy of the future which depends on a practice.44 A similar concep-

tion can be found in The Reaction in Germany, Bakunin’s ﬁrst revolutionary

writing: Hegel is claimed to have ‘already gone above theory, but inside the

theory itself’ and to have ‘postulated a new, practical world’45 so that in

Hegel, the theory itself, separated from the practice under the name of phi-

losophy, ﬁnds its own limit. And last but not least, Marx’s Introduction to

the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) explains that it is time to

‘realise philosophy’: the ﬁrst task of philosophy was to criticise religion, ‘the

prerequisite of all criticism’,46 thus a critique of social alienation, leading to

the ultimate ‘transcendence of the proletariat’, the ‘dissolution of society as

a particular estate’.47 In the situationist theories, the aim of this postulated

unity between theory and practice is to object to theoretical specialisation,

which they saw as the germ of degeneration in Marxism, leading ultimately

to authoritarian forms. This degeneration ends up in a relation of subordi-

nation between theory and practice, where, as I discussed above, the theory

becomes unable to recognise the revolutionary form of organisation and

ignores the rationality inherent in practice.48

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Jean-Christophe Angaut 243

Second, in Debord and in Vaneigem, the critical confrontation with

Hegelian thought is re-performed by asserting the predominance of the

negative in the dialectical process. Once again, the situationists take this

theme from the Young Hegelians. Bakunin’s article explains that the nega-

tive, which is for him the centre of Hegelian philosophy, is ‘a preponderance

of the Negative’ over the Positive49 : the negative, identiﬁed as the party of

the revolution, is what the positive, identiﬁed as the reaction, tries to reject

from itself, so that the positive is only the negation of the negative, the

negation of the destructive movement. The assertion of the preponderance

of the negative is a central theme in Young Hegelianism, also found in Bruno

Bauer.50 For Bakunin however, it is important to recognise the positivity of

the negative, that is to say the new world which is supposed to arise in the

very process by which the old world perishes. In §114 of The Society of the

Spectacle, Debord similarly identiﬁes the revolutionary proletariat as the neg-

ative party51 and at the same time, he asserts the primacy of the negative in

the Hegelian dialectical process – and, as it is written in §206, the style of

the dialectical theory has to express this primacy.52 Similarly, in The Revo-

lution of Everyday Life, Vaneigem explains that the negative has to become

positive.53 This theme was brilliantly illustrated in Bakunin’s article with the

famous sentence: ‘The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too’.54

This sentence is quoted (without any source reference) in the chapter which

relates the situationists’ contribution to the events of May and June 1968 in

France,55 as it was in Vaneigem’s book.56 This reading of the Hegelian dialec-

tical process has a precise meaning in situationism: revolutionary theory,

unitary theory, expresses the global rejection of the actual world, and a new

world can be born only from the global negation of this world.

Like other Marxists of the 1960s (notably Herbert Marcuse), the

,situationists came to use the concept of alienation extensively. They

owe this use to a particular reading of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical

Manuscripts of 1844 as a seminal work which contains Marx’s philosophy,

which later developed throughout the rest of his writings. This text is a

reconstruction of Marxism based on a philosophy of alienation, in which

the theme of commodity fetishism is central (in Debord particularly57). The

theme of alienation is especially used in Vaneigem’s book, without any men-

tion of its Marxian or Hegelian origin. Actually, the concept of alienation

is transformed by the situationists in two ways. In Marx, the concept of

alienation, which translates two German words: Entäußerung – giving some-

thing up by alienating it – and Entfremdung – when the alienated object has

become stranger, is the result of a transfer from the ﬁeld of the critique of reli-

gion to the ﬁeld of social and political critique.58 Marx had read this transfer

in Moses Hess’s On the Essence of Money. In the same way that in Christianity

(according to Feuerbach) human essence is alienated, so that humanity is

unable to recognise what it is oppressed by, the human being in capital-

ist societies alienates its vital activity in money, which is another form of

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244 Beyond Black and Red

oppression.59 In the situationist appropriation of this theme, the ﬁrst trans-

formation is a historicisation: in The Revolution of Everyday Life, Vaneigem

explains that ‘history is the continuous transformation of natural alienation

into social alienation’,60 which would suggest that religious alienation is

natural. The second transformation is a widening. In Marx’s Manuscripts,

alienation applies to the process of production: the worker becomes the

machine’s slave and is dispossessed of the fruit of their labours. Situationists

expand this theme to the alienation of the consumer. Alienation is commod-

ity alienation: it happens in commodity production (workers lose control

of their labour and of the fruits of their labours) and also in commod-

ity consumption, particularly in the spectacle as the ultimate commodity,

according to Debord.61 Spectacle is alienation in so far as ‘the passive con-

templation of images, which have moreover been chosen by someone else,

substitutes for what is experienced and for the determination of the events

by the individual itself’62 and, eventually dominates the individual.

Conclusion: The present relevance of a critique

Situationist critique is often reduced to its negative dimension and its

attempt to go beyond outdated oppositions, such as black and red. This

reduction gave the impression that situationist theories were radically new

and radically separated from the history of the workers’ movement. Yet, such

a position bears little relation with situationist theories. TheyWhile the pro-

situs tended to consider that situationist theses as a spontaneous historical

form, without antecedent, the aim of this chapter has been to link situation-

sim back to its Hegelian roots, roots shared by both anarchists and Marxists.

In other words, in denouncing the ‘pro-situs’63 in 1972 Debord objected to

creating a new object of contemplation, and the last object of spectacular

domination out of the SI. Preventing the dominated from remembering the

history of their revolts is one of the most powerful effects of the society of the

spectacle. For that very reason, it is important to recall that the situationists

attempted to go beyond the opposition between black and red for the sake of

a revolutionary theory whose unity had to be restored, integrating the social

and historical experiment of the workers’ councils and beyond the alien-

ation of theory in bureaucratic economism. So this would be the situationist

answer to Bismarck’s anxiety about a possible reuniﬁcation of black and red

after the split of 1872: black is dead, red is dead, but the uniﬁcation of both

trends is still the manifestation of workers’ democracy and, if we follow

Bakunin’s ﬁrst words as a revolutionary, has to be kept ‘at the top of the

agenda of history’.64

What did the situationist attempt to repeat and extend the seminal moves

of revolutionary thought from the 1840s bring to revolutionary movements

of the 1960s? Basically, the reactivation of Young Hegelian themes provided

a renewed theory of alienation which made possible the critique of both

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Jean-Christophe Angaut 245

capitalist society and false oppositions to it. Capitalist society was from then

on criticised not only as a society in which workers are exploited, but also as

a society in which consumers are passive. The category of alienation enables

us to criticise both aspects: workers are alienated in so far as they have no

control over production, and consumers are alienated in so far as they are

in a passive relation to the commodity. But the theme of alienation is also

a weapon against representative conceptions of democracy or ‘vanguardist’

conceptions of revolution,65 in which people are separated from their rep-

resentation and are unable to act effectively. By showing that opposition to

the capitalist system can also take alienated forms, the situationists pointed

out that the realisation of a society without alienation begins in the very

process of opposition to it.

Yet we cannot bury our head in the sand about certain limits of the

situationist attempt to go beyond black and red. The ﬁrst one concerns

the question of the revolutionary organisation. Their theoretical criticism of

Marxism and anarchism on this very question is as acute as one could wish.

Nevertheless, their practical attempt to preﬁgure another kind of organisa-

tion deserves in turn to be criticised in many respects. As Challand’s chapter

shows in this volume, like the group SouB, the SI had its own authoritari-

anisms. Debord explained the many expulsions that occurred in the history

of the SI by reference to the need to keep the group small and thereby

also forcing those excluded to be free on their own.66 Nevertheless, there

is also evidence that some of the exclusions can be explained by personal

resentments.67 Andwhatkindofpreﬁgurationcanbeimpliedbythealmost

exclusively male composition of the group, or the objective domination of

the French section?

Moreover situationist concepts of unity and totality have to be questioned.

There are very solid reasons to think that capitalist society has to be entirely

rejected, and in that respect a unitary theory can be very useful, but a ques-

tion remains: is there only one alternative to this society? Black and red

today mean the multiplicity of real social alternatives, avoiding hierarchy

and the rule of the commodity. In addition, we have to recognise which

elements of our societies remain outside that rule, such as public services,

which could be self-managed by the workers and users. These aspects of our

society are a kind of collective inheritance which escaped partially from the

rule of the commodity but always risks being caught up in it.

Notes

1. For a critique of this view and another interpretation, see Jean-Christophe Angaut

‘La ﬁn des avant-gardes: les situationnistes et Mai 68’, Actuel Marx, 41 (2009),

pp. 149–161.

2. In the 1990s, several high quality books about the Situationist International were

published and have corrected the picture of a merely artistic avant-garde. The

ﬁrst ones were Pascal Dumontier Les Situationnistes et Mai 68 – Théorie et pratique

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246 Beyond Black and Red

de la révolution (Paris: Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1990), Anselm Jappe Guy Debord

(Paris: Denoël, 2001 – originally published in Italian, Pescara: Edisioni Tracce,

1992), Gianfranco Marinelli L’amère victoire du situationnisme (Arles: Gulliver,

1998) and Shigenobu Gonzalvez, Guy Debord ou la beauté du négatif (Paris:

Nautilus, 2002). Among the numerous books published since then, Laurent

Chollet L’insurrection situationniste (Paris: Dagorno, 2000), Fabien Danesi Le Mythe

brisé de l’Internationale Situationniste: l’aventure d’une avant-garde au cœur de la cul-

ture de masse (1945–2008) (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2008) and Patrick Marcolini,

Le mouvement situationniste: une histoire intellectuelle (Montreuil: L’Échappée, 2012)

must especially be mentioned.

3. That does not mean, however, that the situationists should be considered as an

artistic avant-garde that became purely political. It would be more correct to say

that they refused the separation between art and politics. For a discussion of this

point, see Chollet, L’insurrection situationniste, p. 84 and Danesi, Le Mythe brisé,

pp. 21–29, 229–233, and for the implications of this double label over the concept

of avant-garde used by the situationists, see below.

4. Raoul Vaneigem Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (Paris:

Gallimard, 1992). The book (translated into English as The Revolution of Everyday

Life) was actually written between 1963 and 1965 but was published only in 1967,

the same year as Debord’s book. English translations of both texts can be found

on the Internet: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm http://

library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/5

5. See René Riesel ‘Préliminaires sur les conseils et l’organisation conseilliste’,

Internationale Situationniste, 12 (1969), in Internationale Situationniste (Paris:

Fayard, 1997), pp. 632–641.

6. In May 1968, several situationists, including Debord, had control of the occu-

pation committee at the Sorbonne and in its name sent telegrams to such

correspondents as the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam or

the politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. To the latter, they

wrote this funny and insulting telegram: ‘TREMBLE BUREAUCRATS STOP THE INTER-

NATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS COUNCILS WILL SOON SWEEP YOU AWAY STOP

HUMANITY WILL BE HAPPY ONLY WHEN THE LAST BUREAUCRAT HAS BEEN HANGED

WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE

KRONSTADT SAILORS AND OF THE MAKHNOVTCHINA AGAINST TROTSKY AND LENIN

STOP LONG LIVE THE COUNCILIST INSURRECTION OF BUDAPEST IN 1956 STOP DOWN

WITH THE STATE ST OP LONG LIVE REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM STOP’, in René Viénet,

Enragés et Situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Paris: Gallimard, 1968),

p. 275. A similar telegram was sent to the Chinese Communist Party. Unless

otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

7. See Guy Debord ‘Le commencement d’une époque’, Internationale Situationniste,

12 (1969), in Guy Debord Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), pp. 917–963.

8. In this paper, socialism is not intended as a particular trend beside syndicalism or

communism but as a generic notion including both syndicalism and communism

as particular socialist trends.

9. Debord Œuvres, pp. 1104–1125. Debord’s critique of the ‘pro-situs’ is the response

to what he perceived as the transformation of the SI, after 1968, into a kind

of collective star, a new object of contemplation, and therefore a new source of

alienation.

10. Regarding Nanterre University in the pre-’68 period, see Jean-Pierre Duteuil

Nanterre 1965–66–67–68: Vers le Mouvement du 22 Mars (Mauléon: Acratie, 1988).

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Jean-Christophe Angaut 247

11. The members of the Noir et rouge group (including future MEP Dany Cohn-Bendit)

had been expelled from the French Anarchist Federation in 1967 after accusations

of Marxist conspiracy. The connections between the SI and the (mainly french)

anarchist movement are thoroughly exposed in Miguel Amoros, Les situationnistes

et l’anarchie (Villasavary: Éditions de la Roue, 2012).

12. ICO (Informations et correspondances ouvrières) was founded in 1958 by former

members of ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ Claude Lefort and Henri Simon.

13. According to the situationists, Lefebvre had plagiarised one of their texts on the

Paris Commune. See the 1963 tract ‘Aux poubelles de l’histoire’ in Debord Œuvres,

pp. 624–634. But according to Lefebvre, the text was jointly written by him and

several situationists who visited him at his home in the Pyrenees. See Henri

Lefebvre ‘On the Situationist International’, Interview by Kristin Ross (1983),

October, 79 (1997), pp. 77–78.

14. Viénet, Enragés et situationnistes, p. 18n. Actually, that book was written by René

AQ2 Viénet, Guy Debord, Mustapha Kayati, Raoul Vaneigem and René Riesel.

15. Debord Œuvres, p. 803. And again in 1980, the text ‘Aux libertaires’ evokes ‘the

1936 proletarian revolution, the greatest which ever began in history until today,

and so the one which also best preﬁgures the future. The only organised force

which had the will and the ability to prepare and to make the revolution, and

to defend it – although with less lucidity and consistency – was the anarchist

movement [ ...].’ ibid., p. 1515. Similarly, when they speak about black ﬂags in

the giant demonstration of May 13, 1968, the situationists refuse to see it as a

sign of signiﬁcant anarchist presence inside the demonstration: ‘More than a

hundred black ﬂags were mixed with the many red ﬂags, realising for the ﬁrst

time this junction of the two ﬂags which was about to become the sign of the

most radical trend inside the occupation movement, not as an afﬁrmation of

an autonomous anarchist presence, but as a sign of workers’ democracy.’ Viénet

Enragés et Situationnistes, p. 73.

16. Vaneigem Traité, p. 100.

17. Ibid., p. 216. I rectify the current English translation which speaks about ‘author-

itarian positions’ where the French original text says ‘les attitudes autoritaires de

Marx’.

18. One of the most famous is the editor of Marx’s works in the prestigious collection

‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, Maximilien Rubel. See Maximilien Rubel Marx critique

du marxisme (Paris: Payot, 2000) in which one of the chapters is entitled ‘Marx,

théoricien de l’anarchisme’ (‘Marx as anarchist theoretician’).

19. Debord Œuvres, p. 797.

20. Ibid., p. 798.

21. Ibid., Italics in the original.

22. Karl Marx, Manifeste du parti communiste (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1966), p. 67

(English translation from the Marxists Internet Archive website www.marxists.

org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm)

23. Karl Marx, La Guerre civile en France (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1968), p. 59 (English

translation from the MIA website www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/

civil-war-france/ch05.htm)

24. Debord Œuvres, p. 800. Italics in the original.

25. At the end of his life, in a letter to Jean-Pierre Baudet, published in Jean-François

Martos, Correspondance avec Guy Debord (Paris: Le Fin Mot de l’Histoire, 1998),

Debord recommended the reading of Robert Michels’ famous critique of political

parties. This letter of 18 December 1987 is part of the letters that are unavailable

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248 Beyond Black and Red

because of the dispute between Debord’s widow and Jean-François Martos. The

latter had published his own correspondence with Debord in 1998, but the book

was withdrawn from sale after Alice Debord was recognised as the sole claimant

of Debord’s work. In retaliation, Jean-Pierre Baudet opposed the publication of

Debord’s letters that were sent to him in the ‘ofﬁcial’ edition of his correspon-

dence. That added another shortcoming to an edition which also omits all the

letters sent to Debord.

26. Actually, Debord, Kotanyi and Vaneigem did praise the Paris Commune in a 1962

text (‘Sur la Commune’, republished in Internationale Situationniste), but as an

historical experiment, and not as a political form.

27. Debord Internationale Situationniste, p. 641

28. Actually, the book was signed by Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti, member of

the Italian section of the Situationist International, in order to protest against the

deportation of the latter from France by decision of the Minister of the Interior.

An English translation of the Theses can be found on the Internet: www.notbored.

org/theses-on-the-SI.html

29. Debord Œuvres, pp. 1127–1128. Italics in the original.

30. Ibid., p. 801. Italics in the original.

31. See Guy Bodson La F.A. et les Situationnistes – 1966–1967, ou mémoire pour dis-

cussion dans les familles après boire (Paris: 1968) and and Miguel Amoros, Les

situationnistes et l’anarchie.

32. On the Italian Anarchist Federation, see Debord, Œuvres, pp. 1147–1456; about

the Spanish CNT, see ibid., pp. 1514–1515

33. Ibid., p. 794.

34. In the ﬁrst afﬁrmation of Left Hegelianism, Phenomenology of the Spirit is

mentioned as the only Hegelian book that can be used for a Left inter-

pretation of Hegelian thought. See David Friedrich Strauss, Streitschriften zur

Verteidigung meiner Schirft über das Leben Jesu und zur Charakteristik der gegenwär-

tigen Theologie (Tübingen: 1838), p. 65. See also for English translation David

Friedrich Strauss, In Defense of My Life of Jesus Against The Hegelians, Archon Books,

1983.

35. Debord Œuvres, p. 856. See also Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phénoménologie

de l’Esprit, trans. Bernard Bourgeois (Paris: Vrin, 2006) p. 201 and Georg Wilhelm

Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1979), p. 111.

36. The title of this book is a détournement from the title of the pamphlet written by

Marx and Engels in the name of the General Council of the International after

the Congress of The Hague in 1872 and the exclusion of Bakunin’s friends: Karl

Marx and Friedrich Engels Les Prétendues Scissions dans l’Internationale (Genève:

Imprimerie Coopérative, 1872). English translation on the MIA website: www.

Marxists.org/archive/Marx/works/1872/03/ﬁctitious-splits.htm.

37. Debord Œuvres, p. 1087. See also Hegel, Phénoménologie, p. 490 and Hegel,

Phenomenology, p. 350.

38. It is interesting to note that Bakunin, possibly remembering Hegel, used the

same conception in 1870, during the war between France and Germany, when

he thought that a civil war in France could propagate in Germany. See Michel

Bakounine Œuvres complètes, vol. VII, ‘La guerre franco-allemande et la révolution

sociale en France (1870–1871)’ (Paris: Champ Libre, 1979), p. 59–60 and Jean-

Christophe Angaut ‘Marx, Bakounine et la guerre franco-allemande’, Sens public.

Cosmopolitique (2005), www.sens-public.org/article.php3?id_article=131.

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Jean-Christophe Angaut 249

39. Other ways of comparison are possible, especially from a sociological point

of view. See the description of Young Hegelians as a literary bohemia and

as an avant-garde in Wolfgang Essbach Die Junghegelianer: Soziologie einer

Intellektuellengruppe (München: W. Fink, 1988).

40. See August von Cieszkowski Prolégomènes à l’historiosophie (Paris: Champ Libre,

1973). Partially translated in Lawrence S. Stepelevitch (ed.), The Young Hegelians

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 57–90.

41. ‘Présentation inédite des Prolégomènes à l’historiosophie d’August von Cieszkowski’

[1983], in Debord, Œuvres, pp. 536–537.

42. Viénet Enragés et Situationnistes, p. 57 about the barricades night of 10–11 May

1968: ‘the passion of destruction had never shown itself to be more creative’ (a

hidden quotation of the conclusion of Bakunin’s article: ‘the passion of destruc-

tion is also a creative passion’). See also Vaneigem Traité de savoir-vivre, p. 152

(Chapter XIII) about ‘the pleasure of creating and the pleasure of destroying’.

43. Debord Œuvres, p. 793. Italics in the original.

44. August von Cieszkowski, Prolégomènes, p. 116 and Stepelevitch (ed.), The Young

Hegelians, p. 77: ‘Philosophy must descend from the height of theory to the plane

of praxis. [ ...]Tobe[...] the development of truth in concrete activity – this is the

future fate of philosophy in general.’ (Italics in the original).

45. A French translation of Bakunin’s article can be found in Jean-Christophe

Angaut, Bakounine jeune hégélien: la philosophie et son dehors (Lyon, ENS Éditions,

2007), p. 123 for the quotation and pp. 91–95 for a commentary. See also Paul

McLaughlin Mikhail Bakunin; The Philosophical Basis of His Anarchism (New York:

Algora, 2002), pp. 21–61.

46. Karl Marx Critique du droit politique hégélien, trans. Albert Baraquin (Paris: Éditions

Sociales, 1975), p. 197 (English translation from the MIA website www.marxists.

org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm)

47. Marx Critique du droit politique hégélien, pp. 211–212.

48. Vaneigem Traité, p. 353.

49. Angaut Bakounine jeune hégélien, p. 125.

50. For a comparison of Bakunin’s and Bauer’s views on this point, see McLaughlin,

Mikhail Bakunin, pp. 68–71.

51. Debord Œuvres, p. 816.

52. Debord Œuvres, p. 853.

53. Vaneigem Traité, pp. 266, 352.

54. Angaut Bakounine jeune hégélien, p. 136.

55. Viénet Enragés et Situationnistes, p. 57, about the ‘night of the barricades’ (May 10,

1968): ‘Never had the passion of destruction been so creative.’

56. Vaneigem Traité, p. 152: ‘People may be forced to swing back and forth across the

narrow gap between the pleasure of creating and the pleasure of destroying, but this very

oscillation sufﬁces to bring Power to its knees.’ (Italics in the original).

57. See Jappe Guy Debord, pp. 29–31. It is more difﬁcult to agree with Anselm Jappe

when he asserts that situationists take a lot here from Lukács, who had indeed

emphasised the concept of commodity fetishism in Marx’s Capital but could not

have been familiar with the 1844 Manuscripts, which were published later (ﬁrst in

Russian in 1927, then in German in 1932), after the publishing of Geschichte und

Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness, 1923). In Lukács, reiﬁcation is

more important than alienation.

58. About this transfer, see David Wittmann ‘Les sources du concept d’aliénation’, in

Emmanuel Renault (ed.), Lire les Manuscrits de 1844 (Paris: Presses Universitaires

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250 Beyond Black and Red

de France, 2008), pp. 91–110 and Jean-Christophe Angaut ‘Un Marx feuer-

bachien?’, in Renault (ed.), Lire les Manuscrits de 1844, pp. 51–70.

59. Signiﬁcantly, Feuerbach is the ﬁrst author quoted in The Society of the Spectacle.

60. Vaneigem Traité, p. 96.

61. About ‘the alienation of the spectator to the proﬁt of the contemplated object’,

see Debord Œuvres, p. 774

62. Jappe, Guy Debord, p. 21.

63. Debord Œuvres, pp. 1107–1125.

64. Angaut Bakounine jeune hégélien, p. 111

65. In a paper read at the Université du Québec à Montréal in June

2010 (‘Les situationnistes et le concept d’avant-garde: art, politique et

stratégie’), I tried to show what the differences were between Leninist

and situationist conceptions of the avant-garde: basically, Lenin understands

the avant-garde as a general staff and not as an advanced detachment.

See http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/65/07/60/PDF/Les_situationnistes_

entre_avant-garde_artistique_et_avant-garde_politique.pdf (last consultation:

06/27/2012).

66. See Debord’s letter to Asger Jorn, August 23, 1962 in Guy Debord Correspondance,

vol. II, ‘Septembre 1960–Décembre 1964’ (Paris: Fayard, 2001), pp. 93–94.

67. On the question of the exclusions, the best reference is Marinelli L’amère victoire.

One can also ﬁnd interesting self-criticism in Raoul Vaneigem, Entre le deuil du

vieux monde et la joie de vivre (Paris: Verticales, 2008).

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Chapter 12

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Carnival and Class: Anarchism

and Councilism in Australasia

During the 1970s

Toby Boraman

Anarchism and ‘councilism’, a form of libertarian socialism that was

inﬂuenced heavily by council communism, converged in Australasia dur-

ing the 1970s. Many anarchists drew upon councilism in order to update

anarchism. Councilists sought to rejuvenate socialism from below and

to re-evaluate Marx. In so doing, they took an anarchistic turn. Overall,

two loose anarchist/councilist tendencies emerged. The ﬁrst was that of

‘class-struggle anarchists’ and councilists. The second was a bohemian, anti-

work current represented by ‘carnival anarchists’ and situationist groupings

inﬂuenced by the Situationist International (SI).

This chapter examines the perspectives these currents held on class. Both

tendencies, following the councilist analysis of ‘bureaucratic capitalism’,

asserted that the fundamental problem with society was the lack of control

people had over their everyday lives. Consequently, they believed that the

major division in society was between ‘order-givers’ and ‘order-takers’ rather

than between the capitalist class and the working class. This analysis repre-

sented a shift away from seeing class exploitation as central to the everyday

maintenance and reproduction of capital. As Greg George of the Brisbane

Self-Management Group (SMG) suggested, it might be called a ‘hierarchi-

cal analysis’ based on power relationships of ‘dominance/submission’ rather

than a ‘class analysis’ based on exploitative social relations derived from

property.1Notwithstanding this convergent analysis, a lasting synthesis

between anarchism and councilism did not develop in practice.

The tendencies’ broader relationship with the multifarious forms of class

struggle of the 1970s is also explored. This relationship shaped their ten-

sions, attempts at co-operation and their praxis. Placing the small revo-

lutionary groups studied in this piece in their wider context is important

because it shows how they were inﬂuenced (or not) by this context and

offers a yardstick by which their relevance and effectiveness can roughly

251

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252 Carnival and Class

be judged. The councilist/class-struggle anarchist tendency attempted to

relate to working-class revolts in the workplace and community against cap-

italist, state, union and leftist bureaucracies. In contrast, carnivalists and

followers of the SI (or ‘situs’) generally attempted to relate imaginatively to

working-class resistance by disaffected sub-cultural youth, ‘delinquents’ and

the unwaged.

This chapter presents a case study of the relationship between anarchism

and councilism in Australasia during the 1970s, outlining their attempts at

co-operation and their clashes. It is based on extensive research, including

many interviews, into this milieu in New Zealand,2and on a preliminary

and incomplete investigation into the corresponding milieu in Australia.

Furthermore, this piece aims to shed some light on little-known anarchist

and libertarian socialist movements, as Anglophone studies of anarchism

and unorthodox Marxism tend to neglect movements outside the UK,

France and the USA. While much has been written about Solidarity in

the UK and particularly Socialisme ou Barbarie (SouB) in France, nothing

has been published about their Australian counterpart, the Brisbane SMG,

even though the SMG had a comparable or probably larger membership

than both.3

International context and deﬁnitions

While endeavouring to develop their own praxis, Australasian anarchists

and councilists often took their main inspiration from movements in other

‘advanced’ capitalist countries, especially from the UK, France, the USA and

the Netherlands. Given this level of inﬂuence, what occurred in Australasia

cannot be dismissed as peculiarly Antipodean. To some extent this research

offers a picture in microcosm of developments elsewhere. It is therefore

important to outline the international context in which these currents

arose. This shall be done brieﬂy while deﬁning councilism, class-struggle

anarchism and carnival anarchism.

The coalescence between councilism and anarchism was shaped by two

major developments in the class struggle. First, workers’ councils appeared

during the Hungarian revolution of 1956, which created a surge of interest

in council communism and anarchism among New Leftists searching for an

anti-bureaucratic alternative to Stalinism and social democracy.

Second, the explosive global events of 1968, and particularly the mas-

sive revolt in France, sparked an astonishingly broad upturn in class

struggle until about the mid-1970s. Broadly speaking, workers took direct

action, sometimes outside ofﬁcial organisational forms (union or party),

to press their demands. This revolt was mutually interlinked with a wider

community-based struggle against other forms of social control in society –

such as patriarchy, racism and sex roles, for instance – and in particular,

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Toby Boraman 253

mass opposition to the Vietnam War. As direct action in the community

and workplace became commonplace, many non-Leninist revolutionary

groupings emerged which were inﬂuenced loosely by a melange of left

communism, situationism, council communism and anarchism.4

Deﬁning councilism requires an outline of its Marxist antecedent, coun-

cil communism. Marcel van der Linden deﬁnes council communism, which

arose during the German revolution following the First World War, as aiming

for the abolition of capitalism through workers establishing ‘a democracy

of workers’ councils’. To create these councils, the capitalist-class was not

the only group that had to be ‘consistently resisted’. Parliamentary ‘democ-

racy’, unions, social democratic parties and Bolshevik parties needed to

be treated similarly, as they were viewed as organs that manipulated the

working class and promoted capitalism.5Philippe Bourrinet adds that Coun-

cil Communists opposed nationalism and cross-class popular fronts, and

rejected ‘substitutionism, which sees the communist party as the general

staff and the proletariat as a passive mass blindly submitting to the orders of

this general staff’.6

In the 1940s and 1950s, several Western European groups emerged which

drew upon the legacy of council communism. Those with most inﬂuence in

Australasia were Solidarity, SouB and the SI. Bourrinet maintains that Soli-

darity, SouB and other similar groups represented a new ‘councilist’ tendency

that was largely distinct from the historic Council Communist movement.7

Councilists diverged from council communism predominantly due to

their innovative attempt to transcend Marxism for the changed material

conditions of the postwar era. As explored below, they believed that class

struggle had taken a new form: the struggle of ‘order-takers’ against bureau-

cratic ‘order-givers’. In this vein, the term ‘councilism’ is used in this chapter

to distinguish it from council communism. Bourrinet also believes, when

compared with council communism, the broader councilist milieu of the

post-1968 era lacked coherent theoretical positions, was organisationally

loose and ephemeral, and was theoretically eclectic, as they often borrowed

from anarchism.8Yet unlike Bourrinet, the term councilism is not employed

to imply an anarchist degeneration of council communism, nor theoretical

or organisational looseness. Nor is it meant to suggest councilists deviated

from council communism completely. Indeed, they accepted most of its core

assumptions noted above.9

The SI can perhaps be considered part of this broad councilist cur-

rent. While the SI began as an artistic movement, by the early 1960s

it had adopted the fundamentals of councilist praxis.10 For instance, as

Challand shows in this volume, the SI redeﬁned the proletariat as those

who had no power over their lives, and understood revolution as a process

through which it regained this control. However, the SI was inﬂuenced by an

eclectic mixture of traditions, such as Western Marxism and radical artistic

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254 Carnival and Class

currents. With its analysis of commodity fetishism, it was more Marxist than

SouB and Solidarity.

When anarchism revived in the 1960s and 1970s, it took many differ-

ent forms. This chapter focuses upon the two main types that drew upon

councilism. The ﬁrst was ‘class-struggle anarchism’, a term that was begin-

ning to be used in the 1970s to denote anarchists who rejected liberal

and individualist anarchism. The term encompasses forms of anarchism –

especially anarchist communism and anarcho-syndicalism – that place

emphasis on the centrality of class struggle for the revolutionary overthrow

of capitalism, hierarchy and the state.11 This renewal of class-struggle anar-

chism has been mostly overlooked, yet as Nicolas Walter has noted ‘most of

the new anarchist organisations formed during and after the revival of the

1960s have been of a traditional kind.’12 By traditional, he meant anarchist

communist or anarcho-syndicalist.

Nonetheless, this revival was far from traditional. Many of the new class-

struggle anarchists drew eclectically from Marxism and especially from

councilism to the dismay of traditional anarchists, many of whom simplisti-

cally equated all forms of Marxism with Stalinism. In France, councilism was

highly inﬂuential. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, for instance, declared that he was an

‘anarchist ...along the lines of “council socialism” ’.13 Noir et Rouge, which

included Cohn-Bendit, stated in 1968 that:

The real cleavage is not between ‘Marxism’ or what is described as such,

and anarchism, but rather between the libertarian spirit and idea, and the

Leninist, Bolshevik, bureaucratic conception of organization ...We feel

closer to ‘Marxists’ in the Council Communist movement of the

past ...than we do to ofﬁcial ‘anarchists’ who have a semi-Leninist

conception of party organization.14

The other type of anarchism that drew upon councilism was carnival anar-

chism. During the 1960s, the Dutch groups the Provos and Kabouters helped

to popularise carnival anarchism globally.15 Carnival anarchism was both a

distinctive style and type of anarchism. It aimed to combine the cultural

revolution with a socio-economic one, and synthesise personal transfor-

mation with collective transformation. Theoretically and organisationally,

it valued eclecticism, creativity, informality and spontaneity. Carnivalists

were provocative tactically, mixing absurdist humour with direct action.

In brief, they wanted revolution and fun too. The term ‘carnival anarchist’

was ﬁrst used in Australia. There ‘serious anarchists’ employed it largely

as a derogatory term during the 1970s, but in this chapter it is not used

to suggest that carnivalists were frivolous, disruptive ‘chaoticists’.16 Today,

the current is represented – albeit in a modiﬁed form – by groups such

as the French insurrectionists Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, and

CrimethInc in the US.17

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Toby Boraman 255

The Australasian context

In the 1950s and 1960s, most working-class Australians and New Zealanders

experienced rising living standards, full employment and widespread ‘afﬂu-

ence’ (although most indigenous people were still trapped in deprivation).

In both countries, from about 1968, this Keynesian class compromise began

to break down largely due to an upsurge in proletarian dissent. The percent-

age of the workforce participating in strike activity rose dramatically in the

late 1960s, peaking in about the mid-1970s in Australia and during the late

1970s in New Zealand.18

However, this militancy was conﬁned to a minority. During the 1970s, an

average of 16.5 per cent of the New Zealand workforce went on strike.19 The

Australian working-class was much more combative than its New Zealand

counterpart.20 Yet in neither country did this upsurge reach the radical pro-

portions of France 1968, Italy 1969, nor Britain 1974 when miners helped to

bring down a government.

This workplace rebellion was interlinked with the ‘protest movement’,

which peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Vietnam War was

a signiﬁcant issue in Australasia, as both New Zealand and Australian

troops fought in Vietnam, and conscription was introduced in Australia.

The unwaged, such as students, played an important part in the protest

movement. Furthermore, that movement contributed to the emergence of

a broader youth rebellion, which concurrently helped to create the counter-

culture. Protest began to dissipate because of the election of mildly reforming

social democratic governments during the early 1970s in both countries.

These workplace and community revolts seemingly challenged almost

every form of authority in society. This upheaval also had an anti-

bureaucratic aspect: many people pushed for greater control over their

workplaces, educational institutions and communities, thus challeng-

ing the unprecedented growth of corporate and state – and sometimes

union – bureaucracies that had occurred under the postwar Keynesian class

compromise.

From the early to mid-1970s, economic decline set in. Living standards

fell, mass unemployment arrived, and while workplace rebellion continued,

it became more defensive in nature.21 Yet women’s liberation, anti-apartheid,

anti-racist, indigenous and ecology movements blossomed in both coun-

tries. During the late 1970s in Aotearoa/New Zealand, many Maori occupied

land to protest against the ongoing alienation from the little of it that

remained in their possession.

Belligerent governments attempted to counteract this generalised revolt,

such as Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s state government in Queensland, Australia,

and Robert Muldoon’s government in New Zealand. Both governments

curtailed many civil liberties, were confrontational towards dissenters and

increased police power. Bjelke-Petersen even banned street marches in 1977.

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256 Carnival and Class

The Australasian left throughout this time was dominated by mass social

democratic parties and unions. While militant workers, the New Left and

various social movements challenged this orthodoxy, their contestation was

gradually recuperated. In both countries, revolutionaries were few if not

minuscule in number relative to overseas. Of these, Leninist parties were

dominant. Anarchists and councilists had less impact, apart from in a few

cities where Leninists had not gained ascendency, such as Brisbane. They

were often starting from scratch, particularly in New Zealand, which lacked

both a continuous and notable anarchist tradition, and a Council Com-

munist current whatsoever. The much smaller New Zealand anarchist and

councilist milieu developed close links with its Australian counterpart, hence

developments in New Zealand often closely mirrored those in Australia.

Class-struggle anarchist and councilist groups

This section examines the relevant views of three Australasian groups – the

Christchurch Anarchy Group (CAG), the Brisbane Self-Management Group

(SMG) and the Auckland-based Revolutionary Committee – to illustrate

the relationship between class-struggle anarchists and councilists, and to

appraise these organisations’ relationship with, and perspectives on, class.

Solidarity – and thus SouB, from whom Solidarity took much of its

inspiration – exerted a signiﬁcant inﬂuence upon the 1970s New Zealand

anarchist milieu. While no speciﬁcally anarcho-syndicalist or anarchist

communist groups were established, numerous anarchist groupings drew

heavily from Solidarity. These included CAG, the People’s Revolution-

ary Movement (Wellington), Solidarity (Auckland), the anarchist wing of

the anarcho-situationist magazine KAT (Wellington) and Anarchy magazine

(Christchurch). All of these groups were tiny in size, with most numbering

half a dozen members.

In Australia, an anarcho-syndicalist current was established that concen-

trated on restarting the Industrial Workers of the World from 1975, as well

as building small anarcho-syndicalist propaganda groups. Even then, many

anarchist organisations were also inﬂuenced by Solidarity, as can clearly be

seen in the Melbourne publication Solidarity.

CAG’s relationship with councilism demonstrates well the crossover

between anarchism and councilism that transpired in the 1970s. CAG,

which existed from 1975 to c.1978, identiﬁed with Solidarity to such

an extent that they believed Solidarity was, for all intents and purposes,

anarchist. CAG deﬁned anarchism as centrally involving workers’ councils:

Anarchists propose a society based upon local and industrial peoples

assemblies, federating with elected and revocable delegates in workers

councils. History shows that such workers councils are developed by

everyday people whenever they seek to take control of their life in

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Toby Boraman 257

revolution ...It is because our daily lives are increasingly unliveable that

we must collectively take control of them.22

Anarchism meant a dual ‘struggle against the state and for self-

management’.23 They claimed that Solidarity referred to themselves as

‘libertarian socialists’ rather than ‘anarchists’ only because:

They do not wish to become identiﬁed with the more ‘individualistic’

faction of the anarchist movement. Solidarity do work closely with anar-

chist groups in Britain with whom they share a common theory and basis

for action. Solidarity have had a considerable inﬂuence on the anarchist

movement in Britain.24

This overlooked Solidarity’s critical attitude towards anarchism, including

class-struggle anarchists such as Kropotkin and Bakunin.25 As with many

anarchists, CAG assumed councilism was anarchist rather than engaging

critically with it. For example, Richard Bolstad of CAG, in a pamphlet which

summarised Cornelius Castoriadis’ Workers’ Councils and the Economics of a

Self-Managed Society, presumed that Castoriadis’ ‘central assembly of dele-

gates’ which would run a future socialist society was anarchist in nature. He

did not question whether such a proposal centralised too much power in a

relatively small body.26

Solidarity made such an impression on CAG for numerous reasons. Soli-

darity publications, like those of the SI, seemed fresh and innovative. Solidar-

ity published an impressive series of up-to-date and easy-to-read pamphlets,

including histories which uncovered little-known episodes of workers’ self-

management. Their focus upon workers’ self-organisation, rather than the

activities of party or union bureaucrats, seemed validated by the uprisings of

the time, such as Hungary (1956), France (1968), Czechoslovakia (1968) and

Portugal (1974–1975). In contrast, class-struggle anarchism seemed stuck in

the past, constantly reliving the defeat of the Spanish revolution of 1936–

1937. Class-struggle anarchist literature at the time consisted predominantly

of either tired reprints of classics, or restatements of basic principles.

Solidarity and SouB’s anti-bureaucratic analysis of postwar ‘advanced’ cap-

italist society appealed to CAG because of its anarchistic nature. Castoriadis,

perhaps the main theoretician of SouB, contended that society had become

dominated by a complex pyramid-like hierarchical structure, one that

affected all aspects of social life. People had become manipulated by bureau-

crats at work, in consumption and in everyday life. The working class had

become thoroughly alienated from any control over their lives. Yet they did

not passively accept this. Class struggle had taken a new tendency: pro-

letarians were attempting to assert some form of control over their daily

lives, inside and outside the workplace.27 Hence, to SouB and Solidarity,

socialism meant the full realisation of autogestion throughout society via

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258 Carnival and Class

workers’ councils. Both groups argued that working-class self-organisation

constantly transformed capital, and that this autonomy was the basis for

social revolution.

Bolstad was also drawn to Solidarity because of its well-thought-out

proposals for a future society based on a network of workers’ councils.

He compared his involvement in the carnivalesque New Left group the

Christchurch Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) during the early 1970s

with his later involvement in CAG. In the PYM, it felt like ‘revolution is

around the corner’, while CAG was ‘more thought-out, more planned and

focused upon how to build up support and links’ based on what he perceived

to be Solidarity’s model of a revolutionary organisation that shared people’s

experiences and established mutual trust.28

Another reason why CAG was attracted to Solidarity was because of

Solidarity’s trenchant critique of the traditional left, especially leninLenin-

ism. Solidarity lambasted Leninist parties for being rigidly hierarchical and

bureaucratic, and acting on behalf of the working-class, instead of encour-

aging working-class self-emancipation.29 This critique resonated with CAG

because much of the Christchurch PYM shifted from anarchism to non-

party Maoism in the early 1970s.30 Those PYMers were attracted to ‘direct

action Maoism’ because they believed that China was a near paradise where

no class divisions or state bureaucracy existed. CAG expended much energy

criticising this viewpoint, criticism which drew from a Solidarity pamphlet

by Council Communist Cajo Brendel.31

In the early 1970s, two councilist groups strongly inﬂuenced by Solidarity

and SouB emerged in Australasia. One was the Brisbane Self-Management

Group (1971–1977). The other was the awkwardly named ‘Revolutionary

Committee of the CPNZ (Expelled)’ (1968–c.1974), which was based in

Auckland. Examining the two groups, who were in correspondence with

each other, makes for an interesting contrast.

Both organisations emerged from conﬂict with Leninists, and hence

placed paramount importance on rejecting vanguardism. Indeed, the Rev-

olutionary Committee was formed after it was expelled from the Maoist

Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ), for opposing the CPNZ’s lack of

internal freedom and its participation in elections.32 The SMG originated

from the campus-based Brisbane New Left. Speciﬁcally, it emanated from

the short-lived Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), a party which also con-

tained a Trotskyist tendency. After the Trotskyists departed from the RSP, it

was renamed the SMG.33

The SMG, which called itself ‘libertarian socialist’ and sometimes ‘lib-

ertarian communist’ in orientation,34 was the largest and most inﬂuential

councilist or anarchist organisation in Australasia during the 1970s. It grew

during a period of sharp decline in Brisbane street protest. Estimates of its

size vary from less than 100 to 300 people involved in its cells, with a smaller

core membership that attended general assemblies of somewhere between

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Toby Boraman 259

30 and 70.35 It had a mixed base of workers and students. It formed struggle-

based cells where members lived, worked or studied, such as in high schools,

universities and workplaces. These cells were formal sub-groups which then

reported back to the SMG’s monthly general assembly. The SMG was activist

in orientation: it has been claimed that the SMG ‘led Brisbane’s marches’

against the Vietnam War, apartheid and the repressive measures imposed by

the Bjelke-Petersen government.36 The SMG involved many prominent and

capable activists, such as Drew Hutton and especially Brian Laver. It agitated,

with limited success, for struggles to be controlled by open assemblies.

In contrast, the Revolutionary Committee was a tiny non-student-based

discussion group. They claimed ‘our expulsion from the C.P.N.Z. and our

“splendid isolation” has its obverse side in that we have had unrestricted

freedom to think and draw conclusions’.37 Subsequently, they mostly

focused upon discussing theory and producing their magazine Compass.

However, the SMG was not anti-intellectual, and the Revolutionary Com-

mittee were not armchair revolutionaries. The former proliﬁcally produced

material (mainly leaﬂets, but also a few pamphlets) and operated their own

printshop and bookshop (the Red and Black Bookshop); and members of

the latter went on a hunger strike against the Vietnam War in a central

city park.

The Revolutionary Committee distanced itself from the anarchist milieu.

Indeed, Steve Taylor of the Committee wrote that he had ‘no afﬁliation

express or implicit’ with anarchism.38 In contrast, after initially being hostile

to anarchism on much the same grounds as Solidarity, the SMG developed

contacts with local anarchists, and attempted to co-operate with them. SMG

delegates attended a few Australian anarchist conferences in an effort to seek

revolutionary allies, but soon they stopped participating in these gather-

ings after they found them fraught with internal contradictions, and after

they clashed with carnival anarchists (see below). Greg George of the SMG

said that they generally found anarchism more attractive in theory than in

practice because the Australian anarchists seemed disorganised.39

The SMG was drawn to certain aspects of anarchism because they thought

they complemented councilism. In a pamphlet, George dismissed orthodox

Marxist objections to anarchism. Instead, he praised anarchism for being

practical and relevant to society:

It offers complexity and variety rather than bureaucratic narrowness ...it

offers self-activity, initiative and autonomy balanced by co-operation

and responsibility, it offers real democracy and an end to alienation, it

offers ...equality between specialists and experts and others, and it offers

equal sharing of our riches.40

As the SMG looked towards working-class rebellions involving self-

management as their historical legacy, they were especially attracted to

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260 Carnival and Class

anarchism because they viewed the Spanish revolution and the Makhnovist

uprising as signiﬁcant examples of self-management in action.41

Yet they were not uncritical of anarchism. For example, George criticised

individualist anarchism because he argued it was terrorist and elitist; anar-

chist communism because it fetishised the spontaneous, insurrectionary

creativity of the working class; and anarcho-syndicalism because it was

bureaucratic, vanguardist and overlooked the council form. Overall, he

viewed anarchism as inadequate and in need of being superseded by council

communism.42

Anarchist inﬂuence on the SMG became more pronounced by the mid-

1970s, and some members began to identify with anarchism. This develop-

ment can be seen in several of its offshoots. In 1977, the SMG split into

the Libertarian Socialist Organisation (LSO), the Self-Management Organisa-

tion (SMO) and the ‘Marxist tendency’ (many of whom joined the Trotskyist

International Socialists). The ﬁrst two groups, which were by far the largest,

viewed anarchism positively. The SMO was explicitly anarchist, while the

LSO was sympathetic to anarchism. The latter published You Ca n’t B low

up a Social Relationship: The Anarchist Case against Terrorism with several

other Australian libertarian socialist or anarchist groups.43 The pamphlet

was a revised version of an earlier article written by George for the SMG’s

publication Libertarian.44 It became an internationally recognised, perhaps

classic, publication after it was republished by many anarchist groups out-

side Australia. When Joe Toscano of the SMG moved to Melbourne in about

1976, he helped found the councilist group the Libertarian Workers for

a Self-Managed Society. Yet by 1978 that group had become anarchist in

orientation under the inﬂuence of local anarchists. Toscano was drawn to

anarchism because he considered it a more diverse, vibrant current with a

richer history than councilism, which he contended had been formed only

since 1968.45

Relationship with and perspectives on class

In the UK, Solidarity formed a network of militant workers, developed many

contacts in the shop stewards’ movement and had some inﬂuence in impor-

tant disputes. In contrast, the New Zealand councilist-inﬂuenced milieu did

not seemingly participate in, or support, workplace struggles. For instance,

instead of building a workers’ network, CAG attempted to build a nation-

wide anarchist network, and as such their newsletter did not contain any

items about domestic workplace disputes. Instead, it contained mainly news

stories about anarchist groups abroad.

Of all the Solidarity-inﬂuenced groupings in New Zealand, only Solidar-

ity (Auckland) became involved in workplace-based struggles, and even

then its involvement was minimal. For example, its contribution to the

Auckland ferry dispute of 1974, a signiﬁcant workplace conﬂict which

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Toby Boraman 261

threatened brieﬂy to mushroom into a nationwide wildcat general strike,

was to distribute a leaﬂet at a union meeting.

In comparison, the SMG gained considerable inﬂuence in several work-

places. It tapped into the loose rank-and-ﬁle network that already existed

within many Brisbane unions, and many militants joined the SMG. Part of

the SMG’s appeal was their robust criticism of union bureaucrats, which they

nicknamed ‘TUBs’ (Trade Union Bureaucrats). The SMG had many active

industry-based cells, such as its health-care, teachers, white-collar and indus-

trial cells. The industrial cell contained workers at Cairncross Dock and

the Evans Deakin shipyards, among other worksites. At the shipyards, the

SMG had a substantial presence that took part in numerous go-slows and

strikes. The university cell participated heavily in a large-scale strike at the

University of Queensland in 1971. The health-care cell contained workers

at several worksites in both the public and private sectors. It did not act

within unions or professional associations because it believed, like the rest

of the SMG, that these organisations were undemocratic, bureaucratic and

capitalist.46

The SMG’s workplace strategy had its limitations, however. It was often

based around propagandising the abstract idea of workers’ self-management,

idealistically presenting that idea as a panacea for all situations.47 They seem-

ingly spent more energy on mass leaﬂeting this ideal than attempting to

build solidarity and self-organisation within and across workplaces.

Importantly, the SMG – like other councilists – developed a broader

view of class than orthodox Marxists. Workers without any real power

in ‘industrial, agricultural, white-collar, service (including housewives) and

intellectual labour’ were considered part of the proletariat.48 Furthermore,

George argued that most people worked in non-industrial workplaces.49

As such, the SMG placed emphasis on agitating within white-collar work-

places, and distributed well-received propaganda criticising the boredom

and alienation of ofﬁce work. They saw libertarian socialism as a many-sided

struggle to change not only work, but also everyday life. The SMG adopted

Solidarity’s manifesto ‘As We See It’ wherein it was stated that socialism

meant ‘a radical transformation in all human relations’.50 Hence they pushed

for increasing the ‘quality of life’ by overcoming sexism and racism, experi-

menting with communal living, creating a ‘broader cultural life’, advocating

the decentralisation of cities, preventing ecological destruction and espous-

ing equal wages for all (including wages for those performing domestic

work, and the unwaged in general).51 The Revolutionary Committee likewise

advocated wages for housework.52

However, councilists questionably asserted that the chief problem with

capitalism was the way it was managed. Controversially, they believed

that the fundamental contradiction in society was between order-givers

and order-takers. Subsequently, class was anarchistically seen as being pro-

duced by social relations of authority or hierarchy, rather than the more

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262 Carnival and Class

classical socialist view that class derives from social relations of exploita-

tion.53 Councilists viewed capitalists as bosses whose main task was to order

workers around – they maintained the chief problem with capitalists was

their control of the workplace. This is problematic because it overlooks

how the ownership of property and resultant extraction of surplus value

from labour creates exploitative social relations. Workplace authority and

management are necessary products of class exploitation in order to mon-

itor, speed-up and control workers, rather than being the cause of this

exploitation.

Gilles Dauvé and François Martin argue that ‘Socialism is not the man-

agement, however “democratic” it may be, of capital, but its complete

destruction’.54 Workers could run their workplaces themselves, and yet be

forced to compete with other worker-owned enterprises via the market, thus

forcing these enterprises to lessen costs (such as by ﬁring workers or reducing

wages) and to make workers work harder in order to stay competitive, even if

all workers were paid the same wage and had equal decision-making power.

Consequently, fundamentally transforming the decision-making processes

of society is not enough in itself; private property, the market and the wage

system also need to be abolished.

Several other difﬁculties with the councilists’ conception of class can be

noted. As was argued in an Australian anarchist magazine, their class anal-

ysis was unwieldy since many if not most workers were on some level both

order-takers and order-givers.55 Moreover, self-management as an aim tends

to appeal to a minority of workers: that of skilled technical workers who

desire control over the production process, an aim that is generally not

shared by Taylorised assembly-line workers nor casualised workers.56

The danger of self-managed exploitation was not recognised by

Australasian councilists or anarchists.57 Nor did everyone accept this refor-

mulation of class. For instance, Steve Taylor of the Revolutionary Committee

retained a Marxist deﬁnition of the proletariat as those ‘dependent for its

support on the sale of its labour’, while at the same time redeﬁning it as

‘resting squarely’ on unpaid domestic labour performed mainly by women.58

Bohemian councilism and carnival anarchism

This section presents a brief overview of the stormy relationship between

situationist-inﬂuenced individuals and anarchists, especially the carnival

anarchists. It then examines the ‘situ’ and carnivalist relationship with (or

lack of relationship with) the broader class struggle, and their perspectives

on class.

As the works of the SI became readily available in English during the early-

mid 1970s, many revolutionaries were attracted to their ideas. A few formed

‘situ’ groups. In Australia, one such situationist grouping was founded in

Perth and then migrated to Sydney. It produced many leaﬂets under different

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Toby Boraman 263

names. One such leaﬂet was their ‘vandal’s license’, which was published

under the name of the ‘Free Association of Australasian Shoplifters and the

Disturbed Citizens for the Redistribution of Punishment’. It read:

IS THIS REALLY LIVING? ...

Are you tired of work, consume, be silent, die?

WE ARE!

The DISTURBED CITIZENS for the REDISTRIBUTION of PUNISHMENT

is combating the futility of everyday life; by mounting a campaign to

promote VANDALISM ...

Break up the barriers that separate your desires from reality

To learn how to build; ﬁrst we must learn how to destroy

Ever noticed how your good intentions seemed to be smashed on the reef

of workaday routine?

Why not start the day off by hurling your clock through your TV set

Then begin a festival of looting,burning and busting up the boredom!

Imagine your local shopping centre, workplace, home ...in ruins!

Can you think of a better way to spend the day?59

This leaﬂet encapsulated the wishful insurrectionary immediatism of ‘situ’

groups and the carnival anarchists they inﬂuenced. In New Zealand, no

situationist group was formed, despite the attempts of Grant McDonagh.

Instead, McDonagh operated as an individual on the periphery of the anar-

chist milieu, co-operating with anarchists to publish several magazines, such

as Anarchy and KAT. The latter called itself ‘an anti-authoritarian spasmod-

ical’ of the ‘libertarian ultra-left (situationists, anarchists and libertarian

socialists)’.60 McDonagh argued that the situationist current was ‘only a

minority current in the broader Anarchist milieu between 1975 and 1979,

but potent in that context and beyond’.61 Undoubtedly this tendency had

much impact on the anarchist milieu, but it was not ‘potent’, as many

anarchists found situationist writing impenetrable.62

McDonagh was originally an anarchist, yet soon became a situationist.

However, he viewed the SI as part of the broad anti-authoritarian left.63 He

believed that the ‘Situationists attempted more successfully than anyone

else to supersede the split ﬁrst occurring in the 1st International between

the Marxists and the Bakuninists, by reinventing revolution itself, with

results well known in the [French] occupation movement of May and June

‘68’.64 Indeed, he thought that the SI was more anti-authoritarian than

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264 Carnival and Class

the vast majority of anarchists, and maintained that the SI had criticised

authoritarian forms of Marxism far more effectively and coherently than

anarchists had.65

In practice, instead of overcoming the rigid division between anarchism

and Marxism, bitter clashes occurred between anarchists and McDonagh.

McDonagh critiqued the anarchist milieu for lacking radical and intellec-

tual content, for an ‘anaemic’ opportunistic involvement in various protest

movements, and for being authoritarian. Anarchist ideology, he argued,

causes anarchists ‘to deal with power by choosing to believe that he/she

is somehow immune to it. Perhaps by the magical talismanic qualities of the

mere word anarchy’.66 He dismissed attendees to the 1978 anarchist ‘uncon-

vention’ as ‘corpses, hacks, closet authoritarians, masochists, intellectual

midgets & retarded reformists’.67

Anarchists reciprocated with their own criticisms. For example, Andrew

Dodsworth, who was involved in KAT, thought that McDonagh’s politics

were incomprehensible to working-class people. Likewise, anarchists over-

seas commonly viewed the SI and its followers as hopelessly sectarian,

dogmatic and hierarchical. For example, Franklin Rosemont of the Chicago-

based anarchist publication The Rebel Worker castigated US ‘situ’ groups not

only along these lines, but also for having ‘full time non-involvement in real

struggle’.68

Hence the tension between ‘situs’ and anarchists resulted from anarchists

dismissing ‘situs’ for being too intellectual and isolated, and ‘situs’ scolding

anarchists for indulging in an easily co-optable mindless activism. Despite

these clashes, of all the tendencies within anarchism, the SI and their follow-

ers exerted most inﬂuence over the carnival anarchists (who, interestingly

enough, were very much activists).

Numerous carnival anarchist groupings were formed in Australasia.

In New Zealand, they included the Auckland Anarchist Activists (AAA),

the Lumpen grouping in Auckland and the Dunedin Anarchist Army.

In Melbourne, according to Toscano, they included the Working Peo-

ple’s Association (which produced the paper Dingo) and the Collingwood

Freestore (members of whom had earlier produced the magazine Solidarity).69

In Sydney, they included the Sydney Anarchist Group (members of whom

produced Rising Free and The Plague), Fruity Together, Bondi Vandals and the

Panic Merchants. Frequently, the name of their group would change with

each new action they took. Most of these groups had a loose membership of

half a dozen to a dozen people, with a much larger social group occasionally

participating in their activities.

The carnival anarchists drew eclectically from many different tendencies,

including councilism. For example, Peter McGregor, a central ﬁgure in the

Sydney carnival anarchist scene, noted that he was inﬂuenced by SouB,

Solidarity and the SMG.70 McGregor helped found the Sydney Anarchist

Group (SAG) in about 1974 largely based on the SMG’s platform. As a

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Toby Boraman 265

result, SAG reprinted articles by Carl Boggs and Situationist René Riesel on

workers’ councils.71 Likewise, the AAA, the major carnival anarchist group-

ing in New Zealand, deﬁned anarchism as a ‘real socialist society built from

below. Built by working people who are directly involved, through workers

councils, in making the decisions which affect their lives’.72

Carnivalists were drawn to situationist praxis, including rejecting work

and everyday boredom, and emphasising the festival-like nature of riots and

revolutions. This was because they generally saw the SI’s ideas as comple-

menting and bolstering their attempts to fuse art with politics, and to fuse

the counter-culture with the revolutionary project.

Accordingly, they were more attracted to the SI’s ‘radical subjectivist’

wing represented poetically by Raoul Vaneigem, rather than the SI’s ‘objec-

tivist’ wing represented by Guy Debord, whose writing was more analytical

and Marxist. For example, Terry Leahy, an Australian carnivalist, stressed

Vaneigem’s idea that revolution begins from everyday life by people fulﬁlling

their own desires, rejecting rigid roles and playing games. Leahy wrote ‘spon-

taneous creativity and the sense of festivity are the keys to revolutionary

practice’.73

In this Vaneigemist vein, carnivalists such as McGregor attempted to live

a creative lifestyle free from self-sacriﬁce by refusing to reproduce capital in

everyday life:

In the purist spirit of Charles Fourier’s Some Advice Concerning the Next

Social Metamorphosis: ‘Never sacriﬁce a present good to a future good.

Enjoy the moment; don’t get into anything which doesn’t satisfy your

passions right away.’ ...So, since property was theft, why not squat; and

since work was wage-slavery, then don’t.74

McGregor saw interpersonal relations as the primary site of politics, rather

than self-sacriﬁcing activism for an external cause.

Jean Barrot (Dauvé) perceptively argues that these Vaneigemist lifestyles

‘cannot be lived’. He continues: ‘either one huddles in the crevices of bour-

geois society, or one ceaselessly opposes to it a different life which is impo-

tent because only the revolution can make it a reality’.75 The carnivalists did

not overcome this dilemma. Overall, the carnivalists’ borrowing from the

SI was haphazard. Often they were more attracted to the aggressive style of

the SI rather than its substance. They frequently reduced situationist ideas

to slogans such as ‘everyday life has been reduced to a commodity’.76 What

ultimately mattered to carnivalists was not careful analysis, or theoretical

exposition, but what you were doing in the here and now.

Relationship with and perspectives on class

‘Situs’ like McDonagh unambiguously promoted working-class resistance.

Yet McDonagh took signs of proletarian dissent to signify the possibility

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266 Carnival and Class

of the immediate revolutionary establishment of the ‘total democracy’ of

workers’ councils.77 For example, in a leaﬂet criticising a ‘cover-up’ by Prime

Minister Muldoon, McDonagh wildly asserted that the proletariat would, in

response, unleash a ‘fury’ only hinted at in previous struggles and storm

the palace.78 Further, ‘None ...can stomach Bosses or cops anymore. The

fragmentary radicalism and the moments of poetry it stumbled hesitantly

towards in 1978 must in ‘79 fuse into an insatiable lust for the totality if

we are to gain everything.’79 Unsurprisingly, this ‘lust for the totality’ never

materialised – although in 1979 a one-day general strike involving about

one-third of the workforce occurred. This was the ﬁrst genuinely nationwide

general strike in New Zealand history. However, it did not produce radical

class-wide confrontations with capital. In Australia, the working class was

likewise non-insurrectionary, with a few notable exceptions, such as when

auto-workers rioted in Melbourne in 1973.80

It was hardly a practical suggestion to call for the immediate formation of

workers’ councils during a non-revolutionary period, and indeed, in a coun-

try without a revolutionary tradition where workers’ councils have never

appeared, nor looked likely to appear. Dodsworth elaborates further:

Our contact with, and understanding of, the workers who we were urging

to seize power (Grant [McDonagh] was particularly fond of spraypainting

the slogan ‘All power to the workers’ councils’, overlooking the triv-

ial objection that there were no workers’ councils to seize power, even

if any other of the preconditions for this had been met) was practi-

cally non-existent. [ ...] We didn’t actually do anything except produce

Kat [...] put up a few posters and spraypaint a few walls [with] utterly

incomprehensible [slogans].81

Hence their idealistic immediatism was a product of their isolation from

workers.

Carnival anarchists were much more ambiguous about class than the

‘situs’. On the one hand, some declared that class was a dogmatic and out-

dated leftist belief. Workers were seen as passive, while protesters, students,

youth, hippies and the ‘lumpenproletariat’ were considered the new rebel-

lious ‘classes’. For example, The Lunatic Fringe, a carnival anarchist group

from Melbourne, wrote:

The basis of a revolution must be cultural as well as being political

and social. Therefore, we urge all dropouts, alcoholics, lunatics, junkies,

bludgers, neurotics, prisoners, inmates, schizophrenics, the unemployed,

the insane, the psychologically unsound, the freaks, the lazy, and other

assorted maniacs to ...make the revolution.82

Consequently, much of the exuberant energy of carnivalists went into

somewhat random attempts to push the protest movement in a more

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Toby Boraman 267

radical direction (they participated in a wide variety of movements – in

New Zealand, these included anti-Vietnam War marches, pro-abortion ral-

lies, anti-apartheid demonstrations, land occupations by Maori and protests

against the deportation of Paciﬁc Island migrant labour), as well as build-

ing inner-city communities of largely ‘lumpenproletarian’ counter-cultural

youth. While most of these movements can be considered expressions of

class struggle to a large extent, carnivalists did not see them as such; indeed,

they often saw them as something beyond and against class.

On the other hand, many carnival anarchists were supportive of class

struggle. While their views appear to be individualistic, they sought to

synthesise individual and collective interests.83 Many were from working-

class backgrounds. Their activism included strike support, and a few were

involved in rank-and-ﬁle workplace groups, although these attempts at

workplace organising were carried out on an individual, isolated and inter-

mittent basis.84 Dingo and Rising Free covered workplace disputes. Most

carnivalists espoused workers’ self-management as a core aim.

The stunts of the carnival anarchists were reminiscent of the group Class

War in the UK. For example, in New Zealand, a carnivalist was caught while

attempting to steal a ballot box during the 1981 cliff-hanger election. His

aim was to demand, in return for the votes, a 100 per cent increase in wages

for all workers during the then wage-freeze. In Australia, carnivalists formed

the ‘Dairy Liberation Front’ which stole milk from rich suburbs and redis-

tributed it to community organisations in working-class suburbs. Sydney

carnivalists penned a letter that purported to be the Leichardt Town Council

Mayor’s resignation letter. The letter advocated an anarchist revolution and

encouraged the formation of workers’ and residents’ councils. At the time,

corruption allegations had been made against Council Ofﬁcers regarding the

rezoning of areas for high rise development.85

Furthermore, New Zealand carnivalists were heavily involved in helping to

organise part of the unwaged wing of the working class, namely the unem-

ployed. They formed several unemployed groups, such as the Auckland City

Unemployed Group (ACUG), an energetic group that involved about 30 peo-

ple, including many Polynesians. It distributed material in several different

languages in industrial working-class South Auckland, and picketed racist

capitalists.86

For carnival anarchists, becoming involved in the unemployed movement

was a class-based response to the economic downturn of the mid-1970s.

It was also a product of their rejection of work and the work ethic. Oliver

Robb, of the AAA and ACUG, wrote, ‘Why should a person work? Why

should a person be forced to work at a dull, humiliating job?’87

Yet paradoxically this ‘dole autonomy’ also represented a retreat from

class. It led to self-marginalisation from the waged working class, who could

be looked down upon for having a job and not adopting a creative lifestyle

on the dole.88 Urging workers to ‘drop-out’ was hardly a relevant suggestion

for those who had to work in order to survive. Indeed, many carnivalists

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268 Carnival and Class

worked for a few months at a time at various menial jobs in order to save

money, then quit to live off the proceeds. Like dole autonomy, such a prac-

tice did not challenge class exploitation; it was more a method of survival

under capitalism.

In Australia, carnival anarchists clashed with anarcho-syndicalists and

councilists, such as the SMG, over the worth of workplace-based strate-

gies, resulting in somewhat riotous scenes and bitter splits at anarchist

conferences. The Libertarian Socialist Federation summed up the quarrel:

Those people who were arguing for the Anarchist movement to become

involved in trade union and industrial work were accused of neglecting

other forms of struggle. Wherever this position was advanced the people

doing so were denounced for idolizing the working class, ignoring its con-

servatism, ‘laying heavy moral views’, and pressurizing others to become

factory workers.89

While some anarcho-syndicalists and councilists unfairly demanded that

people who refused to work become workplace militants, and some anarcho-

syndicalists belittled ‘the revolutionary signiﬁcance’ of students and the

unemployed,90 the carnivalist assertion that the working class was conserva-

tive is dubious. In 1976, 38 per cent of the Australian workforce participated

in strikes, including a general strike against the removal of universal health

insurance.91 Many carnival anarchists, who could be quite inward-looking,

seemed out of touch with dissent in broader Australian society. Additionally,

the councilists and anarcho-syndicalists thought that the carnivalists were

‘chaoticist’, individualist, anti-organisational and aimless. In response to the

carnivalists, the SMG defended the need for formal organisation, planning,

internal democracy and a coherent political programme.92 While similar

tensions existed in New Zealand, they did not produce splits.

Conclusions

Councilism and anarchism loosely merged into ‘libertarian socialism’, offer-

ing a non-dogmatic path by which both council communism and anarchism

could be updated for the changed conditions of the time, and for the new

forms of proletarian resistance to these new conditions.

It has been argued that 1970s anarchism was inﬂuenced predominantly by

the New Left, ‘new social movements’, the counter-culture and sometimes

classical anarchism.93 Yet councilism arguably had just as much impact on

anarchism as these movements did. There is much truth in George’s assess-

ment that ‘since the Spanish revolution no major theoretical advances have

been made by anarchism. Council Communists have provided most of the

new energy and new analysis of modern society in the general libertarian

movement.’94 Because anarchists generally lacked in-depth and up-to-date

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Toby Boraman 269

theoretical analysis, they were content to merely republish councilist litera-

ture. Councilism was considered just one more anti-authoritarian ingredient

to be added uncritically into the anarchist melting pot.

In turn, councilists were much inﬂuenced by anarchism, to the extent

that some claimed to be more anti-authoritarian than anarchists, and others

became either anarchists or highly sympathetic to anarchism. Councilists

were attracted by anarchism’s rich history of self-management, and because

they were a new tendency that lacked support, and so needed revolutionary

allies and sympathisers. Indeed, they often operated on the fringes of a larger

anarchist milieu.

However, this synthesis between anarchism and councilism was undevel-

oped. Indeed, anarchists and councilists clashed over many issues. Instead

of these tensions resulting in a healthy redevelopment of anarchist and

councilist praxis, they caused acrimonious and personalised disputes.

The anarchist and councilist milieu was too small, youthful and ephemeral

to develop a sophisticated synthesis or critical engagement. Differences

between anarchists and councilists – for example, on the worth of anarcho-

syndicalist unions versus workers’ councils and extra-union networks, and

the worth of decentralisation or centralisation – were set aside because these

currents were largely oppositional in nature. They were brought together

more for what they were against (such as order-givers of any ideological hue,

especially Leninist bureaucrats), rather than what they were for.

In terms of their relationship to class, councilism and class-struggle anar-

chism were helpfully redeveloped into a praxis that questioned not only

the ownership of the means of production, but also capital’s colonisation of

everyday life. With their focus upon the alienation and boredom produced

by ‘bureaucratic capitalism’ or by the ‘spectacle-commodity economy’, they

transcended vulgar economism. Additionally, in response to changes in

class composition, they importantly considered non-managerial white-collar

workers and the unwaged to be part of the working class.

Yet both tendencies anarchistically argued that the central problem with

capital was its hierarchy. This is highly debateable, as the central contradic-

tion within capital is still class exploitation, not bureaucratic or managerial

control, or boredom. Councilism was developed during a time of expand-

ing bureaucracy in both the capitalist West and ‘communist’ East, which

produced an increased demand for skilled, technical labour. Since the impo-

sition of neo-liberalism, class exploitation has intensiﬁed, labour has become

more precarious and casualised, and bureaucracy has been arguably reduced.

Consequently, councilist theories seem outdated.

The responses of the councilists and carnival anarchists to the upsurge in

workplace struggle of the 1970s stand in contrast. Councilists such as the

Revolutionary Committee urged the formation of extra-union shop com-

mittees. While their strategy was not inﬂuential, and they remained in

‘splendid isolation’, the industrious SMG was more effective. Their grassroots

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270 Carnival and Class

strategy based on their network of cells had much potential to link commu-

nity and workplace struggle together. Nevertheless, their contributions were

transitory and often idealistic. The councilist milieu soon faded away by

the late 1970s in New Zealand, and by the mid-1980s in Australia. Many

Australian councilists became anarchists (some later became involved in the

Institute for Social Ecology in Brisbane), community activists or Green Party

members.

In contrast, the ‘situs’ and carnival anarchists believed impatiently that

total revolution (social, economic, cultural and psychological) needed to

occur immediately. Situationists dismissed the dissent of the time as being

fragmentary and lacking radical content, hence making it easily recupera-

ble. Certainly, this was largely true, but they tended to differentiate ‘a pure,

autonomous class from the “external” institutions of the workers’ move-

ment (unions, leftist parties), and in so doing, end[ed] up concluding that

the class has been duped by the ideology of these external forces’,95 or by the

spectacle. ‘Situs’ – as with other councilists – froze the high points of class

struggle, in particular the emergence of workers’ councils, and used it as a

principle to judge the present. Their critique did not relate to the daily con-

tradictory relationship that exists between capital and workers, where ‘both

the acceptance and refusal of capitalist labour coexist, where workers’ pas-

sive objectiﬁcation and subjective (collective) resistance coexist within the

subsumption of labour-power to the productive process’.96 It was thus unsur-

prising that the groups and projects of the ‘situs’ were highly ephemeral and

ineffectual.

The carnival anarchists were ambiguous towards class. They were not sim-

ply individualist bohemians, nor lifestyle anarchists. They refused to work,

formed unemployed groups, went on picket lines and supported workers’

self-management. Yet in their despair over the decline of the protest move-

ment and the alleged conservatism of the working class, they turned inward.

Their attempt to live the most radical lifestyle possible in their everyday

lives was often elitist and self-marginalising. Their experiments failed,97

and became self-destructive. Subsequently, their squats and afﬁnity groups

collapsed, often without trace.

Nonetheless, the carnivalists went beyond the SI in one respect. In their

challenge to the solemn seriousness of leftists, they attempted to put certain

Situationist ideas into everyday practice. This was well articulated by Franklin

Rosemont: ‘At the time it always seemed to me that the Situationists wrote

and talked and theorized about playing and having fun, while we –stilljust

kids, in a sense – were actually playing and having the fun.’

Class-struggle anarchists and anti-Leninist revolutionary Marxists today

continue to converge and clash. Yet there is still much untapped scope for a

two-way synthesis, or at least for sustained critical engagement between the

two currents. For example, councilists analysed the importance of bureau-

cracy and managerial authority in class struggle, a factor that Marxists

have tended to downplay. In this regard, a genuine synthesis could offer

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Toby Boraman 271

considerable insight into the heavily disputed subject of the ‘middle class’:

that is, those ‘contradictory class locations’ where workers such as managers

are exploited and yet also wield considerable power over other workers.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Peter Riley, Tim Briedis, Steve Wright, Gavin Murray, Joe

Toscano and Greg George for enlightening me about Australian councilism

and anarchism, and for comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to everyone

who participated in my earlier New Zealand research.

Notes

1. Greg George, Essay Aimed at Discovering Anarchism’s Relevance to Modern Society

(Brisbane: Self-Management Group (SMG), c.1974), p. 8.

2. Toby Boraman, The New Left and Anarchism in New Zealand from 1956 to the early

1980s (PhD dissertation, University of Otago, 2006) and Toby Boraman Rabble

Rousers and Merry Pranksters: A History of Anarchism in Aotearoa/New Zealand from

the mid-1950s to the early 1980s (Christchurch: Katipo Books, 2007).

3. Although precise membership ﬁgures for these organisations are lacking,

estimates claim that the SMG had more than 200 members and Solidar-

ity had between 80 and 100 members in the 1970s. SouB’s discussion

meetings in the late 1950s were attended by more than 100 people. Tim

Briedis personal correspondence, May 2010; Louis Robertson ‘Reﬂections of

My Time in Solidarity’, http://libcom.org/library/recollections-solidarity-louis-

robertson [accessed 01/03/12]; and Marcel van der Linden ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie:

A French Revolutionary Group (1949–65)’, Left History 5(1) (1997), p. 36 n. 50.

4. Philippe Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900–68) (N.p.:

Philippe Bourrinet, 2008), pp. 319–322.

5. Marcel van der Linden, ‘On Council Communism’, Historical Materialism, 12(4)

(2004), pp. 30–31.

6. Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left, p. 324.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid, pp. 209, 322.

9. Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975)

goes further and argues that councilism was part of the Council Communist

tradition.

10. While rejecting the term councilism as a frozen and dogmatic ideology ‘which

restrains and reiﬁes their [workers’ councils] total theory and practice’. René

Riesel, ‘Preliminaries on the Councils and Councilist Organization’, in Ken Knabb

(ed.) Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981),

p. 274.

11. See also Benjamin Franks, Rebel Alliances (Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press,

2006), pp. 12–13.

12. Nicolas Walter, ‘Has Anarchism Changed? Part Two’, Freedom (26 June 1976), p. 9.

For this revival, see Alexandre Skirda Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Orga-

nization from Proudhon to May 1968 (Edinburgh, San Francisco, and London: AK

Press and Kate Sharpley Library, 2002).

13. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, ‘Interview’, Anarchy, 99, (May 1969), p. 153.

14. Quoted in George Woodcock, Anarchism (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 271.

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272 Carnival and Class

15. See Peter Stansill and David Mairowitz (eds), BAMN: Outlaw Manifestos and

Ephemera 1965–70 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).

16. The term is borrowed from John Englart, ‘Anarchism in Sydney 1975–1981: Part

I’, Freedom (12 June 1982), yet used differently from Englart www.takver.com/

history/sydney/syd7581.htm [accessed 01/03/12].

17. See CrimethInc Workers’ Collective Days of War, Nights of Love (Atlanta:

CrimethInc, 2001) and the Invisible Committee The Coming Insurrection (Los

Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009).

18. See for instance Tom Bramble, Trade Unionism in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2008) and Brian Roper Prosperity for all? Economic, Social and

Political Change in New Zealand since 1935 (Melbourne: Thomson/Dunmore Press,

2005).

19. Calculated from Industrial Stoppages Report (Wellington: New Zealand Department

of Labour, 1970–1980). This ﬁgure includes political stoppages, which have been

excluded from other statistical series.

20. See Chris Briggs, ‘Strikes and Lockouts in the Antipodes’, New Zealand Journal of

Employment Relations 30(3) (2005).

21. For the decline in living standards and rise in unemployment, see Tom O’Lincoln,

Years of Rage: Social Conﬂicts in the Fraser Era (Melbourne: Bookmarks, 1993) and

Roper, Prosperity for All?

22. Christchurch Anarchy Group (CAG), ‘Peoples Rights – Self-Management is the

Only Answer’ (leaﬂet, Christchurch, c.1977).

23. Ibid.

24. CAG Anarchy Information Sheet, 2 (c.1976).

25. See Maurice Brinton, For Workers’ Power, ed. David Goodway (Edinburgh and

Oakland: AK Press, 2004), pp. 81, 85–89, 215.

26. Richard Bolstad, The Industrial Front (Christchurch: CAG, c.1978), p. 41 and

Cornelius Castoriadis Workers’ Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed Society

(Philadelphia: Wooden Shoe, 1984).

27. See for instance, Paul Cardan [Castoriadis], Redeﬁning Revolution (London: Solidar-

ity, n.d.).

28. Richard Bolstad interview with author, May 1996.

29. Solidarity ‘As We See It’, in Brinton For Workers’ Power, p. 153.

30. For an analysis of this shift towards Maoism see Boraman Rabble Rousers,

pp. 56–58.

31. Richard Bolstad, An Anarchist Analysis of the Chinese Revolution (Christchurch:

CAG, 1976) and Cajo Brendel, Theses on the Chinese Revolution (London: Solidarity,

1974).

32. The CPNZ was one of the few ‘communist’ parties in the ‘advanced’ capitalist

world to side with China after the Sino-Soviet split.

33. Tim Briedis, ‘ “A Map of the World that Includes Utopia” The Self-Management

Group and the Brisbane Libertarians’ (BA Hons. thesis, University of Sydney,

2010), p. 43.

34. For example, George of the SMG claimed that libertarian socialism, libertar-

ian communism and council communism meant the same thing. George, Essay

Aimed at Discovering Anarchism’s Relevance,p.2.

35. Briedis, ‘A Map of the World that Includes Utopia’, p. 10; Joe Toscano personal

correspondence, May 2010; and Greg George interview with author, June 2010.

36. Hamish Alcorn, ‘No Organised Anarchists in Brisbane?’ www.ainfos.ca/99/apr/

ainfos00118.html [accessed 01/03/12].

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-273 9780230280373

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Toby Boraman 273

37. Compass 6 (September 1971).

38. CAG, Anarchy Newsletter (August 1977).

39. George interview.

40. George, Essay Aimed at Discovering Anarchism’s Relevance, p. 13.

41. See SMG, Workers’ Councils Democracy, not Parliamentary (Brisbane: SMG, n.d.),

pp. 2,4.

42. George, Essay Aimed at Discovering Anarchism’s Relevance.

43. You Can’t Blow up a Social Relationship: The Anarchist Case against Terrorism

(Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide: Libertarian Socialist Organisation, Libertar-

ian Workers for a Self-Managed Society, Monash Anarchist Society and Adelaide

Libertarian Socialists, c.1978).

44. Greg George, ‘You Can’t Blow up a Social Relationship’, Libertarian, 2 (May/June

1976). George’s article was subtitled ‘The Case against Terrorism’ rather than ‘The

Anarchist Case against Terrorism’.

45. Toscano personal correspondence.

46. Briedis ‘A Map of the World that Includes Utopia’, p. 62; Briedis personal cor-

respondence; George interview; Toscano personal correspondence; and SMG,

Workers’ Councils Democracy.

47. Briedis ‘A Map of the World that Includes Utopia’, pp. 66–67.

48. SMG, ‘Equal Wages – Equal Power’ (leaﬂet, Brisbane, 1976).

49. George, Essay Aimed at Discovering Anarchism’s Relevance,p.9.

50. ‘As We See It’ quoted in SMG, Workers’ Councils,p.3.

51. SMG, Workers’ Councils,p.3.

52. Steve Taylor, The Anatomy of Decision (Auckland: Compass, c.1974), pp. 24, 41.

53. George, Essay Aimed at Discovering Anarchism’s Relevance,p.8.

54. Gilles Dauvé and François Martin, The Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist

Movement (London: Antagonism Press, 1997), p. 73.

55. ‘Some Provisional Points of Disagreement with the Comrades of the Brisbane

S.M.G.’, Federation of Australian Anarchists Bulletin (1975), in Melbourne Anar-

chist Archives Volume II (Melbourne: Melbourne Anarchist Archives, 1979),

p. 37.

56. ‘Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory? Part Two’,

Aufheben, 3 (Summer 1994), http://libcom.org/library/decadence-aufheben-3

[accessed 01 March 2012].

57. With the exception of ‘Workers’ Councils, Self-Management and Syndicalism’,

Federation of Australian Anarchists Bulletin (1974) in Melbourne Anarchist Archives,

p. 28.

58. Taylor, TheAnatomyofDecision, p. 41.

59. Leaﬂet Sydney, c. late 1970s, original emphasis.

60. KAT 1 (1978), p. 13, 2 (1978), p. 1.

61. Grant McDonagh, ‘My Involvement in an Ultra-Leftist Tendency’, (MSS, Nelson:

1981).

62. Boraman, Rabble Rousers, p. 122.

63. McDonagh interview with author, July 1996.

64. McDonagh, ‘My Involvement’.

65. McDonagh, personal correspondence, December 1997.

66. McDonagh, ‘Tableau in a Morgue’, KAT, 5 (1978), pp. 5–6.

67. Ibid, p. 5.

68. Rosemont in Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe, Dancin’ in the Streets!

(Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2005), pp. 61–62, 68.

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-274 9780230280373

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274 Carnival and Class

69. Joe Toscano, ‘Carnival Anarchism in Melbourne 1970–75’, www.takver.com/

history/melb/carnival1970_75.htm [accessed 01 March 2012].

70. Peter McGregor, Cultural Battles: The Meaning of the Viet Nam – USA war

(Melbourne: Scam Publications, 1988), p. 16.

71. Workers’ Councils (Sydney: Rising Free Reprint, n.d.)

72. Auckland Anarchist Activists, Anarchy and the State (Auckland: AAA, c.1976).

73. Terry Leahy, ‘Pre-War Anarchists and the Post-War Ultra-Left’ (MSS, Sydney,

c.1981), p. 32.

74. Anonymous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_McGregor [accessed 01/03/12].

75. Jean Barrot [Gilles Dauvé], What is Situationism? (Fort Bragg: Flatland, 1991), p. 25,

original emphasis.

76. Black Mail 2 (1982), p. 15.

77. For instance, see McDonagh ‘Tableau in a Morgue’ and ‘The Year of the Goat’,

KAT, 7 (1978), p. 3.

78. McDonagh, ‘Irresponsibility vs Poverty: The Valkay Affair’ (leaﬂet, Christchurch,

1979).

79. McDonagh, ‘The Year of the Goat’, p. 3.

80. Iain McIntyre, Disturbing the Peace (Melbourne: Homebrew Books, 2005),

pp. 35–41.

81. Andrew Dodsworth personal correspondence, February 1997, original emphasis.

82. Lunatic Fringe, ‘Pre-Moratorium Leaﬂet (1970)’, www.takver.com/history/melb/

maa40.htm [accessed 01 March 2012].

83. Graeme Minchin interview with author, February 1997.

84. Gavin Murray, interview with author, June 2010.

85. Englart, ‘Anarchism in Sydney’.

86. Frank Prebble, interview with author, May 1996.

87. Oliver Robb, Anarchy in Albert Park: An Attack on the ‘Work Ethic’ (Christchurch:

Christchurch Anarchy Group, 1976).

88. Aufheben, ‘Unemployed Recalcitrance and Welfare Restructuring in the UK

Today’, in Stop the Clock! Critiques of the New Social Workhouse (Brighton:

Aufheben, 2000).

89. Quoted in Englart, ‘Anarchism in Sydney’. The LSF was formed as a ‘libertar-

ian/syndicalist’ split from the Federation of Australian Anarchists. It did not

involve the SMG.

90. ‘The Split – A Monash Anarchist Perspective’, Federation of Australian Anarchists

Bulletin (1976) in Melbourne Anarchist Archives, p. 30.

91. Briggs, ‘Strikes and Lockouts’, p. 9.

92. SMG, ‘Editorial’, Federation of Australian Anarchists Bulletin (1975), in Melbourne

Anarchist Archives, pp. 31–34.

93. See for instance Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

(London: Fontana Press, 1993), pp. 539–558.

94. George, Essay Aimed at Discovering Anarchism’s Relevance, pp. 1–2. However, it is

doubtful that councilists provided most of the energy.

95. ‘ “We Have Ways of Making You Talk!” Review Article’, Aufheben, 12 (2004), p. 59.

96. Sandro Studer quoted in ‘ “We Have Ways,” ’ p. 60.

97. Minchin interview.

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July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-275 9780230280373

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Situating Hardt and Negri

David Bates

Introduction

To what extent is it possible to situate Hardt and Negri’s thought? Are they

best regarded as ‘anarchists’, ‘socialists’, ‘communists’, ‘Marxists’, ‘Leninists’,

‘post-Marxists’ or ‘post-anarchists’? Answering this question is no mere intel-

lectual exercise. As Wittgenstein once remarked, ‘words are deeds’.1On the

radical Left, much blood has been spilled through those deeds, careers ended

and reputations shattered. Of course, today a great deal is made of the claim

that we live in ‘post-ideological’ times, ‘new times’ where ‘class struggle’ does

not have the importance it once had; postmodern times, where meanings

and identities are constantly subject to the contestation of ‘discourse’. Now,

while the costs of labelling are not what they once were, there are still costs.

Labelling instigates a kind of ‘symbolic violence’ over discursive space. Rival

ideologies are constructed as ‘straw men’, as ‘crude’, ‘naïve’, as ‘elitist’ or

‘authoritarian’ and so on. This process neglects any philosophical sophisti-

cation, common ground, or indeed the interpenetration of ‘rival ideologies’.

One danger of labelling is that we move beyond healthy criticism to a desire

to relegate our theoretical interlocutors to the status of the ‘other’. Accord-

ingly, they become an opponent we seek to dismiss, in order to give positive

identity to ourselves, rather than a potential ally in the struggle against the

exploitative mechanisms of global capitalism. Where labelling is also con-

nected with the construction of orthodoxies, it can lead to what Skinner has

termed a ‘mythology of coherence’ (and of incoherence) produced often by

those wishing to defend the integrity of their speciﬁc ideological projects.2

While seeking to avoid the excesses of such ‘symbolic violence’, this

chapter aims to locate Hardt and Negri’s work within the cross-cutting

currents of modern socialism, and crucially to understand the labelling

strategies which they themselves deploy in the ﬁeld of revolutionary politics.

Why speciﬁcally, do they ﬁnd it necessary to reject the label of ‘anarchism’?

Why do they make often rather cryptic reference to ‘Leninism’? What game

are they playing, and why do they feel a need to play it? What are their

275

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276 Situating Hardt and Negri

intentions? How can we read Hardt and Negri? Antonio Negri has paid a

higher price than most in the struggle against global capitalism and we can

learn a great deal both from his work and activism.3That said, in what

follows I will subject his work – along with Michael Hardt’s – to a robust

critique, drawing on Marxist, anarchist, post-Marxist, and post-anarchist

thinking, so as to assess the cogency of their arguments in the context of

radical politics today.

Labels and the Left

Hardt and Negri are difﬁcult authors to situate. The immediate context in

which Negri’s work emerged was the Italian autonomist movement of the

1960s and 1970s, a movement in which he was one of the leading intel-

lectuals. Autonomism has been viewed by such diverse ﬁgures as Bologna

and Callincos as embodying an attempt to ‘refuse’ or ‘reject’ the rule of the

Leninist party model in the context of contemporary revolutionary politics.4

This challenge to Leninism – perhaps in part as a result of the weakness

of Italian Trotskyism – resulted in a strong libertarian anti-statist aspect in

autonomist thought in general, and Negri’s thought in particular.5More-

over, we see in Negri’s more recent work with Hardt, the combination of

this with an emphasis on that old Marxian foe the ‘lumpenproletariat’.

Accordingly, the well-respected scholar of Marxism David McLellan, and the

post-anarchist Saul Newman, have each regarded Hardt and Negri as at least

unacknowledged anarchists, albeit for Newman of a post-anarchist ﬂavour.6

Yet Hardt and Negri have refused the label of ‘anarchist’. They have writ-

ten: ‘No, we are not anarchists but communists.’7This refusal also leads

Hardt and Negri to adopt a complex response to the discourse of Leninism,

one which – in contrast to Bologna – goes beyond simple ‘refusal’. Rather,

Lenin is treated as ‘the most complete representation of ...the “actuality

of the revolution” ’.8Indeed, in Empire, Hardt and Negri have written of

an ‘alternative implicit in Lenin’s work: either world communist revolution or

Empire’.9The question to be addressed here is ‘what is the practice of these

statements?’ Elsewhere, Negri has written – this time very clearly:

To me, Leninism is the price we paid for the political composition of

the Italian proletariat. There was no way to talk politics other than via

Leninism .... It was the class lingua franca: it could cause trouble, but you

could make headway with the class (and with no one else) only by using

it.10

And of course, this ‘lingua franca’ is anti-anarchist to the very core. To under-

stand this in more detail, we need to look ﬁrst at the nature and prac-

tice of the ‘divide’ between anarchism and Marxism, and then how this

came to feed in to the discourse of Marxism-Leninism. This divide is not

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David Bates 277

illusory. There are some very real differences between anarchist and Marxist

approaches. But such differences are heightened as problematic when used as

textual ‘orthodoxy’ to establish the ‘party line’. To achieve this, a ‘return’ to

Marx was often viewed as the only ‘scientiﬁc’ way forward. This ‘return’

inevitably focuses on Marx’s hostile polemics with Proudhon and Bakunin,

and hence a clear critical line comes do be drawn between Marxism and

anarchism. Yet it must be pointed out – albeit brieﬂy – that these polemics

were complex in nature. Thus, while it is the case that Marx came to criticise

the ‘petty-bourgeois’ and ‘non-dialectical’ character of Proudhon’s work,11

he had earlier regarded Proudhon’s 1840 text What is Property? as a great

scientiﬁc advance.12 And, while Marx wrote of Bakunin that: ‘He does not

understand a thing about social revolution, only the political phrases about

it; its economic conditions do not exist for him’13, he had also considered

there to be many advances in Bakunin’s early economic materialism. And

Bakunin for his part had written of Marx that he ‘advanced and proved the

incontrovertible truth, conﬁrmed by the entire past and present history of

human society, nations and states, that economic fact has always preceded

legal and political right’.14

Indeed, we might comment that both Marx and Bakunin opposed the

institution of private property; both were committed to the revolutionary

overthrow of the capitalist mode of production; both considered economic

conﬂict – speciﬁcally class struggle – to be a fundamental driving force of

historical development; both thought capitalist states to be rooted in sys-

tems of class domination, and should therefore be abolished; and both

explicitly stressed proletarian self-emancipation as a necessary feature of the

forthcoming social revolution.15

Yet, a clear textual basis for the construction of the ofﬁcial state ideology

of Marxism-Leninism came to be viewed as self-evident. Consider how in

his 1901 Thesis on Anarchism and Socialism, Lenin wrote that: ‘Anarchism, in

the course of the 35 to 40 years (Bakunin and the International, 1860) of its

existence (and with Stirner included, in the course of many more years) has

produced nothing but general platitudes against exploitation.’16 For Lenin,

anarchism failed to understand the ‘causes’ of this exploitation. In 1905, he

wrote that: ‘The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned

inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are

the very opposite of socialism.’17 Similarly, in 1912, at the Italian Socialist

Congress, he claimed that the working class movement was ‘rapidly ridding

itself of the sickness ...of anarchism’.18

The words of Lenin can be situated here in the context of the central-

ist theory of organisation that he had articulated in texts such as What

is to Be Done? (1902), and One Step Forwards, Two Steps Backwards (1904).19

Here Lenin, as is well known, put forward the controversial thesis – building

on the arguments of Kautsky – that the working classes, left to their own

devices, would never reach beyond ‘trade union consciousness’. Political

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278 Situating Hardt and Negri

consciousness came to the class from outside the economic struggle, the

vehicle of revolutionary theory being party intellectuals.

Although anarchists have often seized on this to explain the deviations of

the Soviet system, a few words of caution must be made. First, it would be

a mistake to argue that there is a simple continuity between Leninism and

Stalinism. After all in 1922 Lenin stated in his ‘Last Testament’ that ‘Com-

rade Stalin ... has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am

AQ1 not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with suf-

ﬁcient caution.’20 Second – a fact ignored by the Stalinists – Lenin’s view

was amenable to change. Bloody Sunday in 1905 had helped to mobilise

the masses against the Tsarist state. And in The State and Revolution (writ-

ten between August and September of 1917), Lenin had stated the case

for a more open form of organisational structure, and indeed for the rapid

abolition of the state.21

Of course post-revolutionary history led to different outcomes. The ‘new

dawn’ after October 1917 was rapidly to pass, as the political and ideological

differences between the communists and the anarchists came to be accen-

tuated. The Leninist attempt to establish hegemony over the revolutionary

movement led to suppression of alternative voices.

This brings us back to Negri’s point about the ‘price’ of Leninism – for

one price was undoubtedly his (and Hardt’s) refusal of the label anarchism.

Intellectually, too, the price was the dishonesty – however ‘necessary’ –

of dogma. Indeed, it would be a distortion to think of Lenin’s view of

revolutionary organisation as being hegemonic, even among communists.

Trotsky and others had very different views. Revolutionary Marxists such as

Rosa Luxemburg voiced signiﬁcant concerns about the type of centralism

advocated by Lenin, questioning speciﬁcally its suitability even for ‘Russian

conditions’.22 This is not to say that Luxemburg was a ‘naïve’ spontaneist;

certainly, she had faith in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, but

this was a spontaneity in a deﬁnite material context, and with a clear and

democratic organisational structure, serving to militate against the possible

excesses of centralised party structures.

Negri’s ‘orthodoxy’ is far from the usual kind; there is no ‘application’

of Lenin’s theory. Rather, Negri claims to rethink the ‘contemporaneity’ of

Lenin, a Leninism for the epoch of global capitalism, a Lenin whose anal-

ysis shifts in accordance with the speciﬁcity of the context in which he is

embedded, but who nevertheless enables us to ‘think’ revolutionary sub-

jectivity. Indeed, Negri’s account of Lenin involves periodisation. Thus we

have the Lenin of 1890–1900, of 1900–1910, and of 1910–1917.23 In the ﬁrst

period, Lenin focuses on providing an analysis of the ‘determinate social

formation’; here his aim is to understand the speciﬁcity of working class

composition – that is the ‘actual standpoint’ of the working class. The goal

of political economy here is to be judged through its practical-political efﬁ-

cacy, or its contribution to the constituent power of the proletariat. In the

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David Bates 279

second period, characterised by What is to be Done?, Lenin was concerned

with ‘organisational’ questions. In the third period Lenin wrote of the need

to eradicate the bourgeois state. We see this most clearly in Lenin’s The State

and Revolution.

While such periodisation is problematic, Negri’s point is that we need to

think the contemporaneity of Lenin. We can think about a Lenin for the

period of contemporary global capitalism – a Lenin against Empire. As early

as 1973, Negri wrote against the crude application of the Leninist party form

to the contemporary context, insisting that the political composition of the

working class had now been substantially modiﬁed.24 And in a recent arti-

cle, Negri claims that we must understand Lenin’s ‘biopolitics’; we need, he

claims, to grasp ‘new revolutionary corporealities, the powerful base of the

production of subjectivity ...’, ‘of the communist ‘general intellect’. We need

to ‘move into the realm of Lenin beyond Lenin’.25

Thus we arrive at an important question: to what extent is Hardt and

Negri’s somewhat unconventional (post-)Leninist communism actually anti-

anarchist in a way that is comparable with the anti-anarchism of orthodox

‘Marxism-Leninism’? Here we need to explore in greater detail what Hardt

and Negri have to say about anarchism and communism.

Anarchism and communism

Negri writes in Reﬂections on Empire: ‘[i]t is a pity that the anarchist concep-

tion has never been attentive to the issue of homology with the state ...so

that it produces in its concept of insurrection and in that of the abolition

of the state a revolutionary imprint that is ﬁercely empty of alternative pro-

posals and full of resentment’.26 Earlier in the same text, he criticises the

anarchists for refusing ‘to deﬁne a time or space as privileged moments of

uprising; they live in the chaos of the world of exploitation, illustrating

destructively its institutions, but failing to put forward a positive strategy

of transformation’.27

There is no explicit engagement with the ‘texts’ of anarchism here; no

discussion of the wide range of subtle and not so subtle differences in

the anarchist ‘canon’. And there is most deﬁnitely no attempt to explore

the common ground between Marx and his ‘classical’ anarchist contempo-

raries such as Bakunin. Instead we have an opposition to a Leninist (indeed

Stalinist) construction of anarchism, which enables Hardt and Negri to

maintain their communist credentials, and thus – perhaps strategically –

to distract their more orthodox comrades from what is in many ways

an approach which resonates theoretically with themes present both in

‘classical’ as well as ‘post’-anarchism.

So, as we have seen, Hardt and Negri view themselves not as anarchists

but as communists, communists who have seen ‘how much repression

and destruction of humanity has been wrought by liberal and socialist big

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280 Situating Hardt and Negri

government’.28 New co-operative ‘circuits’ have however generated radical

possibilities. Hardt and Negri insist how:

Today productivity, wealth and the creation of social surpluses take the

form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational,

and affective networks. In the expression of its own creative energies,

immaterial labor thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of

spontaneous elementary communism.29

This is a communism based in love and communality, and ‘irrepressible light-

ness and joy’, a communism rendered possible by the information age and

the communication networks instigated therein.30

Some of both Hardt and Negri’s recent writings are of interest to us here.

In a collection of essays responding to the work of Alain Badiou, the authors

argue for what we might term an anti-statist understanding of communism.

Of course, a usual argument put forward by liberal capitalist and anar-

chist opponents of communism is that it is statist, and as such serves to

undermine the freedom of the individual. Both Hardt and Negri develop

a challenging rereading of this line of thought. For them, communism is

opposed to ‘state socialism’ (which might be equated with ‘actually existing

socialism’). In a way which shows something of the rhetorical ﬂourish of

Giddens’s ‘Third Way’,31 Hardt writes that: ‘We need to explore another pos-

sibility: neither the private property of capitalism nor the public property of

socialism but the common in communism.’32 And Negri writes:

Being communist means being against the State. The State is the force

that organizes, always normally yet always exceptionally, the relations

that constitute capital and discipline the conﬂicts between capitalists and

the proletarian labour force.33

State socialism according to this argument is akin to a type of state capi-

talism. Public ownership is state ownership – alienated ownership – which

operates against ‘the common’. As such the constitutive power of proletarian

labour is alienated, indeed neutralised.34

Thus we have a move from a type of strategic (post-)Leninism, to a strong

opposition to actually existing state socialism, and embrace of the ‘common’

in communism. In making the case for this anti-state vision of communism,

the rejection of anarchism continues. For, Negri writes: ‘...there is no revo-

lution without organization [...] there still is no rational design that invests

and involves the moments of rupture with the power of organization’.35

Some critical points need to be both emphasised and re-emphasised here.

Hardt and Negri’s self-identiﬁcation as anti-anarchists is based on a misrep-

resentation of anarchism and hence a sectarianism which undercuts their

critique of capitalism; this problem is exacerbated when we turn to their

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David Bates 281

critique of socialism. Hardt and Negri’s characterisation of socialism is in

some ways more ﬁtting for an author such as Phillip Blond, than for authors

so deeply embedded in progressive radical political struggle.36 But what pos-

sible purpose can such anti-socialism have in the struggle against capitalism?

For one thing, does socialism really undercut the constitutive power of the

proletariat? Maybe so with certain forms of what used to be termed ‘actually

existing socialism’, and aspects of European social democracy. But it must

also be acknowledged that socialism was – and still is – a product of mass

struggle, a struggle often against a laissez faire form of capitalism that has

been quite happy to see workers starve in the name of liberal ‘freedoms’.

It was a system which pushed for the reduction of the working day, the abo-

lition of child labour, the creation of free public education and health care –

all developments resisted by the bourgeoisie, cutting as it did into capitalist

valorisation and the production of surplus value.

Accordingly, an effective anti-capitalist counter-hegemony must oppose

such sectarian lines of reasoning. It must engage honestly and widely with

the revolutionary Left, drawing on the rich history of emancipatory struggle

therein. The political ‘purpose’ which such labelling once served no longer

resonates.

A ‘postmodern’ politics?

But what of the understanding of politics which Hardt and Negri propose?

This is a politics which results from the shift from modernity to postmoder-

nity, a new politics grounded in the realities of globalisation. But how cogent

is their account?

In Empire, Hardt and Negri write: ‘The passage to Empire emerges from

the twilight of modern sovereignty [...] It is a decentred and deterritorializ-

ing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm

within its open, expanding frontiers.’37 The modernist understanding of

‘sovereignty’, the ‘nation state’ and the ‘people’, come to be challenged.

Thus Negri insists: ‘Today, on the contrary, it is the crisis of the nation state

as induced by globalisation that the general crisis of political categories of

modernity manifests, opening thought to the relation between Empire and

multitudes.’38

For Hardt and Negri, ‘classical’ anarchists, socialists and Marxists alike are

trapped inside a ‘modernist’ problematic, where power is understood only in

relation to its univocal, or at best dualistic, exercise. For ‘classical’ anarchists

this is the exercise of repressive state power over essentially free individuals.

For Marxists, this is a causally determinant economic power, which produces

a particular state form and which serves both to justify and maintain the

exploitative status quo. And for ‘socialists’ this is a state which can be seized

for revolutionaries and for reformists, transformed in order to defend and

promote a progressive conception of the public – put in the kind of language

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282 Situating Hardt and Negri

which Hardt might use – a ‘state of love’. As we have already noted, for

Hardt and Negri, the erosion of the very logic of the nation state is making

(technologically) real the communist utopia, as a new conception of the

postmodern ‘commons’ emerges in the context of globalisation. It is to this

theme that I now turn.

Hardt and Negri radicalise the Foucauldian language of biopower, and

harness it to the cause of radical politics in a context of ‘postmoder-

nity’. Foucault wrote of biopower’s ‘inﬂuence on life’ that it ‘endeavours

to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and

comprehensive regulations’.39 Hardt and Negri write of biopower as ‘a form

of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting

it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it’.40 To this extent, the authors are on

the same theoretical terrain as post-anarchism and post-Marxism. Take Saul

Newman’s claim that:

We can no longer imagine a clear conceptual distinction between soci-

ety and the state, between humanity and power, as power is reproduced

through everyday relationships and practices – such as educating, healing,

governing – and through a variety of social institutions ...’41

This is in many ways the irony of postmodern analyses of power – that

power is decentred, multivocal, but also more totalising than it has ever

been. So, for Laclau, as social closure is an ‘impossibility’, power’s grasp is

never complete, but nor are we ever outside the discourse of power relations.

Following an Althusserian theme, the very subject of power is constituted

in the context of power relations; as such the abstract liberal individual

subject comes to be problematised. For the post-anarchist Saul Newman,

power is endemic in everyday social practices, such that the liberal dis-

tinction between state and society can no-longer be sustained, while for

Hardt and Negri, Empire and biopower subjugates more than a state-centred

imperialism ever could.

What then of the possibility of resistance – and in particular, how does

an understanding of Hardt and Negri’s view on this issue enable us to sit-

uate their thought? A key feature that unites Foucault, post-Marxism and

post-anarchism is an opposition to a ‘grand narrative’ of resistance, and of

emancipation. The totalising effect of power means that all attempts to resist

its subjugation will be temporary and partial. Here, much attention is given

to what we might term ‘micro-practices’, embodied perhaps most clearly in

Foucault’s claim that we have to ‘create ourselves as a work of art’.42 Accord-

ingly, the large projects of social transformation held up alike by Bakunin,

Marx and Lenin, are looked on as at best outmoded.

Yet there are clear differences in post-Marxist and post-anarchist

approaches. Where for post-anarchists such as Newman, the concern is with

a non-hegemonic preﬁgurative politics of the ‘here and now’, post-Marxists

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David Bates 283

stress the importance of a post-Gramscian hegemonic politics which seeks

to weld various complex struggles into a concrete – and always precarious –

historic bloc.43

But how ‘radical’ is Newman’s alternative? In some ways it is strangely

conservative. Newman writes: ‘Radical transformation – and here we recall

Bakunin’s “urge to destroy”, which for him was also a creative urge – should

be accompanied by a sensitivity to what exists, and a desire to conserve

what needs to be conserved.’44 Hardt and Negri are more clearly radical in

the language they use. But there is no account of hegemonic politics, either

in ‘statist’ or non-statist forms.45 Instead there is a stress on the autonomist

notion of ‘refusal’.46 In his earlier writings, Negri provided a theorisation

of refusal which he at least considered to have a ﬁrm Marxian ground-

ing – located that is in a speciﬁc and novel reading of Marx’s Grundrisse.47

In this reading, the autonomous and uniﬁed power of labour against capital

is clearly asserted.48

In what they regard as distinguishing their work from anarchism, Hardt

and Negri have made the argument, in Empire and elsewhere, for a con-

structive ontology of resistance, a ‘refusal’ which contains the seeds of a

possible ‘communist’ future. So they write: ‘[s]uch destruction only grasps

the passive, negative limit of sovereign power. The positive, active limit is

revealed most clearly with respect to labor and social production.’49 To this

extent, Hardt and Negri write of the creation of ‘constellations of powerful

singularities’.50

Here the notion of biopolitics is important. Biopolitics rallies against the

exploitive totalisation of the contemporary capital form. It seeks to rein-

corporate a form of production which resists the imposition of the rule

of ‘measure’ – a form of communal production against Empire. Hardt and

Negri draw a distinction between ‘constituent’ and ‘constitutional’ power.

The former is ‘an institutional form that develops a common content; it is

a development of force that defends the historical progression of emancipa-

tion and liberation; it is, in short, an act of love’.51 The latter, on the other

hand, seeks to constrain, to subjugate, to legalise. Just as there is no one site

of Empire, there is no one site of (constructive) resistance to Empire. In the

same way that Empire can be considered a totalising mode of exploitation,

so too resistance is everywhere. The ‘Party’ can no longer represent a unitary

site of struggle. The working class are just one exploited group among many.

We are all the ‘multitude’.

Stressing the complexity of these new modes of struggle, Hardt and Negri

write that ‘as production becomes increasingly biopolitical [...] an isolation

of economic issues makes less and less sense’.52 A revolutionary approach

must be levelled against the social bios as a whole, not at ‘the economy’

(in the limited sense) or ‘the state’, and exploitation must be attacked in

all its differential manifestations. But this for Hardt and Negri is a posi-

tive attack. So, they write: ‘We need to create weapons that are not merely

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284 Situating Hardt and Negri

destructive but are themselves forms of constituent power, weapons capable

of constructing democracy and defeating the armies of Empire.’53

The multitude and revolution

In this section, I interrogate further Hardt and Negri’s concept of the mul-

titude, in order to assess their understanding of the form of revolutionary

agency and subjectivity made possible in the context of Empire. Hardt and

Negri have challenged the restrictive identiﬁcation of the contemporary

proletariat with wage labourers, which they associate with Marxism. Hardt

and Negri write:

The exclusions of other forms of labor from the working class are based on

the notion that there are differences of kind between, for example, male

industrial labor and female reproductive labor, between industrial labor

and peasant labor, between the employed and the unemployed, between

workers and the poor.54

Marx it is true provides a somewhat restricted relational understanding

of the proletariat. Moreover, Ernesto Laclau has pointed out that Marx’s

proletariat involves a substantial revision – indeed redeﬁnition – of that

concept. Whereas the proletariat was a ‘poor outside any stable social ascrip-

tion’,55 it comes now to be associated with a radical and transformative

conception of agency.56

The proletariat, according to the deﬁnition in the Communist Manifesto,

are wage labourers, and the bourgeoisie owners of the means of production,

and purchasers of labour. Moreover, they were labourers capable of their own

emancipation from the constraints of the capitalist economy, despite the

forms of fetishism therein.57 Of course the paradigmatic and most advanced

mode of wage labour in Marx’s time was industrial, and a discussion of

industrial wage labour comprises much of the content of his later analy-

ses of political economy. More recent Marxists,58 motivated by a political

desire to conform to certain party orthodoxies, have maintained that a nec-

essary condition for wage labour to be proletarian is that it produces so-called

‘material’ commodities. For Poulantzas, ‘Non-material’ white-collar labour

was largely ‘petty bourgeois’ in character.59 But Marx explicitly opposed such

an approach; it did not matter for him whether you worked in a ‘sausage fac-

tory’ or a ‘teaching factory’. Proletarian labour was deﬁned simply as ‘wage

labour’, labour which politically may be more or less ‘advanced’.60

To return to the theme of exclusion, let us take the ‘unpaid’ labourers

to which Hardt and Negri refer. Marx uses the term ‘lumpenproletariat’ to

refer to aspects of this category, for in constructing a theory of the rev-

olutionary proletariat, it was necessary for Marx to exclude as ‘other’, all

that which he considered to be ‘reactionary’/’counter-revolutionary’. The

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David Bates 285

lumpenproletariat exist outside of the binary opposition between exploiter

and exploited, conceived as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. They were

the class that was not a class, to the extent that, as Hayes has noted: ‘They

were a class only in so far as they were lumped together by their last contact

with the dialectic, their common exclusion from the relations of produc-

tion.’61 So too, Ernesto Laclau writes that: ‘In order to maintain its credentials

as an “insider” of the main line of historical development, however, the

proletariat had to be strictly differentiated from the absolute “outsider”: the

lumpenproletariat.’62

We can look in more detail at Marx and Engels’ work to see how they go

about constructing this understanding of the outsider. Engels wrote: ‘The

lumpenproletariat, this scum of depraved element from all classes, with head-

quarters in the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. This rabble is

absolutely venal and absolutely brazen.’63 In The Communist Manifesto,Marx

and Engels referred to the lumpenproletariat as ‘the social scum, that pas-

sively rotting mass thrown off by the layers of old society’.64 For Marx, key

aspects of the lumpenproletariat sat outside the (directly) exploitative mech-

anisms of the capitalist system. They were the parasitic groupings. They were

the reactionary forces likely set back the historical cause of the proletariat.

But they were more than (permanently) unemployed workers. They were

the ‘organ grinders’, the ‘criminals’, the ‘prostitutes’. Marx even discusses

the ﬁnance aristocracy in this context, writing that ‘where money, ﬁlth and

blood commingle. The ﬁnance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well

as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the

heights of bourgeois society.’65

Bakunin’s work represented a contemporary and immediate challenge to

Marx and Engels’ views on the lumpenproletariat. But his challenge was

based on an understanding of a further ‘exclusion’. The forces of reac-

tion were for Bakunin to be found not in the ‘lumpenproletariat’, but within

Marx’s hallowed ‘advanced’ sections of the proletariat. Accordingly, Bakunin

turned his back on the industrially ‘advanced’ proletariat, and embraced

the ‘lumpenproletariat’, the ‘ﬂower’ of the proletariat. ‘By the ﬂower of the

proletariat I mean precisely that eternal “meat” for governments, that great

rabble of people ordinarily designated by Messrs. Marx and Engels by the

phrase at once picturesque and contemptuous of “lumpenproletariat” ’66

Both accounts attract the criticism of post-Marxists and post-anarchists.

Laclau considers that Marx’s concept of the lumpenproletariat represents the

boundary of his theory of class struggle and historical materialism, a ten-

sion between an ‘economic essentialism’ and a recognition of the discursive

character of political identity. Marx considered class identity as constructed

through the internal antagonisms of the mode of production. Yet the dis-

course of proletarian identity is the result of an a ‘antagonism’ external to

the social ‘totality’, what Laclau would term a ‘constitutive outside’, this

‘other’, itself being the product of a contradictory discursive operation of

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286 Situating Hardt and Negri

Marxism. To this extent, all political identities result from antagonistic dis-

cursive processes, rather than the unfolding of the historical or economic

dialectic.67 Butifthisisso,Bakunin’s view is hardly an ‘advance’ on the

one put forward by Marx. Bakunin explicitly stated – despite a tendency

in his work to reify the signiﬁcance of state forms – that he shared with

Marx a belief in the economic determinants of the historical process. If, as

Bakunin argued, the lumpenproletariat was the ‘ﬂower of the proletariat’,

this ﬂower would seem spontaneously to bloom outside of the operation of

politics.

Newman has levelled the charge of determinism against Marx and

Bakunin. He writes that: ‘Bakunin’s political thought can be seen as a

scientiﬁc-materialist philosophy combined with a dialectical view of his-

torical development’.68 Yet Bakunin receives a far better treatment from

Newman than does Marx. This is in part because Bakunin’s ‘essentialism’ is

mitigated by the negative character of his dialectics – a dialectics where there

is a thesis, anti-thesis, but no synthesis. This is a dialectics of opposition to

politics, a dialectics of destruction, a dialectics of refusal.69

As we have seen, the theme of refusal runs through Hardt and Negri’s

understanding of the ‘multitude’. Let us explore this multitude in more

detail. Hardt and Negri propose a conception of revolutionary agency which

is more ﬁtting to the ‘realities’ of contemporary global capitalism in the

information age, or the period of ‘Empire’. In place of ‘traditional’ man-

ual labour Hardt and Negri point to the increasing signiﬁcance of what they

term ‘immaterial labour’. Thus they write of ‘the communicative labour of

industrial production that has newly become linked in informational net-

works, the interactive labour of symbolic analysis and problem solving, and

the labour of the production and manipulation of affects.’70 These are broad

categories, uniting the labour of high tech and service industry, for exam-

ple, the ﬂight attendant’s ‘service with a smile.’ For Hardt and Negri – and

to this extent they follow the theorists of the ‘information age’ such as Bell

and Castells71 – these modes of labour are generated through an unfolding

logic of the global capitalist economic system.

Their view, then, is not that there are no determinant processes which

generate an ontological resistance to capitalism but, rather, that the onto-

logical understanding produced by Marxism has been displaced; the need

is for a new understanding of revolutionary agency in a contemporary

‘postmodern’ context. It is again worth making a comparison here with

Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism. Laclau and Mouffe write: ‘Only if we

renounce any epistemological prerogative based on the ontologically priv-

ileged position of a universal class will it be possible seriously to discuss

the present degree of validity of the Marxist categories. At this point we

should state quite plainly that we are now situated on post-marxist ter-

rain.’72 Having made this assertion, Laclau and Mouffe ﬁnd no agent with

which to replace the working class. In contrast, as we have seen, when Hardt

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David Bates 287

and Negri bid farewell to the ‘old working class’ they say hello to the new

proletariat – the ‘multitude’. However, this notion of the multitude is difﬁ-

cult to grasp. At once, it becomes ‘the class of those who refuse the rule of

capital’.73 They maintain that:

The concept rests [...] on the claim that there is no political priority

among the forms of labor: all forms of labor are today socially produc-

tive, they produce in common, and share too a common potential to

resist the domination of capital [...] The multitude gives the concept of

the proletariat its fullest deﬁnition as all those who labour and produce

under the rule of capital.74

The ‘immanence’ of the multitude brings with it a certain political poten-

tiality, a potentiality of common collaboration.

So, the multitude are the exploited who nevertheless have the potential

power to refuse the rule of capital. Let us look a little more at some of those

Hardt and Negri place under this banner. The traditional working class are

part of the multitude. Those who perform domestic labour – women in

the household – are part of the multitude. The health care worker is part

of the multitude. The agricultural worker in the developing country is part

of the multitude. The sex worker is part of the multitude. The ‘poor’ are

part of the multitude. The unemployed are part of the multitude. For, as

Hardt and Negri write: ‘[j]ust as social production takes place today equally

inside and outside the factory walls, so too it takes place equally inside and

outside the wage relationship’.75 At one point, Hardt and Negri insist that:

‘All of the multitude is productive and all of it is poor.’76 And elsewhere Hardt

and Negri write: ‘The poor [...] refers not to those who have nothing but to

the wide multiplicity of all those who are inserted into the mechanisms of

social production regardless of social order or property.’77

Whereas for Hardt and Negri the use of the term lumpenproletariat

by Marxists served to ‘demonise’ the poor, ‘only the poor has the abil-

ity to renew being’.78 As the authors put it: ‘these classes are in fact

included in social production [...] the poor are not merely victims but

powerful agents [...] they are part of the circuits of social and biopolitical

production’.79 The ‘lumpenproletariat’ are not a reactionary ‘other’ to the

proletariat, but rather a constituent element of it.

Leaving aside the issue of whether the ‘poor’ really can be regarded as

having such transformative potential,80 it remains difﬁcult to see how the

multitude can be regarded as a site of possible transformation of the social

bios as a whole. That is, without a hegemonic project bringing together the

unemployed, sex workers, service workers, material and manual labourers, as

well as the lumpenproletariat, immigrants, and indigenous residents, it is dif-

ﬁcult to see how a meaningful challenge to the power of the capitalist state

can be mounted. Indeed, the fact that Hardt and Negri reject engagement

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288 Situating Hardt and Negri

with the state form means that their preﬁgurative politics of resistance – as

with post-anarchism – will always be constrained.

Problems are exacerbated further by some of the approaches to refusal

which Hardt and Negri have suggested. These seem to owe more to a

postmodern understanding of identity politics, than to an effective politics

of anti-capitalism. Accordingly, they write of the subversion of ‘conventional

norms of corporeal and sexual relations between and within genders’.81

They enthuse about the subversion implied by ‘dressing in drag’. Indeed,

‘Bodies themselves transform and mutate to create new posthuman bod-

ies.’82 Speaking about these types of approaches in general, the resoundingly

modernist Marxist Terry Eagleton writes of how: ‘Socialism has lost out to

sado-masochism. Among the students of culture, the body is an immensely

fashionable topic, but it is usually the erotic body, not the famished one.

There is a keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in labouring ones.’83

That said, there is at least for Hardt and Negri a stress on exploitation as a

key determinant of revolutionary capacity, setting their work apart from the

more extreme excesses of postmodern understandings of politics. However,

the lack of analytical precision at the heart of the category of the multitude

does throw into doubt the idea that Hardt and Negri’s work really does repre-

sent an advance on traditional Marxian categories. Indeed, the rich tradition

of Marxist class analysis has attempted to interrogate in detail – and through

a rich theoretical and empirical analysis – the revolutionary potential created

in the context of particular modes of exploitation, and social relations.84 For

Hardt and Negri, if we are all part of the multitude, there is no scope at all

for class analysis.

Conclusion

The task of locating Hardt and Negri’s thought is far from straightforward.

Nevertheless, a number of provisional conclusions can be drawn. First,

Negri’s rereading of Lenin is both strategic and far from orthodox. In going

‘beyond’ Lenin, we see a Leninist basis to Hardt and Negri’s anti-anarchist

communism, and therefore how Hardt and Negri’s polemical approach

might be situated. Yet, second, the account which Hardt and Negri give of

communism, particularly as this relates to the opposition to ‘socialism’ in

their recent work, is to say the least curious. How can two authors so embed-

ded in the radical tradition hold such disappointing views of socialism, its

history, and its advances? What game are they playing? Third, despite their

preoccupation with the theme of exploitation, it seems that when it comes

to ‘politics’, the authors are closer to their anarchist straw man than they

would like. They claim that anarchism lacks strategic awareness, yet they too

fail to articulate a conception of revolutionary strategy. Rather, they see in

the multitude the immanent possibility of spontaneous revolutionary activ-

ity, an activity without centre and therefore without ‘authority’, without

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David Bates 289

‘identity’. Unfortunately, this is activity without direction. Of course, we

might ﬁnally regard Hardt and Negri’s displacement of the problematic and

ontological centrality of the working class as situating them close to the

post-Marxist end of the spectrum. This is an interpretation further rein-

forced by their radicalisation of the Foucauldian conception of biopower.

Yet, at least for the post-Marxists, Hardt and Negri’s multitude fails to take

account of how political identity is a ‘discursive’ product, a product of hege-

mony. Perhaps then they are post-anarchists? However we choose to label

their thought, Hardt and Negri’s go a long way towards subverting many of

the labels which have done so much to carve up the space of radical poli-

tics. The realities of contemporary global capitalism do necessitate revisiting

some of these labels, if radical resistance to exploitation in all its forms is to

be possible.

Acknowledgements

This idea for this chapter initially emerged from a discussion of Hardt

and Negri’s thought with Professor David McLellan, a discussion for which

I am grateful. An early version of the chapter was presented at the

Manchester Workshops in Political Thought, Manchester Metropolitan Uni-

versity, September 2010. I would like to thank all those who attended for

their comments – and particularly Benjamin Franks for making me think of

the historical relationship between Marxism and anarchism in a different

way. I would also like to thank the editors of this volume for their excep-

tionally challenging but also generously constructive comments. Any errors

and omissions remain my own.

Notes

1. Wittgenstein in J. Tully (ed.) Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics

(Cambridge: Polity, 1988), p. v.

2. Q. Skinner ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in J. Tully (ed.),

p. 39.

3. See Alex Callinicos, ‘Toni Negri in Perspective’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.) Debating

Empire (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 121–143.

4. See Callinicos (2003) and Steve Wright, ‘A Party of Autonomy?’, in T.S. Murphy

and A.-K. Mustapha (eds) The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Volume 1, Resistance in

Practice (London: Pluto, 2005), pp. 73–106.

5. On Italian Trotskyism, see R. J. Alexander, International Trotskyism, 1929–1988:

A Documented Analysis of the Movement (Durham, NC, Duke University Press,

1991).

6. The post-Marxist Ernesto Laclau considers that Hardt and Negri do not sufﬁ-

ciently break with the essentialism of Marxist class politics. For Laclau, rev-

olutionary identity is the product of strategic thinking, that is a form of

politics which goes beyond the immediacy of what May terms ‘tactics’. See

David McLellan, Marxism After Marx (Fourth Edition) (London: Palgrave, 2007);

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290 Situating Hardt and Negri

Saul Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 2010). Ernesto Laclau ‘Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?’, in

P.A. Passavant and J. Dean (eds) Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri

(London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 21–30; and Todd May, The Political Philosophy of

Poststructuralist Anarchism (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press,

1994).

7. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 350.

8. Antonio. Negri ‘Lesson One: From the Factory of Strategy’, available online at

http://antonionegriinenglish.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/lesson-1-from-33-

lessons-on-lenin-for-a-marxist-reading-of-lenins-marxism/ (Accessed 20 June

2011).

9. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 234.

10. Negri, cited in Michael Hardt (2005) ‘Into the Factory: Negri’s Lenin and the Sub-

jective Caesura (1968–1973)’, in Timothy Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha,

The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Volume I –Resistance in Practice, (London: Pluto

Press, 2005), p. 13.

11. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975).

12. Karl Marx, ‘The Holy Family’, in D. McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings

(Second Edition) (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2000), pp. 145–169.

13. Karl Marx, ‘On Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy’, in David McLellan (ed.), Karl

Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 607. See also

Engels’ letter to Cuno of 1872, where Engels writes: ‘Bakunin maintains that it is

the state which has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by the

grace of the state. As, therefore, the state is the chief evil, it is above all the state

which must be done away with and then capitalism will go to blazes of itself.’

F. Engels, ‘Letter to Theodore Cuno in Milan in 1872’, in Marx-Engels: Selected

Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p.257.

14. M. Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, M. Shatz (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1990) p. 142.

15. SeeE.H.Carr,Michael Bakunin (London: London, 1937). See also A.W. Gouldner,

‘Marx’s Last Battle: Bakunin and the International’, Theory and Society (Vol. 11,

No. 6, 1982) pp. 853–884.

16. V. I. Lenin, (1901) ‘Theses on Anarchism and Socialism’, available online at http://

www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/dec/31.htm (Accessed 18 April

2011).

17. V. I. Lenin, (1905) ‘Socialism and Anarchism’, available online at http://www.

marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/nov/24.htm (Accessed 18 April 2011).

Stalin, writing in 1906–1907, took seriously Lenin’s line of critique. Thus he

wrote that: ‘Some people believe that Marxism and anarchism are based on

the same principles and that disagreements between them concern only tactics,

so that, in the opinion of these people, it is quite impossible to draw a con-

trast between these two trends [...]This is a great mistake [...] We believe that

anarchists are the real enemies of Marxism.’ J. Stalin ‘Anarchism or Socialism’,

available online at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1906/

12/x01.htm (Accessed 23 May 2011).

18. V. I. Lenin, (1912) ‘The Italian Socialist Congress’, available online at http://www.

marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/jul/15b.htm (Accessed 18 April 2011).

19. V. I. Lenin, What is to Be Done? (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1947); One Step

Forwards, Two Steps Backwards (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1947).

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David Bates 291

20. V. I. Lenin (1922) ‘Letter to Congress’, available online at http://www.marxists.

org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/congress.htm (Accessed 22 May

2011).

21. V. I. Lenin (1917) The State and Revolution, available online at http://www.

marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ (Accessed 22 May 2011).

22. R. Luxemburg ‘Organisational Questions of the Social Democracy’; and ‘The Mass

Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, in M. A. Waters (ed.), Rosa

Luxemburg Speaks (New York: Pathﬁnder Press, 1970) pp. 112–130 and 153–218

respectively.

23. See Hardt, ‘Into the Factory’; David Bates ‘Reading Negri’, Critique, 49 (31/3)

pp. 465–482.

24. Antonio Negri, ‘Workers’ Party Against Work’, in T. S. Murphy (ed.), Books for

Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (London: Verso, 2005)

pp. 51–117.

25. A. Negri ‘What to Do Today with What Is to Be Done?, or, Rather: The Body of

the General Intellect’, in S. Budgen, S. Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek (eds) Lenin

Reloaded: Towards a Politics of the Truth (Durham and London: Duke University

Press, 2007), p. 301.

26. Antonio Negri, (2008) Reﬂections on Empire (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), pp. 145.

27. Negri, Reﬂections on Empire, pp. 144–145.

28. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 350.

29. Ibid., p. 294.

30. Ibid., p. 413.

31. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).

32. Michael Hardt ‘The Common in Communism’, in C. Douzinas and S. Žižek (eds)

The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010), p. 131.

33. Antonio Negri ‘Communism: Some Thoughts on the Concept and Practice’, in

Douzinas and Žižek, TheIdeaofCommunism,p. 159.

34. Ibid., pp. 158–159.

35. Ibid., p. 161.

36. To the extent at least that Blond maintains that ‘state socialism’ undermined

a working-class capacity for ‘self-help’ and self-organisation – a capacity which

had been particularly strong in the nineteenth century. For Blond, of course, the

working class ought still to know its place. For Negri, statism stiﬂes revolutionary

capacity. See P. Blond, Red Toryism (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), especially

Chapter 5.

37. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. xii–xii.

38. Antonio Negri, The Porcelain Workshop (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotex(e), 2008), p. 22.

39. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One (London: Allen Lane, 1979),

p. 137.

40. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 23–24.

41. Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism, p. 62.

42. Michel Foucault, cited in J. Bernauer and M. Mahon, ‘The Ethics of Michael

Foucault’, in G. Gutting (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994),p. 153.

43. Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism, p. 93. A brief word of caution against

Newman’s reading of Laclau and Mouffe, for Laclau and Mouffe do not, I think,

fall prey to the type of state reductionism which Newman suggests. Gramsci –

on whom Laclau and Mouffe draw heavily, if critically – formulated his concept

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292 Situating Hardt and Negri

of the ‘integral state’ to move beyond a liberal understanding of sovereignty.

And Laclau and Mouffe take this line of thought further, arguing for a discursive

‘anti-essentialist’ understanding of power, where power is an effect of discursive

practices which permeate every aspect of the ‘impossible object’ called ‘society’.

This involves a rejection of the base-superstructure ‘metaphor’, and any a priori

understanding of power, whether this emphasises ‘the state’ or ‘the economy’.

This said, I would argue that the political project of ‘radical democracy’ emerging

from Laclau and Mouffe’s thought, in the end, is radical in name only, for the

authors reject all types of large-scale social transformation, or meta-narrative of

human emancipation.

44. Ibid., p. 178.

45. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 54.

46. See K. Weeks ‘The Refusal of Work as Demand and Perspective’, in Murphy and

Mustapha, The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, pp. 109–135.

47. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).

48. Negri, ‘Workers’ Party Against Work (1973)’, p. 75.

49. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 54.

50. Hardt and Negri, Empire,p.61.

51. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 351.

52. Ibid., p. 136.

53. Ibid., p. 347.

54. Ibid., p. 106.

55. E. Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), p. 143.

56. Stallybrass writes: ‘Before Marx, proletarian [prolétaire] was one of the central sig-

niﬁers of the passive spectacle of poverty. In England, Dr Johnson had deﬁned

proletarian in his Dictionary (1755) as ‘mean; wretched; vile; vulgar’, and the word

seems to have had a similar meaning in France in the early nineteenth century,

where it was used virtually interchangeably with nomade’. Staylbrass, cited in

Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 143.

57. See Hal Draper, ‘The Principle of Self-Emancipation in Marx and Engels’,

R. Miliband and J. Saville (eds) The Socialist Register (London: Merlin, 1971),

pp. 81–109; C. Johnson ‘The Problem of Reformism in Marx’s Theory of

Fetishism’, New Left Review, 119 (January–February 1980), pp. 71–96.

58. See Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books); N. Poulantzas,

Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975).

59. Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, especially chapters 3, 4 and 5.

60. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).

61. Paul Hayes, ‘Utopia and the Lumpenproletariat: Marx’s Reasoning in “The

Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”’, The Review of Politics, 50/3 (1988),

p. 447.

62. Laclau, On Populist Reason, pp. 143–144.

63. F. Engels, ‘Preface to The Peasant War in Germany’, in Marx and Engels: Selected

Wor ks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968), p. 229.

64. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto,inD.McLellan(ed.)Karl Marx:

Selected Writings (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 254.

65. Marx in Hayes, ‘Utopia and the Lumpenproletariat’, p. 449.

66. Michael Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, K. J. Kenaﬁck (ed. and trans.)

(London: Freedom Press, 1990), p. 48.

67. See for example, Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 146.

68. Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism, p. 38.

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-293 9780230280373

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David Bates 293

69. See S. Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan (Plymouth: Lexiton Books, 2007), p. 28.

70. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 30.

71. D. Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1999);

M. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Volume 1 (Second Edition) (London:

Blackwell, 2000).

72. E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985),

p. 4.

73. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 106.

74. Ibid., p. 107.

75. Ibid., p. 135.

76. Ibid., p. 134.

77. M. Hardt and A. Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press), p. 40.

78. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 157.

79. Ibid., p. 129.

80. See D. Byrne, Social Exclusion (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999);

W. J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987).

81. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 215.

82. Ibid., p. 215.

83. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 2.

84. See, for example, E. O. Wright, Class Counts (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1997).

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Conclusion: Towards a

Libertarian Socialism for

the Twenty-First Century?

Saku Pinta and David Berry

There is something that has amazed and even shocked me for a long

time. There is a tragicomical paradox in the spectacle of people who

claim to be revolutionary, who wish to overthrow the world and at

the same time try to cling at all costs to a reference system, who

would feel lost if the author or the system which guarantees the

truth of what they believe, were to be taken away from them. How

is it possible not to see that these people place themselves by their

own volition in a position of mental subjection to a work which

is already there, which has mastered a truth which henceforth can

only be interpreted, reﬁned, patched up?

Cornelius Castoriadis1

It is difﬁcult to imagine the ‘Black and Red’ conference (in which this volume

originated) having been conceived of, were it not for the epochal events of

the 1980s and 1990s and the subsequent depolarisation of global politics,

the generalised ideological crisis of the Left and the increased ‘illegibility’ of

many social struggles since then, the emergence of movements of resistance

to globalised capital such as zapatismo (seen by some as ‘post-ideological’2)

and the blossoming of the worldwide ‘movement of movements’ and the

associated Social Forums.3The corollary of this seems to have been not only

a renewed interest in the history and theory of anarchisms (in Europe and

North America, at least), but also a new willingness to revisit the essential-

ist tribalism that has arguably always (but especially since the Comintern’s

‘Bolshevisation’ of the mid-1920s) characterised the Left. Many would con-

cur with John Holloway’s remark that ‘One thing that is new and exciting

about the re-articulation of ideas is that the old divisions between anarchism

and Marxism are being eroded.’4These re-examinations of how anarchist

and communist theories and practices interact – and how some of the old

divisions within the radical Left milieu might be overcome – have acquired

294

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Saku Pinta and David Berry 295

a renewed sense of urgency following the 2008 economic and ﬁnancial crisis

and the search for a new emancipatory politics. David Harvey, in a recent

discussion of the changing nature of present-day anticapitalist movements,

stated:

Contemporary attempts to revive the communist hypothesis typically

abjure state control and look to other forms of collective social organ-

isation [...] .Horizontally networked, as opposed to hierarchically com-

manded, systems of coordination between autonomously organised and

self-governing collectives of producers and consumers are envisaged as

lying at the core of a new form of communism . [...]All manner of

small-scale experiments around the world can be found in which such

economic and political forms are being constructed. In this there is a

convergence of some sort between the Marxist and anarchist traditions

that harks back to the broadly collaborative situation between them in

the 1860s in Europe before their break-up into warring camps after the

Paris Commune in 1871 and the blow-up between Karl Marx and one of

the leading radicals of the time, the anarchist Michael Bakunin, in 1872.5

The reference to the hoary old story of Marx versus Bakunin might seem tire-

some, but interestingly echoes the theme of a conference held in Paris a few

years ago – organised largely by militants associated with the Trotskyist Ligue

Communiste Révolutionnaire, the libertarian communist Alternative Libertaire

and syndicalists from the SUD (Solidaires Unitaires Démocratiques) unions –

which took as its starting point a return to the history of the First Interna-

tional. The point, however, was not to rehearse the divergences and conﬂicts,

or to attempt to apportion blame – all of which has been done quite enough

already by both ‘sides’. It was to hold up the story of the International

Working Men’s Association as ‘an interesting example for the future’, ‘a

democratic, multiple, diverse, internationalist movement’ in which both

Marxists and anarchists (among others) participated, and where ‘it was pos-

sible for distinct, if not opposed, political options to converge in reﬂection

and in action over several years, playing a major role in the ﬁrst great mod-

ern proletarian revolution. An International where libertarians and Marxists

were able – despite conﬂicts – to work together and engage in common

actions.’6

The purpose of this collection of papers has been similarly to provide a

back-story, as it were, to these developments: to rediscover the lost histo-

ries of a libertarian socialist tradition – an ideological current effectively

blurring the boundaries between anarchist and Marxist variants of revolu-

tionary socialist thought – and to open up debate about the development

of socialist ideologies by re-examining the relationship between Marxism

and anarchism – or rather between Marxisms and anarchisms – emphasising

the complexities and the convergences, but also engaging with the very real

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296 Conclusion

divergences not only between Marxism and anarchism, but also between

different Marxisms and between different anarchisms.

Indeed, as was noted in the introduction to this volume and has been

made abundantly clear by more than one contribution, one of the standard

features of established socialist and labour historiography has been to reduce

the complexity of multiple anarchisms and multiple Marxisms. The result

has been an ahistorical portrayal of ‘anarchism’ that routinely lumps indi-

vidualists together with advocates of collective social action, and an equally

ahistorical and reductionist ‘Marxism’ that fails to differentiate between sep-

arate trends in this tradition, often assumed to be Leninist, similarly to the

way in which ‘communism’ is often equated with Stalinism by antisocial-

ists or anticommunists. Articles and books which draw a bold, unbroken

and unproblematic line between ‘authoritarian’ and ‘anti-authoritarian’

socialisms are legion.7

One of the conclusions that may be drawn from the examinations of revo-

lutionary socialist theory and history offered in this volume, is that any such

schematic division of the Left along anarchist and Marxist lines is highly

problematic, and furthermore, that if we are to accept a dividing line in

the socialist tradition between ‘libertarian’ and ‘authoritarian’ currents, then

this does not neatly correspond to anarchist and Marxist ideological des-

ignations. In addition to the fact that multiple anarchisms and Marxisms

throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been, and

continue to be, internally divided on a variety of strategic and theoretical

matters, it is equally clear that those currents on both ‘sides’ of the anarchist-

Marxist ‘divide’ most concerned with working-class self-organisation have

displayed a remarkable degree of commonality, as have, ironically perhaps,

variants of both traditions that have routinely been viewed as diametrically

opposed. One could argue, for example, that there is a similarity between

the ‘substitutionism’ of anarchist ‘illegalists’ or proponents of ‘propaganda

by the deed’ – substituting the exemplary actions of activists as the spark

which will ignite spontaneous mass revolt – with the leadership role assigned

by some Leninists to an avant-garde party composed of enlightened profes-

sional revolutionaries substituted for a similarly conceived mass of followers.

Victor Serge, more than any other historical revolutionary ﬁgure, perhaps

best exempliﬁes this unusual convergence of perspectives, shifting from a

vocal and active advocate of individualist anarchism to, at a later stage,

a member of the Russian Communist Party (employed as a journalist, edi-

tor, and translator with the Communist International) – ending his political

trajectory as a Trotskyist and an anti-Stalinist socialist critic of the Soviet

Union. Historically, it has proved quite possible to make the rather short

conceptual leap from a Stirnerite or Nietzschean idea of a ruthless egoist

or overman – and associated negative or paternalistic attitudes towards the

‘mass’ or ‘herd’ – to the embrace of a powerful political elite.8Conversely,

the evolutionary approach typically identiﬁed with the reformist tendencies

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Saku Pinta and David Berry 297

in social democracy – focused on gradual and piecemeal changes to the exist-

ing system – have certain parallels with ‘liberal’ anarchisms which similarly

advocate the construction of various counter institutions and lifestyles as a

moral rebellion against the state and capital.

Tensions and debates, common to both anarchists and Marxists, sur-

rounding appropriate forms of organisation have frequently arisen, although

often employing different political vocabulary. The ‘party’ as interpreted by

anti-parliamentary Marxists – as an organisation uniting the most politi-

cally advanced and conscious elements of the working class – has parallels

with, for example, the General Union of Anarchists as elaborated by the

platformist-Makhnovists; similarly, there are parallels between the outright

rejection of these political formations – in favour of looser groupings or

strictly autonomous labour combinations – both by Marxists such as Otto

Rühle as well as by anarchists such as Voline.9(Indeed it is perhaps worth

mentioning here that before the term ‘party’ acquired its modern mean-

ing, and in particular prior to its association with Bolshevik conceptions,

anarchist-communists such as Errico Malatesta and Peter Kropotkin spoke of

forming anarchist ‘parties’, and the term ‘vanguard’ – adopted as the name

of one US anarchist-communist journal10 – was embraced by anarchists.)

Debates surrounding the ‘transitional period’ – describing, or speculating,

how a society might undergo the transformation from capitalism to commu-

nism and what (if any) intermediate steps are to be deemed necessary in this

process – have proved to be another traditional dividing point between some

anarchists and Marxists, raising further matters of contention – crucially, the

role of the state in social change (and the nature of that state). Again, this

matter is not always so clear cut. One variation of the ‘transition period’, the

‘two stage’ theory most closely associated with the Social Democratic parties

of the Second International as well as with Stalinist orthodoxy, suggests that

societies (above all economically ‘underdeveloped’ societies) would ﬁrst have

to pass through a capitalist stage of economic development in order to build

the industrial and technological foundations necessary to support a socialist

economy – ‘socialist’ meaning yet another transitional stage of state owner-

ship of productive assets prior to the emergence of full-blown communism.11

Although couched in Marxist terminology the stagist strategy, the emphasis

which it placed on the state as a key instrument for social change, and its

political consequences were not accepted by all Marxists. Moreover, while it

is true that Marx himself remained rather vague or ambiguous about how

he envisaged the process of a revolutionary transformation (at least up to

the Paris Commune in 1871), the familiar accusation of a thoroughly ‘deter-

minist’ and ‘teleological’ Marx has also been contested.12 Another variation

on the ‘transitional period’ theme, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, is

often understood to mean an authoritarian and centralised state controlled

by a political elite. Anarchists have criticised this political form as totalitar-

ian and as tending towards a permanent (rather than transitional) existence,

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298 Conclusion

and claimed that the results of this transitional period were foreseen by

Bakunin in his warnings of Marx’s ‘red bureaucracy’. Instead, anarchists have

posed the alternative of an immediate dissolution of the state following a

revolutionary upheaval. However, the interpretation of the ‘dictatorship of

the proletariat’ as the armed suppression of bourgeois counter-revolution

under the direction of democratic workers’ councils, embraced by councilists

and other anti-state Marxist groupings, also ﬁnds (controversial) parallels in

anarchist praxis in the militias of revolutionary Ukraine and Spain.

These theoretical or practical convergences, if routinely ignored or

unacknowledged, are unsurprising when considering the variety of inter-

pretations and geographic spread of these ideas and practices since the

mid-nineteenth century. However, convergences are all the more notable

when considering those currents, such as the ones primarily discussed in this

volume, associated with working-class movements. If one were to exclude

from consideration, on the one hand, individualist, anti-organisational,

market-oriented or non-socialist currents from the broad anarchist tradi-

tion, and on the other, reformist, electoralist or state-centric approaches

most often associated with the two dominant expressions of Marxism in

the twentieth century (social democracy and Bolshevism), the grey area

between these positions – what has sometimes been referred to as ‘libertarian

socialism’ or ‘libertarian communism’ (despite the lack of any universally

accepted usage of these terms) – display a number of common commit-

ments and considerations: the role assigned to the working class as the

social grouping most clearly associated with carrying out the task of human

liberation; an anti-parliamentary disposition, rejecting the formal political

democracy (as opposed to, and distinct from, economic democracy) of bour-

geois parliaments or participation in electoral activity as effective methods

for advancing social change; working-class self-activity and direct action as

both a method for circumventing mediating bureaucracies, argued to stiﬂe

initiative and channel grievances into acceptable areas, and as a way to forge

solidarities and create a sense of collective workers’ power.

Few sustained or conscious instances of such an alliance – the merger

of an anarchistic insistence on non-hierarchical organisation and anti-

authoritarian praxis and a Marxist critique of alienation and capitalist social

relations – are evident through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The ‘revolutionary industrial unionism’ of the Industrial Workers of the

World (IWW) – distinct from, but with more than a passing family resem-

blance to, revolutionary syndicalism – is one prominent example.13 Indeed

for union organiser and labour historian Fred Thompson, the IWW rep-

resented a working-class ‘Marxism in overalls’.14 Small wonder, then, that

the IWW has served as a major reference point for multiple anarchist and

Marxist currents.15

Syndicalism early on, itself a fairly heterogeneous form of working-class

radicalism, was viewed by many as a synthesis of anarchist and Marxist

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Saku Pinta and David Berry 299

perspectives through the avowal of class struggle combined with a rejec-

tion of electoralism (see Lewis Mates’ contribution to this volume). French

‘anarcho-Marxist’ syndicalist Georges Sorel was but one theorist who, as

Renzo Llorente points out, acknowledged an intellectual debt to both Marx

and the anarchists. The Hungarian revolutionary Ervin Szabó (1877–1918)

would be another example. However, as syndicalism began to adopt a more

consciously anarchist political orientation in the 1920s, theorists such as

Rudolf Rocker began to distance themselves from Marxist contributions to

syndicalist theory (and for their open acceptance of Marxist categories and

terminology, the IWW was excluded by Rocker from the anarcho-syndicalist

tradition).16

‘The revolutionary syndicalism of the early twentieth century,’ writes his-

torian Vadim Damier, ‘was not born in the heads of theoreticians,’ but rather

developed through ‘the practice of the workers’ movement which sought its

own doctrine – above all, the practice of direct action’ and only subsequently

was it theorised.17 Similarly, periods of revolutionary upheaval and collec-

tive action, more than philosophical speculation, have contributed to the

forging of common perspectives between self-identiﬁed revolutionary anar-

chists and Marxists in the years following the First World War. Speciﬁcally,

the workers’ council, as a directly democratic social form preﬁguring post-

capitalist economic and social arrangements emerging from actual workers’

struggles, became a central organisational concept through the interwar

period (and beyond). The workers’ councils were embraced by revolutionary

Marxists (ranging from the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch-German

council communists to the defenders of the Italian factory occupations like

Antonio Gramsci); anarchists such as the Ukrainian Makhnovschina or the

positions adopted by the Friends of Durruti group in the Spanish Revolution

and Civil War in 1937; as well as more variegated political constellations,

for example, the Kronstadt naval mutineers in 1921 and their demands for

democracy in the soviets against single-party rule. In the late 1940s, council

communist theorist Anton Pannekoek came to the view that the workers’

council form had effectively synthesised anarchist notions of liberty and

spontaneity with Marxist conceptions of class struggle and working-class

organisation, and as a result, had transcended the limitations of both pre-war

‘classical anarchism’ and ‘orthodox Marxism’.18

Also drawing inspiration from workers’ councils, in the postwar era, were

groups of activists such as Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationists in

France, the Facing Reality group in the USA, Solidarity in the UK, and others

who saw the continued relevance of this social form in its re-emergence in

the Hungarian workers’ struggle in 1956.19 Indeed, for some the Hungarian

workers’ councils – like the 1905 soviets and the soviets or workers’ coun-

cils thrown up during and immediately after the First World War – were a

revelation and it is clear from a number of the contributions to this vol-

ume how important they were in the development of new thinking among

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300 Conclusion

revolutionaries. This was not only important with regard to the develop-

ment of non-Leninist Marxism, but also for many on the radical Left who

were committed to creating something new and innovative beyond standard

divisions. An editorial written by the Aberdeen Solidarity group expressed

this desire to overcome sectarian divisions, stating that ‘It is often said by

Solidarists that Marxists call us anarchists and anarchists call us Marxists.

This paradox is a result of the inability of traditional revolutionaries to

understand anything which falls outwith their own outdated categories.’20

The recovery of the workers’ councils paved the way for a renewed

interest in self-management or autogestion in the 1960s and 1970s and

beyond. For many this was connected to an analysis of post-1945 tech-

nocratic modernisation, managerialism, bureaucratisation: self-management

thus acquired heightened importance, implying the need to abolish not just

capitalist property relations but also the bureaucratic/manager ‘class’ – what

Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel would later call ‘co-ordinatorism’.21 The

critique of the domination of economic and political life by ‘bureaucratism’

became a major focus of both anarchists and Marxists, and was directed

by many at both modern capitalism/state capitalism and Leninist organisa-

tional conceptions. This was often connected, as we can see in the papers by

Jean-Christophe Angaut, Toby Boraman and Benoît Challand, to a reﬂection

on alienation in modern capitalist society, and a new focus on the quality

of everyday life. Modern capitalism was to be analysed as a total social, cul-

tural and even aesthetic system – a system that had extended its dominance

beyond the immediate ‘point of production’. As Guérin remarked (in 1969)

when quizzed by a journalist about the simultaneous appearance of two of

his books, one on libertarian Marxism and the other on the sexual revolu-

tion: ‘The libertarian critique of the bourgeois regime is not possible without

a critique of bourgeois mores. The revolution cannot be simply political.

It must be, at the same time, both cultural and sexual and thus transform

every aspect of life and of society . [...] The revolt of the spring of 68 rejected

all the faces of subjugation.’22

If there are many examples of convergence and overlap, there are also

clearly a number of tensions which go beyond reciprocated complaints of

caricatural misrepresentation. An important one – perhaps the fundamental

one – is the question of the limits to individual freedom, a point discussed

here by Paul Blackledge, and also raised by Ruth Kinna in the context of

Morris’ criticism of the anarchists, who for him were all individualists. This

has historically been a matter of debate and even a source of conﬂict between

anarchists, too, with the platformists notably arguing that the insistence on

the absolute freedom of the individual so beloved of many anarchists was

incompatible with the effectiveness of a revolutionary movement. (Indeed

Matthew Wilson has recently argued convincingly that an unacknowledged

problem in contemporary anarchism is that the concept of freedom is inade-

quately worked out.23) Like Paul Thomas before him, Blackledge argues that

this represents a fundamental philosophical divide between Marxism and

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Saku Pinta and David Berry 301

anarchism – even social anarchism.24 He nevertheless concedes that there

was greater convergence between Marx and Bakunin than there had been

between Marx and Proudhon – Donald Clark Hodges, as Renzo Llorente

points out, described Bakunin as ‘the ﬁrst anarcho-Marxist’25 – and it is surely

clear from a number of contributions to this volume that some Marxist cur-

rents’ views have been entirely compatible with the anarchist critique of

hierarchy, centralisation and authoritarian organisation.

Another issue which has continued to be much debated – although as

much between anarchists as between anarchists and Marxists – has been the

question of the historic agent of change. C. Wright Mills and others associ-

ated with the New Left were critical of what seemed to them to be the ‘labour

metaphysic’ of European revolutionaries, condemning it as ‘a legacy from

Victorian Marxism’ which had become ‘unrealistic’ in the light of economic,

social and cultural change.26 For such activists, the modern radicals were the

intelligentsia, in particular the young intelligentsia. Although some anar-

chists, especially individualists, have always been drawn to social marginals,

the so-called ‘lumpenproletariat’, to déclassé bohemians – the ‘outsider’ as

the title of E. Armand’s individualist organ l’en dehors had it – anarchist

communists and syndicalists have tended to be just as oriented towards the

working class and organised labour as Marxists. As is made clear in con-

tributions to this collection, redeﬁnitions of the working class prompted

both by social change and by shifts in analytical frames have represented

an area of (qualiﬁed) convergence between social anarchists, syndicalists

and Marxists in the twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst centuries. Andrew Cornell,

emphasising the importance of the conditions that produce convergence

(often movements of opposition to racism, colonialism and war), points out

the impact of the US civil rights movement in breaking down some anar-

chists’ attachment to a focus on class and state. The same can of course be

said of second-wave feminism.

Can the often violent history of Left sectarianism be overcome in the

interests of the common objective of realising an emancipatory society in

which ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free develop-

ment of all’? Perhaps the answer to this question lies less in the activities

and mutual recriminations of groupuscules and revolutionary formulae con-

cocted in sterile theoretical laboratories, and more in relating to, learning

and drawing inspiration from social struggles. History, it might be said, is a

good teacher but a poor master in that we can only draw lessons from our

collective experiences but should be wary of colouring our expectations of

the future too neatly with past events.

Notes

1. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Marx aujourd’hui. Entretien avec Cornelius Castoriadis’,

Lutter! 5 (May–August 1983), pp. 15–18; quotation 18. Original translation by

Franco Schiavoni for the January 1984 issue of the Australian magazine Thesis

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-302 9780230280373

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302 Conclusion

Eleven, amended and corrected by Castoriadis himself for Solidarity. A Journal of

Libertarian Socialism no.17 (Summer 1988), pp. 7–15. Available online: http://

www.rebeller.se/m.html (accessed 12 June 2012). I would like to thank the edi-

tors of this site, Tankar från rebeller, for permission to reproduce this quotation as

an epigraph. (All other translations from the French are by David Berry.)

2. Simon Tormey, Anti-capitalism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2004).

3. Léon Crémieux, ‘Mouvement social, anti-mondialisation et nouvelle Interna-

tionale’, Contretemps 6 (February 2003), pp. 12–18.

4. ‘ “Walking, We ask Questions”: An Interview with John Holloway’, by Marina

A. Sitrin in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory (Fall 2004), available online: http://

www.leftturn.org/?q=node/363 (accessed 26 July 2010).

5. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capital (London: Proﬁle Books, 2010),

p. 225. See also ‘Andrej Grubaˇ

ci´

c: Libertarian Socialism for the Twenty-First Cen-

tury’ in Sasha Lilley, Capital and its Discontents. Conversations with Radical Thinkers

in a Time of Tumult (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), pp. 246–257.

6. Philippe Corcuff and Michaël Löwy, ‘Pour une Première Internationale au XXIe

siècle’, Contretemps 6 (February 2003), 9.

7. For a detailed analysis, see Saku Pinta, Towards a Libertarian Communism: A Con-

ceptual History of the Intersections between Anarchisms and Marxisms (Unpublished

PhD thesis, Loughborough University, 2012).

8. See Part I of David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945

(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009).

9. Otto Rühle, ‘The Revolution Is Not A Party Affair’ (1920), Marxists

Internet Archive, http://www.Marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1920/ruhle02.htm [19

November 2011]. Voline, The Unknown Revolution, 1917–1921 (New York: Free

Life Editions, 1974 [ﬁrst published in 1947, in French]).

10. Vanguard: A Libertarian Communist Journal, edited by Sam Dolgoff et al.,was

published in New York, 1932–1939.

11. As Maximilien Rubel points out ‘The terms “socialism” and “communism” ’ may

be used interchangeably ‘as there is no distinction between society and the

community, so social ownership and communal ownership are equally indistin-

guishable. Contrary to Lenin’s assertions, socialism is not a partial and incomplete

ﬁrst stage of communism.’ Maximilien Rubel and John Crump (eds), Non-Market

Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: MacMillan Press,

1987), 1.

12. See Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-

Western Societies (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Teodor

Shanin (ed.), Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘the Peripheries of Capitalism’

(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).

13. See Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe (eds), Revolutionary Syndicalism:

An International Perspective (Aldershot: Scolar, 1990); Ralph Darlington,

Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism: An International Comparative Study

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Vadim Damier, Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20th Century

(Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2009); Wayne Thorpe, ‘Uneasy Family: Revolution-

arySyndicalisminEuropefromtheCharte d’Amiens to World War I’ in David

Berry and Constance Bantman (eds), New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and

Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational (Newcastle upon

Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 16–42.

14. Quoted in Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary

Workingclass Counterculture (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2003), pp. 19.

July 24, 2012 17:41 MAC/LNSM Page-303 9780230280373

PROOF

Saku Pinta and David Berry 303

15. For the IWW and autonomist Marxists see Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class

Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London and Sterling,

Virginia: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 176–196.

16. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press,

1989), pp. 137.

17. Vadim Damier, Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20th Century, p. 23.

18. John Gerber, Anton Pannekoek and the Socialism of Workers’ Self-Emancipation 1873–

1960. (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers and Amsterdam:

International Institute of Social History, 1989), pp. 198.

19. On Solidarity, see Maurice Brinton, For Workers’ Power. The Selected Writings

of Maurice Brinton (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004), ed. David Goodway. Brinton’s

writings can be found both on the Libcom website (http://libcom.org/tags/

maurice-brinton) and on the Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.Marxists.org/

archive/brinton/index.htm).

20. ‘Editorial’ in Solidarity Aberdeen 3 (1969), pp. 1–2.

21. Michael Albert & Robin Hahnel, Looking Forward: Participatory Economics For The

Twenty First Century (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1991); see also their

Unorthodox Marxism. An Essay on Capitalism, Socialism and Revolution (Cambridge,

MA: South End Press, 1978).

22. Le Monde, 15 November 1969.

23. Matthew Wilson, Rules without Rulers: The possibilities and limits of anarchism

(Unpublished PhD thesis, Loughborough University, 2011).

24. Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: RKP, 1980).

25. Donald Clark Hodges, The Literate Communist: 150 Years of the Communist Man-

ifesto (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 113. Daniel Guérin often referred

approvingly to the argument in favour of a synthesis of Marx and Bakunin by

H.-E. Kaminski in his Bakounine. La vie d’un révolutionnaire (Paris: La Table Ronde,

2003 [1938]).

26. C. Wright Mills, ‘Letter to the New Left’, New Left Review 5, September-October

1960, http://www.Marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.

htm [20 November 2011].

The Rise of ‘Illiberal’ Democracy: The Orbánization of Hungarian Political Culture

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This article examines the rise of the political right and far-right in Hungarian political culture. It highlights the contribution that world-systems analysis can bring to an historical sociological understanding of the concept of political culture, with a particular focus on contemporary Hungary. Many commentators are asking: how it can be that 30 years of democratic transition has led to the dominance in Hungary of a politics of intolerance, illiberalism and ethno-Nationalism, as manifested in both the current government, Fidesz, and the neo-fascist party, Jobbik. This paper argues that the correct way to frame the question is to ask: why, given the legacy of authoritarian social and political movements that have shaped Hungary’s modern history, should a stable, liberal, political culture emerge after communism? Instead what the paper shows is that the goals of classical liberalism and a liberal political culture have long been destroyed by three factors: capitalism; the nation-state; and the persistence of traditional and sometimes irrational forms of social hierarchy, prejudice and authority. Hungary’s current Orbánisation reflects an on-going tension between liberal and illiberal tendencies, the latter being part of the foundations of the modern world-system. Rather than viewing Hungary as a dangerous exception to be quarantined by the European Union, it should be recognised that the political right in Hungary is linked to broader trends across the world-system that foster intolerance and other anti-enlightenment and socially divisive tendencies. Political cultures polarised by decades of neoliberal reforms and in which there is no meaningful socialist alternative have reduced Hungary’s elite political debates to the choice of either neoliberalism or ethnonationalism, neither of which is likely to generate socially progressive solutions to its current problems.

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Alex Prichard

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Antonio Roman-Alcala

This paper applies an anarchist lens to agrarian politics, seeking to expand and enhance inquiry in critical agrarian studies. Anarchism's relevance to agrarian processes is found in three general areas: (1) explicitly anarchist movements, both historical and contemporary; (2) theories that emerge from and shape these movements; and (3) implicit anarchism found in values, ethics, everyday practices, and in forms of social organization – or ‘anarchistic’ elements of human social life. Insights from anarchism are then applied to the problematique of the contemporary rise of ‘authoritarian populism’ and its relation to rural people and agrarian processes, focusing on the United States. Looking via an anarchist lens at this case foregrounds the state powers and logics that underpin authoritarian populist political projects but are created and reproduced by varying political actors; emphasizes the complex political identities of non-elite people, and the ways these can be directed towards either emancipatory or authoritarian directions based on resentments towards state power and identifications with grassroots, lived moral economies; and indicates the strategic need to prioritize ideological development among diverse peoples, in ways that provide for material needs and bolster lived moral economies. The paper concludes with implications for the theory and practice of emancipatory politics.

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The emergence of the Gilet Jaunes has seen a section of the popular classes present a significant challenge to the elite-driven ideological frameworks that have dominated since the end of the cold war: neoliberalism and the Clash of Civilisations. What Immanuel Wallerstein calls ‘centrist liberalism’ has been the dominant ideological foundation of the modern world-system since the late nineteenth century. Its current form, neoliberalism, is in crisis across the core of the world-system, intensified following the Great Recession of 2008. This has invited new challenges from revived and reconstituted political formations of both right and left. Populist movements are a part of this process of ideological reconstitution, and the Gilets Jaunes are an important example of progressive populism calling for social and economic justice. What was triggered by a protest directed at increased fuel taxes rapidly escalated into a much broader protest movement whose influence has spread beyond French borders. Importantly, the Gilet Jaunes have brought a layer of the French working-classes into the public realm in dramatic fashion, raising issues such as equality, public welfare, and participatory and direct democracy that challenge neo-liberal norms. The agenda that has emerged from the Gilet Jaunes illustrates the way in which a working-class left is being reconstituted in opposition to forces of the political right. The article addresses three main questions: Why have the Gilet Jaunes emerged? Who makes up these protests? What do they mean?

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In August of 1999, not too long before narratives of sex trafficking began to dominate prostitution policy debates, the residents of a small town in Nevada debated closing the city’s legal brothels. Citizens crowded the hearing hall, holding signs about protecting family and community values. But instead of opposing prostitution, as one might have expected, most public commenters echoed a sign that read, “Pro Family, Pro Prostitution.” Drawing on an analysis of the testimony of the 51 citizens in attendance at that public hearing and ethnographic data gathered in four visits to Evenheart over a 1-year period, this paper examines the arguments that framed support for, and opposition to, legal prostitution at this critical historic juncture. The research finds important differences in the ways particular neoliberal discourses can be deployed to the wide range of sexual, gender, and relationship values that constitute heterosexuality. Both supporters and opponents drew on market logics—defined for purposes of this paper as a neoliberal individualism and economic rationality of free trade, scarcity, competition, and self-regulation—as well as on discourses of morality and the family, but each side used them in strikingly different ways. Brothel supporters drew on market logics to defend and support individualized family values and a market-driven morality, while brothel opponents deployed market logics that supported conservative heteronormative values and morals. I suggest that these deployments of market logics, particularly among brothel supporters, are instances of “heteroflexibility” in neoliberal governance, that is, flexibility in the various gender, sexual, and relationship norms that collectively make up heterosexuality as an institution. Key to the intensity of heteroflexibility’s challenge to heterosexuality, both then and today, is whether market logics use free choice or protection discourses in the neoliberal governance of sexuality.

Crisis protests in Germany, Occupy Wall Street, and Mietsha user Syndikat: Antinomies of current Marxist- and anarchist-inspired movements and their convergence

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The theoretical and practical narrowings and possibilities of the cross-fertilisation of current Marxist- and anarchist-inspired movements are the subject of this paper. The main arguments are illustrated by an analysis of the crisis protests in Germany in 2009-2010 and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the USA. The German apartment-house syndicate (‘Mietshäuser Syndikat’) functions as an example showing how the different strategies of the two political strands can be combined in practice.

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The article traces nationalist polarization and divergence within the Ukrainian new left in response to the Maidan and Anti-Maidan protests in 2013-2014, and the military conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The ideological left-wing groups in the protests were too weak to push forward any independent progressive agenda. Instead of moving the respective campaigns to the left, they were increasingly converging with the right themselves and degraded into marginal supporters of either pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian camps in the conflict. The liberal and libertarian left supported the Maidan movement on the basis of abstract self-organization, liberal values and anti-authoritarianism. In contrast, the Marxist-Leninists attempted to seize political opportunities from supporting more plebeian and decentralized Anti-Maidan protests and reacting to the far-right threat after the Maidan victory. They deluded themselves that Russian nationalists were not as reactionary as their Ukrainian counterparts and that the world-system crisis allowed them to exploit Russian anti-American politics for progressive purposes.

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In the article that included several chapters that written by the researchers of the Institute of Europe analyzed the influence of the October Revolution of 1917 on the European policy. The authors made a conclusion that the Revolution had an impact on the social and economic landscape of the whole world including Europe. From one side because of the radical character of the social and economic transformations that were very attractive for the most part of the population of the planet. From another side because of the indisputable significance of the Russian potential for the world's policy and economy. The article touches the subjects of the Church question, Ukrainian question, German factor in the Revolution and also the influence of the Revolution on the economy and economic science.

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The year was 1969. In a Chicago courthouse, David Dellinger, one of the Chicago Eight, stood trial for conspiring to disrupt the National Democratic Convention. Dellinger, a long-time but relatively unknown activist, was suddenly, at fifty-three, catapulted into the limelight for his part in this intense courtroom drama.From obscurity to leader of the antiwar movement, David Dellinger is the first full biography of a man who bridged the gap between the Old Left and the New Left. Born in 1915 in the upscale Boston suburb of Wakefield to privilege, Dellinger attended Yale during the Depression, where he became an ardent pacifist and antiwar activist. Rejecting his parents' affluent lifestyle, he endured lengthy prison sentences as a conscientious objector to World War II and created a commune in northern New Jersey in the 1940s, a prototype for those to follow twenty years later. His instrumental role in the creation of Liberation magazine in 1956 launched him onto the national stage. Writing regular essays for the influential radical monthly on the arms race and the Civil Rights movement, he earned an audience among the New Left radicals. As anti-Vietnam sentiment grew, he became, in Abbie Hoffman's words, the father of the antiwar movement and the architect of the 1968 demonstrations in Chicago. He remained active in anti-war causes until his death on May 25, 2004 at age 88. Vilified by critics and glorified by supporters, Dellinger was a man of contradictions: a rigid Ghandian who nonetheless supported violent revolutionary movements; a radical thinker and gifted writer forced to work as a baker to feed his large family; and a charismatic leader who taught his followers to distrust all leaders. Along the way, he encountered Eleanor Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Black Panthers and all the other major figures of the American Left. The remarkable story of a stubborn visionary torn between revolution and compromise, David Dellinger reveals the perils of dissent in America through the struggles of one of our most important dissenters.

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