On May 3, the police attempted to occupy the Telephone Exchange, which was under the control of anarchist (and socialist) workers. In the Catalan metropolis, heart and symbol of the revolution, legal authority stopped at nothing in disarming whatever remained alive, spontaneous and anti-bourgeois. The local police, moreover, was in the hands of the PSUC. Confronted by an openly hostile power, the workers finally understood that this power was not their own, that they had given it the gift of their insurrection ten months earlier, and that their insurrection had been turned against them. In reaction to the power grab by the state, a general strike paralyzed Barcelona. It was too late. The workers still had the capacity to rise up against the state (this time in its democratic form), but they could no longer push their struggle to the point of an open break.
As always, the "social" question predominated over the military one. Legal authority could not impose itself by street battles. Within a few hours, instead of urban guerrilla warfare, a war of position, a face-off of apartment building against apartment building set in. It was a defensive stalemate in which no one could win because no one was attacking. With its own offensive bogged down, the police would not risk its forces in attacks on buildings held by the anarchists. Broadly speaking, the CP and the state held the centre of the city, while the CNT and the POUM held the working-class districts.
The status quo ultimately won out by political means. The masses placed their trust in the two organizations under attack, while the latter, afraid of alienating the state, got people to go back to work (though not without difficulty) and thereby undermined the only force capable of saving them politically and... "physically". As soon as the strike was over, knowing that it henceforth controlled the situation, the government brought in 6.000 Assault Guards, the elite of the police. Because they accepted the mediation of "representative organizations" and counsels of moderation from the POUM and the CNT, the very same masses who had defeated the fascist military in July 1936 surrendered without a fight to the Republican police in May 1937.
At that point, repression could begin. Only a few weeks were necessary to outlaw the POUM, to arrest its leaders, to kill them legally or otherwise, and to dispose of Nin. A parallel police was established, organized by the NKVD and the secret apparatus of the Comintern, and answering only to Moscow. Anyone showing the slightest opposition to the Republican state and its main ally, the USSR, could be denounced and hunted down as a "fascist", and all around the world an army of well-meaning, gentle souls would repeat the slander, some from ignorance, others from self-interest, but every one of them convinced that no denunciation was too excessive when fascism was on the march.
The fury unleashed against the POUM was no aberration. By opposing the Moscow Trials, the POUM condemned itself to be destroyed by a Stalinism locked in a merciless world struggle against its rivals for the control of the masses. At the time, not just CP fellow-travellers, but many political parties, lawyers, reporters and even the French League for the Rights of Man came out in endorsement of the guilt of the accused. Sixty years later, mainstream ideology sees these trials as a sign of the Kremlin's mad will to power. As if Stalinist crimes had nothing to do with anti-fascism! Anti-fascist logic will always align itself with the most moderate forces and always turn against the most radical ones.
On the purely political level, May 37 gave rise to what, a few months before, would have been unthinkable: a Socialist even farther to the right than Caballero, Negrin, heading a government which came down hard on the side of law and order, including open repression against the workers. Orwell - who almost lost his life in the events - realized that the war "for democracy" was obviously over:
"That meant that the general movement would be in the direction of some kind of fascism (...)"
What remained was a competition between two fascisms, Orwell wrote, with the difference that one was less inhuman than its rival: he therefore clung to the necessity of avoiding the "more naked and developed fascism of Hitler and Franco".�(7) From then on, the only issue was fighting for a fascism less bad than the opposing one... �
Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its "military" dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this "weapon". The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any non-violent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.
To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone's power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems, in short for everything that plays down the common man. In Spain, from the fall of 1936 onward, the revolution dissolved into the war effort and into a kind of combat typical of states: a war of fronts. Soon the working-class "militia man" evolved into a "soldier".
Formed into "columns", workers left Barcelona to defeat the fascists in other cities, starting from Zaragoza. Taking the revolution beyond areas under republican control, however, would have meant completing the revolution in the republican areas as well. But even Durruti did not seem to realize that the state was everywhere still intact. As his column (70% of whose members were anarchists) advanced, it extended the collectivizations: the militias helped the peasants and spread revolutionary ideas. But, however much Durruti declared that "these militias will never defend the bourgeoisie", they did not attack it either. Two weeks before his death, he delivered a speech broadcast on November 4, 1936:
"At the front and in the trenches there is only one idea and one aim - the destruction of fascism.
We call on the Catalan people to stop all internal conflicts and intrigues, to forget all jealousy and politics and to think of the war only. The politicians are only playing tricks to secure for themselves an agreeable life. This dubious art must be replaced by the art to work. The people of Catalonia must be worthy of their brothers fighting at the front. If the workers of Catalonia have taken the supreme task to fight at the different fronts, those living in towns and cities will also have to be mobilised to do their share. Our heroic militia, ready to lie down their lives on the battlefield want to be assured whom they have behind them. They feel that no one should be deterred from their duty because of lack of wage increase or shorter hours of work. Today all toilers and especially those of the CNT must be ready for the utmost sacrifices. For in that way alone can we hope to triumph over fascism.
I address myself to all organizations, asking them to bury their conflicts and grudges. (...)
The militarisation of the militias has been decreed. If
this has been done to frighten us, to impose on us an iron discipline,
this is a mistaken policy. We challenge those who have issued this decree
to come to the front and see for themselves our moral and our discipline
and compare it with the moral and discipline in the rear. We will not accept
dictated discipline. We are doing our duty. Come to the front to see our
organisation! Later we shall come to Barcelona to examine your discipline,
your organisation and your control!
�
There is no chaos at the front, no lack of discipline. We all have a strong sense of responsibility. We know what you have entrusted us with. You can sleep quietly. But remember we have left Barcelona in your hands. We demand responsibility and discipline from you too. Let us prove our capacity to prevent the creation of new differences after our war against fascism. Those who want their movement to be the strongest, are working in a wrong direction. Against tyranny there is only one front possible, one organization and only one sort of discipline." (Boletin de Informacion, CNT/AIT/FAI, Via Layetana, 32 y 34, Barcelona, November 11, 1936)
Listeners would think that a revolution had actually taken place, politically and socially, and just needed its military completion: smashing the fascists. Durruti and his comrades embodied an energy which had not waited for 1936 to storm the existing world. But all the combative will in the world is not enough when workers aim all their blows against one particular form of the state, and not against the state as such. In mid-1936, accepting a war of fronts meant leaving social and political weapons in the hands of the bourgeoisie behind the lines, and moreover meant depriving military action itself of the initial vigour it drew from another terrain, the only one where the proletariat has the upper hand. As the "Dutch Left" wrote:
"If the workers really want to build up a defence front against the Whites, they can only do so by taking over political power themselves, instead of leaving it in the hands of a Popular Front government. In other words, defending the revolution is only possible through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and not through the collaboration of all anti-fascist parties (...) Proletarian revolution revolves around the destruction of the old state machine, and the exercise of the central functions of power by the workers themselves." (P.I.C., published by the GIC, Amsterdam, October 1936)
In the summer of 1936, far from having decisive military superiority, the nationalists held no major city. Their main strength lay in the Foreign Legion and in the Moroccan "Moors". In 1912, Morocco had been split by France and Spain into two protectorates, but had long since rebelled against the colonial dreams of both countries. The Spanish royal army had been badly defeated there in 1921, largely due to the defection of Moroccan troops. Despite Franco-Spanish collaboration, the Rif war (in which a general named Franco had distinguished himself) ended only when Abd el-Krim surrendered in 1926. Ten years later, the announcement of immediate and unconditional independence for Spanish Morocco would, at minimum, have stirred up trouble among the shock troops of reaction. The Republic obviously gave short shrift to this solution, under a combined pressure from conservative milieus and from the democracies of England and France, which had little enthusiasm for the possible break-up of their own empires. At the very time, moreover, the French Popular Front not only refused to grant any reform worthy of any name to its colonial subjects, but dissolved the Etoile Nord-Africaine, a proletarian movement in Algeria.
Everyone knows that the policy of "non-intervention" in Spain was a farce. One week after the putsch, London announced its opposition to any arms shipment to what was then the legal Spanish government, and its neutrality in the event that France was drawn into a conflict. Democratic England thus put the Republic and fascism on the same level. As a result, the France of Blum and Thorez sent a few planes, while Italy and Germany sent whole divisions with their supplies. As for the International Brigades, controlled by the Soviet Union and the CPs, their military value came at a heavy price, namely the elimination of any opposition to Stalinism in working-class ranks. It was at the beginning of 1937, after the first arms shipments, that Catalonia removed Nin from his post as adviser to the Ministry of Justice.
Rarely has the narrow conception of history as a list of battles, cannons and strategies been more inept in explaining the course of a directly "social" war, shaped as it was by the internal dynamic of anti-fascism. Revolutionary elan initially broke the elan of the nationalists. Then the workers accepted legality: the conflict was stalemated and then institutionalized. From late 1936 onward, the militia columns were bogged down in the siege of Zaragoza. The state armed only the military units it trusted, i.e. the ones which would not confiscate property. By early 1937, in the poorly equipped POUM militias fighting the Francoists with old guns, a revolver was a luxury. In the cities, militia men rubbed shoulders with perfectly outfitted regular soldiers. The fronts got stuck, like the Barcelona proletarians against the cops. The last burst of energy was the republican victory at Madrid. Soon hereafter, the government ordered private individuals to hand in their weapons. The decree had little immediate effect, but it showed an unabashed will to disarm the people. Disappointment and suspicions undermined morale. The war was increasingly in the hands of specialists. Finally, the Republic increasingly lost ground as all social content and revolutionary appearances faded away in the anti-fascist camp.
Reducing the revolution to war simplifies and falsifies the social question into the alternative of winning or losing, and in being "the strongest". The issue becomes one of having disciplined soldiers, superior logistics, competent officers and the support of allies whose own political nature gets as little scrutiny as possible. Curiously, all this means taking the conflict further from daily life. It is a peculiar quality of warfare that, even for its enthusiasts, no one wants to lose but everyone wants it to end. In contrast to revolution, except in the case of defeat, war does not cross my doorstep. Transformed into a military conflict, the struggle against Franco ceased to be a personal commitment, lost its immediate reality, and became a mobilization from above, like in any other war situation. After January 1937, voluntary enlistments tapered off, and the civil war, in both camps, came to depend mainly on compulsory military service. As a result, a militia man of July 1936, leaving his column a year later, disgusted with republican politics, could be arrested and shot as a "deserter"!
In different historical conditions, the military evolution from insurrection to militias and then to a regular army is reminiscent of the anti-Napoleonic "guerrilla" warfare (the term was borrowed from Spanish at the time) described by Marx:
"If one compares the three periods of guerrilla warfare with the political history of Spain, one notes they represent the three corresponding degrees to which the counter-revolutionary government had reduced the spirit of the people. In the beginning, the whole population rose up, then guerrilla bands carried on a war of attrition backed up by entire provinces; and finally, there were bands without cohesion, always on the verge of turning into bandits or dissolving into regular regiments."�(9)
For 1936 as for 1808, the evolution of the military situation cannot be explained exclusively or even mainly by the art of war, but flows from the balance of political and social forces and its modification in an anti-revolutionary direction. The compromise evoked by Durruti, the necessity of unity at any cost, could only hand victory first to the republican state (over the proletariat) and then to the Francoist state (over the Republic).
There was the beginning of a revolution in Spain, but it turned into its opposite as the proletarians, convinced that they had effective power, placed their trust in the state to fight against Franco. On that basis, the multiplicity of subversive initiatives and measures taken in production and in daily life were doomed by the simple and terrible fact that they took place in the shadow of an intact state structure, which had initially been put on hold, and then reinvigorated by the necessities of the war against Franco, a paradox which remained opaque to most revolutionary groups at the time. In order to be consolidated and extended, the transformations without which revolution becomes an empty word had to pose themselves as antagonistic to a state clearly designed as the adversary.
The trouble was, after July 1936, dual power existed in appearance only. Not only did the instruments of proletarian power which emerged from the insurrection, and those which subsequently oversaw the socializations, tolerate the state, but they accorded the state a primacy in the anti-Franco struggle, as if it were tactically necessary to pass through the state in order to defeat Franco. In terms of "realism", the recourse to traditional military methods accepted by the far left (including the POUM and the CNT) in the name of effectiveness almost invariably proved ineffective. Sixty years later, people still deplore the fact. But the democratic state is as little suited for armed struggle against fascism as it is for stopping its peaceful accession to power. States are normally loath to deal with social war, and normally fear rather than encourage fraternization. When, in Guadalajara, the anti-fascists addressed themselves as workers to the Italian soldiers sent by Mussolini, a group of Italians defected. Such an episode remained the exception.
From the battle for Madrid (March 37) to the final fall of Catalonia (February 39), the cadaver of the aborted revolution decomposed on the battlefield. One can speak of war in Spain, not of revolution. This war wound up having as its first function the resolution of a capitalist problem: the constitution in Spain of a legitimate state which succeeded in developing its national capital while keeping the popular masses in check. In February 1939, the surrealist and (then) trotskyist Benjamin P�ret analyzed the consummation of the defeat as follows:
"The working class (...), having lost sight of its own goals, no longer sees any urgent reason to be killed defending the bourgeois democratic clan against the fascist clan, i.e. in the last analysis, for the defence of Anglo-French capital against Italo-German imperialism. The civil war increasingly became an imperialist war." (Cl�, 2nd issue)
That same year, Bruno Rizzi made a similar comment in his essay on "collective bureaucratism" in the USSR:
"The old democracies play the game of anti-fascist politics
in order to let the sleeping dog lie. One must keep the proletarians quiet.
(...) at any time, the old democracies feed the working class with anti-fascism.
(...) Spain had turned into a slaughter of proletarians of all nationalities,
in order to calm down unruly revolutionary workers, and to sell off the
products of heavy industry."�(10)
�
The two camps undeniably had quite different sociological compositions. If the bourgeoisie was present on both sides, the immense majority of workers and poor peasants supported the Republic, whereas the archaic and reactionary strata (landed property, small holders, clergy) lined up behind Franco. This class polarization gave a progressive aura to the republican state, but it did not disclose the historical meaning of the conflict, any more than the large working-class membership of socialist or Stalinist parties told us all about their nature. Such facts were real, but secondary to the social function of these parties: in fact, because they were grass-roots bodies, they were able to control or oppose any proletarian upsurge. Likewise, the republican army had a large number of workers, but for what, with whom and under whose orders were they fighting? To ask the question is to answer it, unless one considers possible to fight the bourgeoisie in an alliance with the bourgeoisie.
"Civil war is the supreme expression of the class struggle", Trotsky wrote in Their Morals and Ours (1938). Quite... as long as one adds that, from the "Wars of Religion" to the Irish or Lebanese convulsions of our own time, civil war is also, and indeed most often, the form of an impossible or failed social struggle: when class contradictions cannot assert themselves as such, they erupt as ideological or ethnic blocs, still further delaying any human emancipation. �
Social Democracy did not "capitulate" in August 1914, like a fighter throwing in the towel: it followed the normal trajectory of a powerful movement which was internationalist in rhetoric and which, in reality, had become profoundly national long before. The SPD may well have been the leading electoral force in Germany in 1912, but it was powerful only for the purpose of reform, within the framework of capitalism and according to its laws, which included, for example, accepting colonialism, and also war when the latter became the sole solution to social and political contradictions.
In the same way, the integration of Spanish anarchism in the state in 1936 is only surprising if one forgets its nature: the CNT was a union, an original union undoubtedly but a union all the same, and there is no such thing as an anti-union union. Function transforms the organ. Whatever its original ideals, every permanent organism for defending wage labourers as such becomes a mediator, and then a conciliator. Even when it is in the hands of radicals, even when it is repressed, the institution is bound to escape control of the base and to turn into a moderating instrument. Anarchist union though it may have been, the CNT was a union before it was anarchist. A world separated the rank-and-file from the leader seated at the bosses' table, but the CNT as a whole was little different from the UGT. Both of them worked to modernize and rationally manage the economy: in a word, to socialize capitalism. A single thread connects the socialist vote for war credits in August 1914 to the participation in the government of the anarchist leaders, first in Catalonia (September 36) and then in the Spanish Republic (November 36). As early as 1914, Malatesta had called those of his comrades (including Kropotkin) who had accepted national defence "government anarchists".
The CNT had long been both institutionalized and subversive. The contradiction ended in the 1931 general election, when the CNT gave up its anti-parliamentary stand, asking the masses to vote for republican candidates. The anarchist organization was turning into "a union aspiring to the conquest of power", that would "inevitably lead to a dictatorship over the proletariat". (P.I.C., German edition, December 1931)
From one compromise to the next, the CNT wound up renouncing the anti-statism which was its raison d'�tre, even after the Republic and its Russian ally or master had shown their real faces in May 37, not to mention everything that followed, in the jails and secrets cellars. Like the POUM, the CNT was effective in disarming proletarians, calling on them to give up their struggle against the official and Stalinist police bent on finishing them off. As the GIC said,
"(...) the CNT was among those chiefly responsible for the crushing of the insurrection. It demoralized the proletariat at a time when the latter was moving against democratic reactionaries." (R�te-Korrespondenz, June 1937)
Some radicals even had the bitter surprise of being locked up in a prison administered by an old anarchist comrade, stripped of any real power over what went on in his jail. Adding insult to injury, a CNT delegation which had gone to the Soviet Union requesting material aid did not even raise the issue of the Moscow Trials.
Everything for the anti-fascist struggle !
Everything for cannons and guns !
But even so, some people might object, anarchists by their very nature are vaccinated against the statist virus. Isn't anarchism the arch-enemy of the state ? Yes, but...
Some Marxists can recite whole pages of The Civil War in France on the destruction of the state machine, and quote the passage from State and Revolution where Lenin says that one day cooks will administer society instead of politicians. But these same Marxists can practice the most servile state idolatry, once they come to see the state as the agent of progress or historical necessity. Because they imagine the future as a capitalist socialization without capitalists, as a world still based on wage labour but egalitarian, democratized and planned, everything prepares them to accept a state (transitional, to be sure) and to go off to war for a capitalist state they see as bad, against another they see as worse.
Anarchism overestimates state power by regarding authority as the main enemy, and at the same time underestimates the state's force of inertia.
The state is the guarantor, but not the creator, of social relationships. It represents and unifies capital, it is neither capital's motor nor its centrepiece. From the undeniable fact that the Spanish masses were armed after July 1936, anarchism deduced that the state was losing its substance. But the substance of the state resides not in institutional forms, but in its unifying function. The state ensures the tie which human beings cannot and dare not create among themselves, and creates a web of services which are both parasitic and real.
In the summer of 1936, the state apparatus may have seemed derelict in republican Spain, because it only subsisted as a potential framework capable of picking up the pieces of capitalist society and re-arranging them one day. In the meantime, it continued to live, in social hibernation. Then it gained new strength when the relations opened up by subversion were loosened or torn apart. It revived its organs, and, the occasion permitting, assumed control over those bodies which subversion had caused to emerge. What had been seen as an empty shell showed itself capable not only of revival, but of actually emptying out the parallel forms of power in which the revolution thought it had best embodied itself.
The CNT's ultimate justification of its role comes down to the idea that the government no longer really had power, because the workers' movement had taken power de facto.
"(...) the government has ceased to be a force oppressing
the working-class, in the same way that the state is no longer the organism
dividing society into classes. And if CNT members work within the state
and government, the people will be less and less oppressed." (Solidaridad
Obrera, November 1936)
�
No less than marxism, anarchism fetishizes the state and imagines it as being incarnated in a place. Blanqui had already thrown his little armed flock into attacks on city halls or on barracks, but he at least never claimed to base his actions on the proletarian movement, only on a minority that would awaken the people. A century later, the CNT declared the Spanish state to be a phantom relative to the tangible reality of the "social organizations" (i.e. militias, unions). But the existence of the state, its raison d'�tre, is to paper over the shortcomings of "civil" society by a system of relations, of links, of concentration of forces, an administrative, police, judicial, military network which goes "on hold", as a backup, in times of crisis, awaiting the moment when a police investigator can go sniffing into the files of the social worker. The revolution has no Bastille, police station or governor's mansion to "take": its task is to render harmless or destroy everything from which such places draw their substance. �
The depth and breadth of the industrial and agrarian socializations after July 1936 was no historical fluke. Marx noted the Spanish tradition of popular autonomy, and the gap between the people and the state which made itself manifest in the anti-Napoleonic war, and then in the revolutions of the 19th century, which renewed age-old communal resistance to the power of the dynasty. The absolute monarchy, he observed, did not shake up various strata to forge a modern state, but rather left the living forces of the country intact. Napoleon could see Spain as a "cadaver", "but if the Spanish state was indeed dead, Spanish society was full of life" and "what we call the state in the modern sense of the word is materialized, in reality, only in the army, in keeping with the exclusive "provincial" life of the people."�(11)
In the Spain of 1936, the bourgeois revolution had been made, and it was vain to dream of scenarios such as 1917, not to mention 1848 or 1789. But if the bourgeoisie dominated politically, and capital dominated economically, they were nowhere near the creation of a unified internal market and a modern state apparatus, the subjugation of society as a whole, and the domination of local life and its particularism. For Marx, in 1854, a "despotic" government coexisted with a lack of unity that extended to the point of different currencies and different systems of taxation: his observation still had some validity eighty years later. The state was neither able to stimulate industry nor carry out agrarian reform; it could neither extract from agriculture the profits necessary for capital accumulation, nor unify the provinces, nor less keep down the proletarians of the cities and the countryside.
It was thus almost naturally that the shock of July 36 gave rise, on the margins of political power, to a social movement whose realizations with communist potentials were later reabsorbed by the state they allowed to remain intact. The first months of a revolution already ebbing, but whose extent still concealed its failure, looked like a splintering process: each region, commune, enterprise, collective and municipality escaped the central authority without actually attacking it, and set out to live differently. Anarchism, and even the regionalism of the POUM, express this Spanish originality, which is wrongly grasped if one sees only the negative side of this "late" capitalist development. Even the ebb of 1937 did not eradicate the elan of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants who took over land, factories, neighbourhoods, villages, seizing property and socializing production with an autonomy and a solidarity in daily life that struck both observers and participants.�(12) Communism is also the re-appropriation of the conditions of existence.
Sad to say, if these countless acts and deeds, sometimes
extending over several years, bear witness (as do, in their own way, the
Russian and German experience) to a communist movement remaking all of
society, and to its formidable subversive capacities when it emerges on
a large scale, it is equally true that its fate was sealed from the summer
of 1936 onward. The Spanish Civil War proved both the revolutionary vigour
of communitarian bonds and forms which have been penetrated by capital
but which are not yet daily reproduced by capital, and also their impotence,
taken by
�
themselves, in bringing off a revolution. The absence of an assault against the state condemned the establishment of different relationships to a fragmentary self-management preserving the content and often the forms of capitalism, notably money and the division of activities by individual enterprises. Any persistence of wage-labour perpetuates the hierarchy of functions and incomes.
Communist measures could have undermined the social bases of the two states (republican and nationalist), if only by solving the agrarian question: in the 1930's, more than half of the population went hungry. A subversive force erupted, bringing to the fore the most oppressed strata, those farthest from "political life" (e.g. women), but it could not go all the way and eradicate the system root and branch.
At the time, the workers' movement in the major industrial countries corresponded to those regions of the world which had been socialized by a total domination of capital over society, where communism was both closer at hand as a result of this socialization, and at the same time farther away because of the dissolution of all relations into commodity form. The new world, in these countries, was most commonly conceived as a worker's world, even as an industrial one.
The Spanish proletariat, on the contrary, continued to be shaped by a capitalist penetration of society that was more quantitative that qualitative. From this reality it drew both its strength and its weakness, as attested by the tradition and demands for autonomy represented by anarchism.
"In the last hundred years, there has not been a single uprising in Andalusia which has not resulted in the creation of communes, the sharing out of land, the abolition of money and a declaration of independence (...) the anarchism of the workers is not very different. They too demand, first of all, the possibility of managing their industrial community or their union themselves, and then the reduction of working hours and of the effort required from everyone (...)"�(13)
One of the main weaknesses was the attitude towards money. The "disappearance of money" is meaningful only if it entails more than the replacement of one instrument for measuring value with another one (such as labour coupons). Like most radical groups, whether they called themselves Marxist or anarchist, Spanish proletarians did not see money as the expression and abstraction of real relationships, but as a tool of measurement, an accounting device, and they reduced socialism to a different management of the same categories and fundamental components of capitalism.
The failure of the measures taken against commodity relations was not due to the power of the UGT (which was opposed to the collectivizations) over the banks. The closing of private banks and of the central bank puts an end to mercantile relations only if production and life are organized in a way no longer mediated by the commodity, and if such a communal production and life gradually come to dominate the totality of social relationships. Money is not the "evil" to be removed from an otherwise "good" production, but the manifestation (today becoming increasingly immaterial) of the commodity character of all aspects of life. It cannot be destroyed by eliminating signs, but only when exchange withers away as a social relationship.
In fact, only agrarian collectives managed to do without money, and they often did so with the help of local currencies, with coupons often being used as "internal money". Sometimes money was handed over to the collective. Sometimes workers were given vouchers according to the size of their families, not to the amount of work done ("to everyone according to his needs"). Sometimes money played no part: goods were shared. An egalitarian spirit prevailed, as well as a rejection of "luxury".�(14) However, unable to extend non-commodity production beyond different autonomous zones with no scope for global action, the soviets, collectives and liberated villages were transformed into precarious communities, and sooner or later were either destroyed from within or violently suppressed by the fascists... or the republicans. In Aragon, the column of the Stalinist Lister made this a speciality. Entering the village of Calanda, his first act was to write on a wall: "Collectivizations are theft." �
Ever since the First International, anarchism has counterposed the collective appropriation of the means of production to Social Democratic statification. Both visions, nonetheless, have the same starting point: the need for collective management. The problem is: management of what ? Of course, what Social Democracy carried out from above, and bureaucratically, the Spanish proletarians practised at the base, armed, with each individual responsible to everyone, thereby taking the land and the factories away from a minority specialized in the organizing and exploitation of others. The opposite, in short, of the co-management of the Coal Board by socialist or Stalinist union officials. Nevertheless, the fact that a collectivity, rather than the state or a bureaucracy, takes the production of its material life into its own hands does not, by itself, do away with the capitalist character of that life.
Wage labour means the passage of an activity, whatever it might be, ploughing a field or printing a newspaper, through the form of money. This money, while it makes the activity possible, is expanded by it. Equalizing wages, deciding everything collectively, and replacing currency by coupons has never been enough to do away with wage labour. What money brings together cannot be free, and sooner or later money becomes its master.
Substituting association for competition on a local basis was a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Because, if the collective did abolish private property within itself, it also set itself up as a distinct entity and as a particular element among others in the global economy, and therefore as a private collective, compelled to buy and sell, to trade with the outside world, thereby becoming in its turn an enterprise which, like it or not, had to play its part in regional, national and world competition, or else disappear.
One can only rejoice in the fact that half of Spain imploded: what mainstream opinion calls "anarchy" is a necessary condition for revolution, as Marx wrote in his own time. But these movements made their subversive impact on the basis of a centrifugal force. Rejuvenated communitarian ties also locked everyone into their village and their barrio, as if the point were to discover a lost world and a degraded humanity, to counterpose the working-class neighbourhood to the metropolis, the self-managed commune to the vast capitalist domain, the countryside of the common folk to the commercialized city, in a word the poor to the rich, the small to the large and the local to the international, all the while forgetting that a co-operative is often the longest road to capitalism.
There is no revolution without the destruction of the state. But how ? Beating off armed bands, getting rid of state structures and habits, setting up new modes of debate and decision,- all these tasks are impossible if they do no go hand in hand with communization. We don't want "power": we want the power to change all of life. As an historical process extending over generations, can one imagine, over such a time frame, continuing to pay wages for food and lodging ? If the revolution is supposed to be political first and social later, it would create an apparat whose sole function would be the struggle against the supporters of the old world, i.e. a negative function of repression, a system of control resting on no other content than its "program" and its will to realize communism the day that conditions finally allow for it. This is how a revolution ideologizes itself and legitimizes the birth of a specialized stratum assigned to oversee the maturation and the expectation of the ever-radiant day after tomorrow. The very stuff of politics is not being able, and not wanting, to change anything: it brings together what is separated without going any further. Power is there, it manages, it administers, it oversees, it calms, it represses: it is.
Political domination (in which a whole school of thought
sees problem NUMBER ONE) flows from the incapacity of human beings to take
charge of themselves, and to organize their lives and their activity. This
domination persists only through the radical dispossession which characterises
the proletarian. When everyone participates in the production of their
existence, the capacity for pressure and oppression now in the hands of
the state will cease to be operative. It is because wage-labour society
deprives us of our means of living, producing and communicating, not stopping
short of the invasion of once-private space and of our emotional lives,
that the state is all-powerful. The best guarantee against the reappearance
of a new structure of power over us is the deepest possible appropriation
of the conditions of existence, at every level. For example, even if we
don't want everyone generating their own electricity in their basements,
the domination of the Leviathan also comes from the fact that energy (a
significant term, another word for which is power) makes us dependent on
industrial complexes which, nuclear or not, inevitably remain external
to us and escape any control.
�
�
To conceive the destruction of the state as an armed struggle against the police and the armed forces is to mistake the part for the whole. Communism is first of all activity. A mode of life in which men and women produce their social existence paralyzes or reabsorbs the emergence of separate powers.
The alternative upheld by Bordiga: "Shall we take over the factory, or take over power ?" (Il Soviet, February 20, 1920) can and must be superseded. We don't say: it does not matter who manages production, whether an executive or a council, because what counts is to have production without value. We say: as long as production for value continues, as long as it is separated from the rest of life, as long as humankind does not collectively produce its ways and means of existence, as long as there is an "economy", any council is bound to lose its power to an executive. This is where we differ both from "councilists" and "bordiguists", and why we are likely to be called bordiguists by the former, and councilists by the latter. �
The Spanish failure of 1936-37 is symmetrical to the Russian failure of 1917-21. The Russian workers were able to seize power, not to use it for a communist transformation. Backwardness, economic ruin and international isolation by themselves do not explain the involution. The perspective set out by Marx, and perhaps applicable in a different way after 1917, of a renaissance in a new form of communal agrarian structures, was at the time not even thinkable. Leaving aside Lenin's eulogy for Taylorism, and Trotsky's justification of military labour, for almost all the Bolsheviks and the overwhelming majority of the Third International, including the Communist Left, socialism meant a capitalist socialization PLUS soviets, and the agriculture of the future was conceived as democratically managed large landholdings. (The difference - and it is a major one ! - between the German-Dutch left and the Comintern was that the Left took soviets and worker democracy seriously, whereas the Russian communists, as their practice proved, saw in them nothing but tactical formulas.)
The Bolsheviks are the best illustration of what happens to a power which is only a power, and which has to hold on without changing real conditions very much.
What distinguishes reform from revolution is not that revolution is violent, but that it links insurrection and communization. The Russian civil war was won in 1919, but sealed the fate of the revolution, as the victory over the Whites was achieved without communizing society, and ended in a new state power. In his 1939 Brown Fascism, Red Fascism, O. R�hle pointed out how the French Revolution had given birth to a military structure and strategy adequate to its social content. It unified the bourgeoisie with the people, while the Russian revolution failed to create an army based on proletarian principles. The Red Army that Poland defeated in 1920 hardly kept any revolutionary significance. As early as mid-1918, Trotsky summed it up in three words: "work, discipline, order".
Very logically and, at least in the beginning, in perfectly good faith, the soviet state perpetuated itself at any cost, first in the perspective of world revolution, then for itself, with the absolute priority being to preserve the unity of a society coming apart at the seams. This explains, on one hand, the concessions to small peasant property, followed by requisitions, both of which resulted in a further unravelling of any communal life or production. This explains, on the other hand, the repression against workers and against any opposition within the party.
In January 1921, the wheel had come full circle. The 1917 revolutionary wave set in motion by mutinies and basic democratic demands ended in the same way,- except this time proles were being repressed by a "proletarian" state. A power which gets to the point of massacring the Kronstadt mutineers in the name of a socialism it could not realize, and which goes on to justify its action with lies and calumny, is only demonstrating that it no longer has any communist character. Lenin died his physical death in 1924, but the revolutionary Lenin had died as head of state in 1921, if not earlier. Bolshevism was left with no option but to become the manager of capitalism.
As the hypertrophy of a political perspective hell bent on eliminating the obstacles which it could not subvert, the October Revolution dissolved in a self-cannibalizing civil war. Its pathos was that of a power which, unable to transform society, degenerated into a counter-revolutionary force.
In the Spanish tragedy, the proletarians, because they had left their own terrain, wound up prisoners of a conflict in which the bourgeoisie and its state were present behind the front lines on both sides. In 1936-37, the proletarians of Spain were not fighting against Franco alone, but also against the fascist countries, against the democracies and the farce of "non-intervention", against their own state, against the Soviet Union, against...................................... The "Italian" and "German-Dutch" communist Left (including Mattick in the U.S.) were among the very few who defined the post-1933 period as utterly anti-revolutionary, whereas many groups (Trotskyists, for example) were prompt to foresee subversive potentials in France, in Spain, in America, etc.
1937 closed the historical moment opened by 1917. From then on, capital would not accept any other community but its own, which meant there could no longer be permanent radical proletarian groups of any significant size. The demise of the POUM was tantamount to the end of the former workers' movement.
In a future revolutionary period, the most subtle and most dangerous defenders of capitalism will not be the people shouting pro-capitalist and pro-statist slogans, but those who have understood the possible point of a total rupture. Far from eulogizing TV commercials and social submission, they will propose to change life... but, to that end, call for building a true democratic power first. If they succeed in dominating the situation, the creation of this new political form will use up people's energy, fritter away radical aspirations and, with the means becoming the end, will once again turn revolution into an ideology. Against them, and of course against overtly capitalist reaction, the proletarians' only path to success will be the multiplication of concrete communist initiatives, which will naturally often be denounced as anti-democratic or even as.. "fascist". The struggle to establish places and moments for deliberation and decision, making possible the autonomy of the movement, will prove inseparable from practical measures aimed at changing life.
"(...) in all past revolutions, the mode of activity has always remained intact and the only issue has been a different distribution of this activity and a redistribution of work among different persons; whereas the communist revolution is directed against the mode of activity as it has existed up till now and abolishes work and the domination of all classes by abolishing classes themselves, because it is carried out by the class which is no longer, in society, considered as a class and which is already the expression of the dissolution of all classes and all nationalities, etc. within society itself (...)" Marx, The German Ideology, 1845-46