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Anarchism and Marxism

I am writing this article as a result of attending a workshop on this subject at a conference. I was surprised by the number of people who came to it, and the large amount of agreement on the issues. However, I think partly as a result of this agreement, we didn't really discuss the issues in much detail, and I also would like to go ove them for anarchists whose knowledge of the subject is minimal. I am no great expert on the subject, but I hope that my mistakes might provoke some useful debate.

My own political development during the 70s was very strongly influenced by the writings of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, all of them writers of a strong anti-authoritarian and anti-communist streak. Their clear, strong writing and integrity in standing up for the truth about the crimes against humanity committed by the Communist Party have as strong an influence on me as ever, but I no longer simply equate marxism with totalitarian tyranny.

At that time I saw "communism" as being completely opposed to "socialism". Socialism I saw as standing for freedom, equality and democracy whereas communism was the un-democratic domination of society by a small, supposedly enlightened elite which forced people to conform to their rule. I have not actually abandoned that view; it is more that I have thought it out in greater precisison and clarified it. At the end of my teenage I was a right wing Labour supporter because I suspected the left of being elitist, authoritarian and unrealistic. However after several years in the Labour Party I realised that the Labour Right were not interested in any kind of ideals and were mostly smug paternalistic morons who simply wanted control over the feeding trough. They were morally, and often financially corrupt, and had forgotten the ideals of socialism a long time ago. The left, on the other hand, were my allies in the actual struggle against capitalism, and were sometimes as democratic as I had supposed the right to be.

At the same time, because I was opposed to what I saw as being the reality of communism I wanted to understand marxist theory better to be able to oppose it more effectively, and also to see if there was anything of value (pathetic in joke, to those familiar with marxism) in it. That process I have followed for about the last ten years, although I have lived a haphazard kind of life, mostly in squats, reeling from one desperate situation to another, with continually deteriorating health, and so I have had little time or conditions to study, and I have other interests beside politics. However, if this serves to stimulate interest in those to whom the subject is like studying Greek, it will have been worth it

Anarchism and Marxism are supposed to be as opposed as Anarchism and Capitalism, or Marxism and Capitalism. It is worth briefly going over the history of this. Between 1864 and 1877 an organisation existed called the International Working Mens Association (known as the 1st International to distinguish it from those that followed) You could say that there is something missing here - like half of humanity, but its history is important for this article.

Surprisingly, although it is usually associated with marxism, it had an anarchist majority, mostly from southern European countries, but because the original headquarters was based for political reasons in London, the General Council was controlled by Marx and his followers. Marx engaged in various manipulations to thwart the desires of the anarchist majority, finally moving the headquarters to New York, which had the effect of splitting the organisation, the anarchist part of which continued until 1877. Marx and his major anarchist opponent, Bakunin, differed over whether socialism was best brought about by seizing political power, or in the anarchist view, of breaking with any kind of political power, because the structure of the state was designed to maintain a division between those who controlled activity in the workplace, and those who did the work. To be honest, I am not very familiar with this aspect of Marx views, and I tend to think of them as being incidental to the main body of his work. There is no doubt that Marx was an authoritarian and manipulative individual, but I cannot see any connection between that and his analysis of human social organisation. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the participants in the anti-capitalist revolt in Paris in 1968, was asked if he was a marxist. He replied "only in the sense that Bakunin was a marxist". Bakunin made a distinction between Marx political views and activities, which he like I, think little of, with his theoretical work on the development of the human subject in its relationship to the changing human and physical environment and its expression in different kinds of social organisation. Something some anarchists forget is that it was Bakunin who translated Marx major work analysing capitalism, Das Kapital, into Russian. We should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The split between statist and anarchist conceptions of the means of achieving socialism continued up until the 1st World War, with the 2nd International representing state socialism and various 'Black Internationals' representing an anarchist viewpoint. The effectiveness of the 2nd International (which remains today the international organisation of Labour and European style Social Democratic Parties) collapsed when it failed to prevent the 1st World War by means of a general strike.

The end of the 1st World War saw the rise of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia. They split from the Social Democratic international and formed the 3rd or Communist international. Because the Bolsheviks were the first marxist movement to seize power, it is their ideas and the type of regime they established that are what most people think of as communism or marxism. This is that a small elite of professional revolutionaries organised in the Communist Party seize power and rule over the people on their behalf because they know what is good for them. Any opposition is ruthlessly crushed. The anti-democratic content of this is justified by saying that this vanguard, by virtue of the fact that marxist theory represents history become conscious of itself, represents the driving force of history. This type of political thinking obviously appeals to those whose personal psychological makeup is intolerant of different ideas and who desire a superior status. Although Lenin and Trotsky had a fairly authoritarian conception of revolution and political organisation before they seized power, it was only in a situation of civil war and economic and social chaos that they began to fail to distinguish between those who supported the revolution but were opposed to Bolshevism from the counter revolutionaries trying to return to Tsarism or capitalism. In particular they crushed, by military means, three anarchist movements. The first, which was not anarchist as such, but composed of adherents of all radical political groupings, including the Bolsheviks, was the factory committee movement, which was a movement of factory workers attempting to organise economic coordination from below. The second, the Makhnovist movement, was an anarchist peasant movement which dominated the Ukraine until 1921. The third was a revolt in March 1921 by revolutionary sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, in conjunction with anti-Bolshevik strikes in nearby Petrograd (present day St Petersburg) The sailors and strikers wanted a third revolution, against the Bolsheviks - the first having been against Tsarism, and the second against parliamentary capitalism. I will come back to these movements and the Russian Revolution in much greater detail later.

Also at the end of the 1st World War, there was a revolution in Germany which overthrew the monarchy, but which was ultimately suppressed like the Russian one by a 'socialist' government, this time with the help of reactionary army officers who later formed the core of the Nazi movement. The revolutionaries were marxist, but of a more democratic kind led by Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, who were both opposed to the authoritarian direction taken by the Bolsheviks. Unfortunately Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were both shot with the complicity of the 'socialist' government, by the reactionary army officers in the Frei Corps.

One of the strands of the German revolutionary movement was Council Communism, as described in "Workers Councils" by its Dutch exponent, Anton Pannekoek, is completely opposed to the idea of the elite revolutionary party seizing state power and forceably introducing socialism from above. Their idea is that society is organised around a federation of workers councils which are assemblies of all the workers at a particular factory, workshop, farm etc, which federate as autonomous centres of production. This is a social and economic system - there is no 'political' system outside it, and it is essentially the same as anarcho-syndicalism. The revolts in Eastern Europe against the Soviet Empire, in Berlin in 1953, Poland 1970 and 1981 and especially in Hungary in 1956, had ideas about social and economic organisation very close to those of Council Communism. Czechoslovakia, where the revolt was actually led by the Czech Communist Party, was an exception to this.

The next installment in this extremely selective review of libertarian history, is of course, the Spanish Civil War 1936-39. From 1923-30 Spain was under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. In 1930 it became a republic. There followed a succession of left wing and right wing governments, cumulating in the election of a socialist government in February 1936. During the period 1930-36 there were a series of violent uprisings in various parts of the country, mainly by anarchists in the extremely strong anarchist union, the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo, who saw the socialist governments as being a form of fiction.

In July 1936 there was an army revolt against the government, led by General Franco. This was opposed by workers who supported the government, and by anarchist workers, all over Spain. The army won in the Northwest and the Southwest of the country, apart from a strip along the industrial and mining region of the North coast, and the workers won in the West and centre of the country, including Madrid. Because the main source of government power, the army, had rebelled against it, the government was for a while very weak, but the anarchists were forced to compromise with it to maintain a united front against the army and fascism. The government, increasingly under Communist Party influence, took advantage, and eventually moved to militarily crush the social and economic system set up by the anarchist C.N.T. in the provinces of Catalonia, Aragon, Andalucia and parts of Valencia and Castille. The most dramatic moments in this conflict, the May Days in Barcelona, are well described by George Orwell in his book "Homage to Catalonia". However this destruction of anarchist of achievements by the Communist Party and the government drastically weakened the resistance to Franco, with the result that Fascism triumphed in Spain in 1939. I will come back to Spain in greater detail, later in this article.

The last piece of history I want to mention is the movement called Autonomia Operere (Workers Autonomy) in Italy in the late 1970s. I know very little about it, because the only readable accounts of it, published by Red Notes, have been out of print for years. This was a marxist movement, which like anarchism, was opposed to political parties and the seizure of state power. I am not sure how the idea of autonomia differs from the concepts I have already mentioned; obviously it refers to the autonomy of groups opposed to different sectors of captialist social organisation, whether economic or cultural, for example artistic, womans groups, students, mental patients etc in opposition to a centralised hierarchical organisation, but it is not very clear to me. Autonomia was smashed by the mass arrest of about 3000 of its leading militants in the Spring of 1980, many accused of being the force behind the Red Brigades, a Stalinist terror group to who Autonomia were completely opposed.

I have never been able to clarify the theoretical differences between Autonomia, Council Communists, Anarchist Communists and Anarcho-syndicalists. Autonomists will say things like anarcho-syndicalists are trade unionists, which is facile because one of the principles of anarcho-syndicalism is the complete autonomy of the local syndicate, or community group, within the federation, in contrast to normal trade union hierarchies. The structure of relationships between different groups within the federation is a study in itself, but the relationship is one of voluntary cooperation and one group cannot force another group to cooperate, even if it is a central coordinating group. The fact that anarchist organisation has been based soley on voluntary cooperation, and relations of complete equality, even though to build such an organisation is much more difficult than one based on relationships of centralised power like in a political party, trade union or capitalist industrial or commercial organisation, has meant that anarchist organisations have shown tremendous solidarity and resistance to oppression. Capitalist organisations, in particular, need a form of external force, in the form of the police, to back up the centralised authority of the ownership or management. Of course this force is normally only latent; knowledge of its existence usually prevents challenges to managerial authority and it only becomes obvious when workers organise collectively to deny managerial authority over the workplace in strikes or occupations. This authority is recognised by the law of the state, which is occasionally used by trade unions and political parties to enforce central authority.

On the other hand anarcho-syndicalists, when asked about their differences with autonomists, will reply that they are marxists, which seems equally stupid to me, as autonomists are equally opposed to centalised power (as distinct from central coordination) as expressed in political parties, industrial organisation, trade unions or the state.

From this historical review it is obvious that anarchists have been opposed to the idea that it is possible to bring about socialism by a revolutionary elite. This conception of socialism, known as Bolshivism or Leninism, is the only one most people are aware of, and they assume that this is what most of marxism is about. In fact, the conflict in the 1st International apart, most of Marx work is not about how to organsise a revolution or even a description of how socialism would function.

Most of Marx work is an analysis of the origins and development of successive types of human social organisation and in particular capitalism. He noticed that different types of social organisation seemed to correspond to different levels of resources and the development of tools (plough, factory, ship, computer etc) which he called the means of production He identified four main historical types of social organisation, which he called modes of production , meaning the social organisation of production was different in each.

The first of these, primitive communism is characterised by common ownership of property but with little division of labour. However under the second mode of production, slavery, also known as the Age of Antiquity, there is a division into two classes, slaves and slave owners; the slave owners owning both the means of production and the slaves. Under feudalism, the third mode of production, the peasant may own tools and animals and farm a strip of land for himself but he only holds it by consent of the lord, who may deprive him of it if he does not work the land of the lord. Under capitalism, the forth mode of production, there is a complete separation between the workers and the means of production. Both the means of production and the products produced by the worker are owned by the capitalist, and the worker receives only the cost of maintaining him/herself as a worker, enough to feed, clothe and shelter him/her and his/her family.

Something worth knowing about Marx's idea of modes of production is that there may be more than one mode of production in operation at any particular time. However one is politically dominant in a particular society. For example capitalism has only become dominant in the last 300 years, but it in Das Kapital, Marx's major work, he traces the origins back to simple commodity production which obviously goes back to the beginning of trade and coexisted with slavery, feudalism etc. That's why Capital starts with an analysis of commodities and money and follows a logical and historical development of the forms of value inherent in simple buying and selling of commodities as they develop over centuries into capital.

Marx predicted two further modes of production following capitalism, socialism, where the means of production are owned by the workers but there is still a rigid division of people into different types of worker and exchange of the different commodities they produce. A further stage, communism, is where this rigid division has ended and distribution is according to need, rather than work done.

A mode of production, as Marx defined it, was a 'totality', which means that each society formed an integrated whole, that the way that goods were produced and distributed, the political system and the culture of a given mode of production corresponded to each other. However the reason why one society replaced another was that none of these societies remained the same and that there was an increasing conflict between the forces of production and the relations of production. By forces of production Marx meant the level of resources and the efficiency of the tools developed. By relations of production Marx meant the particular type of relationship between those who controlled production - slave owner, feudal lord, capitalist, bureaucrat etc and those who did the work. By a conflict between the forces and relations of production he meant that as the level of resources and the efficiency of tools increased, it destabilised the existing relations of that mode of production, producing a social and economic crisis which had to be resolved by creating different relations of production.

I said that different types of social organisation corresponded to particular levels of resources and levels of development of tools. I said 'corresponded to', not 'were determined by' as this is an area of confusion and controversy among marxists. 'Determined by' can mean two things. It can mean 'is caused by' in the sense of 'mechanically produces' like turning a kettle on causes the water to boil, and many Leninists hold to the idea that as the increasing forces of production under capitalism collide with capitalist social relations, the proletariat mechanically becomes conscious of itself (develops marxist theory) overthrows capitalism, and institutes socialism. Therefore if the class consious revolutionary vanguard (the Communist Party) seizes state power and institutes socialist relations of production, we will end up with socialism.

Unfortunately, if socialism is workers management of production, to have socialist relations of production the workers must emancipate themselves; if the state institutes them from above, the workers do not control them and it can't be socialism, or not according to my definition anyway. It is a social relation between the workers and the state, not between the workers themselves. According to this kind of mechanistic explanation the Russian Revolution shouldn't have happened. Russia was only emerging from feudalism when the revolution took place, and the first part, the overthrow of the Tsar and the replacement with parliamentary capitalism, in February 1917. However the second part, the overthrow of parliamentary capitalism in October 1917, should have been impossible because the forces of the newly developing capitalism were undeveloped and had certainly not developed to the point where they came into conflict with capitalist relations of production. It was for this reason that the Bolsheviks justified an authoritarian dictatorship to bring the forces of production into line with the new social relations. Lenin had to bend the mechanistic type of explanation a long way to explain this.

The other meaning of "social organisation is determined by particular levels of resources and the level of development of tools" simply means that the material circumstances define what the problem is. Human beings cannot avoid the particular circumstances that face them, but they can respond in different ways. Human beings are conscious subjects that respond to circumstances actively and creatively not passively and mechanically, as objects. That is what Marx meant when he said

People create history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing

Throughout history people have always fought for freedom during whatever mode of production and anarchists and libertarian socialists can identify with slave revolts, with the religious heresies described by Umberto Eco in his novel "The Name of the Rose", with the Levellers and Diggers in the English revolution of the 17th century, and the pirates who established a libertarian community in Madagascar during the same period. They held property in common, and freed slaves from slave ships until they were discovered by British warships. That is why the German communists in Bavaria could call themselves the Spartakus Bund, after the leader of the slave revolt against the Roman empire. During normal periods our lives are held in chains by a rigid structure of relationships - personal, sexual, cultural, economic.

During a period of social crisis, all these bonds break and history becomes existential, creative, fluid, until our lives settle into another pattern.

I said that a given mode of production was a 'totality'; that the relations of production exist in relation to the political system (under slavery and feudalism the relations of production are the political system; it is only under capitalism that there is a split between what Marx calls 'civil society' - the economic system of private owners and workers) and to culture. Orthodox marxism used to make a distinction between the economic base (the forces and relations of production) and the political and economic superstructure. Many marxists nowadays have problems distinguishing the base from the superstructure and feel that the base and the superstructure are simply interdependent and that they both determine each other.

It will be observed that so far I have said nothing about 'dialectical materialism', a philosophical system which is supposed to underlie marxism, and much favoured by Leninists when they want to appear sophisticated and escape rational argument. 'Dialectical materialism' was a term never used by Marx, but invented by Engels, and is associated with the mechanistic version of 'mode of production is determined by the level of productive forces.' In recent years it has been pointed out that Marx had a much more subtle and sophisticated idea of the dialectic than Engels, and I do not claim to understand it. I've realised that to understand it I would need to read Hegel, the philosopher whose work was Marx most important influence and whose ideas Marx claimed to have transformed. Well, some day. However, for those who are interested, there is an interesting introduction to dialectics called "The Nature of Human Brain Work" by Joseph Dietzgen, a tanner and friend of Marx. Marx considered him one of the few people to understand his critique of political economy, which he mentions in the introduction to Das Kapital. Dietzgen outraged statist marxists when he took over the editorship of an anarchist newspaper in Chicargo in 1886, following the imprisonment of the previous editors, and declared himself an anarchist. His writings were a major influence on Anton Pannekoek.

Das Kapital, Marx's major work, is an attempt to analyse how the development of productive forces under capitalist relations of production produces a crisis, provoking revolution leading to a new set of social relations. It is often said that Marx explicit description of capitalism is an implicit description of communism, but except in so far as it describes the nature of the problem I can't see it. Marx has written extremely little about communism; a bit in the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", "The Critique of the Gotha Programme", and in "The Civil war in France" (about the Paris commune of 1871). What he has written is vague and general.

Capital begins with an analysis of the commodity, the form under which goods are bought and sold in the market. Marx identifies that the qualitative difference between goods exchanged can be described as use value - the uses that different goods, be they bread or computers, have. He distinguishes this from the quantitative difference, that he calls exchange value or simply value. He asks what this special quantity is that is shared by all different goods, however different their uses, be they ships, books, electricity or whatever, and finds that it is the average amount of time spent producing the goods, in an averagely efficient workplace. This is what is called the Labour Theory of Value. He deduces that money is a special use value used in exchange as an easy measure and means of payment for the exchange value present in goods.

Under capitalism, the workers can only produce goods using the tools and raw materials that are owned by the capitalists as the capitalists are the only ones that can afford them. Marx worked out that the capitalists don't actually pay for the workers labour - if the average value goods sold at was the quantity of labour put in and the worker was paid for it, the capitalist wouldn't make a profit! He realised that what the capitalist actually pays for is the value of the worker as a commodity, the value of the average labour time necessary to feed, clothe and house her and her family. He called this value, which is what the capitalist actually pays the worker for, labour power. However, the worker is a special kind of commodity, the only kind that can add value to raw materials, by working on them.

In order to increase his wealth, the capitalist must buy two kinds of things. First he must buy tools and raw materials, which Marx calls Constant Capital. Then he must buy Labour Power, which as a part of the total capital Marx calls Variable Capital. The reason he calls it that is that these stroppy workers form unions and go on strike to increase the value of their labour power and the value of labour power is always the result of the battle between the workers and the capitalist.

Thus far we have shown that capitalists are a bunch of parasites, but Marx goes on to deduce that the increasing cost of tools necessary to produce cheaper, better goods than your competitor, firstly means that only the richest, most ruthless capitalists survive and second is a threat to the whole set of relationships of ownership and control that we have just described, the social relations of production.

He deduces that Constant Capital (the cost of tools and raw materials) becomes an increasing percentage of the value of the final product and that the percentage of value added by labour decreases. Since the surplus value can only come from the value added by labour the proportion of surplus value declines. This is known as the decline of the rate of profit and some day I will be able to describe how it produces a crisis in the financial system.

(2003) What is my attitude to Marx theory, as outlined above? Some day I hope to deepen my understanding of it, but I'm increasingly inclined to regard it as a good model of what happens in the world. (end of 2003 comment)

The reason that I wanted to describe Marx theory of social organisation is that Leninists make out that it invalidates anarchism and play on anarchists' ignorance of Marx work. Whether or not Marx theory of the development of human social organisation and his analysis of capitalism is true and useful, I can't see anything in it that is opposed to anarchist conceptions of social revolution. It seems perfectly possible to couple anarchist conceptions of social revolution to Marx theory of the development of human social organisation. However, the fact that Communist Parties throughout the globe have used the fact that these theories are obscure and difficult to understand and interpret, to mystify people into believing that a load of authoritarian bullshit is somehow justifiable, makes you want to ask - do they help us understand the present situation and how to fight authoritarian tyranny, be it capitalist or communist? That is an open question - I do not know the answer. After all we all know what capitalism is - we have to in order to survive - do we really need this esoteric theoretical analysis that most people do not understand - that baffles and bewilders people, destroys their confidence in their abilities to organise the production of goods and community life and cons them into handing their power over to revolutionary leaderships who cannot possibly know best, by virtue of the fact that they do not share people's subjective experience of individual situations. Perhaps the only use value of marxism is a debating weapon to expose what we all know anyway, but if people do not want to admit the truth of a situation, because their real motives in hanging onto power would be exposed, they will ultimately use violence to suppress criticism. This is why reason itself is hopeless as a method of human liberation and why you cannot educate people not to be racists, fascists etc; it is a question of power. The only way to challenge power is by direct action; of course you must make clear the reasons behind it - but those in power will not change by the light of reason alone. I believe there are some interesting ideas about this developed by the marxist philosophers of language, Baktin and Voloshinov, that I heard about when I went to a Socialist Workers Party summer school - yes - I really did - I confess.

I now want to write about the Russian and Spanish revolutions in greater detail.

Tsarist social organisation collapsed as a result of the war and was replaced by the Duma, the predecessor of a capitalist style parliament, where the arrangement of political power pres-suuposed the separation of politics from the economy, resting on capitalist relations of production. However, after the overthrow of Tsarism, the state was for various reasons extremely weak and only had any degree of control in the major towns and cities. Encouraged by Bolsheviks, Social Revolutionaries and anarchists, workers and peasants went much further, seizing control of factories and the countryside. In the cities a situation of dual power grew up, with power divided between the government, political guarantor of capitalist social relations by military means, and the soviets, assemblies of all the workers in a particular locality, representing growing economic power. The Duma continued the increasingly unpopular war, until the mass desertion of soldiers swelling the Soviets enabled the Bolsheviks, who now formed a majority in the soviets, to seize state power.

As I described previously, the workers who had seized control of the factories attempted to set up an organisation to coordinate production between enterprises on a national scale, under socialist relations of production i.e. the federated autonomous self management of production, and they got as far as holding several conferences to this end. Workers of all complexions, including Bolsheviks, took part, but it did not fit in with the plans of the Central Committee at all. In one of his pamphlets possibly 'Left Wing Communism, an infantile disorder', Lenin admits that the Bolsheviks had no idea how to run an economy and that it is necessary to bring in capitalist experts to run things. The assumption is that because the Bolshevik leaders, who were mostly from middle class backgrounds and little experience of the organisation of production hadn't a clue what to do, the thick, inferior workers couldn't possibly run things. This is demonstratably untrue.

Lenin and Trotsky made speeches in favour of one man management of factories by those appointed by the Veshenka (the Supreme Economic Council) completely opposed to workers democratic management of their enterprises. Lenin made speeches praising Taylorism, the system of time and motion study previously attacked by marxists for enslaving the worker to the machine. Trotsky, as commissar for the railways, instituted militarisation of production, meaning workers were shot for desertion if they went on strike. Apologists for the Bolsheviks say that the civil war, foreign intervention and economic chaos justified these measures; in fact the economy functioned more despite than because of the Bolsheviks; the repressive measures caused economic chaos and completely alienated the peasantry, and helped fuel opposition to the Bolsheviks. There was an honourable opposition to all this in the Bolshevik Party, called the Workers Opposition, led by Alexandria Kollantai, but it was likewise crushed.

In the Ukraine an anarchist peasant movement arose around the charismatic figure of Nestor Makhno. According to the Russian anarchist historian Voline, who played a role in this movement, Makhno took part in several orgies in which some women were forced to take part; that is he was a rapist. This is sometimes glossed over by anarchist historians. Leaving the ambiguous figure of Makhno to one side, the movement had extremely advanced social ideas. However it had little chance to put these into practice as it was almost continually under attack by either Tsarist or Bolshevik forces, but it decision making bodies and those few communes that were set up are very similar to anarchist social organisation in Spain, discussed later. Voline, in his history of anarchism in the Russian revolution, ('The Unknown Revolution') has an excellent analysis of the economic relations between town and countryside and how the peasantry, originally enthusiatic supporters of the revolution, were alienated by the requisitioning of the Bolsheviks.

The Makhnovist movement arose during the period when the Ukraine was controlled by a German puppet, the Hetman Skoropadsky, and the revolt against Skoropadsky broke German power in the area. Following this the Bolsheviks initially attempted to crush the movement, but were forced to recognise it as an ally when confronted with the white army of Denikin, which was defeated by the Makhnovists, who were superb fighters and tacticians, utilising a highly mobile cavalry and infantry transported in horse drawn carts. After the Bolsheviks had mopped up the remnants of Denikin's army they broke their agreement and tried to suppress the Maknovists again. They were forced to make a new one when confronted with the new white army of Wrangel. Again the Makhnovists helped to defeat this army, and again the Bolsheviks betrayed their agreement, this time for good. Trotsky tried to ensnare Makhno in a trap, persuading him to come to an agreement while launching a military force to crush the movement behind his back, but Maknhno escaped, to lead his forces for another year in a guerilla war against incredible odds. All of this, of course, is completely written out of both Bolshevik and bourgeois history.

In March 1921 there was a revolt against the Bolsheviks led by the anarchist sailor, Petrichenko, in the island naval base of Kronstadt, in the Gulf of Finland. It arose in support of strikes against the Bolsheviks in Petrograd (present day St Petersburg) to which the sailors had sent delegates to find out the reasons for the opposition. Their list of demands included democratisation, freedom of expression and organisation and workers self-management of the workplace. They were falsely slandered by Trotsky, who said "We will shoot them down like partridges" and sent Red Guard units across the ice to slaughter them.

Voline observed about the Russian revolution that it was crushed by the Bolsheviks because the workers and peasants had only just emerged from a period of absolute monarchy where freedom of thought and expression were stifled, and they had not developed the degree of political maturity to think out the organisation of a new society themselves. Hence they left it to the Bolsheviks, with the results we know.

In Spain the revolution failed for different reasons. The C.N.T. (Confederaction Nacional del Trabajo) stemmed directly from the Spanish section of the 1st International. It was the dominant organisation of Spanish workers and peasants - the smaller U.G.T., the state socialist union, was predominately white collar workers, with the exception of the mining region of Asturias and the city of Seville. The CNT had a long history of mass social and economic struggle; strikes, riots and insurrections coupled with a strong tradition of anarchist education. During periods of insurrection an anarchist social and economic system was set up in the liberated areas and when the revolts were crushed these social experiments, their successes and mistakes were discussed and evaluated all over Spain. As a result the anarchist movement had a high degree of political maturity and very exact ideas on setting up a new social organisation. When the anarchists found themselves in control of half of revolutionary Spain in July 1936 they put these ideas into practice with amazing success. The result was an extremely efficient social and economic system. Every village set up a collective in which all land and property was held in common and the collective was run by an assembly of all the villagers who decided how production and distribution would be organised. According to orthodox marxist theory all this is impossible because the peasants are supposed to be petty bourgeois and only capable of dividing the appropriated land into individually owned plots, as happened in France during the French revolution. No-one was forced to take part in the collective and in some villages there were sizable majorities of peasants who kept their individual plots. However many were eventually won over by the obvious greater effeciency and access to resources of the collectives, who could obtain agricultural machinery and build schools, medical and veterinary clinics and whose resources expanded dramatically during their existence. Distribution in the villages was related to production by different systems; in some according to hours worked, and in some according to a system of tokens, taking social priorities into account.

When I first read 'Collectives in the Spanish Revolution' by Gaston Leval and 'Anarchist Collectives in Spain' by Sam Dolgoff by knowledge of marxist economic theory was even more limited than it is now, and I was not able to compare the anarchist economic system to marxian ideas of socialist and communist relations of production.

According to marxist economic theory if labour is still being exchanged for labour, and it sounds as if it is, the law of value still prevails and we are operating under socialist relations of production - commodity exchange under conditions of ownership of the means of production by the people. Communism is supposed to be the phasing out of labour time as described by the labour theory of value. I've never understood how this could work. Are people going to work at producing goods to satisfy other people's desires if they are not sure other people are not going to spend an 'equivalent' amount of time producing goods to satisfy their desires?

If they didn't they would surely be sacrificing themselves and why should they - whoever does less is simply being selfish - why should they have the right to goodies they haven't produced. (I am assuming that old people, children and the sick are provided for by the community, and that not everyone works at the same rate.) In Russia, when they tried to abolish the market, they replaced it with an authoritarian police state, which imposed labour discipline to make people work. In practice, people were selling their labour power to the state, instead of a private employer, although commodity exchange as such had been ended, as the state took over distribution, and related the total money paid as wages to the total price of goods in the shops, making sure they balanced.

I'm quite well aware that in this discussion I have been treating work under communism as 'alienated labour' (something not made for the use of the person who produced it) and not as a desire for inself, like the way you get pleasure from producing something for a friend, but although we don't necessarily expect a direct return from friends - we do expect that if they can help us with something we need they will help, and share any common work. People feel used if that doesn't happen, and usually end the friendship. Exchange is just a lot less formalised under conditions of friendship.

If a community of individuals harmoniously produce goods for each other then that is non-alienated labour, but in so far as there is a division of labour and people do not simply produce for themselves alone, labour has a private character and one type of labour is exchanged for another. I don't see how you can avoid that.

If I don't fully understand the relation of production to distribution within the collective, I understand it even less in the federation of collectivesm where resources were transferred from richer to poorer areas, and equalisation of costs took place.

I have been talking about the agricultural collectives, but the cities, especially Barcelona, the major industrial centre of Spain, were initially collectivised in the same way, although this was quickly complicated by the re-establishment of a political system of exectutive power backed up by force. Although the CNT were strong enough in Catalonia to ignore the major parties completely, they wanted a united front in the rest of Republican Spain, so the central coordinating body they set up, the Central Committee of Militias, included representatives of the anti-Franco parties and the UGT. They even let the regional government, called the Generalitat, continue, as they thought it too weak to be a threat. Unfortunately the politicians took advantage of this laxity and used it to build up their power. The Central Committe of Militias gradually became an executive rather than a federal body, and factories lost their economic autonomy. What is amazing is that the CNT leadership agreed to all this and gradually became seduced to political power to the extent of backing the police and army in establishing centralised economic control, rather than coordination. The workers opposed all this, but were confused and divided by this complete sell out of anarchist principles by the leadership, something that is quite fascinating psychologically. It makes it clear that the hunger for power is not something that is simply overcome by a particular organisational structure, revolutionary experience, or loyalty to anarchist ideals and the anarchist movement. These people were some of the finest the anarchist movement ever produced - their experience and (at least up until this point) their integrity was beyond question.

The libertarian collective economy was destroyed by the conflict between the anarchist movement and the government (in which the four CNT ministers played a confused role) and the resulting defeat by fascism. The government took the view that it was necessary to control the social revolution in order to retain the support, or at least the neutrality, of the liberal capitalist powers in the struggle against fascism. The key to government power was that they held financial control over the access to foreign industrial and financial resources, especially the Spanish gold reserves. To reinforce its own power it supplied only those sections of the front with arms that were in its own hands and starved the anarchist sections of the front, which were more strategically vital, of weapons. Most of the arms the anarchists managed to get hold of were extremeley old, including many rifles dating back to the 1st World War. At the beginning of the war the anarchist column led by Durrutti was poised to take the key city of Zaragoza, on the route to the strip of Northern Spain held by the Republicans, thus uniting their iron and coal mines with the industrial centre of Barcelona. He literally ran out of weapons and munitions, and in frustration took a train to Madrid with several hundred anarchist militiants, intending to steal the Spanish gold reserves to pay for arms. Unfortunately he was talked out of it by anarchist leaders in Madrid, and later died in defence of the city.

The Communist Party, with 3000 members before the war, gradually attained great influence because what arms and munitions did arrive were often from Russia, to where the gold reserves were transferred, though this was much less than those arriving for franco from fascist Germany and Italy. They used this to replace the left socialist prime minister, Largo Caballero, with Negrin, who was more compliant, to set up a vicious secret police, controlled by O.G.P.U. (forerunner to the KGB) men, and to carry out economic sabotage on a wide scale. For example the Ministry of War requisitioned two new lathes the Barcelona railway workers had bought from France but promised them that they could have two older ones in return. The two engineers were escorted to a warehouse in Barcelona, where to their amazement they found a collection of about 80 lathes and milling and grinding machines, which were all in terribly short supply.

In 1937 and 1938, Communist army formations occupied anarchist areas in an attempt to break up the collectives, destroying collective property and equipment. Enrique Lister's division which retreated 50 miles from the front was especially notorious. In 1938, there were tank battles south of Valencia when the citrus growers federation, which had a large export trade with France, attempted to defend their area.

Finally anarchist divisions were given arms on condition that they abandon the militia structure and organisation, and accept militarisation, with Communist supervision, which often meant a bullet in the back of the neck for those they wanted rid of. All this led to a complete collapse of military and civilian morale which brought about defeat, ending with Communist and anarchist divisions fighting each other in the streets of Madrid.

Of course history is what you want to believe, and is a matter of individual judgement, but I urge those who doubt this account to study the books I mention before rejecting it. Leninism is poison to the socialist movement, but it is not the only possible result of marxism. However it is also true that a large body of semi-incomprehensible knowledge makes it possible for a small elite, who have the time and the circumstances to study it, to pretend that they have a special understanding of social transformation that the rest of us lack, and that we must therefore hand control of any social transformation to them. That is why I have tried to understand it and here to clarify and demystify it a little, although there's always the risk that I might end up as that kind of expert myself.

I am not a 'revolutionary'. I would probably support a revolution if it happened, but I do not go around advocating it, because there is so much mythology on the subject, and I am more interested in learning from what actually took place under a particular set of historical circumstances than fantasising about the glorious revolution. People's idea of 'the revolution' can be an abstraction; the moral/political roots of my thinking are from the oppression and bullshit I can see now and what little I can do about it. Revolutions usually grow out of people concentrating on a few issues in front of them that they're particularly angry about, with limited, specific objectives and no grandiose expectations.

I also want to say that marxism is not opposed to ecology, magic and spiritualism. I am not (shock horror) a 'class struggle anarchist' and I consider any resistance to authority, including the festival movement, the green movement, and anarchist individualism as connected to the struggle against the 'totality' as strikes or riots. Starhawk, a Californian witch connects the marxist theory of alienation with magic, spirituality and witchcraft in a very interesting way in her book 'Dreaming the Dark'. Now there's heresy for you!

References

I had originally a long list of references, many of which are out of print now, but I'll put some in again when I have time and try to find some relevant links

It's been a while since I said that, so here are a few still in print to be going on with

Marxism

• Reading Capital Politically Harry Cleaver (autonomist)
• Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory Ernest Mandel (Trotskyite)
• Introduction to Marxism Ernest Mandel
• The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx Alex Callinicos (Trotskyite)

Anarchism

Russian Revolution

• The Unknown Revolution Voline - an amazing history of the Russian Revolution from a leading anarchist participant
• The Bolsheviks and Workers Control Maurice Brinton - history of the Factory Committee movement and its suppression by Lenin and Trotsky.
• The Kronstadt Commune Ida Mett
• Platform of the Workers Opposition Alexandria Kollontai - She was a Bolshevik dissident
• Year One of the Russian Revolution Victor Serge (an anarchist who became a Bolshevik)

Spanish Civil War

• Homage to Catalonia George Orwell
• Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution Jose Peirats (leading participant)
• Anarchist Collectives in Spain Sam Dolgoff
• The Essay 'Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship' in "American Power and the New Mandarins" Noam Chomsky