By Bob Black
Organisational Platform of
the Libertarian Communists. By Nestor Makhno, Ida Mett, Pyotr Arshinov,
Valevsky & Linsky. Dublin, Ireland: Workers' Solidarity Movement, 1989.
It attests to the
ideological bankruptcy of the organizational anarchists today that they should
exhume (not resurrect) a manifesto which was already obsolete when promulgated
in 1926. The Organizational Platform enjoys an imperishable permanence:
untimely then, untimely now, untimely forever. Intended to persuade, it
elicited attacks from almost every prominent anarchist of its time. Intended to
organize, it provoked splits. Intended to restate the anarchist alternative to
Marxism, it restated the Leninist alternative to anarchism. Intended to make
history, it barely made it into the history books. Why read it today?
Precisely because, poor as
it is, it has never been surpassed as a programmatic statement of
organizationalist, workerist anarchism. Not that latter-day workies deserve to
be saddled with archaism like the Platformist policy toward the peasantry, to
which many words are devoted. But much of the rhetoric is familiar -- so much
so that the formulations in circulation apparently cannot be improved upon. The
Platform may have had great influence on those who have not had great
influence.
In language redolent of
recent rantings against "lifestyle anarchism" -- right down to the
disparaging quotation marks -- the Platform attributes the "chronic
general disorganization" of anarchists to "the lovers of assertion of
'self,' [who,] solely with a view to personal pleasure, obstinately cling to
the chaotic state of the anarchist movement." The absence of
organizational principles and practices is the "most important"
reason why anarchism is weak (11). Most deplorable is the claim of a right
"to manifest one's 'ego,' without obligation to account for duties as
regards the organization" (33). It is remarkable that, in 1926, these
anarchists did not consider more important than any internal cause of weakness
the kind of state repression they had all experienced, or the influence of the
Communists who had defeated and exiled them, or even tendencies in capitalist
development which eroded anarchism's social bases. The Plaform is a triumph of
ideology over experience.
No document of this type is
complete -- the Communist Manifesto is another specimen -- unless it opens with
some sweeping, categorical falsifications of history. Everybody knows it is not
true that "all human history represents an uninterrupted chain of
struggles waged by the working masses for their rights, liberty, and a better
life" (14). During long stretches the "working masses" have been
quiescent. At other times -- including ours, in many places -- the struggles
have been confined to small numbers of militants. "In the history of human
society this class struggle has always been the primary factor which determined
the form and structure of these societies" (14). Maybe long, long ago in a
galaxy far, far away ... Space does not permit listing all the societies of
which this is not even colorably true (such as colonial America, or ancient
Greece, or Anglo-Saxon England, or Tokugawa Japan, or ... )
What's the point of these
historical howlers, these proletarian pieties? To give the reader the feeling
that if he should mix it up with class society, he is part of the primary
determinant of history, even if, as usually happens, his efforts determine
nothing.
Next, Makhno & Co.
discuss how "the principle of enslavement and exploitation of the masses
by violence constitutes the basis of modern society" (14) (only modern
society?); they iterate many forms of institutional and ideological domination.
So far, so good. The conclusion: "Analysis of modern society
["description" is more like it] leads to the conclusion that the only
way to transform capitalist society into a society of free workers is the way
of violent social revolution" (15). Huh? There's a middle term missing,
perhaps something like "if capitalist society is very strong, then it can
only be overthrown by violent social revolution." But other consequents
are conceivable, e.g., "if capitalist society is very strong, resistance
is futile, you will be assimilated," or "if capitalist society is
very strong, the only way to overthrow it is not to resist it on its own violent
terrain." Each is as dogmatic and unverifiable as the others.
Class struggle gave birth
to the idea of anarchism, which came not -- the comrades are very insistent --
"from the abstract reflections of an intellectual or a philosopher"
(15). This is of course untrue. Modern anarchism as something with a continuing
history is the idea of Proudhon, who was as much an intellectual as he was a
worker, and who was not engaged in class struggle or even thinking about it in
1840. "The outstanding anarchist thinkers, Bakunin, Kropotkin and
others," discovered the idea of anarchism in the masses (15-16) -- an
extraordinary feat of clairvoyance, since the masses had no idea the idea was
theirs. If Bakunin got the idea of anarchism from the struggling masses, it took
him long enough. Kropotkin got the idea from the Swiss workers in the Jura
Federation, who got their anarchism from Bakunin. As he writes in his Memoirs,
the egalitarianism -- he doesn't mention class struggle -- more than anything
else, won him over to anarchism.
A platform, like a
catechism, cannot accommodate complexity, plurality or uncertainty. An idea
must have a single origin and a single outcome. If the masses originate an idea
then no individual does. If anarchism cannot be reduced to humanitarianism,
then it is not a product of humanitarianism at all (16), and never mind if
there have been real individuals (William Godwin, for instance) who arrived at
anarchism by carrying their version of humanitarianism (in Godwin's case,
utilitarianism) to its logical conclusion.
After some acceptable if
simplistic strictures upon democracy, the social democrats, and the Bolsheviks,
the Platformists aver that, contrary to the Bolsheviks, "the labouring
masses have inherent creative and constructive possibilities which are
enormous" (19). But rather than let nature take its course, before the
revolution the General Union of Anarchists (not to be confused with the Union
of Egoists) are to prepare the masses for social revolution through
"libertarian education" -- but that is not sufficient (20). After
all, if it were sufficient, there would be no need for the General Union of
Anarchists.
The GUA is to organize the
worker and peasant class "on the basis of production and consumption,
penetrated by revolutionary anarchist positions" (20-21). This choice of
words is either revealing or unfortunate. Organized "consumption"
means cooperatives (20), but what organization around production means is
surprisingly unclear for a workerist platform. The comrades are anti-syndicalist,
although, with obvious insincerity, they profess to be agnostic about choosing
between factory committees or workers' soviets (their preference) and
revolutionary trade-unions to organize production (24-25).
However, syndicalist unions
are to be used as a means, "as one of the forms of the revolutionary
workers movement" (25). Anarchists from GUA are supposed to turn the
unions in a libertarian direction, something which even revolutionary
syndicalists, having no "determining theory," and dealing with
ideologically diverse union members, cannot be counted on to accomplish. But
isn't that just more "libertarian education"? This much is clear,
anarchists "must enter into revolutionary trade unions as an organized
force, responsible to accomplish work in the union before [?] the general
anarchist organization and orientated by the latter" (25). In other words,
take over the organizations of others for your purposes, not theirs. Of course,
it's for their own good. This part of the Platform is not much use to
contemporary organizers, since the revolutionary unions they are supposed to
infiltrate nowhere exist, and even they must know better than to try to start
some, since they never do.
Current interest in the
Platform presumably focuses on the climactic "Organizational
Section." Having denounced at some length "all the minimum programmes
of the socialist political parties" (22-24), in this section the authors
state that their scheme "appears to be the minimum to which it is
necessary and urgent to rally all the militants of the organized anarchist
movement"! (32). Repeatedly the Platform requires that all the militants
work toward creation of the General Union of Anarchists and undertake no
revolutionary action not authorized by the organization. "The practice of
acting on one's personal responsibility should be decisively condemned and
rejected" because revolution "is profoundly collective by
nature" (32). Maybe in the endgame, but there has never been a revolution
which was not prepared by various activities of individuals and groups (usually
small). And, unless you count the Bolshevik coup d'etat, there has never been a
revolution ordered and carried out by a vanguard organization. The Platform is
unfathomable as an anarchist program except as a reaction to the anarchist
defeat in Russia. The losers, brooding in exile (and in Makhno's case, in his
cups), fetishize unity precisely because it is always unattainable in their
circumstances. Their hatred adulterated with envy, they long to turn the tables
on the winners. They have to believe that they could have won -- and maybe they
could have, as their critic Voline believed -- otherwise their sacrifices were
meaningless. Significantly, their very first sentence invokes, in the religious
sense of the word, "the heroism and innumerable sacrifices borne by the
anarchists in the struggle for libertarian communism" (11).
"Theory represents the
force which directs the activity of persons and organizations along a defined
path towards a determined goal. Naturally it should be common to all the
persons and organizations adhering to the General Union" (32). Naturally.
The criticism of weapons having failed them, the Platformists take up the
weapons of criticism. The organization dictates the ends and the means to "all
the militants." But theory is not to guide activity directly, as in the
current "chaotic state of the anarchist movement" (11).
Theoretician-leaders translate theory into commands. Am I exaggerating? The
Union "requires each member to undertake fixed organization duties, and
demands execution of communal decisions" (34). The Union prescribes common
"tactical methods" for all (32). By rendering themselves uniform and
predictable, the revolutionaries confer an immense advantage on their enemies.
Taking "a firm line against irresponsible individualism" (30), the
Union forfeits the benefits of responsible individualism.
The division between
leaders and led is not confined to the "executive committee" at the
top of the hierarchy (which the Platform calls "federalism").
"Every organization adhering to the Union represents a vital cell of the
common organism. Every cell should have its secretariat, executing and guiding
theoretically the political and technical work of the organization" (34). I
am reminded of nothing so much as the famous frontispiece to Hobbes' Leviathan,
depicting a giant with the had of a king and a body consisting of swarms of
little people. At exactly this point in history, the Fascists were expressing
similar ideas in similar organismic metaphors. Notice that the secretariat both
proposes and disposes. In its capacity as theoretical guide, it takes the
initiative in transmitting and interpreting Union directives, and in its
capacity as executive, it orders and supervises their implementation. The rank
and file militants are only conduits.
The Workers' Solidarity
Movement edition, without so indicating, omits several interesting passes from
the Platform which are quoted in "Concerning the Platform for an
Organization of Anarchists," a rebuttal by Voline and other Russian
anarchists. For example, "We believe that decisions of the soviets will be
carried out in society without decrees of coercion. But such decisions must be
obligatory for everyone who has accepted them [how? how long?], and sanctions
must be applied against those who reject them." This is the state. Also,
"there can be specific moments when the press, however well intentioned,
will be controlled to an extent for the good of the revolution." The
critics ask: controlled by whom? They voice other objections, including
objections to the defense of the revolution by a centralized regular army. Ten
years later, the issue was posed in Spain between the revolutionary militias
and the counter-revolutionary People's Army.
Anticipating criticism, the
Platformists sought to discount it in advance by attributing it to rabid
individualists. "We foresee that several representatives of self-styled
individualism and chaotic anarchism will attack us, foaming at the mouth, and
accuse us of breaking anarchist principles" (13). Instead, they were
attacked by the most prominent collectivist anarchists: Voline, Malatesta,
Fabbri, Nettlau and Berkman. (With a similar if even cruder ploy, a recent
convert to organizationalism, Bookchin, denounces his self-appointed enemies as
individualists, although David Watson, John Zerzan, L. Susan Brown and the rest
are, without exception, collectivists). The Platformists are testy about
accusations that the Platform is "only one step away from bolshevism, a step
that the authors of the Platform do not dare to take" ("Some Russian
Anarchists") -- but the principal author, Arshinov, took that step,
returning to Stalinist Russia in 1933, only to be liquidated in 1937 (9).
That the Organizational
Platform is on its face a betrayal of anarchism is almost the least of its
vices. It is fundamentally false in its historical method, positing an
imaginal, vaguely defined revolutionary class as an eternal, immutable
historical presence -- not as something with real spatial or temporal
coordinates, something repeatedly self-created but never in quite the same form
or with exactly the same meaning. It calls for an organization so strongly
predisposed to oligarchy that it might have been designed for that purpose. It
offers a formula for victory conceived by losers. Above all, it contradictorily
demands an organization at once inclusive and orthodox. It cannot command
inclusion, but it can impose orthodoxy, and it clearly states that it will do
so. The result is yet another sect. A project with the announced purpose of
eliminating the confusing multiplicity of anarchist organizations only
increases the multiplicity by adding one more.