Anarcho-Communists, Platformism, and Dual
Power:
Innovation or Travesty?
Lawrence Jarach
from Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed
"�When a revolutionary situation develops,
counter-institutions have the potential of functioning as a real alternative to
the existing structure and reliance on them becomes as normal as reliance on
the old authoritarian institutions. This is when counter-institutions
constitute dual power.
Dual power is a state of affairs in which people
have created institutions that fulfill all the useful functions formerly
provided by the state. The creation of a general state of dual power is a
necessary requirement for a successful revolution�"
- Love & Rage Revolutionary Anarchist
Federation New York Local Member Handbook; June, 1997
"�What we need is a theory of the state
that starts with an empirical investigation of the origins of the state, the
state as it actually exists today, the various experiences of revolutionary
dual power, and post-revolutionary societies..."
- After Winter Must Come Spring: a
Self-Critical Evaluation of the Life and Death of the Love and Rage
Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (New York); 2000
"�A revolutionary strategy seeks to
undermine the state by developing a dual power strategy. A dual power strategy
is one that directly challenges institutions of power and at the same time, in
some way, prefigures the new institutions we envision. A dual power strategy
not only opposes the state, it also prepares us for the difficult questions
that will arise in a revolutionary situation� [A] program to develop local Copwatch
chapters could represent a dual power strategy, since monitoring the police
undermines state power by disrupting the cops� ability to enforce class and color lines
and also foreshadows a new society in which ordinary people take responsibility
for ensuring the safety of their communities."
- Bring The Ruckus statement (Phoenix,
AZ); Summer, 2001
"�As anarchist communists, our strategy of
transforming society is the establishment of dual power: creating alternative
and democratic institutions while simultaneously struggling against the
established order. If we ever hope to succeed, anarchist actions cannot be
random and uncoordinated. We should strive for strategic & tactical unity
and coordination in all anarchist factions and affinity groups."
- Alcatraz magazine (Oakland, CA);
February, 2002
"�[W]e feel that it is necessary to develop
a long term strategy, and to place all our actions in the framework of that
strategy�this framework draws most heavily from the Platformist
tradition [sic] within anarchism. This is not to say that one must, or even
should, agree with the specifics of the original Organization Platform of the
Libertarian Communists, but is rather a recognition of the importance of
collective responsibility, discipline, and tactical unity which the Platformist
tradition [sic] puts forward. Clearly then, the framework laid out in this
document recognizes that many of those who today identify as �anarchists� will strongly
disagree with this most basic assumption, and therefore will find the entire
framework less than satisfactory. However, our priority, as stated above, is
the creation of a mass anarchist movement, and where we feel that building such
a movement means alienating others who identify as anarchists, we should have no
problem in doing so.
Further, it is necessary to clarify that this
framework assumes that it is through the creation of dual power and a culture
of resistance that a truly mass, working-class based, anarchist revolutionary
movement will be born�"
- "Toward The Creation Of An Anarchist
Movement: From Reactive Politics to Proactive Struggle" in Barricada;
Agitational Monthly of the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists
[NEFAC] #16 (Boston, MA); April, 2002
"We want Dual Power. We seek to build popular
power that can contest and replace state and capitalist power. We actively work
to create a new world in the shell of the old�politically, culturally and economically.
We do this by both challenging and confronting oppressive institutions and
establishing our own liberatory ones."
- Announcement of the formation of the
Federation of Revolutionary Anarchist Collectives (FRAC) (East Lansing, MI);
August, 2002
"I do not think that word means what you
think it means."
- Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride
My use of quotes from each of these projects has
nothing to do with whether or not they are large or influential in terms of
numbers of members or supporters, but with the fact that they have published
statements where the term dual power has made a prominent appearance.
The discussion of what actually constitutes this dual power is sparse; when it
does occur, it is either vague or unintentionally funny. It is my intention to
examine what the term might mean to those self-described anarchists who use it
and why it is used by this particular constellation of anarcho-communists.
What is "anarchist dual power"?
Various projects have been suggested as examples
of incipient dual power. There are a few questions that I feel must be answered
in order for any real discussion to take place between the partisans of this
odd formulation and those who remain skeptical of its relevance to anarchist
theory and practice. Are the examples of "anarchist dual power" just
anarchist-operated alternatives to current non-revolutionary projects? Are they
counter-institutions that replace current non-revolutionary projects with more
"democratic" control? Do any of them have the potential prestige,
influence, or notoriety to challenge the smooth operation of capitalism and the
state? Then there�s the question of centralization versus diffusion; is bigger
better, or is more better? Do these projects require copies, or do they inspire
others that are better and more relevant? Are they examples of direct action
and self-organization, or do they come with leaders and directors (sometimes
called "influential militants" or "revolutionary nuclei")?
Are they used to recruit followers and/or cadre, or are they used to promote
solidarity and mutual aid?
Bring The Ruckus champions Copwatch, while
others propose extending Independent Media Centers, micropower radio stations,
zines, Food Not Bombs. Infoshops, cafes, performance spaces, and other hangouts
are sometimes mentioned in the context of "the creation of dual
power." Barter networks, worker collectives, food co-ops, independent
unions, and squats also get brought up on occasion. These self-organized
projects exist currently for providing mutual aid and support to various
communities around the world. They are alternative infrastructures for taking
care of the needs of antiauthoritarians trying to eke out some kind of decent
living. Creating and maintaining an antiauthoritarian infrastructure of
autonomous institutions is good practice for making and carrying out some
important decisions in our lives, but it�s impossible for me to believe that these
projects could have the potential to challenge the loyalty of non-subculture
people toward the state. Until people�s allegiance to the state begins to shift
toward these or other alternative or counter-institutions, there�s nothing that
even remotely resembles dual power in the works. Indeed, until the state feels
threatened by these independent institutions, those who sit in the places of
real power will continue to ignore them. Either that or they will silently
cheer them on because voluntarism is more efficient (and less expensive to
them) than welfare programs. Using the term dual power to describe Food Not
Bombs, or your local infoshop, or even your local autonomous union, is a parody
of history.
"What constitutes the essence of dual
power? We must pause upon this question, for an illumination of it has never
appeared in historic literature� a class, deprived of power, inevitably
strives to some extent to swerve the governmental course in its favor. This
does not as yet mean, however, that two or more powers are ruling in society� The two-power
regime arises only out of irreconcilable class conflicts�is possible,
therefore, only in a revolutionary epoch, and constitutes one of its fundamental
elements." Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution.
"The basic question of every revolution is
that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no
intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the
revolution. The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has
brought about a dual power... Nobody previously thought,
or could have thought, of a dual power. What is that dual power? Alongside the�government of
the bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but
undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing�the Soviets of
Workers� and Soldiers� Deputies�The fundamental characteristics of this
[dual power] are:
the source of power is not a law previously
discussed and enacted by parliament, but the direct initiative of the people
from below, in their local areas�;
the replacement of the police and the
army, which are institutions divorced from the people and set against the
people, by the direct arming of the whole people; order in the state under such
a power is maintained by the armed workers and peasants themselves, by
the armed people themselves;
officialdom, the bureaucracy, are either
similarly replaced by the direct rule of the people themselves or at least
placed under special control..."
Lenin, Pravda April 9, 1917."
Lenin and Trotsky were the ones who originally
used the term, so we must look at what they said about it and how they meant
it. For these two theorists of Bolshevism, dual power is a condition of
revolutionary tension, where the allegiance of the population is split between
bourgeois (or non-bourgeois) rule and the incipient governing power of
"the people" (through their deputies in the soviets). A general
arming of "the people" is a central characteristic of such a
revolutionary moment. For Lenin and Trotsky, the term dual power is used as a
descriptive category rather than a strategy; looking back on the revolution in
Petrograd in 1905, in which the first soviet (council) came into existence
spontaneously, Trotsky formulated the term to describe the situation. For
Leninists, dual power is the ultimate revolutionary conflict, when the state
must fight to survive: overt challenges to its ability to govern are made by
councils that, as well as commanding the loyalty of a majority of the
population, have the ability to execute and enforce their decisions.
The two main factors leading to a divergent
loyalty to each government in Russia in 1917 were domestic and foreign policy.
Domestically, the Provisional Government had a difficult time solving the
conflicts between workers and owners and between peasants and landlords; being
bourgeois, its members wanted the resolution to be based on legal and peaceful
compromise. The more radical members of the soviets, factory committees, and
peasant committees were interested in worker control and expropriation of
property�hence some tension. Externally, the Provisional Government
was committed to continuing Russian military involvement in the First World
War, while the Bolsheviks were split between those who wanted to conclude a
separate peace (Lenin) and those who wanted to widen the war into a general
European revolutionary class war (Trotsky). This was the second, and arguably
the more crucial, tension that existed between the Provisional Government and
the growing power of the Bolshevik-dominated soviets. Incidentally, the
decision-making process was not one of the causes of the tension. The soviets
could have been what they eventually became within a year�rubber stamping
organs of Bolshevik dictatorship over the workers�and still constituted organs of dual
power so long as their members were armed and willing to confront the police
and military formations still loyal to the bourgeois state.
Dual power in its original sense, then, is not a
program or even a strategy, but a description of a transitional
political tension and conflict that must be resolved. The Bolsheviks knew that
their periodicals didn�t constitute organs of dual power; they knew that their
meeting-places didn�t; they knew that their legal aid committees didn�t; they knew
that all of their self-help groups didn�t. They were clear that the organs of
dual power were the soviets of workers, peasants, and soldiers, which were
making and executing decisions on production and distribution of goods and
services, ownership and control of factories and land, and how to deal with an
imperialist war. As authoritarians and statists, they were equally clear that
these organs needed to be guided and ultimately controlled by them in order to
create the necessary infrastructure for a new "workers�
government." The Bolsheviks understood that this tension must inevitably
end either in revolution or reaction. The situation of dual power must end with
the state crushing the (more or less) independent power of counter-institutions
based on an armed population, or the successful taking over/replacement of the
state by "the people" and their counter-institutions.
I have no objections to the adoption of non-anarchist
ideas, models, or vocabulary to anarchist theory and practice; many aspects of
anarchism would be impossible to describe without Marxist language and ideas.
However, it is usually clear from the context of their usage that when
anarchists say certain things that are also said by Marxists, their meanings
are different: "revolution," for example. Language changes through
time, but the insinuation of the term dual power into anarchist discourse is a
sign of muddled thinking and creeping Leninism, the unfortunate legacy of Love
& Rage and similar groupings. Its use by those who call themselves
anarchists to describe a situation that is supposed to be anarchist is
ahistorical and therefore inaccurate. Its use by Revolutionary Anarchists is
vague (at best), confusing�and confused�and too far
outside the realm of normative anarchism to accept. Anyone with even a basic
grasp of radical history will be able to recognize this. It is a borrowed term
with a borrowed history; that history cannot be separated from the term.
Love & Rage and
the influence and legacy of Leninism
The Love & Rage project began in the late
1980s when the desire for a mass anarchist federation coincided with the
supposed defection to anarchism of all members of the New York-based Trotskyist
Revolutionary Socialist League. The RSL had been flirting with anarchists as
early as �83, when they began having comradely relations with the New
York chapter of the Workers� Solidarity Alliance, an
anarcho-syndicalist group. L&R took over all the resources of the RSL,
including their newspaper (The Torch). This capital extraction allowed
them to create a new kind of anarchism�one that was heavily influenced by a
mixture of traditional Leninism, New Leftist identity politics, and
anti-imperialism. They called it "revolutionary anarchism" and
sometimes referred to their ideas as "anarcho-communism" even though
they had little to do with the theories and ideas of Kropotkin, Malatesta,
Goldman, and others.
They were constantly working on their Statement
of Principles, which was meant to show their distinctions from other anarchist
and Leninist tendencies. Fewer and fewer individuals worked on the statement,
feeding rumors of a small group of influential cadre who were really in
control; the many other pseudonyms of "Ned Day" were seen as a cover
for the dearth of diverse voices. The specter of democratic centralism was
spreading. There had been similar speculation from the very beginning. At the
conference where the name of the project and their newspaper was decided, some
participants had the feeling that the decisions had been made prior to the
actual conference, that the conference was used as a public rubberstamp to
create a false democratic face for the organization. The strong influence of
Bolshevism is clear. One participant at the founding conference even went so
far as to suggest that they name the paper The Torch.
Hooked into the opportunist politics of
anti-imperialism, members of L&R were expected to be supportive of the
national liberation movements of oppressed peoples in their struggles to create
new states. This generates its own contradictions; but in one of the later
incarnations of the Statement, the organization came out in favor of
"weaker states" in their struggles against "stronger states."
Especially galling at that time (of Operation Desert Shield followed by the
Gulf Massacre of 1990-91) was that this was clearly a reference to Iraq�this even after
the revelations of the previous mass gassings of Kurds, among other atrocities
perpetrated by this "weaker state." Such was their commitment to
anti-statism, the cornerstone of anarchism.
Having learned nothing from the previous
attempts to create national or continental anarchist federations, L&R�immediately
after it formed�began to lose members through attrition, and the group split
not once, but twice; the final split fractured the membership in three
directions. Like most similar organizations, at a certain point the tension
between ideological flexibility and conformity came to a head, with many
feeling that the organizational model chosen and used by L&R after the
first split had become incompatible with anarchist ideas. Others decided that
the problem was not with the organizational model, but with the anarchism, and
they descended into Maoism. Indeed, well before the final split (it could be
argued from its very inception), L&R looked and sounded more and more like
a Marxist-Leninist outfit with a circle-A clumsily slapped over a
hammer-and-sickle. This is the legacy that L&R has left to groups like
NEFAC and Bring The Ruckus, both of which include former members of L&R.
NEFAC is a champion of the Platform. Regardless
of their criticisms of specifics (what is not included in it), NEFAC members
find the overall idea of a highly structured organization with written bylaws
and other formal disciplinary measures to be a positive development for
anarchists. The Platform was written by several veterans and supporters of the
Makhnovist insurgent army of the Ukraine, which was active from 1918-1921.
Having successfully beaten the Whites (counter-revolutionaries fighting for the
restoration of the monarchy and private capitalism), the Ukrainian anarchists
had to face Trotsky�s Red Army. The Makhnovists were finally defeated. Makhno
and several of his general staff eventually escaped to Paris, where, after a
number of years of recovering and establishing contacts with other anarchist
exiles from the Soviet Union, they began a project that culminated in the
publication and circulation of the Organizational Platform of the Libertarian
Communists. In this document, they attempted to explain and understand the
reasons for their loss in particular, and the more general loss of an
antiauthoritarian people�s revolution to the Bolsheviks. They
decided that among the main causes were that the anarchists were not
disciplined and dedicated (and ruthless?) enough. As a result, they attempted
to emulate the political formation of the victorious Bolsheviks (democratic
centralism, an untouchable central committee) without using the terminology of
the Bolsheviks. They wanted to out-Bolshevize the Bolsheviks, in the hopes of
winning the next round of the struggle. It was for these reasons that the
Platform was publicly condemned by ex-Makhnovists (including Voline), anarcho-communists
(like Malatesta), and others as being a sectarian attempt to create an
anarchist program with a Bolshevik organizational structure. The Platform
project was unsuccessful.
There is a nagging question in this
organizational discussion: why have the promoters of formally structured
membership organizations taken an example from a historically unimportant
document, an example of unrivalled ineffectiveness? Why have they not used as a
model the most "successful" anarchist mass organization�the FAI
(Iberian Anarchist Federation)? From the time of its official founding in 1927,
the FAI was feared by government agents, and cheered by a majority of Spanish
anarchists. In the decade of their revolutionary activity the members of the
FAI many mistakes, most notably the entry of some of its members into the
Catalan and Spanish governments in 1936. Despite that extremely serious lapse
in judgment, the fact remains that the FAI was a real and functioning anarchist
federation, and commanded a lot of respect both inside and outside the Spanish
anarchist movement. A practical issue that makes the FAI a better example of
anarchist organization is that it was based on real affinity groups, developed
as an extension of members� familiarity and solidarity with each
other. This is in stark contrast to the Platform model, which proposes a
pre-existing structure that collectives are supposed to join; it puts the cart
before the horse, creating a federative project where there may be no need and
no interest in creating a federation in the first place. Members of the FAI had
known and been active with each other for many years before they decided to
create the Federation, mostly as a response to legal repression against the
broader anarchist movement during the 1920s. Its members maintained their ties
to a traditional and recognizable form of anarchism. After it was allowed to
operate openly, only its reformist rivals condemned it as being
anarcho-Bolshevik; other anarchists sometimes condemned it for being too liberal
(i.e. generous to its enemies).
The Platform, on the other hand, did not result
in anything concrete, other than its condemnation from almost all contemporary
anarchist activists and writers as a call for some bizarre hybrid of anarchism
and Bolshevism. No actual General Union of Libertarian Communists was formed
after the Organizational Platform was circulated. The project of creating a
semi-clandestine militarized vanguard (complete with an executive committee) of
anarcho-communists was soon after abandoned by the Russian exiles. For almost
70 years the document itself languished in relative obscurity, a curio from
anarchist history, something to titillate the trivia-minded. What made it worth
rediscovering?
The anarcho-communism of the Platformists is eerily
similar to the authoritarian communism of various Leninist gangs. From a
cursory examination of their published rhetoric, it is difficult not to
conclude that they have taken the "successful" aspects of a Leninist
program, a Leninist vision, and Lenino-Maoist organizing, and more or less
removed or modified the vocabulary of the more obviously statist parts. The
promoters of this hybridized anarchism�should it be called anarcho-Leninism?�draw on the
Platform the same way that the writers of the Platform drew on Leninism. In
doing this, the Platformists are in turn trying to reclaim a moment in
anarchist history that had been largely (and well-deservedly) forgotten as an
embarrassment. By fabricating a "Platformist tradition," they hope to
give themselves an impeccable anarchist pedigree, allowing the discussion of
"anarchist dual power" to occur without needing to justify such a
contradictory concept. Unfortunately for them, however, there was never such a
"Platformist tradition."
The creation of "anarchist dual power"
by the descendants and disciples of Love & Rage goes against the ideas of a
more recognizable anarchism (that is, one not directly influenced by Leninist
ideas). The fans of this "anarchist dual power" have adopted a, shall
we say, unique perspective on the issue of dual power. Historically the term
dual power has been used as a way of understanding the class-based tensions
that lead either to periods of reaction or political (i.e. statist) revolution.
It is clearly meant to describe a condition of loyalty split between an
existing state and a state-in-formation. As the L&R Member Handbook
correctly states (as quoted above): "Dual power is a state of affairs in
which people have created institutions that fulfill all the useful functions
formerly provided by the state." How this "state of affairs" can
be anti-statist is never explained�for the unspectacularly simple reason
that it cannot be explained within an anti-statist conceptual model. The entire
dual power discourse is concerned with government, with how to create and
maintain a set of institutions that can pull the allegiance of the governed
away from the existing state. Unless the partisans of dual power have worked
out a radically different understanding of what power is, where its legitimacy
comes from, how it is maintained, and�more importantly�how anarchists
can possibly exercise it within a framework that is historically statist, the
discussion of "anarchist dual power" is a mockery of the anarchist
principle of being against government.