Facing the Enemy
A platformist interpretation of the
history of anarchist organization
Review by Jason McQuinn
from Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed
Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist
Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 by Alexandre Skirda,
translated by Paul Sharkey (AK Press, POB 40682, San Francisco, CA 94140-0682,
USA; AK Press, POB 12766, Edinburgh, EH8 9YE, Scotland; & Kate Sharpley
Library, BM Hurricane, London, WC1 3XX, England; 2002) 292 pp., $17.95
paper.
Any history of anarchist currents and movements
must also be a history of their organization. Radical ideas and practices are
nothing if not aspects of a social engagement whose own content and structure both
anticipate the new society that is desired. In fact, the theory and critique of
organization has consistently been one of the most central and contested
concerns of anarchists since Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Faure, Malatesta,
Kropotkin and many, many others gave world-historical shape to the anarchist movement
in the 19th Century.
It thus remains extremely important to this day for
all anarchists to fully understand not only the major anarchist theories and
critiques of organization, but also the history of the actual forms of
organization used by anarchists around the world in well over a century of
often highly-effective practice. Unfortunately, Alexandre Skirda in Facing
the Enemy isn�t
going to be the person to write this history, despite Paul Sharkey�s misleading English
translation of the subtitle of the book as A History of Anarchist
Organization from Proudhon to May 1968. (The original French title and
subtitle actually translate more literally as "Individual Autonomy and
Collective Force: Anarchists and Organization from Proudhon to our time.")
What Skirda is equipped to do is something
much narrower, that is to write a polemical platformist interpretation
of the history of anarchist organization. Facing the Enemy is certainly
not without value in providing a revealing look into the machinations of Marx
in the First International, the various incarnations of Bakunin�s secret societies, the
effects of police interventions, and the manipulative mindsets and practices of
those adopting platformist ideology, primarily in France. However, as a history
of anarchist organization in general the book is often biased, intentionally
incomplete, and occasionally illogical�quite clearly reflecting the limitations of the platformist ideology it
preaches.
Every anarchist (and every would-be revolutionary)
should take some time to study the history of the First International. However,
given the apparent decline of interest within the anarchist milieu in
unearthing its own history (paralleling a decline in interest in history within
the larger media-saturated, spectator/internet society), even reading a short
account like Skirda�s
would improve on most anarchists� knowledge of the situation. Of particular interest here is the period
following the demise Marx�s rump
First International after he safely deposited it�s General Council with stooges in New York�a period of anarchist
agitation too-often ignored in most of the full-scale accounts of the
Marx/Bakunin, centralist/federalist conflict in the International.
Skirda�s quick review of a few of Bakunin�s various organizational schemes and programs for his Alliances and
International Brotherhoods is another worthwhile contribution to anarchist
history, especially since most biographical and historical studies of Bakunin
and those he influenced were done before important source materials were
excavated in recent decades. However, Bakunin�s penchant for invisible, "collective
dictatorship" (p. 15), always unsettling to anti-authoritarians who study
his ideas, is played down a bit too unconvincingly here. Secret societies of
revolutionaries make much more sense when anarchists operate in countries where
all radical speech is suppressed (as Bakunin most often did). But the invisible
"dictatorship" of anarchist revolutionaries from within the masses is
a formulation just as much given to authoritarian tensions as the more
well-known and oft-criticized Marxist formulation of "the dictatorship of
the proletariat."
Another valuable aspect of Skirda�s account of anarchist history
is his periodic focus on the effects of police surveillance, infiltration and
provocation. This has huge implications for contemporary anarchists. There are
the obvious dangers for autonomous, small-group activities (primarily the odd
provocateur urging worthless or suicidal acts of violence, since widespread infiltration
and surveillance are more difficult in such groups). While there are also many
dangers for larger sectarian groupings or the various types of federation (more
obviously revealed in accounts of the COINTELPRO destabilization of the �60s & �70s New Left in the US,
particularly aimed at the Black Panthers and AIM), in which surveillance and
infiltration are much easier, as are attempts to incite internecine strife.
However, like most platformists (and like
authoritarians in general), Skirda considers many important historical
anarchist ideas and criticisms of organization to be impractical or inefficient
because under free self-organization there is nothing to compel anarchists to
fall into line as a disciplined mass of followers under a unitary ideology at
the call of their leadership. Like too many organizationalists he prefers to
condemn any anarchists who balk at attempts to discipline and control them,
ridiculing their refusals to subordinate their own judgments for those of
more-or-less democratic processes or less-than-transparent organizational
directives. This is where sneering efforts at manipulation of the reader enter
his narrative more and more frequently, as in chapter 8:
"Anti-organizationists and bombers." Skirda is as well aware as anyone
else that political bombings have been by far more often the work of
organizations than of isolated, demoralized individuals, and that even within
the anarchist milieu around the end of the 19th century attentats weren�t predominantly the work of
anarchist individualists, much less the semi-mythical
"anti-organizationists."
Relying on a piece of testimony at a trial as his
only flimsy evidence, Skirda concludes that all the anarchist groups in 1880s
Paris were really non-existent except as "temporary get-togethers,"
with "no connection and no coordination involved" even between groups
in federation. If a formal platform, membership cards or dues, and a
secretariat didn�t
exist, then, for the organizational fetishists, obviously there was no
organization involved! Similarly, for the authoritarian left, without formal
offices of leadership and means of controlling members, only chaos can ensue.
Both views oppose the full range of anarchist self-organization, which can be
formal or informal, depending upon its purposes and the situations in faces.
Neither is Skirda very clear in his analysis of the
various illegalist, insurrectionary, "propaganda of the deed"
tendencies which came to prominence in the anarchist milieu of the 1870s and
1880s, at times mixing the various ideas, and portraying them as a single
phenomenon centering on the coincidental movement-wide infatuation with
dynamite and attentats. In its most general meaning, of course,
"propaganda by deed" signifies, as Malatesta said, the "act of
insurrection, designed to assert socialist principles by deeds" (p. 39),
or in more contemporary terms, the potentially exemplary nature of direct
action. And anarchist illegalism at its most basic refuses to acknowledge
capitalist laws as in any way valid limits to anarchist activity. While
insurrectionary anarchism advocates support for the immediate break with all
hierarchical, capitalist institutions and social relations whenever and
wherever possible.
Clearly, the most effective anarchist propaganda
will always be the actual, direct implementation of anarchist social
relationships, and in this sense "propaganda by deed" has always been
a core practice of most anarchists, despite the ill repute gained by the term
itself after it became much more narrowly associated with bombings and
attentats in the popular mind. And the most effective anarchists have always
refused to be limited by the laws imposed by state and capital to maintain our
slavery, though the term "illegalism" has also fallen into ill repute
after being associated with a few particular French anarchists whose
law-breaking tended to stretch the credulity of their commitments to anarchism.
While every form of social revolutionary anarchism has always advocated
insurrectionary practice, since without a complete break with capitalist social
institutions revolution is clearly impossible�though the question of appropriate timing
for insurrectionary acts remains widely contested.
To criticize any of these three aspects of
anarchist practice should always call for careful distinctions to be made in
what is being criticized. Ignorant claims that "propaganda by deed"
necessarily requires bombings or tyrannicide ignore the fruitful history of
anarchist direct action (as well as the fact that some bombings and tyrannicides
have at times been appropriate and effective). While condemnations of
illegalism often ignore the fact that every genuine revolt necessarily involves
the repudiation of all illegitimate, capitalist laws. And categorical
repudiations of insurrectionary practice always in imply the defense of the
institutions of capital and state, which will never wither away without our
active participation in their demise.
Just as importantly, no one should lose sight of
the that the relatively brief anarchist craze for dynamite and fulminates of
mercury, along with assassinations by dagger or pistol, in the decades
immediately before and after the turn of the 19th to the 20th century has
little to do with the more general validity of extra-legal direct action and insurrectionary
or revolutionary violence. While individual and small-group attentats have
sometimes been the work of despairing solidarity (like Alexander Berkman�s attempted assassination of
the industrialist mass-murderer Frick), they have often been tactically and
strategically effective (like the activities of some of the anarchist pistoleros
in Spain).
Which brings up the strangest aspect of Skirda�s platformist interpretation
of anarchist organizational history. The FAI (the Iberian Anarchist Federation)
is almost absent from his analysis, despite the fact that this notorious
federation may be the one example of an anarchist organization that is admired
by social revolutionary anarchists of all tendencies�at least so far as I�m aware. I�m sure the fact that the FAI�s practice in the decade
leading up to the Spanish Revolution was contrary to platformist dogmas has a
part to play in Skirda�s
avoidance of the subject, but no platformist interpretation of history will
ever convince anyone by ignoring the most historically important example of a
large anarchist federation. However, rather than discussing the actual
organizational structure and dynamics of the FAI, Skirda is content to complain
that the FAI ought to have followed the Platform instead of ignoring it.
And after this he gives a confusing account of the CNT refusal of social
revolution and policy of collaboration with political authorities. And this
without indicating the faintest understanding that the only genuine
revolutionary question posed in 1936 was whether the people in arms would
organize their own social revolution (which they attempted throughout much of
the countryside) or submit to authorities, whether those authorities were
constituted in Madrid, the Catalan Generalitat, or the CNT and UGT (as they
largely did in Barcelona and other cities).
The usefulness of Skirda�s history plummets with his
account of the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Suddenly the poor,
misunderstood Organizational Platform is portrayed as the be-all and end-all
of anarchism. The general opposition within the international anarchist
movement to the more unsavory aspects of the Platform must be explained
away, distorted, undermined with personal innuendo and accusations of petty
plots. And a minority organizational practice which has never accomplished much
of lasting value within the international anarchist movement becomes the
complete center of attention for Skirda, as though the vast majority of
non-platformist and anti-platformist anarchists count for little or nothing. In
fact, Skirda often demeans the vast majority of anarchists, their ideas and
practices as chaotic individualist nut-cases of one sort or another. This
despite the fact that platformists, for all their delusionary bombast about
organizing "all of the wholesome elements of the anarchist movement into
one umbrella organization" (p. 211), have almost always attracted only a
small minority of anarchists to follow their sectarian tenets, often only those
least committed to anarchist principles to begin with.
In one of his illogical tirades against opponents
of the Platform (p. 142), Skirda exclaims: "If one wanted to reject
[the Platform], then one also had to throw out �the baby with the bathwater,� that is, repudiate what
was...the most radical revolutionary experiment of the century." Which of
course is nonsensical in the extreme. The Makhnovist experiment was one of the
most radical of the century, but that experiment had nothing directly to do
with injecting authoritarian leftist organizational practices into the
anarchist milieu ten years later!
Skirda continues, not understanding how any
anarchist could ever oppose the incoherent synthesis of leftist organization
and anarchist ideology proposed by the Platform: "Who could
challenge that? Always the same old figures, the usual ditherers, the
incorrigible blatherers, all those who in the end had something to lose, be it
their petty vanity, or ultimately cozy position in established society. That
said, the loudest opposition came from the Russian �migr� community...and a
handful of anarchist elders." But all was not lost for Skirda, since years
later a few platformist-inspired groups managed to organize themselves and
carry on the ever-misunderstood, ever-persecuted cause. Of course, the actual
practice of some of these platformist groups proved to be a pathetic travesty,
with platformists taking secret control of the French post-World War II
Anarchist Federation with a manipulative scheme worthy of any power-hungry
Marxist-Leninists (recounted in Chapter 18).
Despite its many failures, Facing the Enemy
is an important book and I recommend that every anarchist seriously committed
to encouraging social revolution read it. Along with chronicling an episodic,
Eurocentric and polemical (but still worthwhile) history of anarchism, it
provides a fairly comprehensive catalog of the most tempting authoritarian,
leftist compromises that cut the heart out of anarchist practice and turn
anarchist theory into a rigid ideology. Ultimately, the unintended message of
Skirda�s book
is that not only is the platformism it pushes hopelessly anachronistic in today�s anarchist milieu, but
historically it has been the ideology of demoralized losers.