[STUDY GROUP] Part 2 of Towards a fresh revolution

[rebelworker]

Ok so heres a new thread to discuss the second part about the FoD's suggestions for a new direction and structure of the revolution.

[Severian]

Link to the article (PDF) (http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=938)

Part 2, "Our Position", starts on page 11

Here's the thread where the first section was discussed. (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=62884)

***

The demands at the beginning are excellent. I'll leave aside the question of suppressing religion for now - except to comment this question occurred in a context in Spain that had some unusual features.

It's not just that the particular proposals are good in themselves, but they all point in the direction of workers taking and holding every bit of power they can. Trust the bosses, their state, their officers with nothing.

This is possibly the most surprising section:

We are introducing a slight variation in anarchism into our programme. The establishment of a revolutionary Junta. As we see it, the revolution needs organisms
to oversee it, and repress, in an organised sense, hostile sectors. As current events have shown such sectors do not accept oblivion unless they are crushed.
There may be anarchist comrades who feel certain ideological misgivings, but the lesson of experience is enough to induce us to stop pussy-footing. Unless we want a repetition of what is happening with the present revolution, we must proceed with the utmost energy against those who are not identified with the working class.

After this brief preamble, we shall now proceed to set out the items of our programme.
I-Establishment of a Revolutionary Junta or National Defence Council.
This body will be organised as follows: members of the revolutionary Junta will be elected by democratic vote in the union organisations. Account is to be taken of the number of comrades away at the front; these comrades must have the right to representation.
The Junta will steer clear of economic affairs, which are the exclusive preserve of the unions.
The functions of the revolutionary Junta are as follows:
a) The management of the war
b) The supervision of revolutionary order
c) International affairs
d) Revolutionary propaganda.
Posts to come up regularly for re-allocation so as to prevent anyone growing attached to them. And the trade union assemblies will exercise control over the Juntaʼs activities.

The Friends of Durruti seem to acknowledge that it's a bit unorthodox for anarchists. I'd go further, and say this seems like a proposal for a workers' government by another name.

Anarchist doctrine, at its heart, contains an evasion of the basic question: which class must hold state power? In the heat of the revolution, it gets much harder to evade basic political questions.

When the moment came, the CNT leadership answered the question: the bourgeoisie must continue to hold state power. That's a part of the explanation for the other thread's recurring topic, why did they behave in such a reformist manner? (Besides other valid partial explanations given there.)

It seems to me the Friends of Durruti, under the impact of experience, were feeling their way towards the opposite answer.


An Economic Council may also be set up, taking into consideration the natures of the Industrial Unions and Industrial federations,
to improve on the co-ordination of economic activities.

Here, they're just beginning to tackle a problem that's still unsolved today. How to coordinate different workplaces and industries without simply leaving it to the market.

Workers already know more than anyone about the production process, and the internal functioning of the workplace. But the relations between different workplaces, getting the inputs for production and determining what outputs are needed by others? The bosses handled that in the past, by means of the market.

I commented in the other thread about the potential conflict of interest between the unions' original functions and administering the means of production, so I won't go into that here.


III - Free municipality.
Prior to the coming of the foreign dynasties, municipal rights were defended with great tenacity in Spain. Such decentralisation precluded the erection of a new State system.....
The Municipality shall take charge of those functions of society that fall outside the preserve of the unions.....
The Municipalities will be organised at the level of local, comarcal and peninsula federations.

OK, I've seen this kind of thing before, and I've never got it. Municipal government is still government. And not necessarily any more democratic - sometimes the opposite. Are anarchists opposed to government, or not?

And BTW, the old "municipal rights" were part of feudal decentralization. The absolute monarchs and bourgeois republics, in knocking them down, were accomplishing a progressive part of the rise of capitalism.


Revolutions occur with great frequency in our country. Sometimes they are embarked upon with out the requisite conditions being present and with no possibility of success. One has to be able to divine the precise moment, psychologically and insurrectionally speaking. The outcome hangs on the correct choice.

Damn. I think this concept is usually called "reformism" on this board.

[rebelworker]

Originally posted by [email protected] 04, 2007 04:17 am


First off Severian i want to thank you for properly posting links for this thread, i got a bit lazy...


Now to the meat and potatoes.




The Friends of Durruti seem to acknowledge that it's a bit unorthodox for anarchists. I'd go further, and say this seems like a proposal for a workers' government by another name.

Anarchist doctrine, at its heart, contains an evasion of the basic question: which class must hold state power? In the heat of the revolution, it gets much harder to evade basic political questions.

I think this is a very accurate and poigniant critique of much of the anarchist movement.

I do however want to point out as i have before that influential groups within the anarchist movement have addressed this while still avoiding the mistakes made by the Bolsheviks. here im speaking specifically of The Workers cause group, FoD and most of what would be considered the platformist tendancy within anarhism today.

In fact while i was in Ireland last year some comrades from nefac's sister organization there, The Workers Solidarity Movement, were candidly throwing around the term "dictatorship of the proletariate".

Now it true most of us still dont use the term state, though workers goverment is often used. Now although the uncertainty of most anarchists is crearly a problem, the fact is that there is a solid position, that differs on crutial points from that of Bolshevik practice, from those of us within the Platformist camp.

The failue of the CNT was clear, a revolutionary workers goverment needed to be set up, at the very least in catalonia, but thi should be a federation of workers councils. Now a seperate military body, to centralise the democratic militias may be nessesary, but this should be accountable to the federal council structure. Also all of this shiuld take intoaccount that the party, or in the anarchist case revolutionary organisation should not be at the center of a new overarching state structure.

In practice this means that party militants might hold majority positions in the federation of councils, or more importantly the revolutionary junta(as it was called by the FoD) but the organisations decisionmaking structure would remain a seperate body, not at all intwined with the new govt. This is where the bolsheviks made a crutial mistake, and the key difference many of u anarchist see in our practice and why we do not use the word state to describe they system of govt we wish to create.


I have to run now, but Id like to get more into this and specifically address the economic question in a later post.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 04, 2007 07:55 pm

The Friends of Durruti seem to acknowledge that it's a bit unorthodox for anarchists. I'd go further, and say this seems like a proposal for a workers' government by another name.

Anarchist doctrine, at its heart, contains an evasion of the basic question: which class must hold state power? In the heat of the revolution, it gets much harder to evade basic political questions.

I think this is a very accurate and poigniant critique of much of the anarchist movement.

I do however want to point out as i have before that influential groups within the anarchist movement have addressed this while still avoiding the mistakes made by the Bolsheviks.
It's a little odd that you speak of this as anarchism vs Bolshevism specifically, rather than vs Marxism, or vs Manifesto-defined communism.

Anarchism was counterposed to Marxism well before there was a Bolshevik Party.

Also, I don't see how you could address that without ceasing to be anarchist, by the usual definition of the word.


The Workers Solidarity Movement, were candidly throwing around the term "dictatorship of the proletariate".

Now it true most of us still dont use the term state, though workers goverment is often used.
...
The failue of the CNT was clear, a revolutionary workers goverment needed to be set up, at the very least in catalonia, but thi should be a federation of workers councils.

This all seems very semantic. To most people, anarchism implies opposition to government. Also, "dictatorship" is usually considered more repressive than "state".


Now a seperate military body, to centralise the democratic militias may be nessesary, but this should be accountable to the federal council structure.

Which implies a federal state, but not no state. The history of class society includes all kinds of state structures, more or less centralized - it's a secondary question, really.


Also all of this shiuld take intoaccount that the party, or in the anarchist case revolutionary organisation should not be at the center of a new overarching state structure.

In practice this means that party militants might hold majority positions in the federation of councils, or more importantly the revolutionary junta(as it was called by the FoD) but the organisations decisionmaking structure would remain a seperate body, not at all intwined with the new govt. This is where the bolsheviks made a crutial mistake, and the key difference many of u anarchist see in our practice and why we do not use the word state to describe they system of govt we wish to create.

Which is more about the role of the party organization than the role of the state.

BTW, the Bolshevik leaders, in the first few years after the revolution, also recognized that a lot of problems were resulting from the party and state becoming entangled. The bureaucratization of the party resulting from its connection to the state bureaucracy, among other things.

How to solve this was less simple than just recognizing the problem, especially under the circumstances. I'd like to refer here to my comments in the other thread, about how you could easily have the same problems, by combining all functions in the unions or any other organization....

And the key thing about the Bolshevik party was how it was organized, what kind of party it was.....it didn't really set out to become the only legal party, and certainly didn't proclaim that in advance as any kind of principle.....that evolved over the course of years.

[SPK]

In the previous section, the FoD laid out the many problems with previous anarchist approaches towards the revolutionary process and war against Franco. Overcoming those difficulties was not going to be easy and would take time. It seems that the FoD was one of few anarchist formations seriously trying to understand them and devise proposals for moving forward. Perhaps that helps to explain why this last section, which is good at points, is also puzzling and riddled with contradictions at others.

A few notes.

- TAFR: “Bureaucracy must go. The thousands of bureaucrats who have descended on Barcelona are one of the worst plagues ever visited on us. In place of a bureaucrat, there ought to be a worker. And by bureaucrat we mean any cafe layabout.”

This is absurd and naïve. The problem with bureaucrats is not that they are lounging about in cafes. The problem with bureaucrats is that they are most definitely not lounging about in cafes, but instead are: making government decisions based on criteria not directly determined, democratically, by the workers; acting as central, nodal points for crucial information flows – and by definition excluding other parties from those information flows; concentrating skills and experience, in state administration, within a small strata of people; perpetuating the traditional, capitalist division of manual and mental labor; etcetera. Bureaucracy is a concrete, material entity with highly defined characteristics independent of the individuals or persons who are a part of the bureaucracy. These characteristics should be viewed as problematic – if, at least, temporarily necessary -- by a revolutionary society. Instead, the FoD views as problematic the class background or status of those individual bureaucrats. This is an extremely simplistic and reductive analysis: being working-class is not some magic cure-all that will immediately resolve the contradictions brought into being by capitalism. The CNT, a militant labor union for marx’s sake, had this problem! :rolleyes:

To give more credit to the FoD, I might ask exactly where this perspective came from. Having workers transferred into the state apparatus may be a good idea (see my last note at the bottom of this post): it may provide a foundation or starting point for needed revolutionary leadership. But fully developed political and ideological lines on how to deal with the problems of bureaucracy are then required, and the FoD just begs the question here. Also, was the republican administration really awash in funds that paid for such functionaries, to such a degree that they lounged about in cafes without doing any real work? (Monies which, the FoD persistently implies, could have been reallocated to the purchase of weaponry for the fight against Franco.) If so, where precisely did these funds come from? Spain was not a rich country, and it did not have bottomless gold reserves.

- TAFR: “With regard to the problem of the war, we back the idea of the army being under the absolute control of the working class. Officers with their origins in the capitalist regime do not deserve the slightest trust from us… (S)hould any officer be retained, it must be under the strictest supervision.”

This makes sense. The entire military should be under political control, not just those officers from the bourgeois regime that switched sides to support the revolutionary process. Though this decision on the part of the FoD would be an easier one to make, given that the Spanish armed forces were historically among the least capable out of all the western capitalist states. In imperialist campaigns prior to the republican government, the brass had been demonstrably incompetent; corruption had been rampant; food and clothing shipments for the troops had been stolen and sold off for private profit; the same had happened with weapons and ammunition; and so on. This was one of the factors in bloodbaths such as the battle of Annual in 1921, where Moroccan resistance fighters killed more than 15,000 Spanish occupying soldiers and took thousands more as prisoners. A revolution will always face the quandary of whether and how to integrate existing state institutions. However, in this case, it seems dubious whether the old military structures or politically-supportive strata of the Spanish officer caste were worth maintaining: building a new, worker-controlled armed formation from the ground up would have been the preferred alternative. Perhaps a capitalist state, on the eve of revolutionary situation, will by definition always be in this condition – i.e. with a dysfunctional and decadent state apparatus that should simply be replaced in totum?

- Severian had objections to the FoD statements on “free municipalities”. I get these impression that the FoD wasn’t necessarily using that terminology in the way that we would (here in the usa), i.e. to refer to cities or towns or counties. Instead, it seems that this was a reference to the national questions in Spain, i.e. concerning Catalonia, the Basque regions, and other large areas with separatist sentiments. That would give the FoD positions a rather different tenor. Catalonia was home to a disproportionate bulk of Spanish industrial production and, by extension, the proletariat. For one region in Spain to occupy such a pivotal role in the revolutionary process raised many questions, for other regions, which had to be handled very, very carefully.

There is a lot to say about this section, so I’ll have other comments later on, including some reponses to previous posts.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 07, 2007 12:18 am
Also, was the republican administration really awash in funds that paid for such functionaries, to such a degree that they lounged about in cafes without doing any real work? (Monies which, the FoD persistently implies, could have been reallocated to the purchase of weaponry for the fight against Franco.) If so, where precisely did these funds come from? Spain was not a rich country, and it did not have bottomless gold reserves.
Dunno, but I'd be astounded if the Republican government didn't pay functionaries substantially more than workers' wages. Heck, I'd be surprised if the CNT and UGT didn't. Correcting that would have saved money, and also been one step in fighting bureaucracy.

A lot of very poor countries in, say, sub-Saharan Africa today do have plenty of privileged and fairly idle bureaucrats. They seem to find funds for themselves even, maybe especially, if there are no funds for anything else.

But I agree with the rest of your point.


A revolution will always face the quandary of whether and how to integrate existing state institutions. However, in this case, it seems dubious whether the old military structures or politically-supportive strata of the Spanish officer caste were worth maintaining: building a new, worker-controlled armed formation from the ground up would have been the preferred alternative.

This largely happened, initially: militias created by different workers' organizations were the main force fighting Franco. Later, new Republican police and army formations were created to re-solidify bourgeois power - the Assault Guards and so forth.

But no modern revolution, in smashing the state, has wholly vaporized it. You fight and build with what you have -what else? And particularly this does mean trained officers and sergeants. However incompetent they may be, they're still going to be ahead of wholly untrained people. Spain did ultimately conquer Morocco - and enlist Moroccans in its army, after all.

You wouldn't try to substitute revolutionary slogans for knowing the practical business of a machinists' trade, would you? Similarly the soldiers' trade. Trying to substitute hand-waving and rhetoric for practicality and experience is a very common approach to military matters among leftists. It's not remotely serious.

And a serious approach is needed, since: 1. The big political questions of the modern world are ultimately settled by armed force and 2. Marxism is not a magic 8-ball that gives superior answers to anything - it's a method of materialist analysis, which requires that one first know the facts to be analyzed. So people who try to answer this stuff without even making a slight effort to learn about military organization and history....


Instead, it seems that this was a reference to the national questions in Spain, i.e. concerning Catalonia, the Basque regions, and other large areas with separatist sentiments.

That interpretation doesn't seem to be supported by the text. They're clearly proposing an overall state structure, not just for the national regions. They seem to be suggesting a highly localized structure would render the national question irrelevant.

That would fit with the traditional approach of Spanish anarchists to this question - simply emphasizing class unity without advocating self-determination. OK, Catalan workers are of course free to advocate that the right to self-determination not be excercised.

This is all besides my point anyway - that municipal governments are still governments, so what's up with this supposed anarchist opposition to government? Autonomous nationality region governments are also still governments.....

[rebelworker]

I would have to agree that many anarchist, and most anarchist language is murky on this subject.

Obviously communist anarchist envision some kind of goverment, the difference being we opose the idea of taking over the old or building a new, state structure, with a large developed burocracy, centralised police, secret police and bodies of centralised economic dictation.

I beleive in a workers govt. Local councils in the workplace and the comunity should make up the most basic level of govt. i think they should have a dirct line of controll over federated bodies covering regions, that then federate larger areas (modern nations or continents.