articles from MD: The Problem of Organisation and Leadership

  1. Devrim
    Devrim
    This article appeared in the journal of the Anarchist Communist Federation (UK): “Virus – Militant Anarchism,” number 9, 1986. It is one of the first serious pieces of writing I produced, so please forgive its simplicity and incoherence, I have edited it a little. It is reproduced because I think it might be relevant to current thinking around workplace organising and ‘revolutionary consciousness.’

    lines (MD) Jan 1st 2012


    The Problem of Organisation and Leadership

    An investigation into the claims of anarcho-syndicalism – and what happened to the CNT and FAI in 1936.



    It has long been a part of anarchist theory that means cannot be separated from ends. By ‘means’ here, it is meant types of organisation, kinds of tactics. Many anarchist analyses of historical events or movements have shown that ‘degenerations’ in movements or organisations are not really degenerations at all, but faults that have become fully evident and that can be traced back to the structure of the organisation in question, or the ideology that has shaped it. For example, whereas certain Trotskyists would argue that the USSR was a ‘degenerate workers’ state, we would argue that the initial ideology and organisation of the Bolshevik Party made that ‘degeneration’ inevitable. Before the end of the last century, anarchists were correctly predicting what would happen to a revolution if the Marxists were allowed to direct, or hi-jack, it; they were predicting Stalinism long before Stalin was even in the party.


    Anarcho-syndicalism asserts that workers must organise themselves in their economic units and in these structures must practise the organisational forms of the anarchist society; this is only possible if the organisations are anti-parliamentary. The anarcho-syndicalist CNT in Spain, in its congress of 1918, stated that: “Professional politicians can never represent workers’ organisations, and the latter should make sure that they never affiliate themselves to any political club.” Slogans of the CNT reflecting its apolitical/anti-parliamentary stance included: “There are no good and bad politicians, only bad ones and worse,” and, “Provisional governments turn into permanent ones inevitably.”


    However, on November 4th, 1936, the CNT entered four ministers to the government which was led by the non-revolutionary socialist, Largo Caballero. Jose Peirats, the official historian of the CNT, has written:


    “The top cadres of the movement acknowledged the crushing weight of a situation which they had been incapable of for-seeing seriously. They never outgrew their apprenticeship […] [and] they had to play the unwelcome part of acting as a brake on the inexperienced revolutionary impulse of their own comrades. They had to take on an ungrateful task, for which they were neither prepared nor felt a vocation.”

    ‘Solidaridad Obrera,’ the paper of the CNT in Catalonia, wrote at the time:

    “The entry of the CNT to the government of Madrid is one of the most important facts of the political history of our country. Always, on principle and by conviction, the CNT has been anti-state and the enemy of every form of government. But circumstances, almost always superior to human will, although determined by it, have transformed the nature of the government and the Spanish State. The government at the present time, as a regular instrument of the State organs, is no longer an oppressive force against the working class.”

    (In the light of the May events in Barcelona in 1937, amongst others, this reads like a bad joke.)


    However, Federica Montseny, one of those CNT ministers, said, “All the most prominent men of the syndical and anarchist groups were present [at the decision to join the government]… We have joined the government, but the streets have escaped us…”


    And ‘Los Amigos de Durruti’: “The truth is that the rank and file was not consulted, only a few of the best known elements of the CNT and FAI were present at the meetings.”


    In fact, the entry of the four anarchists to the Republican government was a logical stage in the policy of the CNT, relating to the revolution and the fight against Franco, which began on July 21st, 1936, the day after the people had defeated the military rebellion in Barcelona and proclaimed the revolution.


    Hours after the defeat of the military rebellion, Luis Companys, as head of the Generalitat (regional government) of Catalonia, arranged a meeting with prominent members of the CNT-FAI. He told them that since it was they now who had the power, he would step down as President of Catalonia if they so wished. [A very similar meeting was held between Prime Minister Lloyd George and the leaders of the Shop Stewards’ Movement in Britain during WW1, but the Shop Steward leaders got scared, kept the content of the meeting secret, backed down and proceeded to dismantle the movement.] However, he also suggested that the struggle against fascism nationally might be aided by his presence as President of a government composed of all the leading parties in Catalonia. He knew that his Generalitat would have little authority without the CNT.


    ON July 21st, a Regional Plenum of the CNT, ‘decided not to speak about Libertarian Communism as long as part of Spain was in the hands of the fascists,’ (Paz). With objections from only one delegation, a policy of collaboration was agreed upon. The Generalitat was retained.


    Garcia Oliver, who was in charge of the Central Committee of Militias, explained that the fascist threat was the most important consideration and that anti-fascist unity had to be maintained. Gaston Leval gives his other, deeper, reasons:


    “He expressed them in conversations with comrades. ‘What would I have done with the power? I was in no way prepared for what was implied, the situation was such that I could not but fail.’ And it was quite true. Garcia Oliver, like all the more or less demagogic orators of the FAI, was quite ignorant of the steps that had to be taken to direct the life, industry and provisioning of a city like Barcelona. The same could be said of Federica Montseny. This did not stop them from becoming ministers of the Republic. It was easier than organising a collective.”


    In reality it was to be the Central Committee of the Militias which wielded the real power in Barcelona at this time, not the Generalitat. But the fact that the Generalitat, and Companys, was retained and supported by the CNT-FAI, as part of a strategy of collaboration with the state did not bode well.


    The revolutionary CNT and FAI were now embarking on a course which, because the revolution was going on around them, meant that for the sake of collaboration they would have to try to slow down the spread of the revolution, any steps toward the new society, beyond the ones already achieved, had to wait until the fascists had been defeated.


    This policy of postponing the revolution affected the military strategy of the CNT (probably disastrously) and forced the CNT into positions which even leading CNTers, such as Durruti, found hard to justify in the terms of their anarchist views..


    The contradictory, though common, situation of revolutionaries attempting to hold back the revolution while still trying to maintain, or envisage, a course to the revolution, led to a strange formula being adopted by prominent CNTers (Santillan especially). This was that the revolutionaries must legally [using the legal machinery of the State] build up defences, using the power of the armed workers controlled by the Central Committee of militias, so that the old regime would not be able to restore itself, either now or after the defeat of fascism. This would entail creating an ‘armed vigilance unit’ controlled by the unions.


    Legally creating the conditions whereby the revolution could not be seriously attacked, and could, in fact, extend itself, would mean the complete integration into, and perhaps take-over of, the State – not the abolition of the State. The new economy, already managed by the workers, would gain strength against the central Committee of Militias, which was provisional and regional, and the CNT would perhaps become the dominant force in the State since it would control the economy. As Durruti argued, this would lead to a “sort of State socialist economy,” it would not mean revolution since it is impossible for a revolution to have “a legal basis.”


    Here we can see the ‘degeneration’ of the union at ultra-fast speed. Collaboration - with other political parties and the state in order to ensure the survival of the organisation and its growth of power in the present society – has led to the acceptance of bourgeois legality and the organisation trying to use the workers for its own political ends: ultimately the taking over of the running of the state, and thus of exploitation, ‘in the interests of the workers.’


    The entry of the CNT to the Madrid government was not a very big surprise, nor was it an ‘historic error,’ but a symptom of the weakness of the CNT as an anarchist organisation.

    (Note: A Giles Peters, in ‘A New World…’, in an article in support of the CNT writes: “The CNT has its own political traditions even if these are more ambiguous than many people would like to believe.” p.91. “The celebrated ‘anti-politicism’ of the CNT was not only compatible with the ‘historic error’ of entering the Caballero cabinet in 1936 but also with all the military and political conspiracies against the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in the 1920’s and the rather more dubiously useful political alliances of the CNT in exile in the 1940’s.” p96)


    As Malatesta has pointed out, and Alfredo M Bonanno expanded: traditionally a union that aims to defend and increase the immediate, partial gains of the workers (which is an objective of anarcho-syndicalism) tends to collaboration with the state. Basically, the leaders, or the bureaucracy, become fearful of ‘losing all they have fought for’ (i.e., their positions) by jeopardising their relations with the state.


    Bonanno: “Given that the job of the unions is that of claiming better conditions, to claim them it is necessary first to save the life and efficiency of the counterpart [employer/economy/state].” And again: “On the morrow of the revolution… there can be neither party nor trade union, just as there can be no capitalism. The structure of the future will consist of only economic and not political federations of grass roots organisations, otherwise the work will have to be done all over again.”


    The argument here is that even revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism will, sooner or later, find itself inevitably bound up in a trade union logic, defending the organisation before anything else, and doing this by getting involved in all sorts of political chicanery.


    Malatesta: “In fact, being a movement which proposes to defend the present interests of the workers, it must necessarily adapt itself to the living conditions of the present.”


    The problem is that an organisation is built that acts in the workers’ interests. The organisation must therefore act in the best interests of all its members; in fact, therefore, in the best interests of the organisation. In a revolutionary event it means that the revolutionary proletariat will be subject to stops and checks from positions of seeming revolutionary authority, and finally repression. Witness the CNT’s collaboration with the Communist Party during 1937 when the CP started to stamp out anarchist initiatives.


    The Problem of the General Strike


    A central tactic that emerged with the concept of anarcho-syndicalism was that of the revolutionary general strike. At the beginning of this century many anarchists had given up hope of a mass revolutionary insurrection, partly because organising it seemed too difficult and partly because it was thought that that the armed forces of the state were now so efficient and so technically advanced that an armed uprising would stand little chance of success. A complete, mass withdrawal of labour was considered to be the ideal way to make the bourgeoisie relinquish power; the bourgeoisie would be, in effect, ‘starved out.’


    Some realised the error in this position as it stood on its own – it would certainly be the strike that would break before the bourgeoisie, because the people would also starve – and argued that the strikers must also start expropriating the means of production and use them for the benefit of the people. This was called ‘the expropriating general strike,’ later the idea of insurrection was also incorporated into the concept, this made it ‘the expropriating and insurrectionary general strike.’


    But the general strike would have finished once the expropriating had started and due to the certainty that mass expropriation will provoke an armed response from the bourgeoisie the people would have already made provisions for their defence (locating and distributing arms, for example). The revolution, therefore, would be identifiable not as an expropriating general strike but as a mass insurrection.


    In 1907 Errico Malatesta was complaining that the use of the term ‘general strike’ was misleading: “Some of the enthusiasts of the general strike go so far as to admit that the general strike involves expropriation. But then the soldiers come. Are we to let ourselves be shot down? Of course not. We should stand up to them, and that would mean Revolution. So why not say Revolution at once, instead of General Strike?”


    Apart from the confusion over what the general strike is supposed to be there is another problem which relates to armed resistance or struggle during the revolutionary event. The general strike is considered to be a tactic which will minimise armed intervention by the state. But, as we have noted, such an event is likely to lead to armed conflict anyway. Alexander Berkman, in ‘The ABC of Anarchism (1929), argued that the masses would not stand a chance in a fight with a modern army, and that to propose such a thing was foolish. But Berkman wrote this some years before several guerrilla movements of the 20th Century had defeated modern state armies, and after the Ukranian peasants had driven out the Whites during the Russian Revolution.


    In 1930 Pierre Besnard, the French syndicalist, wrote on the general strike that, “On the duration of the stoppage will depend the future of the revolutionary movement.” And Berkman wrote, “You can shoot people to death but you can’t shoot them back to work.” However, people can be starved back to work. If the general strike is to be a revolution then the people will have resumed all the ‘essential services’ well before any workers, or their children, have become disastrously hungry. And this revolution is going to have to be able to defend itself - as well as trying to extend itself - in the face of the state’s armed forces. This is an insurrection, not a mass withdrawal of labour.


    In 1943, Lady Katherine Chorley’s ‘Armies and the Art of Revolution’ was published. Part of it deals with the efficiency of the general strike as a revolutionary tactic and though Chorley wasn’t an anarchist or revolutionary she makes some interesting comments:

    “During a revolution, the more smoothly the machinery runs for the neutral population the better. […]. A general strike, then, must succeed in its objective within the first few days. If this does not happen, it will probably collapse under the weight of the dislocation it has itself brought about before that dislocation actually brings down the whole social structure. There is an alternative: that it should transform itself into armed revolt. Granted the opposition of the armed forces of the government, such a revolt can only be successful if the conditions created by the strike prevent the troops from exerting their full strength. […] Taking it by and large, the general strike is not a good revolutionary weapon. Its main revolutionary value is as an expression of working class solidarity. It can sometimes be used to create artificially a revolutionary situation, but unless such a situation can be used as the taking-off point for an already planned insurrection, whose chances have been calculated, it is a useless expenditure of enormous energy. As an actual instrument of policy it is more wasteful of energy than a straight insurrection, and its failure is more likely to set back a working class movement than the failure of an insurrection.”


    There will be a suspension of work during a revolutionary event; this will be the time of initial armed defence/insurrection, celebration, and the re-organisation of the machinery of the economy (survival). It was the armed workers who defeated the military rebellion in Barcelona in 1936, not the general strike.


    Problem of the relationship of workplace to community in anarcho-syndicalism


    The most common criticism of anarcho-syndicalism is that it neglects roles in the community by being solely pre-occupied with the workplace and industrial struggles.

    This criticism can be looked at in two ways. Firstly, is it actually true that anarcho-syndicalism neglects wider issues and, if it is true, then does it have to remain so? Secondly, does it matter?


    If anarcho-syndicalism is truly revolutionary does it matter if it is restricted to organising around industrial struggles? Will it be one organisation, decided upon, and built up in non-revolutionary times that will prefigure the organisational forms of society after the revolution, whether syndical or not?


    In ‘A New World in Our Hearts,’ Albert Meltzer writes that anarcho-syndicalism should be viewed as a movement within the anarchist movement. He argues, for example, that the CNT, as a union organisation, is not designed to operate outside the workplace and that other anarchist organisations should be created to work in the wider community.


    This would seem plausible: people creating their own forms of organisation specifically designed to operate within a certain situation, i.e., in the workplace, on the housing estate, etc. These organisations would then of course be affected by the fact that people would be involved in at least two or three of the different organisations.


    But what if anarcho-syndicalism is not, or cannot remain, an anarchist (revolutionary) organisation? What if all unions, from typical/reformist to anarcho-syndicalist, end up with a similar relationship to the state, and to their membership? Bearing in mind that anarcho-syndicalism must always try to expand, or strengthen itself in regard to the state, is it reasonable to assume that anarcho-syndicalism will eventually be in competition with all other forms of organisation, even anarchist ones? To act like a trade union in protecting workers ‘rights’ anarcho-syndicalism must become a counterpart: struggling with the bourgeoisie under the rules the bourgeoisie have set down.


    The ultimate aim of the trade union is the management of the state (this is why unions funded the first social democratic political parties), their argument is that the union will be able to look after the interests of the worker far better, and run capitalism (exploitation) more smoothly than at present.


    Malatesta: “The union can emerge with a socialist, revolutionary or anarchist programme, and indeed it is with such programmes that many workers’ organisations were originally launched. But they remain faithful to the programme so long as they are weak and impotent, that is so long as they are propaganda groups, initiated and sustained by a few enthusiastic and convinced individuals rather than organisms capable of effective action; but then, as they manage to attract the masses to their ranks, and to acquire the strength to demand and impose improvements, the original programme becomes an empty slogan which no one bothers about. Tactics are adjusted to contingent needs and the enthusiasts of the first hour either adapt themselves or just make way for the ‘practical’ men, who pay attention to the present without worrying about the future.” (1925)


    Anarcho-syndicalist unions must always try to become a power in society, in industrial and political relations, because for an organisation that aims to protect workers’ interests, and improve on them, it must have an influence of its own, that influence must be based on the ability to control the rank and file membership.


    Anarchism has always taught, especially in the theory of direct action that workers must collectively look after their own interests. It has long been a part of anarchist theory that means cannot be separated from ends.

    (1986, UK)

    Sources:
    Bonanno, A.M., ‘Critique of Syndicalist Methods’, Bratach Dubh Anarchist Pamplets No2, 1979
    Leval, G, ‘Collectives in the Spanish Revolution,’ Freedom Press, 1975
    Meltzer, A, (ed), ‘A New World in our Hearts,’ Cienfuegos Press, 1978.
    Paz, A, ‘Durruti – the People Armed,’ Black Rose Books, 1977.
    Richards, V, (ed), ‘Malatesta – Life and Ideas,’ Freedom Press, 1977.
  2. Jock
    Jock
    This ia also an important contribution. A couple of things though. You quote Solidaridad Obrera (the CNT paper) to say
    "The entry of the CNT to the government of Madrid is one of the most important facts of the political history of our country."
    I have not got the Spanish original but the version of the translation we have is
    that it is "the most transcendental day in the political history of our country". The "our country" is bad enough but this version is much worse.

    And on a simliar theme a comrade from Italy sent round a Seasonal quiz question. Who wrote

    "I believe the hour has come to create a war industry in earnest. I believe that the hour has come come to finish with certain flagrant extravagances: like respect for Sunday as a day of rest and of certain "rights for the workers" sabotaging the defence of the revolution".

    He got Stalin, Trotsky and Preobrazhensky as answers. All were wrong. It is from Camillo Berneri's letter to Federica Montseny criticising the entry of anarchists into the Republican government.

    Happy New Year to all!