People :
Author : Alex Prichard
Author : Andrew Cornell
Author : Benoit Challand
Author : Carl Levy
Sections (TOC) :
• Acknowledgements
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• Contributors
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• Preface
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• Chapter 1 : Introduction
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• Chapter 2 : Freedom and Democracy: Marxism, Anarchism and the Problem of Human Nature
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• Chapter 3 : Anarchism, Individualism and Communism: William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism
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• Chapter 4 : The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalfield before 1914
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• Chapter 5 : Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism
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• Chapter 6 : Antonio Gramsci, Anarchism, Syndicalism and Sovversivismo
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• Chapter 7 : Council Communist Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War and Revolution, 1936–1939
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• Chapter 8 : A ‘Bohemian Freelancer’? C.L.R. James, His Early Relationship to Anarchism and the Intellectual Origins of Autonomism
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• Chapter 9 : ‘White Skin, Black Masks’: Marxist and Anti-racist Roots of Contemporary US Anarchism
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• Chapter 10 : The Search for a Libertarian Communism: Daniel Guérin and the ‘Synthesis’ of Marxism and Anarchism
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• Chapter 11 : Socialisme ou Barbarie or the Partial Encounters between Critical Marxism and Libertarianism
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• Chapter 12 : Beyond Black and Red: The Situationists and the Legacy of the Workers’ Movement
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• Chapter 13 : Carnival and Class: Anarchism and Councilism in Australasia during the 1970s
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• Chapter 14 : Situating Hardt and Negri
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• Chapter 15 : Conclusion: Towards a Libertarian Socialism for the Twenty-First Century?
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• Bibliography
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• Notes
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Sections (Content) :
• Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our contributors to the volume for their patience and for responding so positively to editorial requests. We gratefully acknowledge the support of everyone at PM Press, who have enabled us to bring out this expanded, accessible edition of the book. We would also like to thank all the participants at the ‘Is Black and Red Dead?’ conference held at the Center for the Study of Social and Global Justice, University of Nottingham, UK, in September 2009, which provided the original inspiration for this collection. Sue Simpson and Tony Burns deserve a special mention for their help and support throughout. We would also like to acknowledge the generosity of the UK Political Studies Association’s Marxist Specialist Group and the PSA Anarchist Studies Network, who, in supporting this conference, made it possible for some of the contributors, and many others whose excellent papers could not be included, to meet and exchange ideas face-to-face in a convivial environment.
• Contributors
Jean-Christophe Angaut has been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon since 2006. His fields of research and teaching are nineteenth-century philosophy, political philosophy and connections between socialist, communist and anarchist thought. He has published two books on the young Bakunin’s thought: Bakunin jeune hégélien — La philosophie et son dehors (2007) and La liberté des peuples — Bakunin et les révolutions de 1848 (2009). He has also published articles on Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, the Young Hegelian movement and the situationists. He is a member of the editorial committee of the French anarchist journal Réfractions.
David Bates is a principal lecturer and Director of Politics and International Relations in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. His interests are focused primarily in the area of radical politics, including anti-capitalist forms of thinking. He has a particular concern with Marxist and post-Marxist approaches to socialist emancipation. More recently he has been interested in the critical relationship between Marxist and libertarian radical politics.
David Berry is Senior Lecturer in History at Loughborough University, UK. He was awarded his DPhil in French labor history from the University of Sussex, UK. His research area is the history of the Left and of labor movements in twentieth-century France. He has worked mostly on the French anarchist movement and ‘alternative Left,’ and is currently working on the life and ideas of Daniel Guérin (1904–1988) and the libertarian communist tradition from 1917 to the present. His publications include A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945 (2009) and (edited jointly with Constance Bantman) New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labor and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational (2010). Having been involved for some years with the Journal of Contemporary European Studies (formerly the Journal of Area Studies), he is currently an associate editor and reviews editor of the journal Anarchist Studies. He is a member of the Center International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme, Lausanne and Marseille, of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France and of the Anarchist Studies Network.
Paul Blackledge is Professor of Political Theory and UCU Branch Secretary at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He is author of Marxism and Ethics (2012), Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (2006) and Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (2004). He is coeditor of Virtue and Politics (2011), Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism (2008), Revolutionary Aristotelianism (2008) and Historical Materialism and Social Evolution (2002). He has written on Marxism and anarchism in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2011) and in International Socialism. He is a member of the Socialist Workers Party.
Toby Boraman is a lecturer in politics at Massey University Te Kunenga Ki Pūrehuroa, New Zealand. His research interests are labor history from below, (anti-state) communism and extra-parliamentary protest of the 1960s and 1970s. He received his PhD in 2006 from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, on the subjects of the New Left and anarchism in New Zealand. Afterwards, he published a history of anarchism and anti-Bolshevik communism in New Zealand from the 1950s to the 1980s called Rabble Rousers and Merry Pranksters (2007). He has also published a book chapter and articles on the subjects of the New Left and working-class resistance to neoliberalism, and historical pieces on strikes and near riots in New Zealand.
Benoît Challand is an associate professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research and a lecturer at the University of Bologna, Italy. He works in the field of political and historical sociology, with a particular interest in Arab politics and political theory. His publications include La Ligue Marxiste Révolutionaire, 1969–1980 (2000) and Palestinian Civil Society and Foreign Donors (2009). He is coauthor, with Chiara Bottici, of The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (2010) and The Politics of Imagination (edited 2011).
Andrew Cornell is a visiting assistant professor of American studies at Williams College, MA. He holds a PhD in American studies from New York University, New York, USA, and is completing a study of anarchism in mid-twentieth-century USA. He is the author of Oppose and Propose! Lessons from Movement for a New Society. His writing appears in periodicals such as the Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory and Left Turn magazine. He has also contributed to the collections The University against Itself (2008) and The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (2010).
Christian Høgsbjerg is a UK-based historian and recently was teaching fellow in Caribbean history at the UCL Institute of the Americas. He completed his doctoral thesis, C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain, 1932–38, in the Department of History at the University of York, UK, and is the editor of a special edition of C.L.R. James’s 1934 play about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (2012). He is a member of the editorial board of the journal International Socialism.
Ruth Kinna is Professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University, UK. She is the author of William Morris: The Art of Socialism (2000) and the Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide (2005, 2009). She has published numerous articles on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialism, including ‘Guy Aldred: Bridging the Gap between Marxism and Anarchism’ (Journal of Political Ideologies, 16 (1) 2011), which explores themes examined in this collection.
Carl Levy is a professor in the Department of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He is the author of six books. His interests include comparative European politics, history, policy-making and the history of ideas since 1860, with particular interest in anarchism and specializing in Italy and Italian anarchism. He is currently writing a biography of Errico Malatesta.
Renzo Llorente teaches philosophy at Saint Louis University’s Madrid Campus, Spain. His research centers on issues in social philosophy, ethics and Latin American philosophy, and he is the author of numerous papers in these and other areas. His recent publications include Beyond the Pale: Exercises in Provocation (2010), a chapter on Marxism in A Companion to Latin American Philosophy (2010), ‘The Moral Framework of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation’ in Ethical Perspectives (2009) and ‘Sobre el humanismo especista de Víctor Gómez Pin,’ in Razonary actuar en defense de los animales (2008). He is currently working on a study of the moral foundations of Marxism.
Lewis H. Mates is a tutor in history and politics at Durham University, UK. He has published several journal articles and book chapters on aspects of interwar British political history, and a monograph titled The Spanish Civil War and the British Left (2007). He is currently working on two projects: membership and activism in the Labor and Conservative parties (1945–1974), and rank-and-file movements and political change in the Durham coalfield before 1914.
Saku Pinta is a documentary filmmaker, sheet-metal worker and independent scholar. He completed his doctoral thesis, titled ‘Towards a Libertarian Communism: A Conceptual History of the Intersections between Anarchisms and Marxisms,’ at Loughborough University, UK in 2011. His current research focuses on the history of the Finnish membership of the Industrial Workers of the World (c.1905–1975) in Canada and the USA. An essay on this topic — ‘Educate, Organize, Emancipate: The Work People’s College and the IWW’ — is set to appear in Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education (2012).
Alex Prichard is senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Exeter, UK. He gained his PhD from Loughborough University, UK, in 2008, and has since held research and teaching posts at the University of Bath, UK, and the London School of Economics, UK, and an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published articles on anarchism and world politics in the Review of International Studies, Millennium: Journal of International Studies and Anarchist Studies. He is the founder of the PSA Anarchist Studies Network and coeditor of the new monograph series Contemporary Anarchist Studies, published by Continuum Books. His first monograph, Justice, Order and Anarchy: The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was published in 2012.
• Preface
A century has now passed since the 1917 October Revolution in Russia ushered in the world’s first ‘workers’ state.’ Aside from its significance as one of the defining historical moments of the twentieth century, the ten days that shook the world reshaped the contours of the revolutionary Left, casting a long shadow over later global movements. The clampdown on radical left formations that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power generated considerable hostility and mutual recrimination, bringing to an end the reasonably good relations that groups of anarchists and Marxists had forged in opposition to the European capitalist war and against reformist social democracy.[1] This was especially so after the suppression of the Makhnovists in Ukraine and the Kronstadt uprising in 1921, though the antagonism was symbolized most dramatically in Europe in 1936 when Franco’s failed coup gave a green light to the Soviet communist suppression of anarchist social revolution. For anarchists, Marxism emerged as the undisputed victor of the Russian Revolution and indisputably the revolution’s undoing. In 1970, Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer wrote that the ‘old battles between Marxism or Marxist-Leninism on the one hand and Anarchism on the other left Marxism stronger than ever, sustained not only in State communist countries with all the violence of criminal Statism, but by schools of philosophy churning these out in all countries of the world.’[2]
The effects of the Soviet Union’s assumption of the leadership of the world revolution were felt in local movements across the globe. The disastrous effects of alignment with the Comintern, resulting in the imposition of Soviet-led policy, are well known. ‘At the end of the twenties,’ Jorge Semprun wrote, ‘the Spanish Communist party was a tiny sect, torn apart by internal conflicts … and neutralized as a possible vanguard force by the capricious, authoritarian, and manipulative leadership of the all-powerful delegates of the Comintern, who forced the party into constant contradictory shifts of policy and changes of the party line.’[3] Anarchists of course had no place in this new International, but the Bolshevik coup not only aggravated historic tensions between anarchists and Marxists, it created strains within anarchist and Marxist movements, too.
Just as the dispute between Makhno’s platformists and Voline’s synthesists fractured anarchist communist and syndicalist movements, in the Marxist camp antiparliamentary and left communists, dubbed infantile by Lenin, turned their fire against the Bolsheviks and two significant elements of their international revolutionary strategy: parliamentary participation and ‘boring from within,’ designed to transform established trade union federations. Changes with the Soviet leadership, resulting in the identification of successive fifth columns, inevitably created new divisions. To borrow Marie-Louise Berneri’s formulation: ‘In order to prevent the past from condemning the present, in order to prevent Lenin from judging Stalin, the militiamen from condemning the Stalinist commissars, the communist militants from denouncing the Communist Party, the victims of the G.P.U. from accusing their persecutors, it is necessary to shut their mouths.’[4]
Once the Soviet Communist Party had established itself as the authoritative voice of world socialism, virtually everyone who identified with the Left was obliged to position themselves in relation to it: anarchists and Marxists, reformists and revolutionaries alike.[5] As the British libertarian communist journal Aufheben noted:
Ever since the Russian Revolution in 1917, all points along the political spectrum have had to define themselves in terms of the USSR, and in doing so they have necessarily had to define what the USSR was. This has been particularly true for those on the ‘left’ who have sought in some way to challenge capitalism. In so far as the USSR was able to present itself as ‘an actually existing socialist system,’ as a viable alternative to the ‘market capitalism of the West,’ it came to define what socialism was.[6]
Undoubtedly, the fracturing of the socialist movement was organizationally significant and it mapped, albeit imperfectly, on to some important disagreements about strategy. To be sure, the story of its development — typically traced back to the breakup of the First International in 1872 and the subsequent ejection of anarchists from the congresses of the Second International in 1896 — has also played an important part in forging movement identities, and has certainly been retold in ways that reinforce oppositional political loyalties. The intellectual domination of Marxism over anarchism in political and academic debate has created barriers to dialogue and exchange, and these continue to resonate, as the recent discussion between Simon Springer and David Harvey demonstrates.[7]
Although there is considerable disagreement about the proper labeling of the axes separating Marxism from anarchism, there is also a discernible pattern in the prevailing shorthand: Marxism’s head to anarchism’s heart, Marxism’s theory to anarchism’s practice, Marxism’s science to anarchism’s utopianism, Marxism’s modernism to anarchism’s primitivism are some of the most potent and deeply rooted oppositions. A more recent variation, rehearsed in the recent Critchley-Žižek debate, which mostly rumbled on after Libertarian Socialism was first published, compares Marxism’s strategy to anarchism’s ethics, perhaps picking up on the post-anarchist strategy-tactics distinction.
While not underestimating the significance of these traditions and representations, our principal aim in this book was to show that the anarchist-Marxist schism that the Bolshevik seizure of power ostensibly cemented was in fact neither final nor complete. The consolidation of Bolshevik power left an indelible mark on revolutionary socialism, yet the divisions it buttressed were always partial. Relationships between anti-Bolshevik and anti-Soviet Marxists and anarchists remained in flux and shifts in anti-Fascist and later cold war politics stimulated a huge body of critical theory and often biting analysis of the appalling results of Soviet-led policy, opening up consensual spaces for activists who placed themselves on different sides of the socialist divide.
Viewed as a tension and not a breach, the relationship between the black and the red — the red of communism, the black of anarchism — reveals a creative dynamic and a space for the articulation of libertarian socialism. Contributors to this volume illustrate the obstacles to its development — the misunderstandings, deliberate distortions, and misrepresentations of ideas — as well as the potential for its expression, by looking at late-nineteenth and twentieth-century, primarily European, socialist thought. A subsequent collection of essays, developing from this volume, examines the space and need for ideological convergence and has a more contemporary focus, with a third in preparation examining the ideological composition of the contemporary non-European Left.[8]
There is considerable scope to open up other fields for analysis, probing the politics of workers’ self-management, reformulated by a new postwar generation in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and the critique of bureaucratic control in the West and the East; revisiting the development of socialist feminisms in the spirit of Selma James and bell hooks by looking at the resonances between militants such as Alexandra Kollontai and Emma Goldman; examining the cross-pollination of ideas in postcolonial critique and the ways that activists breathed new life into old revolutionary principles, transcending traditional Marxisms and anarchisms.[9] Peace activism and ecology are equally rich grounds for thinking about libertarian socialist experimentation.[10]
As the contributors to this volume show, there has always been a rich, fertile ground for the configuration of ‘anarchism,’ and of ‘Marxism,’ and for the construction of their interrelation. By shedding light on the character of the disagreements that divided anarchists from Marxists, exploring how these played out in theory and practice and revealing the intersections between groups and individuals who located themselves in (and outside of) rival traditions, our aim has not been to deny the tensions that existed — and exist — within the socialist movement, but to show how processes of convergence in black and red politics have always run alongside the polarization of ideological and theoretical positions.
A quarter of a century has now passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Fukuyama’s triumphalist ‘end of history’ thesis following closely in its wake. What have been the political implications of the post-Soviet era on the relationships between anarchisms and Marxisms?
Without a doubt several variants of Marxist-Leninism remain influential and maintain a viable presence, especially through the Maoist insurgencies on the Indian subcontinent, to say nothing of the remaining one-party ‘workers’ republics.’ Nevertheless, in the period since the fall of the Berlin Wall, two events stand out as examples of libertarian socialist experimentation: the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico in 1994 and the Rojava revolution, in progress since 2011. These are very different models of revolutionary practice, but each may be seen as an example of nonsectarian, inclusive, libertarian self-organizing. Subcomandate Marcos’s well-known declaration ‘I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet’ was not only a rejection of Leninism but a rebuke to all socialists (especially Europeans) who sought to recommend models of best revolutionary practice to non-European peoples.[11] The uprising emerged as the first sustained rebellion in the post-Soviet period. It rejected the well-worn model of capturing state power and broke with doctrinaire state socialism, serving as a key reference point for anti-state Marxists like John Holloway and Harry Cleaver and some anarchists (though it was not recognized as anarchist by others). The movement continues to exercise a bottom-up form of self-governance over a large territory in Chiapas.
The Rojava revolution is the most important recent example of a convergence of Marxist and anarchist-inspired ideas since Libertarian Socialism was first published.[12] Abandoning Marxist-Leninist ideology and seemingly the emphasis on national liberation, the social experiment in the Rojava region of northern Syria rose to prominence after the uprisings connected to the Arab Spring shook the foundations of established political power in North Africa. The dramatic Stalingrad-esque defense of the city of Kobane by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units captured international headlines. Kurdish forces, eventually supported by American-led bombing missions, finally gained control of the city after a six-month battle against the Islamic State. Aside from the highly visible role of women fighters in the militias, this conflict has drawn attention to the ideological transformation of the Kurdish radical Left which has been developing since the mid-2000s, resulting in the shedding of a Leninist heritage and the adoption of practices that look similar to those of the Zapatistas; some have even drawn parallels between the Kurdish-led struggle in northern Syria against the Islamic State and the Spanish anarchist revolutionary uprising against Franco in 1936.[13]
The Movement for a Democratic Society (Tev-Dem) in Rojava supports a political program that is informed by the work of Murray Bookchin: a non-statist vision of networked, self-governing communities as an alternative to the nation-state, or what has been termed democratic confederalism by its imprisoned figurehead Abdullah Ocalan.[14] It remains unclear to what degree the democratic forms celebrated by the Tev-Dem have been extended into the economy as a direct challenge to capitalist property relations. Left critics and feminists have also questioned the cult of personality that surrounds Abdullah Ocalan, and there are claims of ethnic cleansing in Rojava. However, international supporters of the movement highlight the relative religious, ethnic, and gender equality that exists in Rojava, and regard the self-governing cantons of northern Syria as a viable libertarian socialist alternative to the colonially established state boundaries in the Middle East, as well as providing an antidote to the social tensions generated by the comprador bourgeoisie.
As the inter-imperialist conflict continues to play out through highly complex, often contradictory and shifting alliances, it seems that the real choice before us is the one Rosa Luxemburg outlined: socialism or barbarism. Perhaps there’s some consolation in thinking that as the memory of the Bolshevik coup dims and new traditions of libertarian socialist resistance become established, Marxists and anarchists will stop fighting each other and look to commonalities and mutual strategies for realignment and renewal. The chapters in this volume should give historical context and pause for reflection in the context of calls for a new left party,[15] or for a fully automated luxury communism.[16] The future demands debate and engagement, and on the basis of sound historical understanding.
• Chapter 1 : Introduction
1. Introduction