Review of "Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism", by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt (AK Press).
Click here to download all three parts as pdf.
- Part 1: All feathered up: a new defence of anarchism
- Part 2: How anarchism parted ways with Marxism
- Part 3: Anarchism and the Commune
Variants of revolutionary syndicalism were major influences in the labour movements of several countries between the 1890s and World War One.
Their activists reckoned the work of the "political" socialists who spent much time on parliamentary electioneering to be deficient or even harmful, and focused effort on building up militant and democratic trade-union movements which they believed could be both the agency to overthrow capitalist power and the framework for future working-class administration of society. Some of them saw themselves as anarchists as well as syndicalists - "anarcho-syndicalists".
Schmidt and van der Walt, a journalist and an academic from Johannesburg, South Africa, tell us not only about the famous movements of France and Spain, Argentina and Mexico, but also about the less-known ones of China, Japan, and Korea.
Their book is not primarily a history. The authors reconstruct what the authors call a "broad anarchist tradition". They argued that it includes all of revolutionary syndicalism, not just the strands which called themselves anarchist. They present their own variant of "anarchism" as the most thorough and "sophisticated" development of the "tradition".
Their own version of anarchism is one in which the traditional points of dispute with Marxism are thinned down or, some of them, virtually given up; but it is accompanied by a horror of Marxism.
Schmidt and van der Walt never say straight out that they agree that a working class overthrowing capitalism must organise from among itself a strong revolutionary authority to combat counter-revolution and consolidate the new order. They never directly disavow the traditional anarchist doctrine of the immediate abolition of any form of state.
But they pointedly do not repeat Bakunin's doctrine that the task of anarchists on the day after any revolution must be (through, so Bakunin held, a "secret" network of "invisible pilots") to thwart, divert, disrupt the victorious workers in their moves to coordinate their efforts democratically by electing a revolutionary authority.
Junta
They agree with "taking power in society" and "creating a coordinated system of governance". They say "stateless governance", but the adjective "stateless", for them, seems to mean "radically democratic", "linked through delegates and mandates". In that sense, the Marxist-envisaged "workers' state" (or, in Lenin's term, "semi-state"), is "stateless".
They accept the term "Revolutionary Junta" or "Workers' Republic" for the new authority. Although in one passage they claim that "class no longer exists" once the workers' revolution wins, in other passages they concede that counter-revolutionary groups will not disappear instantly, and accept the need for the new authority to organise "coordinated military defence" with "the best weaponry" (i.e. not just scattered militia groups with hand-weapons).
They agree that revolutionaries must build "a coherent... organisation, with a common analysis, strategy, and tactics, along with a measure of collective responsibility, expressed in a programme". They use the term "party" sometimes and the term "vanguard" often for that.
They agree that the party must be disciplined and tight. They quote with approval an account of the Nabat organisation led by Nestor Makhno: "The secretariat... was not merely 'technically' executive... It was also the movement's ideological 'pilot core'... controlling and deploying the movement's resources and militants".
While many anarchists today see the fact that Marxist organisations stretch themselves to produce and circulate weekly papers as infamous, Schmidt and van der Walt report on the extensive newspaper-producing and newspaper-selling culture of late 19th century anarchists with approval and pride.
They agree that the process of the working class preparing itself for revolution must include struggle for reforms. They approvingly quote Bakunin's statement, from the time (1867-8) when he was focused on trying to win over the bourgeois League for Peace and Freedom, that "the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy... The democratic regime lifts the masses up gradually to participation in public life". (Bakunin wrote different things later).
They emphasise that the value of the struggle for reforms lies in organisation from below in the struggle; but this is not a point of difference from Marxism. They explicitly dissent from the strands in anarchism which "refuse to deal with reforms, laws, and compromises".
Schmidt and van der Walt argue that revolutionary socialists should work systematically in trade unions, generally on building sustained and organised rank-and-file movements, and also sometimes contest elections for union office.
They agree that revolutionary socialists should take up battles for national liberation - "engage seriously with national liberation struggles and [aim] at supplanting nationalism, radicalising the struggle, and merging the national and class struggles in one revolutionary movement".
They oppose "identity politics" and the "cultural relativist" "claim made by some nationalists that certain rights are alien to their cultures and therefore unimportant or objectionable".
On all these points Schmidt and van der Walt have, in effect, a criticism of most of what calls itself anarchism today different only in shading from what we in Workers' Liberty would say. They are further away from conventional anarchism than is a group like the avowedly-Marxist Socialist Workers Party today, with its "One Solution, Revolution" slogan and its pretence that all "direct action" against the established order, even if it be led by Islamist clerical-fascists, is revolutionary and progressive.
Schmidt and van der Walt seem to stick to the old anarchist dogma of boycotting all electoral politics - "this would apply regardless of the mandates given... the wages paid to the parliamentarians, or the existence of other mechanisms to keep the parliamentarians accountable to their constituents" - and their account of anarchists in Korea who were elected to parliament there in the 1920s is disapproving. But they make little fuss about that issue.
In one passage they uphold the old anarchist idea of "the revolutionary general strike" as the only and more or less self-sufficient path to socialist revolution. But they make little of it, and other passages in the book imply a much less "fetishistic" view of the general strike.
Anti-Marxism
Their anti-Marxism is built not so much on a defence of traditional anarchist points as on a skewed presentation of Marxism. For them, Marxism from its earliest days was proto-Stalinism. They construct their picture of Marxism by "reading back" from Stalinism.
They concede that "in claiming that his theory was scientific, Marx was no different from say, Kropotkin or Reclus, who saw their own theories as scientific". But somehow they also think that Marx's claim to have worked some things out and got some things right was more sinister than the similar claim made by anyone who ventures to trouble the public with their writings.
"Classical Marxism purported to alone understand the movement of history and express the fundamental interests of the proletariat... When [this] claim to a unique truth was welded to the strategy of the dictatorship of the proletariat... the formula for a one-party dictatorship through an authoritarian state was written".
Marxist theory was also, the authors claim, "teleological", seeing history as progressing mechanically "in a straight line towards a better future", through predetermined "stages". Marx (so they allege, on the basis of out-of-context snippets from his writings on India) "considered colonialism to be progressive". The "two-stage" doctrine developed for poorer countries by the Stalinists - that workers should first support the "national bourgeoisie" in "bourgeois-democratic revolution", and look to socialist revolution only at a later "stage" - was authentic Marxism, or so Schmidt and van der Walt claim.
They say that Marx had a relatively conservative view of socialist economic organisation: "Marx believed that the law of value would operate after the 'abolition of the capitalist mode of production'... the distribution of consumer goods under socialism would be organised through... markets". On that basis they claim the ideal of communist economics - supersession of the wages system; from each according to their ability, to each according to their need - as having been pioneered by the anarchist writer Peter Kropotkin.
The poor quality of Schmidt's and van der Walt's polemic on such points can be judged from their quotations. For example, they claim that Marx was cool on trade-unions, and that it was the anarchists who explained and championed the potential of trade-union struggles.
"Marx complained that anarchists contended that workers 'must... organise themselves by trades-unions' to 'supplant the existing states'..."
This is the passage from Marx (in a letter to Paul Lafargue of April 1870) from which Schmidt and van der Walt quote their snippets:
"Bakunin's programme [held that] the working class must not occupy itself with politics. They must only organise themselves by trades-unions. One fine day, by means of the International, they will supplant the place of all existing states. You see what a caricature he [Bakunin] has made of my doctrines!
"As the transformation of the existing States into Associations is our last end, we must allow the governments, those great Trade-Unions of the ruling classes, to do as they like, because to occupy ourselves with them is to acknowledge them. Why! In the same way the old socialists said: You must not occupy yourselves with the wages question, because you want to abolish wages labour, and to struggle with the capitalist about the rate of wages is to acknowledge the wages system!
"The ass has not even seen that every class movement, as a class movement, is necessarily and was always a political movement".
Marx was not hostile or cool about workers organising in trade unions. On the contrary: he was probably (in "The Poverty of Philosophy", his polemic against Proudhon in 1846, at a time when trade unions existed only in infant form) the first socialist to argue that trade-union organisation could be central in working-class emancipation.
Marx's objection was not to organising in trade unions, but to Bakunin's claim that the working class should not also "occupy itself with politics" (i.e. struggles for political reforms, and electoral activity).
Trotsky fought Stalinism to the death. But Schmidt and van der Walt claim he "envisaged socialism as 'authoritarian leadership... centralised distribution of the labour force... the workers' state... entitled to send any worker wherever his labour may be needed', with dissenters sent to labour camps if necessary".
The footnotes show that the words put in quote marks by Schmidt and van der Walt, as if they come from Trotsky, are culled not from Trotsky himself but from "pages 128, 132" of a book by one Wayne Thorpe.
Some of the words may have been taken by Thorpe from one of the polemics in which, in late 1920 - between the Bolsheviks' voting-down of Trotsky's first proposal in February 1920 of what would become the more liberal "New Economic Policy" and the adoption of the NEP itself, on Lenin's initiative, in early 1921 - Trotsky sought expedients to get the economy of revolutionary Russia into working order in the midst of civil war. None of the words was ever written by Trotsky as a statement of his vision of socialism. The quoted string of words was never written as a whole connected passage by Trotsky anywhere.
Schmidt and van der Walt claim further that: "The differences between [Stalinism and Trotskyism] should not be overstated: both embraced classical Marxism and its theories, both saw the USSR as post-capitalist and progressive, and both envisaged revolution by stages in less developed countries". A footnote dismisses Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution as "no break with stage theory... simply a compression of the time frame".
Although Trotsky sketched the permanent revolution theory around 1905, before Stalin became prominent in politics and before Mao Zedong was politically active at all, they call permanent revolution an "echo" of "the two-stage formulation of Stalin and Mao". Why? Apparently because Trotsky recognised that issues such as land reform, national independence, and the replacement of autocracy by elected and constitutional government would be central in the first stages of mass mobilisation in capitalistically-undeveloped countries, and could not be "skipped over".
Marxism and Trotskyism are equated to Stalinism by Schmidt and van der Walt in order to clear the way for defence of "the broad anarchist tradition", with the authors' particular variants presented as the most thorough version of that tradition. The book raises, and offers a distinctive and unusual answer to, the question: what exactly is anarchism?
Its headline argument is that "the anarchist tradition" is in history the libertarian, class-struggle, "from-below" wing of the broad socialist current of thought. The authors have the same scheme of the history of socialism as the Marxist Hal Draper's famous pamphlet "The Two Souls of Socialism" - "socialism from below" versus "socialism from above" - but for them, unlike Draper, "the broad anarchist tradition" is socialism from below, and Marxism a chief species of socialism from above.
Anarchism = unions?
Schmidt and van der Walt say that anarchism proper began only with the Bakunin wing of the First International, in the early 1870s. It was always a class-struggle movement. Anarcho-syndicalism was not a fringe development from anarchism. On the contrary, "the most important strand in anarchism has always been syndicalism: the view that unions... are crucial levers of revolution, and can even serve as the nucleus of a free socialist order".
The "broad anarchist tradition" is thus for them, so to speak, what the "broad labour movement" is to Marxists.
We know that our views are for now in a small minority, and I think Schmidt and van der Walt know that theirs are too. But we see ourselves as immersed in a broader movement which - despite all the follies and limitations which affect it now - is constantly pushed by its own activity, by its own logic and fundamentals, in our direction, for now in the shape of local flurries, and in future crises potentially wholesale.
For us, that broader movement is the labour movement; for Schmidt and van der Walt, it is the "broad anarchist tradition".
Their definition allows them to deal with what they effectively admit to be the follies of much anarchism either by defining them out - for them, Max Stirner and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon were not anarchists at all - or by seeing them as vagaries and immaturities which, with good work, will be dispelled by the logic of the movement itself.
It allows them to claim as de facto anarchists many heroes who in life did not consider themselves anarchists at all. They claim the whole of the pre-1914 revolutionary syndicalist movement in France, and the whole of the IWW, for anarchism, though most of the leaders of the French movement and of the IWW did not see themselves as anarchists, and some, like Victor Griffuelhes, secretary of the French CGT in its heroic period, were explicitly political socialists.
They claim the avowed Marxists Daniel De Leon and James Connolly as "anarchists" because of their syndicalistic views, and seem (though this is not so explicit) also to claim the "council communists" Herman Görter, Anton Pannekoek, and Otto Rühle, and modern "autonomist Marxists", for their own.
Having "secured their flank" polemically by dismissing Marxism as proto-Stalinism (all but a few Marxists whom they claim as having really been anarchists), and by portraying many traditional anarchist dogmas as mere immature errors of the movement, they free themselves to maintain some traditional anarchist tenets at a more "theoretical" level.
This review article will be continued in future issues of Solidarity. Continuation articles will cover:
● The discrepancy between Schmidt's and van der Walt's definition of their politics as "class politics", and their views that peasantries are as good a basis for socialism as wage-working classes, or better, and that capitalist development is not a prerequisite for socialism;
● Why "socialism from below" is not an adequate political definition, and anyway cannot be equated with a "broad anarchist tradition";
● The real history of the separating-out of anarchism and Marxism as distinct currents in the labour movement after the Paris Commune.
Click here to download all three parts as pdf.
- Part 1: All feathered up: a new defence of anarchism
- Part 2: How anarchism parted ways with Marxism
- Part 3: Anarchism and the Commune