Bakunin died in 1875, exhausted and disillusioned, his revolutionary energy sapped and his dreams dashed. Though he left behind substantial movements in Italy and Spain, as well as Russia, the immediate legacy lay in the pursuit of the “propaganda of the deed.” This focus on deeds as a spur to revolt demoted words, and resulted in even less attention being paid to the arts of persuasion. For example, the Italian Errico Malatesta, who discovered the writings of Bakunin in 1871, was explaining five years later how “the revolution consists more in deeds than in words … each time a spontaneous movement of the people erupts … It is the duty of every revolutionary socialist to declare his solidarity with the movement in the making.” Although Malatesta later argued against anarchist terror, at the time the language was forceful. A “river of blood” separated the movement from the future as they sought to destroy all existing institutions.31 Having urged an insurrectional approach on the Anarchist International, he then went off to make his propaganda through deeds, turning up in villages in Campania with an armed band, burning tax registers, and declaring the end of the monarchy. Malatesta and his followers were soon arrested. Yet Malatesta was noted for his analytical and debating skills, evident when it came to influencing juries in political trials. A police informer described him as seeking to “persuade with calm, and never with violent language.” He deliberately avoided “the pseudoscientific phraseology, violent and paradoxical turns of phrase or verbal abuse that were the stock-in-trade of so many of his fellow anarchists and socialists.”32
Thereafter he moved around Europe as well as Argentina, Egypt, and the United States, fomenting rebellion where he could and debating the character of the good society and how to overthrow the old order without using power or creating a new power in its place. Later in his long life he deplored indiscriminate terror, insisting that only justifiable violence would support liberation. “One thing is certain,” he wrote in 1894, “that with a number of blows of the knife a society like bourgeois society cannot be overthrown, being built, as it is on an enormous mass of private interests and prejudices and sustained, more than it is by force of arms, by the inertia of the masses and their habits of submission.”33
The heated language of revolution, however, never encouraged a sense of limitation when it came to force. The International Anarchist Congress, held in London in 1881, urged exploring all means for the “annihilation of all rulers, ministers of state, nobility, the clergy, the most prominent capitalists, and other exploiters,” with special attention to be paid to the study of chemistry and the preparation of explosives. The German anarchist Johann Most argued in the spirit of the Jacobins for the extermination of the possessing classes. In his pamphlet entitled “The Science of Revolutionary Warfare: a manual of instruction in the use and preparation of Nitro-Glycerine, Dynamite, Gun Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc, etc.,” he wrote: “In giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe, science has done its best work. A pound of this stuff beats a bushel of ballots all hollow.” Assassinations became regular. Starting with Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the assassins took out a French president, a Spanish prime minister, an Italian king, and a U.S. president (McKinley), failing with the German kaiser. The murder of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in August 1914 provided the trigger for the First World War. An association between anarchism and terror was established and endures to this day, despite the best efforts of its adherents to stress its gentler and more humane aspects.
The novelist Joseph Conrad wrote perceptively about the anarchists and the circles in which they operated. In his note to Under Western Eyes, he commented on how the “ferocity and imbecility” of autocratic rule provoked the “no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institution.”34 His most famous characterization of the futile revolutionaries of his time was in The Secret Agent, published in 1907. The most notorious character was the bomb-maker known as the Professor (in fact a reject technician from a chemistry department) who lusted after the perfect detonator. By wiring himself up to explode, the Professor concluded that he had rendered himself untouchable by the police. Yet behind his “sinister loneliness” was a “haunting fear” that the people were too feeble to overthrow the established order. He was frustrated by the “resisting power of numbers, the unattackable stolidity of a great multitude.” He bemoaned the fact that the “social spirit of this people is wrapped up in scrupulous prejudices, and that is fatal to our work.” To break the “worship of legality,” he sought to trigger repression.
The most sinister figure in the book agreed. This was not an anarchist, but Vladimir, from an unnamed embassy clearly meant to be Russia’s. To Vladimir, England was a weak link in the fight against terror. “This country,” he complained, “is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty.” What was needed, he concluded, was a “jolly good scare” for which this was the “psychological moment.” What would be the best sort of scare? Attempts on monarchs or presidents were no longer so sensational while attacks on churches, restaurants, and theaters could easily be explained away. He wanted “an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad? Madness alone is truly terrifying.” And so by this reasoning he identified his target as “the first meridian.” The hapless Adolf Verloc was told to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The book was based on a real incident of 1894, in which the building was not touched but the bomber was blown to pieces. Conrad described this episode as “a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought.” In his book neither the Professor nor Vladimir are able to trigger the repression they sought and the story becomes one of individual tragedy.35
Anarchism was not solely about individual terror. Notably, a genuinely popular mass movement was developed in Spain during the first decades of the twentieth century. Anarchism was a formidable presence on the Left in Spain, more so than communism. It came in a variety of forms, including strong syndicalist tendencies among the workforce. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was formed in 1911 and a decade later it had over a million members. It shunned politics and committed itself to direct action in the economic sphere, denouncing all forms of power. Politics was never far away, however. There was sufficient organization to have all members agreeing that after appropriate branch discussion they were bound by the majority view. Unsurprisingly for a movement of such a size, it soon had an extremist wing, ready to engage in violent insurrection, and a moderate wing, prepared to do deals with employers and the state. In the early 1930s, the extremists, having organized themselves into an effective Bakunin-type conspiracy within the CNT, supplanted the moderates. This was a time of growing social unrest, and the movement began to face real choices. The consequences of their actions were evident and not merely theoretical.
Having abstained in the 1933 election, and let in a right-wing government, many members voted in 1936 in support of the leftist Popular front. Then came General Franco’s coup against the Republic. The resistance was led by the CNT, with its members to the fore in running areas on collectivist principles controlled by the Republic. The harsh realities of power began to intrude. The first choice was whether to dissolve the local government in Catalonia and set up what would be in effect an anarchist dictatorship or work with the sort of institutions they had always denounced. The leadership chose collaboration. As Franco’s forces gained ground, the CNT leadership accepted the need for a united front with the socialists and was soon requiring its members to follow a party line. On entering government, the CNT paper observed that because anarchists were now ministers, the state was no longer oppressive. There was conscription and demands for strict military discipline, while the social experiments (some of which had been successful) were
halted. In practice, an army composed of militias, each with their own political sponsor, was always likely to lead to factional in-fighting. As the more disciplined force, and with the Republic increasingly reliant upon Soviet support, communists soon dominated the officer corps.36 Eventually the communists, with Soviet backing, turned on the anarchists and a civil war within the civil war began. To anarchism’s association with terror, the experience of Spain added an association with futility and ineffectuality.
Anarchists might see with great clarity the temptations and perversions of power, as well as its incompatibility with their ideal society, but they were unable to demonstrate how to function effectively without it. When an opportunity came to exert influence over human affairs, they either had to forget their past strictures against accepting positions of power or let others who were less squeamish about power take their chance. The anarchists understood how the means employed shaped the ends achieved, but by ruling out all effective means as potentially corrupting, they were left waiting for the people to take an initiative that they could support. There was, as Carl Levy has noted, something paradoxical about this reluctance to take power because the anarchists, more than most, “relied on its leaders (local, national and international) to help preserve institutional continuity.”37 But leaders who had to pretend that they were not leading could not provide strategic direction. Indeed, a refusal to address directly the possibilities of power precluded the possibility of a serious strategy leaving them only the role of angry critics. The question of leadership thereafter continued to divide the Left, with two extremes on offer. On the one hand were the purists who dared do little more than nudge the masses in the right direction; at the other extreme were those who put themselves firmly in the vanguard of change and insisted that there was no other way forward than the one which they set.
CHAPTER 20 Revisionists and Vanguards
The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past.
—Frederic Engels, 1895
ENGELS’S LAST PUBLISHED work, which appeared a few months before his death in 1895, is sometimes known as his “testament.” That was not how he viewed it, but it was nonetheless a reflective piece, using the republication of Marx’s 1850 Class Struggles in France to comment on the changing fortunes of the working-class movement during the second half of the century. The political significance of the piece was that it was used by the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) to justify the parliamentary strategy they had been following, with some success, and to warn against violent revolution. Because of Engels’s singular authority, those who continued to yearn for a more militant approach to revolution found it troubling. They could argue, with some justice, that Engels had been put under pressure by the SPD hierarchy to tone down his language because a new antisubversion law was under consideration. Yet despite insisting that he was not ruling out force, and that the more optimistic aspects of his analysis only truly applied to Germany, he acknowledged that his views on socialist strategy had changed significantly since 1848. Then revolution was seen as a “great decisive battle,” that once commenced would continue, no doubt at length and with many vicissitudes until it concluded with the “final victory of the proletariat.” Almost fifty years on, however, a street-fighting insurrectionary victory over a regular army could only be envisaged as a rare exception.
The influence of the military debates of the past decades was evident as he tried to think of ways in which insurrectionists could operate as a successful army. The only way the balance of forces could be tilted in favor of the revolution was by playing on the doubts of troops about the cause for which they were fighting and encouraging them not to fire on their own people. In all other circumstances, the superior equipment and discipline of the regulars would prevail. It was always likely that poorly armed demonstrators would be outnumbered, but now army reserves could use the railways to rush to any trouble spot. Their arms would also be far more effective. Even city planners had been working against the revolution. Cities were now “laid out in long, straight, broad streets, tailor-made to give full effect to the new cannons and rifles.”
It would be difficult for the revolution to defend a single borough, never mind a whole town.
Concentration of the military forces at a decisive point is, of course, out of the question here. Hence passive defense is the predominant form of struggle; an attack will be mounted here and there, by way of exception, in the form of occasional thrusts and assaults on the flanks; as a rule, however, it will be limited to the occupation of positions abandoned by retreating troops.1
The only value of the barricade was in its moral rather than material effect, as a means of shaking the “steadfastness” of the military. This was another reason why revolutions could not be undertaken “by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness.” If the masses were not directly involved there was no chance.
By contrast, universal male suffrage had created real opportunities and the working classes, via the SPD, had taken full advantage. If the steady rise in the party’s vote continued, “we shall grow into the decisive power in the land, before which all other powers will have to bow, whether they like it or not.” The risk to the rise of socialism in Germany therefore would be “a clash on a grand scale with the military, a blood-letting like that of 1871 in Paris.” To avoid that, resources should be conserved. So Engels saw it as ironic that the “revolutionaries” and “overthrowers” were thriving far better on legal methods. It was the “parties of order” that were “perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves.” If the movement was “not so crazy as to let ourselves be driven to street fighting in order to please them,” it would be their opponents who would have to contemplate illegal action.
Engels privately was adamant that he could not advocate complete abstinence from force. He was annoyed at being presented as “a peaceful worshipper of legality at any price.”2 He was of the view that when socialists acquired the sort of electoral strength that would justify them taking power, the government would clamp down. It might then be necessary to take to the streets. A couple of passages in his testament, which the party hierarchy feared were too inflammatory, referred to the need to avoid frittering away strength in “vanguard skirmishes” but to “keep it intact until the decisive day.” Rather than start the revolutionary process on the streets as a way of stimulating support, his view was that it would only be taken when the masses were fully behind the revolution, for this would be the time when the resolve of the government troops would be at its lowest. A few years earlier he had explained that he doubted that the SPD would be allowed to take power as a majority party. He gave ten to one odds that well before that point “our rulers” would “use violence against us, and this would shift us from the terrain of majority to the terrain of revolution.”3
Revisionism
Marx’s theory implied economic determinism, but as an activist he never denied the possibility of consequential action within the political sphere. Works such as The Eighteenth Brumaire made little sense unless it was recognized that the links between class interests and political action could be diffuse and distorted, and that poor choices caused revolutionary opportunities to be lost. Marx would not dismiss any setting, including parliamentary elections, where the cause of the working class might be promoted. His political judgments could be quite pragmatic even while he remained dogmatic in his underlying theory.
By insisting on the scientific basis of socialism, not a mere act of imagination but a causal theory, everything had to turn on how the working classes came to understand their situation and struggle against it. The key moment would come when the proletariat moved from being a class in itself to one for itself, grasping their full power and potential. One reading of Marx was that this should, somehow, happen naturally—almost spontaneously—as collective eyes were opened to the reasons for their misery an
d how all could be transformed. But what role did this leave for the party? Surges of popular anger and yearnings for a better life so often resulted in dashed hopes and more persecution and misery. Radical movements either petered out or suddenly took a turn toward respectability, becoming part of the system rather than a means to its overthrow.
This was the curse of Marx, from which he personally suffered: a theory of inevitable, progressive change but one that could doom the activist to frustration. If the politics could never be right without the correct material base, what was the revolutionary politician to do? One answer was to wait until the conditions were right, building up strength until the moment eventually arrived and the working class was ready. The alternative was to find a way of accelerating the pace of change, creating conditions in which class consciousness could develop faster. The SPD as the most substantial and confident of all Marxist parties presented itself as having found the happy medium. The rise in class consciousness could be measured in the growth of party membership and steady successes in elections. There would be no mystery about when the moment of transition to socialism would come: the party would have majority support among the electorate. The risk was that successes in achieving improvements in workers’ conditions would drain the movement of its revolutionary fervor, while the party would develop a stake in the system.
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