Guerin Anarchism From Theory to Practice (1970)

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tomorrow will serve to impose the will of the dictators on the workers, to
check the course of the Revolution, to consolidate newly established
interests, and to defend a newly privileged class against the masses.
Lenin, Trotsky, and their companions are certainly sincere
revolutionaries, but they are preparing the governmental cadres which
will enable their successors to profit by the Revolution and kill it. They
will be the first victims of their own methods.
Two years later, the Italian Anarchist Union met in congress at Ancona
on November 2-4, 1921, and refused to recognize the Russian
government as a representative of the Revolution, instead denouncing it
as "the main enemy of the Revolution," "the oppressor and exploiter of
the proletariat in whose name it pretends to exercise authority." And the
libertarian writer Luigi Fabbri in the same year concluded that "a critical
study of the Russian Revolution is of immense importance . . . because
the Western revolutionaries can direct their actions in such a way as to
avoid the errors which have been brought to light by the Russian
experience."
Anarchism in the Spanish Revolution
THE SOVIET MIRAGE
The time lag between subjective awareness and objective reality is a
constant in history. The Russian anarchists and those who witnessed the
Russian drama drew a lesson as early as 1920 which only became
known, admitted, and shared years later. The first proletarian revolution
in triumph over a sixth of the globe had such prestige and glitter that the
working-class movement long remained hypnotized by so imposing an
example. "Councils" in the image of the Russian soviets sprang up all
over the place, not only in Italy, as we have seen, but in Germany,
Austria, and Hungary. In Germany the system of councils was the
essential item in the program of the Spartacus League of Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
In 1919 the president of the Bavarian Republic, Kurt Eisner, was
assassinated in Munich. A Soviet Republic was then proclaimed under
the leadership of the libertarian writer Gustav Landauer, who was in turn
assassinated by the counter-revolution. His friend and companion in
arms, the anarchist poet Erich Muhsam, composed a "Rate-Marseillaise"
( Marseillaise of the Councils ), in which the workers were called to arms
not to form battalions but councils on the model of those of Russia and
Hungary, and thus to make an end of the centuries-old world of slavery.
However, in the spring of 1920 a German opposition group advocating
Rate-Kommunismus (Communism of the councils) left the Communist
Party to form a German Communist Workers Party (KAPD).(26) The
idea of councils inspired a similar group in Holland led by Hermann
Gorter and Anton Pannekoek. During a lively polemic with Lenin, the
former was not afraid to reply, in pure libertarian style, to the infallible
leader of the Russian Revolution: "We are still looking for real leaders
who will not seek to dominate the masses and will not betray them. As
long as we do not have them we want everything to be done from the
bottom upward and by the dictatorship of the masses over themselves. If
I have a mountain guide and he leads me over a precipice, I prefer to do
without." Pannekoek proclaimed that the councils were a form of self-
government which would replace the forms of government of the old
world; just like Gramsci he could see no difference between the latter
and "Bolshevik dictatorship."
In many places, especially Bavaria, Germany, and Holland, the
anarchists played a positive part in the practical and theoretical
development of the system of councils.
Similarly, in Spain the anarcho-syndicalists were dazzled by the October
Revolution. The Madrid congress of the CNT(27) (December 10-20,
1919), adopted a statement which stated that "the epic of the Russian
people has electrified the world proletariat." By acclamation, "without
reticence, as a beauty gives herself to the man she loves," the congress
voted provisionally to join the Communist International because of its
revolutionary character, expressing the hope, however, that a universal
workers' congress would be called to determine the basis upon which a
true workers' international could be built. A few timid voices of dissent
were heard, however: the Russian Revolution was a "political"
revolution and did not incorporate the libertarian ideal. The congress
took no notice and decided to send a delegation to the Second Congress
of the Third International which opened in Moscow on July 15, 1920.
By then, however, the love match was already on the way to breaking up.
The delegate representing Spanish anarcho-syndicalism was pressed to
take part in establishing an international revolutionary trade-union
center, but he jibed when presented with a text which referred to the
"conquest of political power," "the dictatorship of the proletariat," and
proposed an organic relation ship between the trade unions and the
communist parties which thinly disguised a relationship of subordination
of the former to the latter. In the forthcoming meetings of the
Communist Inter national the trade-union organizations of the different
nations would be represented by the delegates of the communist parties
of their respective countries; and the projected Red Trade-Union
International would be openly controlled by the Communist Inter
national and its national sections. Angel Pestana, the Spanish spokesman,
set forth the libertarian conception of the social revolution and
exclaimed: "The revolution is not, and cannot be, the work of a party.
The most a party can do is to foment a coup d'etat. But a coup d'etat is
not a revolution." He concluded: "You tell us that the revolution cannot
take place without a communist party and that without the conquest of
political power emancipation is not possible, and that without
dictatorship one cannot destroy the bourgeoisie: all these assertions are
absolutely gratuitous."
In view of the doubts expressed by the CNT delegate, the communists
made a show of adjusting the resolution with regard to the "dictatorship
of the proletariat." The Russian trade-union leader Lozovsky
nevertheless ultimately published the text in its original form without the
modifications introduced by Pestana, but bearing his signature. From the
rostrum Trotsky had laid into the Spanish delegate for nearly an hour but
the president declared the debate closed when Pestana asked for time to
reply to these attacks.
Pestana spent several months in Moscow and left Russia on September 6,
1920, profoundly disillusioned by all that he had observed during that
time. In an account of a subsequent visit to Berlin, Rudolf Rocker
described Pestana as being like a man "saved from a shipwreck." He had
not the heart to tell his Spanish comrades the truth. It seemed to him like
"murder" to destroy the immense hope which the Russian Revolution [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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