http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=8897
by Wayne Price
drwdprice@aol.com
May 14 2008
Introduction to new book.
This will be the introductory chapter of my next book, which will be
a compilation of essays, many from the Anarkismo.net site.
--
The following essays cover different topics, written at different
times, but all reflect a particular viewpoint. I am not a
spokesperson for anyone and make no claims to be an "orthodox
anarchist," whatever that would be. But my views are more-or-less
consistent with the main tendency of certain traditional and current
anarchist thought. This tendency is revolutionary, believing that
eventually the working class will have to directly confront and
dismantle the state; it is anti-capitalist, in the tradition of
libertarian socialism, social anarchism, and anarchist-communism; it
is decentralist, believing that society should be in human scale,
rooted in direct democracy; it is federalist, believing that local
assemblies and workplace councils should replace the state with
associations and networks; it is internationalist, believing that a
world-wide revolution is necessary; it is for ecological and
environmental rebuilding of all industry and technology, in the
tradition of social ecology and Green anarchism; as class struggle
anarchism, it sees the working class as central to the revolutionary
struggle, an analysis which overlaps with the libertarian and
humanistic aspects of Marxism; yet it also supports every struggle
against oppression by every group and on every issue, including that
of women, People of Color, nations oppressed by imperialism, Gay
Lesbian Bi and Transexual people, physically disabled people, those
opposed to war or to ecological catastrophe; etc. In order to achieve
these goals, it believes that revolutionaries should organize
themselves to fight for them by word and example; this is seen as
part of the self-organization of the working class and oppressed, a
program called Platformism or especifisimo.
If you are not at least curious about these ideas, do not bother to
read this book.
I came to this set of ideas by a zig-zag process. I grew up in the
suburbs, the child of white collar workers (at the upper end of the
working class or the lower end of the middle class). I suffered no
material deprivation or personal abuse, but I was intensely,
neurotically, unhappy. Shortly before entering high school, I spent a
summer in a camp program for teenagers. By happenstance, I came
across the writings of Paul Goodman and Dwight Macdonald which
converted me to anarchist-pacifism. Over time, I was also influenced
by the bioregionalist Lewis Mumford and by the humanistic Marxist,
Erich Fromm (Fromm and Goodman were also both radical psychologists).
These and other writers convinced me that there was another way for
human beings to relate to each other, more human, kinder, and more
rational, than what I was used to. People, they said, needed
decentralized, human-scale, face-to-face, radically democratic,
communities, and this was technologically possible. They answered my
intense need to rebel against authority while still keeping most of
the humanistic and democratic values I had internalized from my
liberal parents. I regarded myself as a decentralist socialistand
still do. (Paul Goodman is discussed further in one of the following essays.)
When I went to college, I joined the Students for a Democratic
Society and participated in the movement against the Vietnamese war.
In the course of this, I ran across a Trotskyist who talked me out of
anarchist-pacifism. He persuaded me that a revolution was needed and
that anarchist-pacifism was not a sufficient program for revolution.
He argued that nonviolence would not work against a committed evil
force, such as the Nazis. He gave me works on the Hungarian
revolution and the Spanish revolution of the thirties. These argued
that the Leninist concept of a "workers' state" or "dictatorship of
the proletariat" meant that workers, peasants, and soldiers should
form assemblies and councils and should associate these together as
an alternate power to either the fascists or to the liberal
capitalist state. Why, I thought, I am for that! I still am, although
I would not call this a workers state. So I became a Trotskyist.
But I never could agree withor even understand--his orthodox
Trotskyist belief that the Soviet Union was a workers' state, as were
Eastern Europe and China, and especially Cuba. He admitted that the
workers did not control any of these states, that the workers and
peasants were extremely oppressed in all of these states (except, he
claimed, Cuba), and that the regimes, outside of the USSR, had all
come to power without workers' revolutions. Nevertheless, he
insisted, the workers were the ruling class in these states because
industry was nationalized and the economy was planned (he thought). I
thought this was ridiculous and in complete contradiction to the
democratic and proletarian view of Marxism I had been learning.
So, much to this Trotskyist's disgust, I joined the unorthodox, soft,
semi-social-democratic, wing of Trotskyism. This rejects Trotsky's
view that Stalin's Soviet Union was a workers' state, in favor of
theories that the Stalinist bureaucracy was a new ruling class,
maintaining either state capitalism or a new type of class society
("bureaucratic collectivism," similar to the "coordinatorist" theory
of today's Pareconists). In 1969 I was a founding member (that is, I
was at the founding conference) of the International Socialists. This
was in the the tradition of the Independent Socialist League of Max
Shachtman but was also influenced by the British International
Socialists (now the Socialist Workers Party).
Later I was to work together with my Trotskyist friend from college
when I began to do opposition work in the New York City teachers
union. The last I heard he has become a leader of Socialist Action, a
split-off from the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (no relation to the
British group) after the latter abandoned Trotskyism altogether for Castroism.
What most attracted me to the I.S. was its concept of
"socialism-from-below" as opposed to "socialism-from-above,"
expounded by Hal Draper in his pamphlet, The Two Souls of Socialism
(reprinted in Draper, 1992, pp. 233). Real socialism, he argued,
could only come about through the upheavals of ordinary people,
workers and others, against the elites who ruled us, and this had to
be done against those who only wanted to use the people as a
battering ram to put themselves in power. He claimed that this was
the essential meaning of the Marxism of Marx and Engels, and
eventually wrote a series of fat books to argue his case (e.g.,
Draper , 1977). These books are worth reading, in my opinion, despite
his anti-anarchist bias, which I accepted at the time (as I put my
decentralism on hold). Draper's contributions are discussed further
in one of my essays below; I am still for socialism-from-below.
This position was not easy to hold in the 60s and 70s. People who
regarded themselves as revolutionaries were mostly attracted to the
politicians which seemed to be leading revolutions against U.S.
imperialism: Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Tse Tung. All three were
dictators in the tradition of Stalin, who made revolutions based on
control of the peasantry and not on the workers' and peasants'
self-organization. U.S. Maoists became influential among radical
workers and People of Color. The main Trotskyists were the orthodox
sort who also regarded these regimes as workers' states. Meanwhile
the low level of working class struggles in that period made it
difficult to argue for a working class orientation, as we did. The
I.S. were marginalized.
A number of us came to conclude that the I.S., was not really
revolutionary in action, being organizationally sloppy and
politically muddled. Draper himself did a lot to push the I.S. toward
building a middle class liberal party, the Peace and Freedom Party,
whose only virtue was that it was not the Democrats or Republicans
(similar to today's Green Party, Labor Party Advocates, or Nader's
electoral runs, which have been supported by the decendents of the
I.S.). A fierce faction fight broke out and we split off (were
expelled), forming the Revolutionary Socialist League in 1973. The
I.S. continued; today its main survivors in the U.S. are the
International Socialist Organization (probably the largest Left
group) and Solidarity.
Our goal was to be really Trotskyist, unlike the I.S., except for the
orthodox Trotskyist position on the Soviet Union. From the start the
R.S.L. rejected Trotsky's belief that Stalin ruled a workers' state,
in favor of a state capitalist analysis. Otherwise we studied
Trotsky's writings and sought to be as Trotskyist as could be.
Fervent Trotskyism may seem like an odd detour from
socialism-from-below to revolutionary anarchism, but there was a
logic to it. What we saw in Trotsky's Trotskyism was a serious
approach to revolution. It offered the intellectual resources of
Marxist theory (I studied and taught the three volumes of Capital).
It was based on an analysis that capitalism was in an overall epoch
of decay, despite the extended periods of apparent prosperity after
World War II, and that therefore reforms could not be won on a
consistent and lasting basis. It believed that the revolution could
be made by the working class, in particular by the most oppressed
sections of the working class: women, African-Americans, workers of
the oppressed nations, youth, etc. (in this it was consistent with
socialism-from-below). It sought to replace the states of capitalism
and of the Stalinist bureaucracy with associations of councils
(soviets), with democracy for opposing tendencies. It called for
world revolution.
Especially, Trotsky's Trotskyism opposed both holding ourselves aloof
from popular reform struggles, as the sectarians do, or burying
ourselves in reform efforts, as the opportunists do. It looked for
ways for revolutionaries to combine active participation in the
struggles of the exploited with an open expression of the need for
revolution. Trotsky demanded of his followers that they "say what
is," tell the truth to the workers about the need for revolution,
even while participating in more limited reform efforts. He taught
methods for this, such as the United Front, critical support, the
Permanent Revolution, and transitional demands, which we studied as
they had been applied in various revolutions in the past. We tried to
apply the lessons of revolutionary history in our own situtation, but
this became more difficult as time went on and the period became more
conservative. I won't say we were perfect in combining revolutionary
propaganda with popular participationfar from it--but we tried.
We were also deeply influenced by the movements for Women's
Liberation and for Gay Liberation. It was not so much their overt
programs, but their implicit libertarianism more and more came into
conflict with the authoritarianism of Trotskyism. In general we found
it increasingly difficult to reconcile the democratic-libertarian
side of Marxism with its authoritarian side. Why had Trotsky insisted
that Stalin's state (which he had said was similar to Hitler's) was
nevertheless workers' rule, so long as the economy remained
nationalized? This made the actual power of the workers to be
secondary to the importance of the statified economy in his
conception of socialism. Why had Lenin and Trotsky set up a one-party
dictatorship? If Marx and Engels were so democratic, as Draper
claimed, how come their followers were almost all authoritarians (as
Draper admitted)? Were we so right in saying that we were almost the
only ones who really understood Marx, while 99.99% of self-proclaimed
Marxists had an entirely different interpretation? Perhaps their
authoritarian interpretation of Marxism also had a legitimate basis
in the work of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky?
We held a discussion of the failures of Trotskyism (summarized in
Hobson & Tabor, 1988, which included an analysis of the Soviet
Union's state capitalism). This was followed by Ron Tabor's (1988)
devastating critique of Leninism. I contributed a few papers on
decentralism, workers' control of industry, and anarchism. Meanwhile
a minority had split off (been expelled) because they wanted to
continue to develop their own orthodox Trotskyism (see Daum, 1990).
We were attracted by the growth of an anarchist movement in the 80s.
In 1989 we dissolved the R.S.L. after about 16 years. Some of us then
joined with a variety of younger anarchists to form the Love and Rage
Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (most former R.S.L. members
dropping out of politics altogether). This was the wing of anarchism
which saw itself as leftist and anti-capitalist; they supported the
struggles of People of Color, of women, and of oppressed nations.
Unfortunately, they were ambivalent about supporting the working
class. They were for a distinct anarchist organization, unlike the
anti-organizationalist anarchists. They were serious about joining in
popular struggles in a militant way, working together with others
while raising the perspective of anarchist revolution.
Love and Rage lasted for nine years. As my friends and I had been
moving from Marxism to anarchism, others had been moving from
anarchism to Marxismof a Maoist variety, no less. As our paths
crossed, we thought for a while that we agreed with each other, but
actually we were moving in opposite directions. The left as a whole
was declining in the 90s, including its anarchist wing. In reaction,
there was an attraction for some to the "successes" of Marxism and
its body of work. Former R.S.L. members and a few others opposed this
tendency, out of our many years of hating Stalinism. The resulting
faction fight ended with the dissolution of Love and Rage in 1998.
I remain an anarchist, a decentralist socialist, and a believer is
socialism-from-below. As a class struggle, Platformist, revolutionary
anarchist, I can have all the benefits I sought as a Trotskyist,
while maintaining the libertarian vision of anarchism. I no longer
advocate a "workers' state" (whatever that means), but I do advocate
a federation of workers' and popular councils (in the tradition of
the Friends of Durruti Group of the Spanish revolution). I no longer
advocate a vanguard (Leninist) party, which aims to rule over the
workers, but I do advocate a revolutionary organization of anachist
workers: Platformism or especificismo. (These topics are discussed in
essays in this book as well as in my book, The Abolition of the
State: Anarchist and Marxist Perspectives.) While I no longer call
myself a Marxist, I accept many ideas from the Marxist tradition (as
can be seen from my essays) This is especially true from the
libertarian Marxists (such as C.L.R. James, the council communists,
etc.) I now regard myself as a Marxist-informed anarchist. I have
joined the Northeastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists (or NEFAC)
and write for the www.Anarkismo.net site, which is the web site for
our international tendency.
It cannot be said that I have sacrified much by being a
revolutionary, compared to others, especially to those in other
countries who they have risked years of imprisonment or even their
lives. All I have lost has been some time and some money. I have
undergone some emotional stress, went to many boring meetings, and
had a few profoundly moving experiences. I met a few stinkers and
some wonderful human beings. I still believe in the ideal, as
something both necessary to save the world from destruction and as
morally right. There are better ways for humans to live and work together.
--
References
Daum, Walter (1990). The life and death of Stalinism; A resurrection
of Marxist theory. NY: Socialist Voice Publishing Co.
Draper, Hal (1992). Socialism from below (E. Haberkern, ed.). New
Jersey/London: Humanities Press.
Draper, Hal (1977). Karl Marx's theory of revolution; Vol. 1: State
and bureaucracy. NY/London: Monthly Review Press.
Hobson, Christopher, & Tabor, Ronald D. (1988). Trotskyism and the
dilemma of socialism. NY/Westport CT/London: Greenwood Press.
Taber, Ron (1988). A look at Leninism. NY: Aspect Foundation.
.
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