![]() ![]() Ian instead cites former anarchist Victor Serge’s recollections. Draper distorted anarchist views through manipulation and fabrication. ![]() Ian commendably distances himself from Hal Draper’s bizarre charges that Bakunin favoured dictatorship, etc. I agree with Paul and Leo that anarchists have caricatured Marxists, but the reverse is true too-often because Marxists use unreliable or hostile sources, dismissing other accounts as “liberal”, etc. There is a global spread of anarchist values: bottom-up organising and direct action outside the official political system. A 2007 syndicalist union summit in Paris drew 250 delegates worldwide, Africans the biggest continental grouping. Today anarchists are central to the “most determined and combative of the movements” fighting capitalist globalisation. In its dark years, into the 1980s, the tradition remained important in unions and armed struggles in Asia, Latin America and southern Europe, and in the Cuban and Soviet undergrounds. Into the 1950s its movements were often larger than their Marxist rivals. ![]() The point of Black Flame is not to study Marxism, but the 150 year tradition of anarchism and syndicalism-a mass movement with a sophisticated theory, usually caricatured by Marxists.īenedict Anderson notes that the broad anarchist tradition was long the “dominant element in the self-consciously internationalist radical left”, “the main vehicle of global opposition to industrial capitalism, autocracy, latifundism, and imperialism”. It is a pity, then, that Leo’s review concentrates on refuting (as I will show, not convincingly) what Black Flame said about mainstream Marxism. The first step in avoiding “caricatured non-debate” is to engage seriously with what Leo calls the “often obscured” history of the broad anarchist tradition. We have real differences too: these require comradely yet frank discussion. The popular classes would “take upon themselves the task of rebuilding society”, through revolutionary counter-power and counter-culture, outside and against the ruling class, state and capital. The “new social order” would be constructed “from the bottom up” by the “organisation and power of the working masses”. For Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin, social revolution required a movement by “ the workers and the peasants”, “the only two classes capable of so mighty an insurrection”. īy any measure, anarchists favour working class self-emancipation. The term “dictatorship of the proletariat”, Leo insists, means merely “the democratic defence of working class power” through “organs of self-organisation councils, trade unions, communes etc”. If Marx, Lenin and Trotsky are invoked here, it is because the “essence” of their works is taken to be “working class self-emancipation”. The IST states it is for socialism from below through revolution. It is important to note where we converge. Leo Zeilig praises Michael Schmidt’s and my book, Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, as “a fascinating account”. Ian Birchall stresses that “lines between anarchism and Marxism are often blurred”. Paul Blackledge’s article rejects “caricatured non-debate”. The articles I am engaging with are marked by commendable goodwill I strive for the same. I will discuss topics such as the use of sources, defending revolutions and freedom, the Spanish anarchists, anarchism and democracy, the historical role of Marxism, and the Russian Revolution. This article responds to criticisms of the broad anarchist tradition in International Socialism, an International Socialist Tendency (IST) journal. ![]()
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