Letters

Macedonia

I was pretty amused by the letter in your last issue from Richard Roper on Macedonia, slagging off the Weekly Worker for ?supporting? Nato (September 6).

It looks to me that this fellow was so offended by the analysis you put forward, defending the basic democratic rights of the obviously oppressed Albanian population, that he lost his capacity to read plain English. Obviously this person did not notice (or rather was too dishonest to notice) the prominent demands for Nato to get out of Macedonia, or the criticism of the National Liberation Army in the article for appealing to Nato in the first place.

Roper?s letter is typical of the racist Stalinist mentality. He slanders the NLA as having something to do with an ethnic Albanian division of Hitler?s SS, yet produces not one shred of evidence to link any single individual NLAer with this organisation. For him, the fact that they are Albanians presumably makes them guilty by virtue of their common nationality. Yet, as is quite clear from his moaning about ?western plots? to ?break up Yugoslavia? that he is not shy of supporting the Yugoslav government under Milosevic, whose vice-president, Seselj, was an open fascist who openly advocated the mass expulsion and murder of non-Serbs from ?Yugoslavia?, at one point issuing the murderous call to ?cut the Croats? throats with rusty knives?.

The Weekly Worker has nothing to ?explain? to the likes of Roper or any other apologist for pan-Slavist ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. It is the likes of Roper, on the contrary, who should ?explain? their alliances with fascist like Seselj.

Keep up the good work!

Macedonia

Bakunin

So the CPGB?s response to criticism of your reporting on Genoa is to trot out (pun intended), via Eddie Ford, the same old historical smears on Bakunin

Let?s start by pointing out that, while Bakunin played a key role in founding the anarchist movement, none of us today call ourselves Bakuninists. In part this is because we acknowledge his flaws, including his occasional, but virulent anti-semitism. It is an unfortunate fact that all the socialists of that period, Marx included, were infected with the ideas of the ruling class when it came to racism and imperialism.

Eddie?s treatment of Bakunin?s views on organisation (which seem, as usual, to by lazily lifted from a hostile Marxist commentary) do need to be addressed. Eddie pulls the old trick of producing quotes from Bakunin?s pre-anarchist period, when he was a left republican (in the Slav rather then the Irish sense), mixing them with incomplete later quotes and then paraphrasing the bundle so that he claims Bakunin said: ?The masses are stupid. ?Liberation? must come about through the action of a tiny minority who then proceed to educate the population and administer the new order.?

In fact Bakunin argued strongly against this point of view, even in his pre-anarchist period. Writing in The Bell in 1862, for instance, he advocated that Russian students ?Go to the people. This is your field, your life, your science. Learn from the people how best to serve their cause! Remember, friends, that educated youth must be neither the teacher, the paternalistic benefactor, nor the dictatorial leader of the people, but only the midwife for the self-liberation, inspiring them to increase their power by acting together and coordinating their efforts.?

Bakunin was an active revolutionary who was sentenced to death in two separate countries for his part in the 1848 rebellions. He spent a decade in prison as a result, during which he lost all his teeth to scurvy. He knew at first hand the costs of defeat. He also knew that capital and the state in that period not only kept the masses illiterate, but took active steps to keep them so. As late as 1909 the Spanish state was to execute the anarchist educator, Francisco Ferrer. This was also a period where in many European countries advocating revolutionary ideas was liable to land you in jail or worse.

In this context he argued: ?Only individuals, and a small number of them at that, can be carried away by an abstract and ?pure? idea.? In building the international, ?in order to touch the heart and gain the confidence, the assent, the adhesion, and the cooperation of the illiterate legions of the proletariat - and the vast majority of proletarians unfortunately still belong in this category - it is necessary to begin to speak to those workers not of the general sufferings of the international proletariat as a whole, but of their particular, daily, altogether private misfortunes. It is necessary to speak to them of their own trade and the conditions of their work in the specific locality where they live; of the harsh conditions and long hours of their daily work, of the small pay, the meanness of their employer, the high cost of living, and how impossible it is for them properly to support and bring up a family.?

Mind you, unlike Lenin he never claimed that this meant the socialist idea came from outside the working class. Rather he saw the role of revolutionary intellectuals to act as a midwife for ideas that were already there.

Bakunin thus came to advocate a form of organisation designed to promote and coordinate revolution within the broader movement that would indeed include ?a hundred tightly and seriously allied revolutionaries for the whole of Europe?. But he emphasised this group was to have no power other then the power of persuasion. And it was never suggested it should run post-revolutionary society. Rather, ?As regards organisation of the commune, there will be a federation of standing barricades and a Revolutionary Communal Council will operate on the basis of one or two delegates from each barricade, one per street or per district, these deputies being invested with binding mandates and accountable and revocable at all times? (D Guerin [ed] No gods, no masters Vol 1, p155).

Marxists who criticise this as an actual dictatorship are making the mistake of judging it by their own organisational methods. Bakunin, with most modern anarchists, held that the role of the anarchist organisation (the 100 above) was to influence working class struggles with their ideas. Marxists seek to become the actual leadership of these struggles. You combine these two forms of leadership into one - in fact you often are not even aware that you do so. For Bakunin there is no contradiction between a revolution from below and a revolution that is influenced by the ideas of 100 revolutionaries, precisely because he says these 100 should hold no positions of power.

This is obvious enough to anyone who reads Bakunin first hand rather they relying on the selected quotes of Marxists and liberals. If you do so then you discover the alleged ?contradiction? of the secret society and ?revolution from below? most often occur side by side. Either Bakunin was so stupid as to not spot this himself or he was engaged in some of that old Hegelian dialectics he, along with Marx, was so keen on.

For any of your readers willing to engage in the exercise I recommend appendix A of his final work, Statism and anarchism, written in 1873, as a neat example. It?s edited by Marshal Shatz, and published by Cambridge University Press. Additional writings and biographical information on Bakunin can be found at

Bakunin

Class missing

Eddie Ford?s misses out his class outlook, making him appear strangely irrational.

However, put into the context of that time, Bakunin?s secret project of an anarchist state is just a benign variation on the Russian state: an absolute state presiding over a widely dispersed, but locally organised peasantry. It is the peasantry that he is principally relying on to form the revolutionary mass - both in Russia and, in the context of the First International, southern Europe.

Many anarchists, particularly those influenced by Marx, are well aware of Bakunin?s personal shortcomings, but take the view that his ideas are good and can be divorced from their creator. Often this is a perfectly reasonable approach, but in this case I do not think Bakunin?s  project can be separated from his class position.

Peasants experience the state almost exclusively as a rapacious tax-gatherer, which exists only to dispossess them of the fruits of their labour. For the peasant the disappearance of the state appears as an unalloyed good. The locally circumscribed conditions of their lives and the similarity of their conditions of labour make it appear reasonable that everyone?s interests are the same and universal agreement can be reached without much difficulty.

The reality is very different, because in fact peasants frequently disagree violently and need some arbiter from outside to adjudicate. Just the role for Bakunin. I am not accusing him of wanting to be an exploitative dictator by taking advantage of that other problem faced by the peasantry: namely that their decentralised existence means they cannot defend themselves against a centrally organised power. Though that would be the inevitable outcome.

The other problem of his approach is that it leads to a static society reproducing itself as an unchanging peasantry, ruled by an equally unchanging elite. Presumably for Bakunin the rulers would be clever scholars - perhaps a bit like the bureaucrats that served the emperors in China for so many millenniums.

Class missing
Class missing

Confusion

It is unlikely that many activists in Anti-Fascist Action will be too surprised or even bothered at being likened to the ?left wing of the Nazi Party?, as Ian Donovan does in the. Virtually every time Afa has physically beaten the fascists over the years the middle class left have shrieked, ?You?re as bad as them!? Now the hysteria has simply moved into the political arena (significantly Afa has never got this kind of reaction from a working class audience).

What is surprising is Donovan?s assertion that the alternative to Afa?s ?reactionary? arguments was the recent demonstration held in Sighthill on August 25. The demonstration was called in the aftermath of the murder of a refugee, Firsat Yildiz, under the banner, ?Sighthill - the way forward - unity against racism and poverty?. Not only did the demonstration call for improved facilities for the estate, but specifically demanded ?the right to be listened to and consulted with before decisions are made for the area?.

The fact that the demonstration acknowledged the grievances of both the refugees and the local community was very important - and something Afa has argued for the last two years. In May 2000 Afa warned: ?A failure to demand adequate resources along with the rights of refugees can only, as in many communities in Britain, pit the most wretched against the most disadvantaged? (AFA News).

The Sighthill demonstration illustrates that some sections of the left have abandoned the divisive ?Refugees welcome here? approach and adopted a more progressive working class strategy. In July 2000 Afa argued that, ?The way to undermine the racists is to bring class into the equation and support the rights of local communities and the refugees? (Fighting Talk No24).

So while Mr Donovan applauds the Sighthill demonstration, he urges people to ?distance ourselves decisively? from Afa - the very people who, as we have shown, were the first to suggest this was the way forward.

Some confusion here ...

Confusion
Confusion