Follow the Party?
What makes these decisions different and acceptable to us is in fact what separates “collective responsibility” from “party discipline”. The first and most important of these is that we have an equal say in how these decisions are reached. In the anarchist organisation all have an equal say and vote in defining the organisation’s position through conference discussions or mandated delegates. In the Leninist organisation the closest you get to this is getting some sort of vote on which party leader tells you what to do [21]. Secondly, in the anarchist organisation the nature of this discipline is voluntary in the sense that members should be free to leave organisations they disagree with and join ones they agree with without being regarded as “class traitors” (readers will be aware of how Leninist groups relate to each other) [22]. A third difference is that members would be free to carry on whatever activity they were interested in providing it did not contradict the agreed policy of their organisation, rather than having their political activity monopolised by the party leadership.
Many of the readers of this article may find themselves agreeing with the sort of organisational structure and principles it outlines. But this is not written merely as a set of ideas to be thought about and then laid aside. If you agree with the core ideas presented here then you have a responsibility to start to put these into action by searching out others who also agree and taking the first steps in building such organisation(s). It is my experience that many of the anarchists I have met are completely selfless when it comes to putting themselves in exposed physical positions in the struggles of our class, it is time to put the same sort of energy into building anarchist organisations that can re-define the traditions of working class struggle and prepare for a successful revolution.
Footnotes
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[1] This casualty figure is the maximum estimate for actual war deaths I have seen. It is a sign of the continued acceptance of the rationale behind the war in the West that no-one actually seems to either know or care how many died on the Iraqi side, or that perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children have died since the end of the war due to the combined effects of destruction at the time of the war and sanctions since.
[2] The EZLN rising of 1 Jan. 1994 in Chiapas; see Red & Black Revolution No. 1 for an analysis of the Zapatistas.
[3] Quoted in ‘The SWP and the Crisis of British Capitalism’, 1992
[4] A faction within the Bolshevik party that was based on the unions and demanded a return to some workplace democracy. The main result was that factions were then banned in the Party!
[5] R.V. Daniels ‘The Conscience of the Revolution’ Pp. 145–6
[6] This is split into two sections, the section with its HQ in Paris was expelled from the IWA-AIT at its December 1996 Congress.
[7] This article is referring to the anarchist movement in Britain and Ireland except where I state otherwise. This is the area where I am very familiar with the internal life of organised anarchism but from what I am told similar problems apply in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. These countries all share a common tradition of union and political organising, dominated by struggles for the leadership of the movement and where self-organisation of struggle has seldom progressed beyond a slogan.
[8] Workers Solidarity Movement (publishers of Red & Black Revolution)
[9] Anarchist Communist Federation
[10] British section of the IWA, now called Solidarity Federation, formerly the Direct Action Movement
[11] Although including Class War in a listing of national anarchist organisations is problematical as they keep changing their minds about whether they are or are not anarchists.
[12] Scottish Federation of Anarchists
[13] The Anarchist Workers Group which self-destructed in 1992 when it abandoned anarchism, changed its name to Socialism from Below and then vanished.
[14] There has been an increase in interest in anarchism as a set of ideas but in English language countries this has not translated into a significant growth in organisation.
[15] Not unreasonable in the context of syndicalism where either the union is capable of taking over the economy on its own or it is not. In terms of non-syndicalist anarchist politics, however, the idea of completing the revolution on a non-syndicalist basis through the creation of other organs of workers’ self-management was open. By 1937 a sizeable minority of the CNT were willing to explore this possibility in the form of a revolutionary junta elected (and recallable) by the CNT and CGT workers.
[16] The CNT had about one million members at the start of the revolution, this may have risen as high as two million by 1937.
[17] CNT textile worker Andreu Capdevila, quoted in ‘Blood of Spain’ P.72
[18] See the article Syndicalism: Its strengths and weaknesses in Red & Black Revolution No. 1
[19] Which is why we must be careful not to imagine that the Leninist concept of democratic centralism, which means no more than democratically selecting who gets to decide party policy, has anything in common with the anarchist concept of theoretical and tactical unity.
[20] Bakunin discussed the difference in the two forms as being two different forms of meaning of the word authority; i.e. to be an authority on something as opposed to being in authority over something.
[21] In practice, though, this selection is fixed through mechanisms like the use of slates. Leninist groups are infamous for having the same leader ‘elected’ again and again until he dies and the organisation then splits!
[22] In fact, as usual, we can observe that the Leninists have adopted the methods of capitalist organisation on this issue, with a division between those who make decisions and those who carry them out whereas collective responsibility models the future anarchist society, where those making the decisions will be all of those effected by those decisions (workers’ self-management in the economic context).
