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From International Socialism, No.45, November/December 1970, pp.29-30.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Floodgates of Anarchy
S. Christie and A. Meltzer
Kahn & Averill
To most people nowadays, anarchism conjures up the notion of pre-political forms of protest associated with hippies and middle class youth dropouts. It is as well to be reminded therefore that serious political anarchism has a tradition in the European working-class movement as old as Marxism itself. Although of decisive importance in the Spanish civil war (CNT) and the early stages of the American labour movement (IWW), anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism has never really taken hold in Britain. Today except in some Latin American countries, anarchism has ceased to be a serious urban or rural political force.
But this should not be an excuse for forgetting anarchism, if only because the criticisms levelled at us by anarchists force us to face and answer important questions of theory and practice. Namely
Have, as anarchists argue, Marxist parties (other than Stalinist) seriously betrayed the working class movement at decisive political moments such as in Spain and during the Russian revolutions. The charges of bolshevik systematic atrocities against other revolutionary movements, e.g. Makhnov’s army, have to be answered.
Is it possible, as anarchists claim, to accept Marxist analysis of the working of capitalist society, while rejecting the doctrine of the leadership of the revolutionary party?
It is this second question with which Meltzer and Christie concern themselves, attempting to give an anarchist analysis of modern capitalism and the road to revolution. If their claim to accept Marxist analysis is true this part of their book should of course be a Marxist analysis.
An undoubted burden for contemporary British anarchists is that they seem incapable of drawing to their ranks, or sustaining, any competent intellectuals. The movement would benefit from a Guerin or even a Chomsky who at least knows how to write coherently and to stimulate the reader. Not so for poor old Meltzer and Christie. Despite the difficulty of following the prose (it was probably written in one of those booze ups in the Lamb and Flag before the latter became the YCL local) one searches in vain for the Marxist analysis of capitalism which ought to logically be there. Thus in the chapter on class entitled Do Classes Exist we don’t even get a definition of the term ‘class’ let alone a Marxist one. They don’t even seem to be able to use the term consistently, often equating it simply with occupational group or status. Their whole ‘analysis’ could be summarised as: most societies have more than one class, one of these classes rules in an oppressive way over the others. No evidence can be found in this chapter or any other of anything but a passing acquaintance with serious Marxist analysis.
The hollowness of the anarchist claim to ‘accept the Marxist analysis of capitalism’ is well illustrated by a seminal faux pas committed by their monthly Anarchy a couple of years ago in allowing into print an article by a certain Mr Pilgrim arguing that no serious revolutionary could have faith in the working class movement because of the horrible and authoritarian regime which would follow consequent upon a proletarian revolution. This, it was argued, is due to the fact that the working class has inherent authoritarian instincts. The sources for this thesis: the well-known American sociologist S.M. Lipset, who put forward just such an argument no doubt as a final act of self-cleansing from his pre-war Trotskyist flirtations, and is acknowledged by Mr Pilgrim. A few embarrassed replies in later issues of Anarchy failed to produce any inkling of a Marxist approach to the question and to forestall the conclusion that anarchism in this country has nothing at all to do with the revolutionary movement. However, let us give comrades Meltzer and Christie the benefit of the doubt and proceed: let us examine their treatment of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the usual point at which anarchists ‘accept’ Marxist analysis yet reject the practice. Meltzer and Christie simply repeat in slovenly form the old cliches, derived from Bakunin (who compared Marx to Bismarck) and reiterated by 20th century anarchists from Voline, Berkmann, and Rocker down to Cohn-Bendit, that the whole notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat leads inexorably to state capitalism. If all this has to be gone through again we are at least entitled to some new arguments or formulation of the question.
The argument that any dictatorship is as dangerous as the next, which forms the basis of the anarchist doctrine of spontaneism, is a clear example of undialectical thinking akin to bourgeois arguments about law and order. To treat dictatorship as an absolute and fixed concept and to attempt to deduce its characteristics from a mere contemplation of the concept itself might conform to the rules of formal logic but will lead to political disaster. The dictatorship depends for its consequences upon its historical context. The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be compared to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie because of the different relations to production of these classes. All this was said by Marx early in his life (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, No.2 on Private Property and Communism, or in the Critique of the Gotha Program) where he clearly outlines the doctrine that the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot but fail to liberate the whole of society, unless of course that dictatorship is changed by exogenous forces into some other phenomenon (e.g. Russia as a result of the Civil War).
The argument of the authoritarian nature of all dictatorships enables the anarchists to avoid any concrete discussion about such problems as the uneven development of class consciousness, and signifies the total collapse of their fruitless analysis into bourgeois pessimism. Exactly the same argument as to the necessary authoritarian nature of all forms of organisation and dictatorship was put forward by the bourgeois social theorists Weber, Michels and Pareto in the early years of the present century expressing the acceptance of the onslaught of monopoly capital on the democratic institutions of the early bourgeois era.
It is finally worth noting that the diagrams used to illustrate the ‘discussion’ on social class in Ch.5 previously appeared in a low circulation joke magazine called Cuddons Review, now, I believe, ceased publication. If anyone gives you a copy of the Floodgates of Anarchy, keep it, it might be valuable one day. If you want to find out something about serious political anarchism, read something else.
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Last updated on 24.1.2008