Centralisation of power.
CockneyRebel has refered several times to the centralisation of power apparently advocated or at least accepted by anarchists, in particular by the friends of Durrutti. As with his reference to the juntas, this is really just an example of plucking a couple of phrases out of complicated writings and repeating them over and over. There is really no attempt to look at the ideas behind the phrases and it once again smacks of trotskyist mis-education on anarchism where the whole theory is reduced to a couple of out-of-context quotes with inaccurate meanings added.
Anyway, anarchists naturally have no problem with people voluntarily co-operating towards collective goals and collectivising certain functions when it seems that this would lead to greater efficiencies. Note there are a few key words here: "voluntarily" and "co-operating". This has nothing in common with the bolshevik practice of imposing centralised decision making on recalcitrant people by force.
You see there are many concrete practices which can hide behind Cockney's simplistic refrain about centralisation. The version presented by these trots, of autonomous federations each doing their own thing, only makes sense if you think that people are so stupid that they will never see the use in co-operating with each other on a voluntary basis in pursuit of collective goals. It is not an accurate depiction of anarchist theory (anarchism is organisation, organisation and more organisation - Malatesta) nor does it bear any resemblance to what actually happened whenever these ideas had a chance to be put into practice - Spain saw the greatest flowering of working class self-organisation in immensely complex intertwined co-operative bodies that the world has ever seen.
Now, I happen to know quite a bit about the actual proposals of the Friends of Durruti for the organisation of the military effort against Franco in Spain. I doubt whether any of our trots here know much more than the seven or eight words that they keep repeating as if that was an excuse for knowledge.
Firstly, a condition of membership of the FoD was membership of the CNT. They never ceased to express loyalty to the organisation, so the suggestion that they would have suppressed it is ludicrous.
Secondly, they were proposing that the CNT should attempt to enter into a voluntary agreement with the UGT and other working class organisations in order to render the prosecution of the war more efficent. They were not proposing that anybody force anything upon anybody. They were not even proposing that the CNT should impose this proposal unilaterally, even though the CNT was probably the most democratic mass organisation that the world has ever seen. They were proposing that the CNT should advocate a voluntary association with other working class organisations which any of them would be free to join or leave if they saw fit.
Thirdly, their proposal was for a council, elected from the working class organisations, whose membership would be subject to democratic mandates and instant recall by their members and which would be formed proportionately from the constituent bodies, none of which would have a majority - despite the fact that the CNT was by far the strongest.
Fourthly, their proposal was for a council which would have a strictly limited mandate and would have precisely no power to dictate on any matters which the constituent bodies had not voluntarily delegated it to do so.
Fifthly, they presented a sophisticated model for preventing the emergence of a professional class of managers in the proposed army. Each trained military officer would share their command with a political officer elected directly from the soldiers in their unit, an officer who could overrule the military officer and who was subject to immediate recall and mandate. They explicitly called for the removal of all petty privileges and special powers for these officers.
Sixthly, their call for the disbandment of counter-revolutionary parties was directed at the main Leninist organisation, the PSUC, which was being used to organise the internal crushing of the revolution and for the regroupment of the bourgeois forces in Spain, based upon their monopoly over arms supplies. This call obviously did not extend to other political forces such as the UGT or the POUM, since despite their dislike for the POUM's politics, they actually fought side by side in defence of them in the streets in the Barcelona maydays and they were proposing a voluntary alliance with the UGT. They only proposed the disbandment of the political parties which were physically organising attacks on the working class organisations.
Now, I realise that you guys are pretty slow on the uptake (taylorists 100 years too late!), but I really don't see how you can confuse these proposals with anything resembling the Bolshevik position or practice. I also realise that you have only a comic-book understanding of anarchism, so I'll elaborate a little on the ideas.
In describing the anarchist position, I'll try to apply it to the question of food supply to the cities in russia. Now, I realise that by doing this I'm sort of falling for the cheap trick of the trots and allowing them to take the thread off the topic. They can't defend the bolsheviks and their record or their fixation with centralisation so they resort to attacking another set of ideas instead. I really don't see how the question of whether the bolshevik program lead inexorably to a dictatorship can rest on whether the anarchists had a specific solution to the problem of food distribution in Russia in 1917. As it happens they did - as I have demonstrated - a solution that moreover worked exceedingly well in practice when it had an opportunity to be put into practice.
However, I will take the bait and explain to our more dim-witted cultees as to exactly what this solution was and how it could have worked in Russia. If they actually were interested in ideas they would probably bother to familiarise themselves with the contents of the book referred to, rather than just slagging it off from a position of woeful ignorance. Perhaps, they can learn something from somebody who actually attempts to defend their ideas, I know, I'm a dreamer...
Anyway, the essence of Kropotkin's work is that a revolution in early 20th century europe would immediately find itself in a very difficult position. The revolution would inevitably start in the proletarianised cities and would not spread to the rural areas immediately. Kropotkin, with considerable foresight, pointed out that this would be absolutely crucial for the revolution. If the cities could not feed themselves the revolution would die in a short space of time. The title of the book refers to the key immediate task of the revolution, the conquest of bread in a situation where the rural population who produced the food would be unwilling to just give it to the revolutionary cities.
Now the question that Kropotkin posed was not "how can the anarchists solve this", as the trots put it - revealing their trademark managerial arrogant mindsets. It was, "how can the working class solve this". As an anarchist he was interested in whether there was a solution to this problem which did not contradict any of the anarchist principles of voluntary association and lack of coercion.
Now, I'm not going to go into the fine details of his proposed solution, but I will give you a rough idea of what it would have entailed in the Russian situation. The urban soviets would come together, on as general a level as possible, whether this be the factory or the entire country, and produce a list of the surpluses that they could produce. They would form delegations and send these to the rural regions where they would address the peasant organisations and say to them "tell us what you need, we have factories, teachers, trains, machinery, engineers and all of the products of modern science. We will send whatever you need. In return we beg that you produce as much food as possible and send it to the cities as we are hungry. The question of how you produce the food and how you distribute the goods is up to you. We promise to send you whatever we can spare if you do the same".
Now this may sound utopian to the trots - although this is communism - but this is essentially what happened in Spain and it worked tremendously well. Not only did they see massive increases in rural productivity of food, they also saw the introduction of new machinery all over rural areas like tractors and threshers, they acheived all of this during a war when significant numbers of people were sent to the front and when a huge amount of industry was diverted towards the war effort. If anybody can find a source that contradicts these claims, I'd be very suprised.
In contrast to this, a theory that is both principled and shown to have worked in practice, what do the trots have to offer? A war of terror against the peasantry, huge decreases in production, famines and a state that quickly became a massive prison camp. And they have the bare-faced cheek to sneer at us.
Sure, you could say that this was not applied in Russia, but the russian working class made many efforts to do so and were thwarted repeatedly by the bolsheviks with their control detachments and their militarisation of labour and their obession with maintaining control. And the anarchists? Well we don't know what the anarchists were saying, we can guess that they were actively engaged in their soviets arguing that this was the way forward, as we know that Kropotkin's writings were immensely well known in Russia. However we can only guess, as their voices weren't too loud from behind the prison bars and their writings were almost all in ashes by 1921, burned by the monstrous dictatorship that you trots can somehow still defend.
