charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
And it lacked the acrimony of many Leninist splits in that cooperation is still possible between the two groupings
Does anarchism have a serious future?
- Thread starter Joe Reilly
- Start date
belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
that report in full (actually there is another one as well, says it was about feminism):
At the time of the last annual congress of the F.A some sections
decided to leave FA in order to constitute itself in autonomous
collective.
The collectives of Lyon, Saint-Brieuc, Lille, Bordeaux and one of
the two groups of Rennes thus made scission with the F.A.
They are groups composed almost entirely of libertarian Communists
who chose to leave the federation.
would that be about right?
At the time of the last annual congress of the F.A some sections
decided to leave FA in order to constitute itself in autonomous
collective.
The collectives of Lyon, Saint-Brieuc, Lille, Bordeaux and one of
the two groups of Rennes thus made scission with the F.A.
They are groups composed almost entirely of libertarian Communists
who chose to leave the federation.
would that be about right?
charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
yes
Yeah, I was talking to the FA international secretary about thsi on Saturday. It was over some of the results of the Patriarchy Commission that was set up within the FA to work on and around issues of patriarchy. I didn't really understand what the split was about, but it did result in a couple of hundred members leaving (according to her).
charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
I thought it was about 70 all told
gawkrodger
Well-Known Member
yeh, i thought it was 50-70leaving and hundreds remaining?
gawkrodger
Well-Known Member
cross-class alliances???
charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
Yes that was my understanding- those leaving were deemed to be advocating cross-class alliances in the fight against patriarchy. Getting a bit off topic now though.
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
charlie mowbray said:
There has always been a high number of ideologically motivated polemics published for one purpose; to prove M&E anti-democratic.
From the right the intention was to show that from the outset, communism or any working class attempt to assert itself politically, is thoroughly unnatural and must therefore in end some form of dictatorial disaster or other.
Much of the propaganda output from the anarchist camp was stimulated by the likes of Bakunin as a result of his struggles with M&E within the International.
A third feed comes from the Stalinist/Trotskyist Left desperate to find justifcation in the writings of M&E for their hi-jacking of the cause.
Ps I looked at the letter from Weitling. How that can be presented as evidence of anything much is beyond me. So Marx shouted, did he, big deal.
Ace said:Sorry, I feel I'm interrupting a private conversation on this thread.
" Does Anarchism Have a Serious Future?"
If someone here could someone here explain anarchism without recourse to:
a) Acroynoms no one knows.
b) Obscure fights in the Spain/Russia/France of 80/100 years ago.
c) The Sectarian Struggles of the post war British Left.
d) Beards.
e) Utopian farms in the Scottish Highlands, presided over by a beaming pilchardman in a bobble hat.
f) Turgid turgid, utterly anachronistic, 'monopoly capitalist,' rhetoric.
g) Explosions of adolescent aggression.
Then yeah.
Surely anarchism has a future if it can be explained in ordinary terms to normal people - and stays well clear of utopianism.
Perfect description of the Alexander Berkman school of thought, 1st publication in Britain 1942 of ABC of anarchism, , they've been around for some time now the berks and idiots.
Few pages into the second part "the Nazarene, the man of peace" tells which direction to follow, some call themselves krystian anarchist's now, shade of Bakunine will haunt them forever.
Been known to work well with the right wing utopians in the states.
Berkman also states that all he put forwards could be implemented it the states at the time, first published 1929.
charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
Leaving aside the loonie, I think it is you that is bound by ideology., if by ideology you use one of the two meanings, that is a doctrine that is hidebound and narrow in outlook. I am perfectly prepared to accept a lot of Marx's economic analysis and some of his approach. You seem unable to take any criticism of his and Engels manouevrings and general unpleasant and authoritarian behaviour. Weitling was pushed out of the League and were many others in a series of manouevres and Marx wrote that that was his attention. I'll get you the quote if you want. How is communism discredited by criticising Marx? I regard myself as a communist
If you look at Marxism as a whole it was predominantly social democratic with mass parties in Germany and Austria and smaller formations in France, etc. A minority was Leninist i.e. influenced by Jacobinism/Blanquism) an even smaller minority upheld workers autonomy (council communism)
If you look at Marxism as a whole it was predominantly social democratic with mass parties in Germany and Austria and smaller formations in France, etc. A minority was Leninist i.e. influenced by Jacobinism/Blanquism) an even smaller minority upheld workers autonomy (council communism)
charlie mowbray said:
The first to accuse...........shame, i'll tell picky.
Hi Charlie,
so who were the last people to live as communist's and who before them ? or is it just ideology you imbibe.
Not an idea but a study of all previous communist societies, you know, economics, science, family structures, democratic means etc, as a guide to understanding a new society, for the future.
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
charlie mowbray said:
You in turn have not presented any evidence - just a few tired assertions made by political opponents. Also I notice you conflate 'unpleasant with authoritarian' as if swearing of rudeness by itself somehow signified a dictatorial mindset!
Being democratic dosen't mean agreeing with everyone all the time, or nodding respectfully at every view no matter how cretinious, as some on here seem to believe. It is rather about setting up or adhering to democratic institutions and fighting your corner (as hard as you like) within that framework.
On the wider question given that the political opposition are in arguably a stronger position that they were in 1848 it's past time for our side to pull its finger out.
Given the scale of the ambition the enemy displays that some home made speed bumps can be sited as proof of a lurking counter offensive speaks volumes.
october_lost
It's not hip any more...
Ace said:Sorry, I feel I'm interrupting a private conversation on this thread.
Just one last question before I piss off - related to the thread title
" Does Anarchism Have a Serious Future?"
.......
Surely anarchism has a future if it can be explained in ordinary terms to normal people - and stays well clear of utopianism.
Anarchism is a political system based on mutual aid and co-operation, which rejects all forms of government and economic repression...
does that help?
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
charlie mowbray said:
I just noticed this. I didn't say communism was discredited by criticising Marx.
The playing up of false allegations of him being anti-democratic were originally designed to discredit him personally within the workers movement. Ever since the same old rubbish has been widely circulated by historians of a right-wing hue not to discredit Marx as such, but used more as the launch pad for the notion that democratic working class control must automatically lead to some perverse, obscene, gangster ridden society. 'Look at the author of the Communist Manifesto, if he was like this etc...'
Anarchists and Trots still draw on the original and subsequent slanders to justify what they are fighting for - and - against respectively. Needless to say none of it advances the cause one whit.
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
...leading to what?october_lost said:
october_lost
It's not hip any more...
to a society based on mutual aid and co-operation, minus economic repression and government....do you want the coloring book version?Joe Reilly said:
Direct democratic control by the working class and communist distribution are for me the central aspects of any future society I'd like to see. That I agree with Marx on some things and not on others doesn't mean I do so because I don't want democracy and communism.
However, I think anything other than direct democracy shouldn't rightly be called democracy, and therefore reject representative democracy, national referendums and other forms of centralised decision making.
That's consensus, not democracy. Really dislike consensus decision making. Setting up democratic institutions I'm all for, adhering to current ones, since in my view they're anti-democratic, no.
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
october_lost said:
How will what is defined 'as mutual aid and co-operation' be decided?
october_lost
It's not hip any more...
by ordinary people, it would be wrong to talk of blueprints as such, but different industries maybe run on different principles, that ultimately is for them to decide which strand of self-management they want....all I can do is influence the community/workplace I belong to...Joe Reilly said:
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
catch said:
define 'direct democracy'.
charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
Marx " Without parties no development, without division no progress". Later on in a letter to Bebel in 1873 Engels wrote:" old Hegel has already said it; a party proves itself a victorious party by the fact that it splits and can stand the split. The movement of the proletariat necessarily passes through stages of development; at every stage one section of the people lags behind and does not join in the further advance; and this alone explains why it is that actually the "solidarity of the proletariat" is everywhere realised in different party groupings which carry on life and death feuds with one another".
The mythology of Marxism implies that the theory of communism was perfected by M & E without really taking into consideration all that had gone before and that communism, organised more or less into a loose movement, was created by artisans and workers as a result of their practical experiences in the French Revolution and the events of the 1830s, as well as their continuing theoretical labours. M & E entered into an already existing movement. Their struggle againsst Weitling was about theoretical and practical leadership of this movement. Both the Russian Annenkov and Weitling (eyewitnesses) testify that at a meeting in Brussels in 1846 Marx demanded a thorough cleansing of the ranks of the communists. weitling testifies that ( despite an often asserted claim that he was opposed to propaganda) that the Marx camp itself opposed "oral propaganda, no provision for secret propaganda, in general the word propaganda not to be used in the future". Marx firmly stated that the realisation of communism in the near future was out of the question and that first the bourgeoisie must be at the helm.
Weitling's exclusion was quickly followed by the exclusion of Weitlingites in France and Germany and by that of the group around Karl Gruen. Engels carried out this purging of the ranks in Paris in corresponsdence with M saying that he had "put it over" with some communists and "bamboozled" others.
During the first months of 1848 Marx was an enthusiastic supporter of the section of the bourgeoisie that was struggling for democratic rights. He clashed with Andreas Gottschalk and his Workers ASociety in Cologne( He and the people around him were members of the Communist League) M accused this group of isolating itself from the struggle. In fact the agitation of Gottschalk and co had increased the Workers Society to 5,000 members. Finding himself in a minority M first of all dissolved the Central Committee, despite the Cologne group being a section of the Communist League. Her set up a rival organisation, the Democratic Association and launched an electoral campaign for the Frankfurt Parliament,, supporting a dubious left candidate (Wespec' anyone?)
Previously describing themselves as communists, Marx and his associates now described themselves in the daily paper Neue Rheinische Zeitung- organ of democracy they had now set up as "we other democrats". They advocated a united front between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, as long as the former remained on the "revolutionary road" in other words as long as they struggled for a democratic society. There was not an iota of antagonism between the democracy of the bourgeoisie and the communism of the proletariat, and nothing about the immediate economic problems of the workers as the paper of the Workers Society was quick to point out. During all of this, the Communist League in Germany was dropped and allowed to fizzle out.
As Marx said in his paoper "The revolution must be first of all a revolution for the bourgeoisie. The revolution of the proletariat is solely possible after capitalist economy has created the conditions". Gottschalk replied " Must we, after finally escaping the hell of the Middle Age, throw ourselves voluntarily into the purgatory of a decrepit capitalist power".
The criticisms of Gootschalk hit home among German workers. The German bourgeoisie signally failed in its endeavours to bring about a revolution for democracy and M was obliged to break with the bourgeois democrats in April 1849 and resurrect the Communist League. Not only had M & E attempted to hitch working class communism to the democratic desires of the bourgeoisie but he had denounced the fundamental principles of international solidarity between peoples. Positing the theory of "historic nations" Germany, Poland, Hungary and Italy and lesser nations doomed to be Germanised or disappear altogether, they argued that strong nation states had to be created in order to quicken the fall of absolutism. In a totally inaccurate prediction, M foresaw the extinction of the Czechs, Slovaks and South Slavs. Chillingly, he saw these nations as backward and obsolete. He warned in a veiled attack on the panSlavist Bakunin that " We shall fight an 'implacable life and death struggle' with Slavdom, which has betrayed the revolution; a war of annihilation and ruthless terrorism, not in the interests of Germany but in the interests of the revolution!" that " we can only secure the revolution against these Slav peoples by the most decisive acts of terrorism". In a profoudly racist language against the Slavs he bellyaches that no gratitude was shown "for the pains the Germans have taken to civilise the obstinate Czechs ansd Slovenes, and to introduce among them trade, industry, a tolerable agriculture and education!" Even more chilling was E's comment that "the next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance".
The mythology of Marxism implies that the theory of communism was perfected by M & E without really taking into consideration all that had gone before and that communism, organised more or less into a loose movement, was created by artisans and workers as a result of their practical experiences in the French Revolution and the events of the 1830s, as well as their continuing theoretical labours. M & E entered into an already existing movement. Their struggle againsst Weitling was about theoretical and practical leadership of this movement. Both the Russian Annenkov and Weitling (eyewitnesses) testify that at a meeting in Brussels in 1846 Marx demanded a thorough cleansing of the ranks of the communists. weitling testifies that ( despite an often asserted claim that he was opposed to propaganda) that the Marx camp itself opposed "oral propaganda, no provision for secret propaganda, in general the word propaganda not to be used in the future". Marx firmly stated that the realisation of communism in the near future was out of the question and that first the bourgeoisie must be at the helm.
Weitling's exclusion was quickly followed by the exclusion of Weitlingites in France and Germany and by that of the group around Karl Gruen. Engels carried out this purging of the ranks in Paris in corresponsdence with M saying that he had "put it over" with some communists and "bamboozled" others.
During the first months of 1848 Marx was an enthusiastic supporter of the section of the bourgeoisie that was struggling for democratic rights. He clashed with Andreas Gottschalk and his Workers ASociety in Cologne( He and the people around him were members of the Communist League) M accused this group of isolating itself from the struggle. In fact the agitation of Gottschalk and co had increased the Workers Society to 5,000 members. Finding himself in a minority M first of all dissolved the Central Committee, despite the Cologne group being a section of the Communist League. Her set up a rival organisation, the Democratic Association and launched an electoral campaign for the Frankfurt Parliament,, supporting a dubious left candidate (Wespec' anyone?)
Previously describing themselves as communists, Marx and his associates now described themselves in the daily paper Neue Rheinische Zeitung- organ of democracy they had now set up as "we other democrats". They advocated a united front between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, as long as the former remained on the "revolutionary road" in other words as long as they struggled for a democratic society. There was not an iota of antagonism between the democracy of the bourgeoisie and the communism of the proletariat, and nothing about the immediate economic problems of the workers as the paper of the Workers Society was quick to point out. During all of this, the Communist League in Germany was dropped and allowed to fizzle out.
As Marx said in his paoper "The revolution must be first of all a revolution for the bourgeoisie. The revolution of the proletariat is solely possible after capitalist economy has created the conditions". Gottschalk replied " Must we, after finally escaping the hell of the Middle Age, throw ourselves voluntarily into the purgatory of a decrepit capitalist power".
The criticisms of Gootschalk hit home among German workers. The German bourgeoisie signally failed in its endeavours to bring about a revolution for democracy and M was obliged to break with the bourgeois democrats in April 1849 and resurrect the Communist League. Not only had M & E attempted to hitch working class communism to the democratic desires of the bourgeoisie but he had denounced the fundamental principles of international solidarity between peoples. Positing the theory of "historic nations" Germany, Poland, Hungary and Italy and lesser nations doomed to be Germanised or disappear altogether, they argued that strong nation states had to be created in order to quicken the fall of absolutism. In a totally inaccurate prediction, M foresaw the extinction of the Czechs, Slovaks and South Slavs. Chillingly, he saw these nations as backward and obsolete. He warned in a veiled attack on the panSlavist Bakunin that " We shall fight an 'implacable life and death struggle' with Slavdom, which has betrayed the revolution; a war of annihilation and ruthless terrorism, not in the interests of Germany but in the interests of the revolution!" that " we can only secure the revolution against these Slav peoples by the most decisive acts of terrorism". In a profoudly racist language against the Slavs he bellyaches that no gratitude was shown "for the pains the Germans have taken to civilise the obstinate Czechs ansd Slovenes, and to introduce among them trade, industry, a tolerable agriculture and education!" Even more chilling was E's comment that "the next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance".
charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
Soon Marx took a turn away from revolutionary activity, stating that no revolution was possible for the present because of of the economic recovery. Further, a coming revolution did not just depend on another trade crisis, which he had seen as the cause of the 1848 Revolutions, but a massive development of the productive forces. Leading workers in the Communist League like Schapper, Fraenkel, Lehmann and willich ( many of whom had been the real founders of the League) fell out with him over this. In behaviour that was echoed in Marx;'s later tactics in the First International, the Central Committee was transferred to Cologne. As Schapper noted" Just as the proletariat cut itself off from the Montagne and the press in France, so here the people who speak for the party on matters of principle are cutting themselves off from those who organise within the proletariat". After this M& E wrote to their Blanquist allies saying that as far as they were concerned the World Society set up between them and the revolutionary wing of Chartism no longer existed. The Cologne section and indeed the whole German section of the League controlled by the M & E minoritywas closed down by police action , as was the German majority section in 1851. During the trial of the Willich-Schapper group in Germany, M & E made unfounded accusations that they had shopped the rival M & E faction to the police. These tactics of calumny were later used by them and their associates against Bakunin.
Shortly after in 1852 dissolved his section of the League and began to drop the use of the word communist, and to start using the term social democrat to describe his politics.
M & E had done considerable damage to important sections of the nascent communist movement with their tactic of allying the cause of the working class with that of the bourgeoisie. They had further strengthened the pro-Statist currents within this loose communist movement and had prepared the way for the mass social-democratic parties to come. Now they had the luxury of retreating into theoretical work work until 1864, whilst communist workers endeavoured to carry on their organisational work within the working class.
Shortly after in 1852 dissolved his section of the League and began to drop the use of the word communist, and to start using the term social democrat to describe his politics.
M & E had done considerable damage to important sections of the nascent communist movement with their tactic of allying the cause of the working class with that of the bourgeoisie. They had further strengthened the pro-Statist currents within this loose communist movement and had prepared the way for the mass social-democratic parties to come. Now they had the luxury of retreating into theoretical work work until 1864, whilst communist workers endeavoured to carry on their organisational work within the working class.
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
I can't actually see what any of this has to dow with accusation made by you that Marx was anti-democratic. Vague whitterings, 'eye-witnesses' criticisms by bitter political opponents as to this or that tactic adopted, on this or that issues do not a smoking gun make.
Also this subjective approach side-steps the broader public theoritical conclusions, which is where the case for or against, stands or falls.
Also this subjective approach side-steps the broader public theoritical conclusions, which is where the case for or against, stands or falls.
charlie mowbray said:
Joe Reilly
Well-Known Member
In Bloom said:
And would this system be applied to running the country?
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