Join Socialist Resistance Youth! PHIL HEARSE'S attempt (Socialist Resistance Youth April 2004) to reply to anarchist criticism was wonderfully self-contradictory. He wants a government, dismissing direct democracy as impossible, yet also argues that this "does not imply a delegation of overall social and political power by the working class"!
He maintains that "majority rule is part of the central definition of workers democracy" while also arguing that "for us all democracy is representative." In other words, minority rule by the handful of leaders elected by the majority. Rather than the actual self-organised power of the workers" we get a government only "based" on it.
Anarchists reject this sophistry. The key issue is, as | said, power. When I said the Bolsheviks aimed at party power, Hearst asserts that 1 am "presumably referring to Lenin's insentience that the Bolsheviks... take the initiative for the insurrection of October 1917."
No, I was referring to Lenin's constant refrain that they "can and must take state power into their own hands." Hearse claims that workers and community councils would rule, yet Lenin argued that "it is impossible to refuse a purely Bolshevik government without treason to the slogan of the power of the Soviets, since a majority at the Second AllRussian Congress of Soviets... handed power over to this government." "All power to party leadership via the soviets" is a more accurate say, 'Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position..."
He, like Hearse, dismissed the idea that the whole working class could rule for "in all capitalist countries... the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by a mass proletarian organisation. It can be exercised only by a vanguard. " Trotsky agreed, arguing (in 1936)) that the "revolutionary dictatorship of a proletarian party" was "an objective necessity" and that the "revolutionary party (vanguard) which renounces its own dictatorship surrenders the masses to the counter-revolution."
Perhaps Hearse will argue that this was due to the "conditions of civil war." Yet he significantly ignores the fact that the Bolsheviks had been disbanding soviets and imposing one-man management before it started.
They had also been repressing the left. He asserts that "decisive action was taken against the anarchists" after some bombed a Bolshevik meeting. That was in September 1919. A year and a half before, the Cheka had attacked the anarchists all across Russia - before the civil war started. Repression continued from then on. The bombing was in response to state repression, not is cause
Ignoring the awkward fact that Bolshevik authoritarianism started before (and continued after) the civil war, Hearse argues that "decline of soviet democracy" was due to "the decline and near-disappearance of the proletariat."
Hearse asserts the same civil war, the Bolsheviks were putting the "dictatorship of the party" at the core of their politics while the anarchists called democratic soviet congresses and protected freedom of speech and association.
Hearse claims that Makhno "was part" of the "counter-revolution." This is a lie. Makhno fought the Whites and the Bolsheviks for soviet democracy.
Is soviet democracy "counter-revolution"? Significantly, the Bolsheviks worked with Makhno, betraying him once the Whites were defeated. The Makhnovists also refute his assertion that we anarchists "can't" defend a revolution.
Hearse wonders if there "would have been a Russian revolution without the Bolshevik party?" If the striking women in February 1917 had listened to the Bolsheviks, the answer would have been no! However, Hearse • • makes the common Leninist assumption that diately after a revolution. The task of working class organs (like federations of factory committees and neighbourhood assemblies) is to build it.
Finally, there is the question of "politics." Anarchists do not ignore political issues ("public affairs"). Rather we argue that they be fought on our class terrain, by direct action and solidarity.
We do reject electionism because it does not work. Hearse points to SSP doing a "brilliant job" in the Scottish Parliament. One hundred years ago the Marxist Social Democrats were
doing the reformist, watering down their principles to get more votes. The means used became an end in itself. Come 1914, the chickens came home to roost and the "socialists" voted for war credits As in so many things, Bakunin, not Marx, was proven correct.
Marxists seem intent on repeating history, not making it. The Anarchist critique of Marxism has been confirmed repeatedly. So has our theory of revolution. To see the references for the facts and quotes I present, please visit "An Anarchist FAQ" at www.anarchistfaq.org
Plain McKay