Internationalist anarchism

This is the concluding part of a contribution aimed at clarifying the ICC’s analysis of the main anarchist groups in Britain.

The aim of these notes is to serve as a basis for recognising and understanding that anarchism in Britain, as elsewhere, has its revolutionary, internationalist wing, thus enabling us to correct certain significant errors we have made towards some of its organised expressions. 

This series has the aim of showing that the members of the communist left and the internationalist anarchists have a duty to discuss and even work together. The reason for this is simple. Despite important disagreements, we share key revolutionary positions: internationalism; the rejection of any collaboration and any compromise with bourgeois political forces; the defence of workers taking their struggles into their own hands…

In the first part of this new series of articles, we tried to show that there are fundamental points of agreement between the internationalist anarchists and the communist left. For the ICC, without denying that important differences exist, the crucial thing is that we are all determined defenders of workers’ autonomy...

Today, the crisis-ridden capitalist system is revealing the barbaric impasse which confronts humanity, and the proletariat is gradually returning to the road of struggle. In this historic situation, a new process of decantation is taking place within the milieu coming from anarchism.

Since the collapse of the Stalinist regimes and the eastern bloc, the organisations of official anarchism have prided themselves on keeping their hands clean in the confrontation of the east and western blocs from 1945 to 1989 and fostered the legend of an unshakeable opposition to the military blocs: "The anarchists vary on the problems of the blocs. The majority decided to oppose both east and west..."

Two recent documents coming from different parts of the anarchist movement both make attempts to address the questions of the role of the unions and how workers can struggle...

A recent discussion on the Libcom website has raised the question of the role of the Bolshevik party in the Russian Revolution. All the fractions of the Communist Left that broke with the Communist International examined the experience of the revolution from a marxist perspective to see what lessons could be learnt for the future struggles of the working class, and for the revolutionary party. The ICC has tried to draw on the clearest contributions from the Italian, Dutch and German Left (see for example, our pamphlet on The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism.) The article that we are publishing here comes from a close sympathiser of the ICC.

In October 2004 delegations of the Hungarian group Barikád Kollektíva and the International Communist Current met for a discussion around the following points:

- Russian Revolution, role and character of the Bolsheviks and the left fractions of the Komintern

- Decadence of capitalism

- Current situation: imperialism and the class struggle

We are publishing a leaflet by the Moscow anarcho-syndicalist group KRAS in response to the massacre that took place when Chechen separatists took control of a Moscow theatre last October. We don't agree with all its formulations, especially the classical anarchist ones which seem to imply that the main problem facing the working class is not the capitalist mode of production but the principle of 'Authority', or that the system can be brought down by a general strike alone. But we want to express our solidarity with its basic internationalist spirit, its opposition to a war that is against the class interests of both the Russian and the Chechen workers. We have redrafted the English translation sent to us with the aim of making it more accessible, and hope that we have not altered any of its political content. No war between the peoples - no peace between the classes!

In May the media was full of stories about the success of 10 years of 'democracy' in South Africa. The pictures of tens of thousands of workers queuing up to vote for the first time in May 1994 were dragged out the vaults to remind us of what a benefit democracy is for humanity. The reality for the working class has been worsening living and working conditions: 76% of households in South Africa live below the poverty line, an increase of 15% since 1996; unemployment has doubled since 1994; income in black households fell by 19% between 1995 and 2000 (Insights, issue 46). All of this presided over by the 'liberators' of the African National Congress.

Presentation

Anarchism today has the wind in its sails. Anarchist ideas, in the form both of the emergence and strengthening of anarcho-syndicalism, and of the appearance of numerous small libertarian groups, are getting off the ground in several countries (and are getting more and more attention from the capitalist media). This is perfectly explicable inperfectly explicable in the present historic period.

In the first part of this article, written by a sympathiser of the ICC, we examined the struggle of the revolutionary left in Britain against the first world war, looking firstly at its theoretical understanding of capitalism’s entry into its imperialist phase, and then at the organisational struggle for internationalism inside the main Marxist organisation, the British Socialist Party.