The discussion that follows was prompted by the article: The communist left and internationalist anarchism, Part 3: The approach needed for this debate. The discussion was initiated by LoneLondoner.
Below is the discussion so far. Feel free to add your own comments!
This issue has come up here and there on the forum, but oddly enough nobody has actually started off from an article which we wrote explicitly on the subject. So I thought it might be an idea to kick off a discussion, and perhaps to clarify what has led us to write these articles if necessary.
In fact these articles represent a reappraisal of our approach to the whole issue (as should be obvious from reading them). Perhaps we could say that there were two reasons for this:
The question has been asked - not unreasonably I suppose - whether this is not just opportunist. In fact if we go back to look at the workers' movement in the past, we can see that the divisions between anarchists and communists could be overcome. And not least by the Bolsheviks and our predecessors of the Italian Left.
It's instructive, from this point of view, to look at Rosmer's "Moscow in Lenin's days". Here for example is Bukharin, answering a young Spanish comrade who adopts an attitude of "merciless combat" against the anarchists:
Here is Trotsky
So, if we are conducting a reappraisal we are not inventing something fundamentally new (though of course we are expressing it in new conditions and new ways), but rather rediscovering the old practice of the Third International and the Bolsheviks - who were a lot less "sectarian" than people usually paint them.
In that quote Bukharin speaks of anarchists who rallied to the dictatorship of the proletariat, an example of which is Grossman-Roshchin. Here is a text where Grossman-Roshchin critises Kropotkin's supra-class humanism and ethics (something that is useful also to some of the ICC's texts I think): http://libcom.org/library/critique-kropotkin%E2%80%99s-fundamental-teachings
Bukharin spoke very frankly about anarchism:
http://marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1918/ps.htm
Anarchists debating among themselves, for example Makhno in his exchange with Malatesta:
Is Makhno perhaps also sectarian? Another passage of his analysis:
http://anarchistplatform.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/a-second-letter-to-mal...
Thanks to d-man for his post - the quotes are interesting and I will try to take the time out to study carefully the texts he refers to.
Just one point springs to mind reading this: that "anarchism" is an extremely broad category which includes some very different ideas. If you make an analogy with "marxism", just look at what describes itself as "marxist": everything from maoism through to a kind of intellectual liberalism. Anarchism is even worse in a sense, because at least "marxism" refers to an original body of theory - the writings of Marx and Engels - whereas "anarchism" does not. So there is no standard by which you can judge what is "real" anarchism (I realise I'm being a bit provocative here) and what is not. And anarchism can go from Stirneresque ultra-individualism to Makhno's Platformism (which requires the existence of a political organisation, a "party" perhaps?).
So what kind of anarchism is Bukharin referring to in d-man's quote? A different kind, it seems to me, than the kind referred to in my earlier quote. The anarchy he is talking to here could very well be inspired by Bakunin and his admiration for bandits as the ultimate revolutionaries, but it's a long way from the anarcho-syndicalism of Rosmer or Monatte, or indeed Pelloutier, just to take a few examples, who were real militants of the working class.
And certainly there were currents of anarchism during the Russian Revolution that stood side-by-side with the Bolsheviks and the original ideals of the soviets. It also can't be forgotten that many (especially the syndicalists) were loyal to the class even as the cancer of the Bolshevik state began to turn against the working class.
This is not to say that "anarchism" is not without its weaknesses and is beyond critique, far from it. But dismissing proletarian currents who defended internationalism and workers' control as vigorously as the communist left simply because of an "anarchist" label seems to be a flawed methodology to me.
Of course it's not because these individual positive examples are people who called themselves anarchists, that they must be dismissed in the sense of their existence being denied (which I don't think the "old sectarian" ICC even has done). But Lenin was correct during the war to abstain from finding such positive examples from anarchist history (or the few in his contemporary time) and instead declared anarchism and French syndicalism bankrupt; "One of the useful results of this war will undoubtedly be that it will kill both anarchism and opportunism."