CNT Counter Revolution?

Perhaps an expose of the CNT in the Civil War period is long overdue? Murray Bookchin has said that they, in practical effect, re-created USSR style state socialism in the factories, quickly paying only lip service to the anarcho part of anarcho-syndicalism.

Diego Abed de Santillan, their (arguably Anarcho-Syndicalism's) greatest intellectual out of office and the Catalan Economics minister in office, had before the war proposed in his writings a system similar to USSR style state socialism, and to modern Parecon, with 'federal economic councils' in charge of all substantial economic decisions.

The FAI had siezed and exercised control over the CNT with no platform (they comprised anarchists-without-hyphens affinity groups only) so were open to de Santillan style State-Socialism-under-another-name. Can hardly criticze the FAI/CNT for their accomodations with the Cheka, if they were in effect identical in all but name to Stalinists. Under that analysis the CNT leadership (which I think means the FAI almost in its entirety) were of one mind with the Chekists, Stalinists, on the Barecelona barricades as much as on the factory floor and everywhere else.

I'm not saying that's how it actually was. I am saying that critical debate along those lines could be overdue.

I thought Devrim's post was a good one, and raises many, many key points. I think one of the most concise arguments that the CNT played a counter-revolutionary role in Spain comes from Gilles Dauve. Its also worth considering in my humble opinion.

from http://libcom.org/library/when-insurrections-die

There's just such an expose right here in the Libcom library, Michael Seidman's book, "Workers against Work"

http://libcom.org/library/workers-against-work-michael-seidman

It's been a while since I read it but basically Seidman documents workers resistance to their CNT bosses who weren't so different from the old bosses (who the CNT often retained as advisors).

There's also this short article from Wildcat, 'Revolution or Self-managed Capitalism'

http://www.angelfire.com/pop2/pkv/spain.html

Which fans of Durruti should definitely read. It would be a worthwhile addition to the library seeing as it's hidden away on one of the more obscure ultra-left sites.

Devrim, thanks a lot for coming to my aid in the arguments spawned on the AWG thread.

cheers

Pete

that is possibly one of the worst critiques of the the spanish revolution i have ever fucking read. it is is simle minded nonsense that condemns everything that doesn't immediately move to communism. On the basis of such criticism there has never been a revolutionary movement worth supporting, from the Commune to the CHiapas.

I the comment that the Spanish revolution could hardly be any less revolutionary for women is just fuckng idiotic, it doesn't even mention the Mujuere Libres ffs.

Do you mean Seidman or Wildcat?

Anyway do you think that the process of communisation (the only revolution worth having) can pass through a stage of self-managed capitalism?

Pete

well i'd say self management is a fundamental in implementing communisation, unless your waiting for some Hegelian spirit to bring it about vis a vis the Ideal dressed up in the marxist rhetoric of the "historical programme". Nowadays of course with advances i communication and such a material abundance the process of communisation would be much quicker, but it still has to be co ordinated and that requires workers counicls/soviets/assemblies co ordiinated with communes, neighbourhood assemblies etc.

In this i'm much much closer to the Dutch/German left communists focus on structure and power mechanisms than the Bordigists faintly hidden historical determinism that see's everything as a transcendent battle between some te "programme" and "capital".

p.s.I meant the Wildcat one BTW, i'm not joking when I say it's unworthy of a GCSE paper.

I have to get back to work, stupid split shift so I'll only note that I didn't say 'self-management' I said 'self-managed capitalism'.

Pete

but anarcho syndicalism has never suggested self managed capitalism, infact the CNT is the only mass movement in history to adopt libertarian communism as it's goal.

The continuation of money and a wage system in Spain 36 was possibly much more to do with the actual "concrete" facts on the ground ie you know those little details many left communists seem to overlook, guns, the need to import goods, a raging civil war, half the country in fascist hands, limited communications, the desire of most of the revolutionary workng class to save their comrades under the nationalist jack boot from execution.

There are serious issues to do with the CNT, the role of the leadership and the lets not forget the actual potentiality within the proletariat, the left communists in their puritan semantic slurry spraying aren't fit to analysis such issues.

I'd disagree with the first part. I'd say the major aim of anarcho-syndicalism is self-managed capitalism, that is, workers owning and running 'their' factories themselves which then compete with other worker owned businesses on the market. (and this is just not a left communist critique, but one put forward by many anarchist communists like the Kropotkinesque non-market anarchist commies such as the Japanese "pure" anarchists). From reading Leval, self-managed capitalism in Spain took place mainly in the urban areas, while in the rural areas there were more attempts to establish communism.

now to the second part. Yes the CNT did adopt libertarian communism as a goal. But it was very very vague over exactly what it meant by libertarian communism. It never really defined it. Sometimes libertarian communism meant communism. Sometimes it meant worker run capitalism (as in Puente's pamphlet Libertarian Communism). Sometimes it meant a vague mixture of the two. Sometimes it meant free experimentation between communism and worker run capitalism and mutualism and everything else in between (as in Abad de Santillan's book After the Revolution). Sometimes it meant communism was held up as an abstract ideal which people would never reach immediately, so various transitional measures had to played out before hand (again, as in de Santillan). This vagueness was played out in the Spanish revolution.

Now where have i heard this type of argument before? Oh yes, Leninists use it to justify their counter-revolution in Russia. The fact is that no matter what the circumstances the CNT decided to postpone and suppress libertarian communism and fight fascism instead.

Your dismissal of left communist analysis sounds a little dogmatic here. I'm not a left communist, and i do find some of their stuff to be annoyingly purist, sectarian and dogmatic. But i do find some of their analysis to be good and worthy of consideration, such as Dauve's analysis. Seidman's work is also very challenging, if flawed.

Surely the point of this discussion should be to try and understand what happened? I love hindsight. It makes everything so simple. But to ignore it is criminal. Clearly by understanding we make the first steps to not repeating.

Now that's a nice, vague fence-sitting statement, isn't it?

The CNT was mistaken in joining the govt and not pushing for revolution full on in Catalonia. Few anarchists would disagree (and most of those are probably in Australia ). There are anarchists who cannot see what else could have been done at the time, but that, as Knightrose pointed out, means we don't learn and take advantage of what hindsight has to offer.

Did the CNT do the same thing everywhere? No, the revolution was pushed further in those parts of Aragon not under fascist control. Nor did the CNT there choose to join the govt. So, rejecting anarchist principles isn't something that is inherent to anarchism.

The next question should be whether anarchists/the CNT have learnt anything from this. If the answer is no and we seek to replay the same strategies then we belong in the same dustbin of history as Leninists and their spawn. But it is quite clear that we don't and you would have to look very hard to find any anarchist tracts that take a different line to saying they were wrong, though you will find plenty that seeks to justify it by historical circumstances. The big difference here is that anarchists will say that the CNT were wrong to join the govt and argue for postponing revolution, while apologists for Lenin never quite go that far.

Regards

Martin

I wouldn't disagree, the point about rejecting anarchist principles is that some critics of the CNT argue that it is something inherent.

Again, I wouldn't disagree that there was insufficient analysis of the state. I think we can understand why, and if anything there was not enough criticism of "democracy", chiefly because they'd so little experience of it. There were hopeful signs in this area, like with the distrust of the PSOE exhibited in 1934, but it was too little too late.

I agree, again, though the achivements of the collectives didn't fall from the sky. They came from decades of a-s organising and propaganda. I also think in rural Spain it was an easy trap to fall into to ignore the state, as it basically consisted of Civil guards and a few records in the Town Hall. That excuse isn't, however, available to anarchists in Barcelona.

TBH I don't know how they reacted on this and it's probably worth finding out. I also think crimes is the wrong way of putting it - errors, perhaps.

Hmm, I thought that was pretty much what I just said.

Yes, it's always been more of a concern to me that there wasn't more of a reaction to the leadership's treachery by the rank and file. As an anarchist, the treachery of leaders, even anarchist ones, is to be expected and organised against. While this happened, it didn't happen on the scale it should have, and in part I think this is down to the role of the FAI and how it had become corrupted by the role it was playing within the CNT.

I don't consider you as one, apologies if it came across that way. I think the Bolsheviks were sincere (and right) in 1914, and again in 1917. Where they went wrong is a whole separate thread. I'd also argue that where they went wrong was predetermined by their beliefs.

Regards

Martin

This might be appear like pedantry but by the 'CNT', and Devrim's unwittingly touched upon this, what exactly do we mean? Do we take all members and organs of the organisation together in this shared treachery? Weren't a good number, perhaps even a majority, of those members in support of ceasing work on May 1937? So who was it that 'ordered' them? (I'm not just being rhetorical, I don't really know the answer). As for the 'treachery' itself; who was it against? That majority of workers, or an Ideal that was crushed? In the former case, if there was a clear treachery by a few against the interests of the many, how come, as Dolgoff cites, "people's direct grass-roots democracy, were practiced, "...in ALL the syndicates THROUGHOUT SPAIN.""?

The first is obvious and clearly wasn't carried out by the mass movement organised under the name and terms of the CNT. But your last point is just bad ultra-leftism - power uses organs for its ends, it is not inherent and residing in those organs themselves but mixed and reproduced in human relations. So whilst the 'organs' remained and were not en mass attacked by the organised workers, what's more important is the basis for ignoring that attack and where (and why) relations of power, in various forms, were still present in the mass movement - from the collaborationists to the 'Friends of Durrutti' and the way in which syndicates worked round governmental presence etc.

I'm of course of the opinion that the counter-revolution itself, which must've existed, was more of a play between those 'objective conditions' that are mentioned, and the active and ideological dynamic of what revolution there was. We all find it so easy to look at the situation in terms of the organisational, and self-imposed definitions that existed at the time - saying 'the CNT was part of the counter-revolution' is just too plain easy, as well as simplified.

This is likewise quite vague, and misleading. You're using 'anarchism' like the other concepts - anarchism was undoubtedly against the existence of the state in Spain as everywhere - was it therefore about a need for a 'better theory' in Spain?

Hi Devrim I can accept that the objective conditions in Russia led to the Bolsheviks counter revolutionary "state capitalism", but I also think the actual Bolshevik programme prior to the revolution itself was a product of it;s material conditions, the class composition of it's leadership and as such the Bolsheviks acted as a surrogate bourgeois.

I don't know if it the objective conditions would have allowed a successful revolution in Russia, but I do know that the Bolshevik programme has never had fuck all to do with communism, and that the Bolshevik programme itself has to count as a huge condition in the destruction of "working class" self organisation.

For all it's faults the CNT was a proletarian organisation and it's errors came in abandoning it's programme rather than ruthlessly implementing it.

Excellent contributions by Devrim on how the CNT as an organisation joined the counter-revolution (but then I would say that). It seems to me that the method many use on these boards when we talk about the CNT (or trade unions in general) is really the same as the Trotskyists use for characterising the Labour Party as a workers' party, i.e. 'because it contains many sincere workes who join it because they want to see a better world'. The problem then becomes one of the 'bad leaders' who betray the true nature of the organisation.

This approach avoids the real issue the actual, objective function of an organisation, and in particular its relationship to the state. Once an organisation has been integrated into the capitalist state, the subjective intentions of its members not only can't alter its nature and function - those very 'good intentions' are manipulated to become the very means for preserving the working class image of the organisation, and thus enable it to play its role for capital.

The point Devrim makes about the Bolsheviks is basically correct - that we have to see them not as 'bourgeois from the beginning' but as a prime example of a proletarian current which degenerated and passed to the enemy. In the past I would have said that 1921 was the point of no return but I think the ICC has moved on from there. Our book on the Russian left communists argues that it was not finally dead for the working class until the last proletarian expressions had been eliminated from it (ie by the end of the 20s). In fact this was the point of view of Miasnikov, who formed his Workers Group in 1923 as a fraction of the Bolshevik party. In this sense his approach had a lot in common with the Italian left, which was in favour of fighting for proletarian organisations for as long as they had any sign of life within them.

Having read a bit of Lenin, I'd say he was basically a 19th century social democrat, operating in conditions of near illegality. Nothing more, nothing less.

I think slurry is a kind of liquid shit used to fertilise farms.

I'd like to add he was just a jumpedup lil middle class prick who was a tad upset that his brother got jacked up by the Tsar and was pissed off at the lack of industrial development.

You have such a better way with word s than I do revol.

People realised at the time too. There's an interesting text by Luxemburg written before 1910 about Lenin. http://af-north.org/other%20pamphlets/luxemburg.htm

You pose that as if I'd disagree - sure, most 'anarchist' explanations, whilst containing much truth, are generally very simplistic in nature. The obvious ideological and practical differences between the CNT and the Bolsheviks as groups puts things in a very different light. Their goals, concept of organisation and praxis are more than passing points of divergence - and to put it bluntly, comparing the CNT to the Bolsheviks is shoddy. I'm certainly not disputing that the role of the organisation, as its conveniently defined, was most definitely (in the end) one which very much undermined the independence of the workers and their own actions - that is, against the revolution. It's just, and again I'm ignorant, how can an apparently 'directly democratically-run' organisation (very unlike the Russian party-model) then order its own members against their will? Re-impose work when the majority were -clearly- for pushing beyond it?

I didn't say otherwise, actually. Rather that smashing them relies on revolutionising a whole social milieu, in toto. So obviously, destroying them is a must but it goes much further than that, and the reason why that didn't happened cannot be (solely) pinned to the collaborationists, or the specific actions of the CNT, but in the unfolding of the people's own revolutionary forces. I'm completely in agreement with the view that dependence on a permament organisation, disempowered those capable of producing social revolution. [mandatory Dauve quote;]

"The question is not: who has the guns? but rather: what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000 proletarians armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in anything beside their own power to change the world. Otherwise, the next day, the next month or the next year, the power whose authority they recognize will take away the guns which they failed to use against it"

I would like to believe this, but in all honesty I think when it came to the point it couldn't implement that programme, which was as you say the only real mass movement to speak of communism, by the very nature of its existence.

Luxemburg said this in 1904. Wade through the language and see how perceptive she was:

That's 17 years before 1921.

devrim don't quote me out of context. its annoying.

Hi Devrim

I do think that your comparisons of the CNT to the Bolsheviks are simplistic. Revol has put it most accurately, the CNT failed to implement its programme, the Bolsheviks ruthlessly implemented theirs.

In response to you asking if RevolutionRugger had learned anything from "Towards a Fresh Revolution", Platformists/Anarchist-communists have drawn lessons from Spain: The most important is that if worker's councils allow themselves to co-exist with the state, they will be co-existed out of existence.

The other important thing which is not being addressed is that the CNT, as opposed to the Bolsheviks, was a mass, directly-democratic organization - it contained 1.5 million workers of varying political stripes. I won't deal with Alf's assertion that it was part of the State because it was a 'union' (and I think Dauve's estimation is about as ridiculous and far below his usually competent thought), when they are clearly using a definition of 'union' taken from the experiences of Germany and the UK.

The sources i've seen have always claimed that the decision to join the government was made by the upper committees of the CNT in the early days because they feared an 'anarchist dictatorship' - in particular this was people like Montseny, with Garcia Oliver and Durruti arguing for the recognition of the fact that the workers had near-total power and could finish off the state, in Catalunya at least. If anything that could provide a decent argument for the counter-revolutionary nature of the FAI in promoting anarcho-liberals like Montseny. But there are many who claim that the decision to join the government was decided democratically, particularly at the later stages. If that is the case then the excuse of 'material reality' constraining our options is legitimate, because it is not hard to imagine that the majority of workers in this case would rather have a fighting chance against fascism than a make a noble, but doomed stand.

Either way, this is where the platformists draw the lesson: there ought to be a 'specific' anarchist organization based around strict theoretical and tactical unity which seeks not the mechanical leadership of any organization but tries to put its ideas as the leading ones among the class and in the class organs. It should be autonomous from any larger structure (and in that sense we do have a good grasp of the critique of democratism). Groups like the FdCA have solidified a lot of theory around the relationship between the 'specific organization' and the 'mass organization' (i.e. the class and its organs): to paraphrase, that the 'specific organization' has a responsibility, if it sees a threat to the revolution, to mobilize all possible force against it and to fight alone if absolutely necessary. What we propose is in every way the opposite of what the FAI was; the Friends of Durruti should have existed sooner and stronger - it should have used direct action to rob the gold of the Bank of Spain (against the orders of the national committee of the CNT) and it should have been willing to mobilize the greatest force possible to finish off the state in Catalunya and carry on the war against the bourgeoisie, including those within the CNT/FAI (such as Montseny). If such an organization had existed and had tried to mobilize around its programme, there is a real chance that both the Republic and Franco could have been defeated; whether the Second World War would have started in Spain, and what the outcome would have been for the proletariat from that is hard to say, though it is doubtful that things would have been worse.

Those who are afraid of "anarchist dictatorship" (by which they mean proletarianj) should be excluded from anarchist organizations, because that is exactly what we propose.