Difference between Anarchism and Left Communism?

I wouldn't call left communists Leninists but they are bolsheviks. I agree with you about councilists being like hen's teeth.

I'm not sure calling someone a 'Bolshevik' is that useful - the Bolsheviks were actual members of a real organisation that doesn't now exist. It's a bit like calling someone a Black Guard if they support the Makhnovists.

~J.

Hmmm...the black guards and the makhnovists were different entities.

I agree calling yourself a bolshevik nowadays if a bit daft but lots of people do it and it is a recogniable political tendency.

Hmmm...the black guards and the makhnovists were different entities.

I agree calling yourself a bolshevik nowadays if a bit daft but lots of people do it and it is a recognisable political tendency.

No, you are right, and I never meant to deny (or ignore) that the Bolsheviks were also amongst the "left radical" wing of pre-WWI Social Dmocracy. I had simply assumed that (and that everyone would know that anyway), and was in fact responding to Vlad's request for clarification on the question of the "political roots of anti-Leninist councilism", i.e. didn't they share the same roots as the Bordigists and Bolsheviks.

I don't see what is abstract about what I have expressed at all. All I said re: the ICC's conception of proletarian revolution was that I agreed with BLJ in rejecting this schematic separation of "political revolution" (overthrow of the state) from "economic revolution" (abolition of capitalist economic modes of activity, production, circulation, distribution and consumption). So how can refusing to separate the "economic" sphere of revolutionary struggle from the "political" be "even more abstract"? Clearly it is much less abstract, as well as not at all schematic and stagist. I haven't referred to "statist activity" anywhere in this thread, and frankly see no need to.

Uh, no, I never did say "... if such a revolution (a purely political one) was carried out it would be a waste of time." I definitely would not say that, and see no reason to because it is seriously confusing. We were talking about the ICC's conception of proletarian revolution, not an actual event occurring in the future. If there were to be such a revolution, and were the proletariat to be its subject, I would of course support it, but I would be highly critical about it, and try to push for total social transformation, particularly in the economic realm, but also in various other ("everyday life", cultural, sexual, etc.) "realms". But of course I am certain that there will never be any such purely political revolution. There will rather be a total social revolution, involving political, economic, and other social factors. I hope you agree with that.

Also, a "purely political revolution" is indeed part of left communist theory, but it is not the only one. You are quite wrong if you think that it is "the [only left communist] historical tendency." In fact, it is the (single) historical tendency of the Italian communist left (thus, not only the ICC, but also the Bordigists and the IBRP/ICT defend it). However, it is definitely not the "historical tendency" or the dominant conception of proletarian revolution of the German-Dutch communist left. Once again you are generalizing from one tendency or a few currents within one tradition of the communist left to the whole of the communist left. I ask that you please cease this, since you have admitted that you are really only familiar with the ICC tendency of the communist left.

Re: Dauve, it is a very interesting question for me where to place him since he clearly has a very big influence within libertarian communist circles. I am also quite influenced by him. If you want, you can exclude him from my category #5. I wish I knew which tendency to place him in on this question of the role of pro-revolutionaries in relation to the class in the revolution. But I do disagree with you somewhat about his relationship to the communist left. I am quite sure that he is more influenced by the communist left than by either the Situationists or any other tendency. A lot of his views, and his approach, come(s) from either the Italian com. left or the German-Dutch com. left. In fact, his critique of the SI (which I really like) is based largely on a left communist perspective, i.e. that they ignore the realm of production, and focus rather too much on consumption. For me, Dauve is definitely a Marxist (or, if you prefer, he comes from the Marxist tradition and utilizes the "Marxist method"), and not an anarchist, even though he is probably more popular and influential within the anarchist milieu than he is within the left communist milieu.

Btw, for the ICC, unless they've changed their position on the question, Dauve is not a Marxist revolutionary but a "modernist" who rejects the proletariat as the revolutionary subject. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here.

This is true. But are you identifying "councilists" with "council communists". I wouldn't do that. I think that there are actually a fair number of people around who identify to some extent as "council communist", or consider themselves to be highly influenced by council communism (or council communists). But a question I have is: where are all the council communists these days? I am afraid that most are either in anarchist groups (probably mostly anarcho-syndicalist), in the IWW, or resigned from any "political" activity whatsoever (i.e. honest to goodness "councilists" afraid to have any negative influence on the working class' spontaneity and self-activity). (I realize I've contradicted myself here by calling these people both "council communists" and "councilists"; what I mean is that they were council communists until resigned and became councilists.) This depresses me.

Btw, how can the situationists be called "councilists"? They definitely were not opposed to a political organization defending a revolutionary perspective within the struggles of the class. In fact, the SI was just such an organization, was it not? But I wouldn't call them "council communists" either, even if there was obviously a significant influence there, via Socialisme ou Barbarie. Better to just say that the Situationists were "situationists"; they constituted their own separate tendency.

Both compete for the biggest joke of a petty-bourgeois ideology. The differences are minimal: one pretends to not want a state and the other pretends to want a state. Most jackasses of the middle class petty bourgeoisie compete to join either of these joke ideologies.

No, but nor do I see myself as an authoritarian communist.

I think revolutions are violent things and I think that the working class should either capture all power in society and contort it to their will or create new organs of power (or a mix). I wouldn’t class this as libertarian (I wouldn’t class it is as authoritarian either). I think the term libertarian communist is misleading since most here would hopefully want to see working class dictatorship. That is emancipating to the working class, but not to the ruling class. I think those sorts of catchwords aren’t very useful in explaining much. I don’t think Trotskyists aren’t communist because they’re authoritarian, I think they aren’t communist because they hold positions which I believe to be anti-working class.

But I think its important to define terms here. Wikipedia defines it as:

Libertarian socialism (sometimes called socialist anarchism, and sometimes left libertarianism) is a group of political philosophies that aspire to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e. a society in which all violent or coercive institutions would be dissolved, and in their place every person would have free, equal access to the tools of information and production.

This equality and freedom would be achieved through the abolition of authoritarian institutions that own and control productive means as private property, so that direct control of these means of production and resources will be shared by society as a whole. Libertarian socialism also constitutes a tendency of thought that informs the identification, criticism and practical dismantling of illegitimate authority in all aspects of social life. Accordingly libertarian socialists believe that “the exercise of power in any institutionalized form– whether economic, political, religious, or sexual– brutalizes both the wielder of power and the one over whom it is exercised.”

Libertarian socialists place their hopes in trade unions, workers' councils, municipalities, citizens' assemblies, and other non-bureaucratic, decentralized means of direct democracy. Many libertarian socialists advocate doing away with the state altogether, seeing it as a bulwark of capitalist class rule, while others propose that a minimal, non-hierarchical version is unobjectionable

But socialism is the exercise of institutionalized economic power by the working class, and I fail to see how that brutalizes the wielder or involves the brutalization of another.

I don’t see anything inherently wrong with hierarchy. I am not concerned whether there is a hierarchy of power, but who wields that power and for what purpose. If we are proposing a society where the economy is structured in such a way to benefit all, then I think a level of hierarchy would be necessary at least in the foreseeable future. That doesn’t mean I think that there shouldn’t be limits and restrictions on such a hierarchy (many of which were explained by Marx in reference to the Paris Commune), but I don’t understand why hierarchy in itself is seen as something to be opposed. What is ‘illegitimate authority?’ Why should we care about legitimacy? Who defines what is legitimate? By what divine right does something gain legitimacy?

I think the people who focus on the nature of the state or hierarchy in a revolutionary, or communist society are missing the point. I think it’s fundamentally utopian to propose a certain type of state which satisfies your political aspirations when the conditions of such a state are quite unforeseeable. Someone stated earlier in the thread “Much more important to look at what groups are doing on the ground than what "positions" they take on this or that, which may even end up contradicting what they actually do when that position becomes immediately relevant to them.” In the context of the state this seems relevant; your views shouldn’t be dictated by any democratic opposition to hierarchy but by the circumstances of the situation which may demand the very opposite.

Bordiga wrote that ‘the proletarian state is a real historical force which adapts itself to the goal it pursues, that is, to the necessities which gave birth to it. At certain moments its impulse may come from either broad mass consultations or from the action of very restricted executive organs endowed with full powers. What is essential is to give this organisation of proletarian power the means and weapons to destroy bourgeois economic privilege and the political and military resistance of the bourgeoisie, in a way that prepares for the subsequent disappearance of classes themselves, and for the more and more profound modifications of the tasks and structure of the proletarian state.’

I agree with this; a proletarian state is a real historical force not something theoretically derived, but as a response to the conditions in which it is made. Sometimes it will act from either ‘broad mass consultations’, other times from ‘very restricted execute organs.’ But what matters is that it acts in such a way to destroy capitalism and begin the socialisation of society.

There was another definition:

Libertarian socialism (including social anarchism and libertarian Marxism) rejects state control and ownership of the economy altogether and advocates direct collective ownership of the means of production via co-operative workers' councils and workplace democracy.

But I think workers’ councils are state organizations. I’m using this definition of state: ‘The supreme public power within a sovereign political entity.’ I think that soviets/councils fulfill this definition; they are the highest authority within a particular area, their purpose is to lead a civil war against capitalism and begin the socialization of society. Would you disagree that Soviets or Councils have state power? I am only using the ordinary meaning of these words.

Lastly, are there any organizations or parties which classify themselves as libertarian communist? Whilst some anarchists may call themselves that, I think when questioned further they would describe their organisation as an anarchist one, and their analysis and influence would primarily be anarchist. I think the term libertarian communist is really synonymous with anarchism, hence why I labeled someone who described themselves a libertarian communist as a ‘confused anarchist’ earlier.

The same purpose as most other people; discuss radical politics. Or do you think that someone who doesn’t identify as a libertarian communist shouldn’t post here (how authoritarian)? I wonder if you would ask the same question to any Left Communist here. I doubt any of them would describe their politics as 'libertarian communism.' You said earlier that ‘I can't think of any concrete political issues that I really strongly disagree with the ICC on that much.’ Isn’t that what’s really relevant, not the fact that they wouldn’t describe themselves as libertarian communists or hold such opposition to all hierarchy?

Kropotkinist is as ignorant in undertanding as s/he is in expression. What both lib coms (anarchists?) and left communists agree on is what has always united the Marxist and anarchist wings of the workers' movement which is that ultimately there will be a free association of producers which will need no apparatus of suppression. What they differ on is how that will come about.

And this is probably what is behind the exchange with Waslax. It is not true that all the Let Communists have the same view of the connection between the economic and political revolution. Back in the 70s we polemicised against the ICC's insistence that the building of socialism could only begin once the proletarian revolution had been victorious everywhere. We argued that this was a) not practically feasible (since workes would begin socialisation as soon as they had the chance i.e were in power in a certain geographical area and b) the unfolding of the world revolution would take some time therefore workers victorious in a dominant imperialist power would the tasks of both have the economic and political transformation of the world thrust upon them.

However I am not sure that this is what the exchange between BLJ and Waslax is about. When BLJ says that the economic and the potical have to take palce together is eh advocating a sort of economic building up of proletarian production before the bourgeois state is defeated? On this the left communists are agreed. The political smashing of the bourgeois state is the prerequisite of economic and social transformation. All other projects (like self-management of production under capitalist rule) are both a confusion and a mystification. Please excuse me if I have misunderstood...

On these labels I sometimes think we pay too much lip service to the counter-revolution. Communism is libertarian or it is not communism. Similarly we call ourselves the internationalist communist left but this was in relation to a decaying Third International and later to Stalinism. Today we are the only communists who still defend the vision of the Manifesto. I suppose when we do overcome this nominalist defeat it wil demonstrate that their really is a renewed workers' movement on the march and until then we are stuck with the labels we've got.

For fucks sake...

Can you please stop playing 'my political current is better than your political current' for just 5 minutes? If you don't agree with the views I've been criticising then good for you. To argue that I shouldn't use the same terminology as the people I've been criticising when critiquing those views, simply because you hold those terms to mean something different is pure semantics.

I have never claimed that the political revolution was a) universal among left communists or b) the whole of left communist theory. The closest I came to this was to say that it was 'of' left communist theory. This is clearly true, if you accept that Bordiga et al. are part of the left communist tradition.

My point about a political revolution being a waste of time in no way implies that I would not support such a revolution. It simply implies that I would view it as a mis-direction of struggle, as a wasted effort, in comparison to what could have been achieved had such a struggle taken a different form.

~J.

I think that Dauve's critique is actually a lot deeper than that one, which any social democrat or trot could make.

It's based on comments like these that I don't think Dauve would identify himself with the communist left.

~J.

EDIT: Sorry, I meant Dauve not Bordiga. Doh! Apologies for any confusion there.

At the risk of subjecting myself to another shower of insults, I feel I have to reply to this.
Hierarchy as long as its socially imposed by a legislative or political body is a form of violence. Given that under capitalism the victims of such violence are always working-class (whether women who experience discrimination, people who experience racism, children who are abused, unskilled workers who are paid less than skilled ones etc.), there is a pretty good reason for anarchists to oppose social hierarchy as such. There has never been a state in history so far, whether Communist-bureaucratic or free market capitalist, that did not use hierarchy as a tool of social control against the working class, so I don't see any reasons for arguing that hierarchy "would be necessary at least in the foreseeable future." If class society is abolished, then workers can no longer be divided hierarchically along profession, wage, racial, sexual and so on, lines. If class society is not abolished, and the working class is forced into maintaining a supposedly "proletarian state" (I'm not sure what Bordiga meant by real historical force, given that in every revolutionary context, the state was imposed from outside the working class by a political organization) to rule themselves with, hierarchy is maintained. So hierarchy is not just a nebulous term; it is fundamental to maintaining a class society.
That said, there are of course natural hierarchies arising between individuals in terms of talent, intelligence, and so on, and anarchists do not seek to abolish these individual distinctions (given the anarchist emphasis on individual freedom), unlike the collectivist bureaucrats in charge of the "proletarian state" (just look at the disasters caused by socialist realism and proletarian science in Soviet Russia, both consequences of attempting to level individual talent).

abolishing class society is not something for the distant future. Either it is accomplished immediately (by which I don't mean an instant utopia), or not at all (as history has shown us over and over again). The role of the state in this process can only be a reactionary one, given that the state as a bourgeois political institution (even if it claims to be proletarian) will not simply lay down and die; there is a will to live not only in organisms but also in social and political institutions. The workers would sooner or later have to violently overthrow the state and place nothing in its stead (as was attempted occasionally in the Soviet bloc).

Just to clarify: we have never argued that the political and social transformation are two rigidly separated stages. We talk about the initial phase of the revolution as part of a global civil war in which political tasks - dismantling the bourgeois state, defending the power of the working class from counter-revolutionary attempts of the old ruling class, and spreading the revolution - inevitably take priority and in which any advances towards socialisation are necessarily limited and conditional, otherwise we are getting into the view of building islands of communism. We are entirely with Marx when he wrote (in Poverty of Philosophy I think) that the political aspect of the revolution is a necessity in order to uncover its social soul.

To respnd to Waslax on Dauve: he has written some interesting and useful things but he is in our view deeply vitiated by his modernist and anti-organisational stance. See for example our review of his text 'When insurrections die' http://en.internationalism.org/wr/230_Fbarrot.htm

I wish I could get away with calling myself a Black Guard, but it'd make me sound like (even more of) a dickhead.

To be fair, it's quite rare that you'll find someone who actively identifies as an authoritarian.

I'm sure you must know better than to think you've actually identified any contradiction there.

I'd ask the same question to any Left Communist who gave the impression that all anarchists were totally wrong-headed and there was nothing that could be learned from discussing with them, which is the image you've projected in this discussion. If that's a misrepresentation of your attitude then I apologise. When you discuss radical politics here, is it because you think that you and libertarian/anarcho-communists can engage in a process of mutually clarifying and improving our ideas together, or is it because you see yourself as having consciousness that we lack?

It was this that I was interpreting as you claiming that the 'political revolution' theory was universal among left communists:

Sorry for the mis-interpretation. And thanks for the clarification.

BLJ

Re: Dauve's critique of the SI, you are of course correct that it is much deeper than my casual characterization of it. Your quote from his text is a very good summary of it. It's been too long since I read that text, and I need to do so again.

But do you agree that Dauve is a communist in the Marxist rather than the anarchist tradition? And that even if he can't be categorized as 'left communist' that he is in some sense of the 'ultra-left'? Or maybe you don't that like term?

I think it can be difficult to place a thinker like Dauve. Perhaps this quote sums up how I see his theoretical contribution - and why, in a way, I think it's so groundbreaking:

~J.

Why are you a "kropotkinist" then? Weird.

Because he was the best anarchist of all time. His theories and actions are fit to be emulated for all times to come. Especially this.

Yeah, right. Now we know just how serious you are.

That article does make a statement I'm curious about

Is it actually true that the majority of Russian anarchists supported WWI? If so where is the evidence? Of course wikipedia is often crap, this could just be based on Lenin saying so.

There is an old issue of Mother Earth that includes Kropotkin's statement in support of the war as well as an essay he wrote a year earlier in which he takes the opposite position - the first statement is based on fuzzy notions of national character while the earlier piece is much more rational, class/economy based and well argued. It's quite amusing and makes Kropotkin look like an inconsistent fool (which he was, and worse).

I know that mickeybobbyMaloneyjohn09 is the precedent for allowing multiple accounts, but kropotkinist is clearly a sockpuppet for someone who has recently made it their mission to vilify anarchism on this thread by appeal to strawmen and red herrings. If that person wants to continue trolling the forum, let her do so honestly at least.

No, 'kropotkinist' isn't me; I don't think Left Communism is a petty-bourgeoisie ideology. I think its more likely to be one of the idiots that frequent this forum, in order to give people like you an excuse to accuse me for something which I haven't done. How pathetic. An admin should ban them because they're clearly here just to provoke.

ya

But the ICC position exactly says that any state apparatus has to be controlled by the workers' councils.

Anyway, how are things Cleishbotham? Hope all is going well.

There are a lot of things that I wanted to comment on on this thread but it got very long very qucikly and I didn't have the time, so I am going to take them point by point:

On whether people are left communists

a) Dauve:

I think actually that he does. I don't know him, and only met him once in the eighties, but as far as I am aware he considers himself a left communist.

I think that the classification as a modernist is a bit extreme. Our article even suggests as such:

When I think of 'modernism', I think of things like Camatte. I think classifying Barrot there puts them all in the same bag. I don't really think it is useful. He is certainly anti-organisation though. Maybe councilist would be a better term for him.

b) The council communists

Yes they did, but the people who went on to be 'council communists' also originally called themselves left communists.

Devrim

I defer to you, oh secret leader. The article you quote puts it more accurately.

I wasn't aware of that about him - has he published anything to that effect, or is it something you talked about when you met him? Genuine question, I'm just curious.

Er,

~J.