5hN40Fqk

1I will out you motherfuckers for censoring someone who threw the Nazis and Comminterns under the bus. I've fucking had it. I will expose it all. I will expose COMINTERN and the United States for what they were way back when. I will expose the Xenhai Revolution started through Homer Lea under William Howard Taft. I will expose the CCCP and their crap revolutions in Germany and China with the United States involved, and I will go all the way back to AT LEAST 1900. I will expose the rise of Mao Zedong, and the Japanese helping Pu Yi re-gain China which is easy considering "The Eastern Star" is his freaking cousin, I will expose the KMT and Russia and the United States involvement from Homer fucking Lea to Franklin fucking Delano Roosevelt. I've fucking had it. Those motherfuckers damn near destroyed the planet. Unless you really like Hitler, or you're the evilest motherfuckers on the planet, you probably won't have much trouble with it.
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3If you are, in that case, alright then. You can get ejected into orbit with the rest of them. I will succeed, or I will die. If you don't like what I say I'll make it very easy for you to find me. My name and address is at the bottom of the page.
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5This isn't about a left thing or a right thing. This is about fucking facts. I don't CARE if my words hurt your feelings, but I will be DAMNED if I let a fucking bunch of NAZIS and COMINTERNS run amok either on the Internet or within my own sphere of influence. 100 million fucking people. 100 MILLION FUCKING PEOPLE THAT DID FUCKING NOTHING FUCKING DIED IN CHINA ALONE. YOU KNOW WHAT, LET'S COUNT THE FUCKING NUMBERS ASSHOLES.
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7110 million people, foreign and domestic, were killed by communist democide from 1900 to 1987 in the USSR, of those 61,911,000 people were murdered by the Soviet Union during World War II.
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9There were 38,702,000 by the Chinese communists, 10,214,000 by the Chinese Nationalists, 17,000,000 by the German Nazis, and 5,890,000 killed by imperial Japan during World War II.
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11Death tolls in China post-1945:
121. 8,427,000 in The Totalization Period
132. 7,474,000 in "The Great Leap Forward"
143. 10,729,000 in "The Great Famine and Retrenchment Period"
154. 7,731,000 in "The Cultural Revolution"
165. 874,000 in Liberalization
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18DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND ME?
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20And this shit ain't talking out of my fucking ass or some right-wing fucking conspiracy or anything. I've got my own disagreements with our government's conduct as well.
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22The United States with all its peace-loving language sure has a problem living it.
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24https://www.scribd.com/document/393977816/DIPLOMATIC-HISTORY-OF-EUROPE-ASIA-AND-AFRICA-1870-1914 (US GOVERNMENT - STATE DEPARTMENT)
25https://www.scribd.com/document/393977806/Prejudice-Japanese-Racial-Intolerance-1944 (WRITTEN BEFORE 1945)
26https://www.scribd.com/document/393977808/TERRITORIAL-AGGRESSIONS-OF-THE-POWERS-IN-CHINA-1912  (Paul Henry Clements, A.B.)
27https://www.scribd.com/document/393977809/Japanese-Expansion-and-American-Policies-1916 (James Francis Abbott - foreign adviser in Japan during the Meiji era, assumed embassy attache in 1919)
28https://www.scribd.com/document/394328757/Treaty-of-Versailles-Negotiations-Robert-Lansing-1921 (Accompanied Woodrow Wilson, thrashes his ineffectiveness completely)
29https://www.scribd.com/document/394329013/Valor-of-Ignorance-Homer-Lea (adviser to Sun Yat-sen during Xenhai Revolution)
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31We all know what fucking HITLER said, there needs no fucking explanation for that asshole. The plan is over. Done. I will make sure of this, and you will have to stop me fucking physically. YOU ALL are the ones out of step towards "progress" and "peace". I will build a better world, and if I have do it alone so be it. I will not tolerate this shit to go on any longer.  
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33I don't give a fuck what your opinion is. I will come after you, but whatever violence and oppression you do is on you and I'll even spare the web gestapo the time spent doxing me. I simply do not fucking care, cuz if you ever lived a tenth of what I've lived and have seen, read, and felt, you'd probably pray for death sometimes too. We're so fucked up to each other for the most part. Nothing really phases me anymore in this respect. It used to, and I used to be more hopeful of the future.
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35Those days are long gone, but what isn't gone is my desire to do something about these things. In that respect, I will succeed, or I will die. Including with the shit I'm saying now. This is going out to practically the entire planet within the circle of people I have known online and in the physical world.
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37I grew up white in color, but I never had a racial home as I grew up on a reservation near Coulee Dam, Washington. My grandfather and his grandfather were enrolled Colville. I detested the way people acted in school towards each other, and I detest the fact many carry this into adulthood. I have seen Native Americans and white people engage each other in petty ways. Calling each other names, disrespecting their spaces and culture, and using ghosts and vague language to justify it all. It's what drove me to seek and understand this subject in the first place. I too know what it's like to be on either end. You can try to label me however you'd like but I'd guarantee you'd be wrong. I'll make it fucking easy for you to label me though.
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39As for my "dox":
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41Most of my life I've been a pacifist, so I would much prefer to fight this shit with words and not weapons. I like the battle of ideas and thoughts. I tried violence one time in my life against my mother. My mother sent me to jail but by luck, all I got was an assault charge. What really happened is that I fell into a depression because I raped a woman. It wasn't violent or anything, but I tried to fix everything and nothing worked out. The reason I got violent was that she tried to get in the middle of it. I even told her what happened and she pressed charges despite only picking up the weapon. I never used it, nor did I have the desire. It was merely a warning that she was stepping into something that she shouldn't have. She used that as an excuse to try what she thought was the best move and tried to figure out a way for me to quit whatever I was doing. To try to get me out what I felt I was obligated towards doing, but I had my own reasons for it and nobody would stop me. I had a great job and everything as well within information technology, but I lost it mostly because of that. I didn't even spend my unemployment money on myself and I don't have much use for money anyway.
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43It's not even the money I dislike. I don't even dislike capitalism. I dislike what they represent and how they are used. I like co-ops and I loathe corporations, as much as I loath centralized control and jack booted thugs telling me a god damn thing. Last time I was in Jail I put anarchist literature there and left it. You can ask the NSA what they thought about me on October 21st, 2016 when I sent their fucking spy software back through a DNS motherfucking root zone, paralyzing the entire internet in protest of Edward Snowden and of using Native American lands for eavesdropping, just like those motherfuckers do in Australia. So... There ain't any evidence against me anyway, because oh well whatever. Anyway, here's to the motherfuckers that try to perpetuate this bullshit. This is the new deal, and Y'all can take it or leave it. I ain't give a fuck now.
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45I'd rather build the world we seek through cooperation, through a transition. In that sense, I am a fullerite in that I believe that the only way you can change things is by making old models obsolete. Additionally, I am a fullerite in the sense that it's gotta be everybody or nobody or we won't survive. This means NO marginalization. NO secret backroom deals to try to gain. If we can manage such an effort and I'm really skeptical, then we might be able to get somewhere. Otherwise, this letter will likely be prophetic.
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47If most people can grow up without committing murder, then most people can grow up without the use of state power and social uniformity to deal with money and resources. We have not built a new economic system in hundreds of fucking years. Even our digital money is just copies of old systems, and the only difference is they fail faster than the old ones did because the lag is shorter. Now is the time to talk about it. Every one of us has a computer better than what it took for the human genome project. The only people I see in crypto are a bunch of Ayn Rand silicon valley gold bugs trying to make digital gold mine simulations and using up the world's power to do it. I hear they're in COMINTERN fucking Venezuela.
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49https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-venezuela-came-to-be-one-of-the-biggest-markets-for-crypto-in-the-world
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51What a weird fucking world we live in eh? They don't even know the most valuable thing we have is data and resources.  
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53Frankly, it's no wonder to me why we treat the planet like shit when we treat each other like shit using the planet as a tool to do it. I have had enough of it. I could censor myself and make a cute little fucking politically correct message, but I don't think that's what any of you motherfuckers should hear from me. If you don't like it, kill me. You've got my address. Don't be a pussy. Prove you are who you say you are. You got a chance to kill a rapist. Don't be shy. My mom works at a bank. Kill her too. She's a "capitalist" and a loan collector which makes her the bourgeoisie by association. That's what they did to the regular people in Russia that didn't fit their stereotype. Don't matter that she's supported me. Don't matter that she has had to raise me without my dad I've never met and the person after that was abusive and she's just as fucked up as I am.
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55She votes for racists and she is one cause of this same bullshit, but I certainly won't tell her who to vote for and I won't call her names. I'll just lay it all flat out and she can decide what she wants. Until then, instead of being mean I'll just leave the place a mess until she gives up supporting the genocide of Arabs because they are "evil" and quits saying Israel needs to be rebuilt so we can have the end of the world and fulfillment of prophecy. This is Puritan dominion trash. The Puritans that killed her own fucking heritage, and she denies it and says things like "why can't us have a white nation". The media she consumes feeds her the same Puritan white identity garbage the rest are seeing now. I'm not mad at her, but I'm pissed off at them and the organizations that allow it. The people that decided to censor me is no exception, they just set me off.
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57I believe these things should be chosen through voluntary means, and I don't think we're nearly good enough to say which of these are the correct system but I have ideas and I'm certain there can be an improvement. For fuck's sake, Andrew Jackson is on the twenty dollar bill. This has been an issue since I've been alive. If I had a choice of who to pick it would not even be an American. It would be Emma Goldman.
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59Emma Goldman was the only white person I am aware of that's ever been deported for her political views from the United States, including speaking out against the imperialism it was doing from the late 1800s on. She grew up in Russia, came to the US to do social activism, then got deported back to Russia for it after jailing her did nothing. When she got there, many Russians she knew as friends and comrades were all killed or died of starvation for their political views. They helped Lenin gain power was the messed up part of what really happened. Lots of Jews were killed in the USSR too, but all the literature you read tries to hide this. She ended up leaving Russia out of disgust, landed in Spain and got involved with the civil war where the same thing happened. In each case, they went through the revolution but there were people who disagreed. Since civil society was gone and they were in control of everything, the people that disagreed were killed. In communism, you kill for money. In racism, you kill for skin color. In bigotry, you kill for religious difference. In "capitalism", which should be called statism in that our capitalist system comes from the Roman Empire (and why Bookchin correctly uses the term state capitalism for the COMINTERNS), you're just a piece of shit asshole killing people with slow torture with a relentless struggle for domination. It used to be in Rome, that regularly one of the leaders would just get expunged and all the money would change to the new guy's face. It has no fucking place in the 21st century and THAT is what must be eradicated.
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61I first read Emma Goldman when I was thirteen years old, and her dream became mine too. I thought I could live that but I would end up betraying myself. Ever since I've been on this path, I have a chance to make a change. It's just as well since I probably wouldn't have done anything differently in this political climate anyway, but now I have many reasons and I feel a lot more in general. A huge amount of my life has been devoted to this study. I first got involved with some of it in the early cyberculture stuff. Computers and network communication are non-violent means of social change, but it is up to the way we use the technology. They're very powerful at mobilizing many people without authority and are the purest decision makers. However, if we use them to talk down or silence somebody that denounces social change in violent ways, or denounces Nazism and Leninism completely, including advocating the use of force against all such people, is inexcusable. Allowing it to exist in the first place probably even more so.
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63As we grow in technical ability, we must be more responsible with it or we'll end up with a mess of secret societies, not unlike the Knights Templar of the crusades. This mess is actually extremely old. In times past, they had swords, guns, and shells. They didn't have nuclear weapons. The wars of empires were bloody enough without them. Today, such wars would destroy the whole planet, so I don't think my "fucks" and my "shits" and other things are going to really matter much. Sometimes I wish our leaders would simply say fuck and shit more often. Like Donald Trump calling Africa a shithole. At least with that Nazi piece of shit, I know what he is. Barack Obama drone bombed while everyone thought he was the peace president. When Malala Yousafzai confronted the Obamas about this, they said it was "necessary". See for yourself.
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65https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/12/politics/obamas-meet-malalas/index.html
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67Oh, about as necessary as giving the motherfucking Chinese and Japanese weapons to fight each other so they can take it over (according to the motherfucking advisors to Japan and China in their own motherfucking books), and forever split it up and put the boot on the world. About as necessary as destabilizing Germany, screwing up the motherfucking peace treaty, and letting COMINTERN run amok. Probably funding em too. Churchill knew all of this.
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69WINSTON MOTHERFUCKING CHURCHILL SAID IN 1920: (original copy here: https://archive.org/details/ZionismVsBolshevismByWinstonChurchill)
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71"SOME people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.
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73Disraeli, the Jew Prime Minister of England, and Leader of the Conservative Party, who was always true to his race and proud of his origin, said on a well-known occasion: "The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews." Certainly when we look at the miserable state of Russia, where of all countries in the world the Jews were the most cruelly treated, and contrast it with the fortunes of our own country, which seems to have been so providentially preserved amid the awful perils of these times, we must admit that nothing that has since happened in the history of the world has falsified the truth of Disraeli's confident assertion.
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75Good and Bad Jews
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77The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such an intensity as in the Jewish race. The dual nature of mankind is nowhere more strongly or more terribly exemplified. We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization.
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79And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical.
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81'National' Jews
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83There can be no greater mistake than to attribute to each individual a recognizable share in the qualities which make up the national character. There are all sorts of men -- good, bad and, for the most part, indifferent -- in every country, and in every race. Nothing is more wrong than to deny to an individual, on account of race or origin, his right to be judged on his personal merits and conduct. In a people of peculiar genius like the Jews, contrasts are more vivid, the extremes are more widely separated, the resulting consequences are more decisive.
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85At the present fateful period there are three main lines of political conception among the Jews. two of which are helpful and hopeful in a very high degree to humanity, and the third absolutely destructive.
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87First there are the Jews who, dwelling in every country throughout the world, identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life and, while adhering faithfully to their own religion, regard themselves as citizens in the fullest sense of the State which has received them. Such a Jew living in England would say, "I am an English man practising the Jewish faith." This is a worthy conception, and useful in the highest degree. We in Great Britain well know that during the great struggle the influence of what may be called the "National Jews" in many lands was cast preponderatingly on the side of the Allies; and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, others winning the Victoria Cross for valour.
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89The National Russian Jews, in spite of the disabilities under which they have suffered, have managed to play an honorable and useful part in the national life even of Russia. As bankers and industrialists they have strenuously promoted the development of Russia's economic resources, and they were foremost in the creation of those remarkable organizations, the Russian Co-operative Societies. In politics their support has been given, for the most part, to liberal and progressive movements, and they have been among the staunchest upholder of friendship with France and Great Britain.
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91International Jews
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93In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
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95Terrorist Jews
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97There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews, it is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd) or of Krassin or Radek -- all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.
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99'Protector of the Jews'
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101Needless to say, the most intense passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people. Wherever General Denikin's authority could reach, protection was always accorded to the Jewish population, and strenuous efforts were made by his officers to prevent reprisals and to punish those guilty of them. So much was this the case that the Petlurist propaganda against General Denikin denounced him as the Protector of the Jews. The Misses Healy, nieces of Mr. Tim Healy, in relating their personal experiences in Kieff, have declared that to their knowledge on more than one occasion officers who committed offenses against Jews were reduced to the ranks and sent out of the city to the front. But the hordes of brigands by whom the whole. vast expanse of the Russian Empire is becoming infested do not hesitate to gratify their lust for blood and for revenge at the expense of the innocent Jewish population whenever an opportunity occurs. The brigand Makhno, the hordes of Petlura and of Gregorieff, who signalized their every success by the most brutal massacres, everywhere found among the half-stupefied, half-infuriated population an eager response to anti-Semitism in its worst and foulest forms.
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103The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with the villainies, which are now being perpetrated. This is an injustice on millions of helpless people, most of whom are themselves sufferers from the revolutionary regime. It becomes, therefore, specially important to foster and develop any strongly-marked Jewish movement which leads directly away from these fatal associations. And it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the whole world at the present time.
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105A Home for the Jews
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107Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. it has fallen to the British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and centre of national life. The statesmanship and historic sense of Mr. Balfour were prompt to seize this opportunity. Declarations have now been made which have irrevocably decided the policy of Great Britain. The fiery energies of Dr. Weissmann, the leader, for practical purposes, of the Zionist project. backed by many of the most prominent British Jews, and supported by the full authority of Lord Allenby, are all directed to achieving the success of this inspiring movement.
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109Of course, Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, nor do the majority of national Jews wish to go there. But if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.
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111Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. Weissmann in particular. The cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal. The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionist and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.
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113Duty of Loyal Jews
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115It is particularly important in these circumstances that the national Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik conspiracy. In this way they will be able to vindicate the honor of the Jewish name and make it clear to all the world that the Bolshevik movement is not a Jewish movement, but is repudiated vehemently by the great mass of the Jewish race.
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117But a negative resistance to Bolshevism in any field is not enough. Positive and practicable alternatives are needed in the moral as well as in the social sphere; and in building up with the utmost possible rapidity a Jewish national centre in Palestine which may become not only a refuge to the oppressed from the unhappy lands of Central Europe, but which will also be a symbol of Jewish unity and the temple of Jewish glory, a task is presented on which many blessings rest."
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119
120SO THERE YOU HAVE IT.
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122The Anglicans begot the separatists, which begot the Puritans, starting with John Smyth and ending with Increase Mather, who married a family member of John Cotton, who was involved with the Salem Witch Trials. This is also the foundation of the idea for the Israeli State which was sold to them, and in reality, this idea has always been purely American and English. Not Jewish. As Roger Williams says in the Key Into The Language Of America, "A little key may open a box, where lies a bunch of keyes". In that sense, that is what I feel about that. Marx, for all he wrote is like all of these. However, it's just another batch of puritanism to follow him as religion as even Emma Goldman herself. We've always had a static government, that dealt with a dynamic world. The static governments were white. They were of Greece and Rome, then of the Holy Roman Empire, then of the Anglican and hyper-Calvinism of the Puritans. All of this is hidden, and those who hide this information on purpose are the purest of all evil.  
123
124https://www.scribd.com/document/394364998/Works-of-John-Smyth-Various-1500s-1600s-published-1915
125https://www.scribd.com/document/394364983/Roger-Williams-Bloudy-Tenent-of-Persecution-1838-re-publish-of-1647ish
126https://www.scribd.com/document/394365371/Roger-Williams-Key-Into-Language-of-America-1643
127
128The Puritans were mostly changed by the enlightenment, but many people try to hide this fact. As I have said, all of this took me fifteen years to find sources good enough for me to accept. Going through book after book. I've heard a million theories but this is the closest to purity I believe. Additionally, the stain of blood from such puritanism garbage is left on this continent in the form of genocide and banishment of people that "weren't a part of the plan". If Britain had any balls they'd rescind the Treaty of Paris allowing the legitimacy of the United States. Even if only on paper, on the grounds that Roger Williams got a charter from the King of England in 1636 with native citizens included. This charter, approved by King Charles II in 1663, but legally valid in 1636 as Roger Williams himself was the apprentice of Sir William Coke and a law graduate of Cambridge with full marks states:
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130"...together with the gaining over and conversion of the poor ignorant Indian natives, in those parts of America, to the sincere profession and obedience of the same faith and worship, did, not only by the consent and good encouragement of our royal progenitors, transport themselves out of this kingdom of England into America, but also, since their arrival there, after their first settlement amongst other our subjects in those parts, for the avoiding of discord, and those many evils which were likely to ensue upon some of those our subjects not being able to bear, in these remote parts, their different apprehensions in religious concernments, and in pursuance of the aforesaid ends, did once again leave their desirable stations and habitations, and with excessive labor and travel, hazard and charge did transplant themselves into the midst of the Indian natives, who as we are informed, are the most potent princes and people of all that country where; by the good Providence of God, from whom the Plantations have taken their name, upon their labor and industry, they have not only been preserved to admiration, but have increased and prospered, and are seized and possessed, by purchase and consent of the said natives, to their full content, of such lands, islands, rivers, harbors and roads, as are very convenient, both for plantations, and also for building of ships, supply of pipe-staves, and other merchandize and which lies very commodious, in many respects, for commerce, and to accommodate our southern plantations, and may much advance the trade of this our realm, and greatly enlarge the territories thereof they having by near neighborhood to and friendly society with the great body of the Narragansett Indians, given them encouragement of their own accord, to subject themselves, their people and lands, unto us whereby, as is hoped, there may, in time, by the blessing of God upon their endeavors be laid a sure foundation of happiness to all America."
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132Setting a legal precedent according to existing common law of England, with prior other judgments of Englishmen. Proof of such judgments lie within the ruling Lord Ellesmere gave on the Earl of Oxford's case. Lord Ellesmore booted Sir Edward Coke himself out of the bar association. It states:
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134The Office of the Chancellor is to correct Men’s consciences for Frauds, Breach of Trusts, Wrongs and oppressions, of what Nature soever they be, and to soften and mollify the Extremity of the Law, which is called summum jus. And for the judgment, &c., law and equity are distinct, both in their courts, their judges, and the rules of justice; and yet they both aim at one and the same end, which is to do right; as Justice and Mercy differ in their effects and operations, yet both join in the manifestation of God's glory.
135… when a Judgment is obtained by Oppression, Wrong and a hard Conscience, the Chancellor will frustrate and set it aside, not for any error or Defect in the Judgment, but for the hard Conscience of the Party.
136
137In this Case there is no Opposition to the Judgment; neither will the Truth or justice of the Judgment be examined in this Court, not any Circumstance depending thereupon. The Cause why there is Chancery is, for that Men[']s Actions are so divers[e] and infinite, That it is impossible to make any general Law which may aptly meet with every particular Act, and not fail in some Circumstances.
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140I think it's pretty clear what this means in that Roger Williams was correct in saying the natives needed to be paid for the land, which he did so using their own currency. The book definition of the settlers not seeing what they were doing is false, and this just as hidden from history like everything else.
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142This is what these plans do. Secret conspiracy, to shut out freedom and lead everyone down the path of doom - on purpose. So to come right out before you show yourself, fuck your plan. Whoever you are and wherever you are. If your plan was peaceful, it would not be secret. I must kill this before it starts, and I spent fifteen years unraveling what I am telling you.
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144It's not that I am not sympathetic towards what people feel. In fact, I explained very well my positions on issues. I probably just pissed off a bunch of very powerful people all over the planet. I drug down the right, left, United States Government, England, Russia, Winston Churchill, Steve Bannon, and I know I'm forgetting someone but... You get the point. Technically I'm off US soil, so...
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146If you want to try to censor me because I post facts that is your choice but think about how easily you can fake this. It's pretty damn hard. You could wipe my entire account out from the database and it would just make you look worse. It would put you in the company of Bannon and Eric Schmidt and everyone else. I got dirt on everyone. You know all my dirty laundry, so fair is fair.
147
148It's all timestamped. What's cool is that I uh... Kinda mailed a member of the oversight committee this below and guess what? It's now part of congressional records. Another funny thing is it's been timestamped probably as well.
149
150- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
151I saw your comment about this so I will write you. Lots of it has to do with alternative cultures.  Web culture is a huge part of the Nazi problem because Steve Bannon has been using the technology to do his dirty work.
152
153https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/28/trump-assange-bannon-farage-bound-together-in-unholy-alliance
154
155https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/16/15657512/cambridge-analytica-facebook-alexander-nix-christopher-wylie
156
157Cool thing to know about Bannon is he was involved with Gamergate and hired Milo Yiannopoulos to Breitbart because of this.
158
159https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump
160
161However we know Eric Schmidt is involved with meddling too.
162
163https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/43494
164
165The tech industry incriminated itself in a way. Look, this stuff is coming from within. The idea of an open web isn't bad per se, it's just that the same place that was carrying forward Occupy Wall Street is now dominated by people on  http://boards.4chan.org/pol/ saying things like:
166
167‘Women collect dick sucking and riding trophies like they got a Dickedex. Gotta suck and ride'em all."
168
169Now, these guys are anonymous. They have no identity. You can't kick them off. The tech industry and others are playing with people's lives and screwing up the democratic process to bring on the stateless society through anarchist means and a stonewall to Congressional and public oversight.
170Now, I believe that a stateless society is probably an improvement, but that doesn't mean we need to destroy government in the process. It should be superceded. We need to use the same systems being developed for freedom like cryptographic blockchain tech, to be able to create a system of accountability. I don't like Alphabet, Facebook, etc cooperating with the NSA and so on any more than I like Nazis freeloading off of tools designed to protect the freedom of speech, but we need to know who is speaking, if it is an AI or whatever, and  we need to handle 3d printed weapons before that technology matures.
171I also do not like the advertisement model. I guess if this reaches you and Eric Schmidt hears about it then I would just say use unique data from the compiler down to the person listening to a unique piece of music with digital signatures as proof of work and he will understand this concept. I've been into cyberculture and have an okay understanding of this stuff having a systems and AV background. So by that metric, we need a real digital identification system that is hard locked to the hardware as well. It could solve all these problems and civilize the Internet. Even I lean right, but I have had it with the way things are going, as if we really want to repeat the years 1918-1945. Such a thing happening is likely to destroy the entire planet, and it is extremely dangerous to be passive on this issue.
172
173To really get to the heart of this, we gotta go to 2011/2012.
174
175Here is a conversation with Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, and Assange. It's extremely interesting.
176
177https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html
178
179JA
180Just don't say anything antisemitic for the next few months.
181
182[laughter]
183
184ES
185We would never say anything anti-semitic.
186
187JA
188No no, it's just the last the last this Russian journalist came over and took a photo of me and then he is a, he is a sort of, his name is Israel Shamir, he is as Jewish as could possibly be, but he is very, he converted to Russian Orthodox, and is anti-Judaistic, and so he then put this out in Russian Reporter or something with this photo of me, and I started to cop it, in the most unbelievable way.
189
190ES
191Interesting.
192
193You and I both understand the costs of negative publicity.
194
195(redacted)
196
197Here is the founder of the EFF:
198
199https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
200
201Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
202by John Perry Barlow
203Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
204
205Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
206
207Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.
208
209- -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
210
211OH AND BEFORE I POST WHAT MURRAY BOOKCHIN THOUGHT OF THE FUCKING COMINTERN, FOR YOUR FUCKING INFORMATION EMMA MOTHERFUCKING GOLDMAN STARTED FUCKING MODERN FEMINISM AND GAY RIGHTS YOU FUCKING RETARDS. ALIX KATES SHULMAN HERSELF PUBLISHED THE FIRST MODERN COMPILATION OF HER PUBLICATIONS. I KNOW YOU KNOW IT TOO. THERE IS A LEFT AND A RIGHT WITHIN THE LEFT, AND THE COMINTERN ALWAYS INFILTRATED THE RANKS EVEN WITHIN SDS. IT'S LIKE SOME MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE SHIT, REALLY. THE PURITAN COMINTERNS, AND THE LEFTIST ANARCHISTS. AS FOR GOLDMAN, YOU ALL SPIT ON HER GRAVE. SHE IS THE REAL MOTHERFUCKING HERO IN THIS STORY YOU MOTHERFUCKERS CAUSE YOU KNOW WHAT? THERE WOULD NOT BE A WWI OR A WWII IF PEOPLE LISTENED TO WHAT SHE HAD TO SAY. SHE WAS IN AMERICA FIGHTING AGAINST THAT WOODROW WILSON SON OF A BITCH. AND THEY DEPORTED HER TO RUSSIA FOR IT TOO IN 1919. SHE PUBLISHED MY DISILLUSIONMENT IN RUSSIA IN 1923. BUT BEFORE I GO INTO THAT, I WANT TO GO INTO THE McCORMICK HARVESTER.
212
213The International Harvester Company known as the maker of early motorized farm equipment started off as the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. It is now common knowledge that a slave named Jo Anderson, who belonged to the Cyrus McCormick family, was involved with the invention of the first reaper machine. McCormick and Anderson improved the machine, then in 1846 McCormick began to mass produce it in Chicago at what would become the International Harvester Company.
214
215Jo Anderson was born in 1808 at the McCormick farm, and Cyrus was born one year later, in 1809. Robert then gave Anderson to Cyrus at a young age, and the two grew up together. Cutting wheat in those days was slow, difficult and labor-intensive. Workers had to walk and cut the stalks with scythes, and laborers (also called “binders”) walking behind them gathered and tied the stalks into sheaves. This was the real reason slavery existed.
216
217Slavery was not as racist driven as we are told, or at least the common theory says. It was only partially true. The language used by racists was simply justification to exploit the dehumanization of blacks, just like they used it to justify economic and social disadvantages later on. This includes other people of their own race depending on the times within history we are speaking, and I can give lots of examples of this – enough to likely fill volumes of encyclopedias. We do the same thing to nature.
218
219Over the years, however, Cyrus and Anderson worked diligently to get a device ready for public debut. On the big day, witnesses watched as a horse pulled the machine that sheared a wide path of grain. Anderson walked beside it, raking the cut stalks off the machine’s bed onto the ground in ready-to-bind stacks. The two men continued to make improvements until 1834, when the patent was issued under McCormick’s name, as the patent laws at the time did not allow blacks to have any patent rights to their contributions. However, he opposed Lincoln as well. He grew up a Democrat, and just like everything else that puritan ideology was beat into his head. He tried to run as a peace broker to try to change things, as the harvester was really built for freeing the slaves in general anyway but was shut out.
220
221Jo Anderson was freed by McCormick sometime before the Civil War, but since he could not live as a free man in Virginia, he remained at Walnut Grove and was hired out to neighbors for about $60 per year – which McCormick reportedly paid back to him until his death sometime after 1888. By the time this technology matured and the first cotton picker was made, slavery was dead.
222
223Then, by mere “chance”, oil was found in Texas. (or so we are told.) This spawned the creation of the big industry hub that exists there today. Lots of oil was available for the brand new farm equipment, and Texas today is a booming economy because of this discovery. Now, the use of this oil has increased our carbon dioxide levels and we've effected other things just as negatively as we have done to black people.
224
225So what is the best argument to organize civilization? Is it human slaves? Is it a destroyed planet, populist tendencies with fascist results? Obviously not, unless you're the type to put humpty-dumpty back together again like a conservative quoting the dead ghosts of Marx, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, FDR, Trotsky, Stalin, or Hitler.
226
227Marx begot Lenin, which begot Mao, which begot Pol Pot, and so on. Marx also begot Goldman, which begot others. And then, there is Buckminster Fuller in Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth.
228
229http://designsciencelab.com/resources/OperatingManual_BF.pdf
230
231The Great Pirates did run the world. They were the first and last to do so. They were world
232men, and they ran the world with ruthless and brilliant pragmatism based on the mis-seemingly
233"fundamental" information of their scientifically specialized servants. First came their Royal
234Society scientific servants, with their "Great" Second Law of thermodynamics, whose "entropy"
235showed that every energy machine kept losing energy and eventually "ran down."
236
237In their prespeed-of-light-measurement misconceptioning of an omnisimultaneous-instant universe" that
238universe, as an energy machine was thought, also to be "running down." And thus the energy
239wealth and life support were erroneously thought to be in continuous depletion-orginating the
240misconception of "spending."
241
242Next came Thomas Malthus, professor of political economics of the Great Pirate’s East India
243Company, who said that man was multiplying himself at a geometrical rate and that food was
244multiplying only at an arithmetical rate. And lastly, thirty-five years later, came the G. P.’s
245biological specialist servant, Charles Darwin, who, explaining his theory of animate evolution,
246said that survival was only for the fittest.
247
248Quite clearly to the Great Pirates it was a scientific fact that not only was there not enough
249to go around but apparently not enough to go around for even I per cent of humanity to live at
250a satisfactorily-sustaining standard of living. And because of entropy the inadequacy would
251always increase. Hence, said the G. P.’s, survival was obviously a cruel and almost hopeless
252battle. They ran the world on the basis that these Malthusian-Darwinian entropy concepts were
253absolute scientific laws, for that was what their scientifically respected, intellectual slave
254specialists had told them.
255
256Then we have the great pragmatic ideologist Marx running into that entropic-MalthusianDarwinian
257information and saying, "Well, the workers who produce things are the fittest
258because they are the only ones who know how to physically produce and therefore they ought
259to be the ones to survive." That was the beginning of the great "class warfare." All of the
260ideologies range somewhere between the Great Pirates and the Marxists. But all of them
261assume that there is not enough to go around. And that’s been the rationalized working
262hypothesis of all the great sovereign claims to great areas of the Earth.
263
264Because of their respective exclusivities, all the class warfare ideologies have become extinct.
265Capitalism and socialism are mutually extinct. Why? Because science now finds there can be ample
266for all, but only if the sovereign fences are completely removed. The basic you-or-me-not-enough-
267for-both ergo, someone-must-die tenets of the class warfaring are extinct.
268
269Now let us examine more closely what we know scientifically about extinction. At the annual
270Congress of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as held approximately
271ten years ago in Philadelphia, two papers were presented in widely-separated parts of the
272Congress. One was presented in anthropology and the other in biology, and though the two
273author-scientists knew nothing of each other’s efforts they were closely related.
274
275The one in anthropology examined the case histories of all the known human tribes that had become
276extinct. The biological paper investigated the case histories of all the known biological species
277that had become extinct. Both scientists sought for a common cause of extinction. Both of them
278found a cause, and when the two papers were accidentally brought together it was discovered
279that the researchers had found the same causes. Extinction in both cases was the consequence
280of over-specialization. How does that come about?
281
282We can develop faster and faster running horses as specialists. To do so we inbreed by
283mating two fast-running horses. By concentrating certain genes the probability of their
284dominance is increased. But in doing so we breed out or sacrifice general adaptability.
285Inbreeding and specialization always do away with general adaptability.
286
287So saying this, we'll go to what Goldman and Bookchin found as well.
288
289- -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
290
291Yet I go much further. It is not only Bolshevism, Marxism, and Governmentalism which are fatal to revolution as well as to all vital human progress. The main cause of the defeat of the Russian Revolution lies much deeper. It is to be found in the whole Socialist conception of revolution itself. The dominant, almost general idea of revolution-particularly the Socialist idea-is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class.
292
293It is the conception of a purely physical change, and as such it involves only political scene shifting and institutional rearrangements. Bourgeois dictatorship is replaced by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" or by that of its "advance guard," the Communist Party; Lenin takes the seat of the Romanovs, the Imperial Cabinet is rechristened Soviet of People's Commissars, Trotsky is
294appointed Minister of War, and a laborer becomes the Military Governor General of Moscow. That is, in essence, the Bolshevik conception of revolution, as translated into actual practice. And with a few minor alterations it is also the idea of revolution held by all other Socialist parties. This conception is inherently and fatally false.
295
296Revolution is indeed a violent process. But if it is to result only in a change of dictatorship, in a shifting of names and political
297personalities, then it is hardly worthwhile. It is surely not worth all the struggle and sacrifice, the stupendous loss in human life and cultural values that result from every revolution. If such a revolution were even to bring greater social well-being ( which has not been the case in Russia ) then it would also not be worth the terrific price paid: mere improvement can be brought about without bloody revolution.
298
299It is not palliatives or reforms that are the real aim and purpose of revolution, as I conceive it. In my opinion-a thousandfold strengthened by the Russian experience-the great mission of revolution, of the SoCIAL REVOLUTION, is a fundamental transvaluation of values. A transvaluation not only of social, but also of human values. The latter are even preeminent, for they are the basis of all social values. Our institutions and conditions rest upon deep-seated ideas. To change those conditions and at the same time leave the underlying ideas and values intact means only a superficial transformation, one that cannot be permanent or bring real betterment. It is a change of form only, not of substance, as so tragically proven by Russia.
300
301It is at once the great failure and the great tragedy of the Russian Revolution that it attempted ( in the leadership of the ruling political party ) to change only institutions and conditions while ignoring entirely the human and social values involved in the Revolution. Worse yet, in its mad passion for power, the Communist State even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy. It supported and encouraged all the worst anti-social qualities and systematically destroyed the already awakened conception of the new revolutionary values. The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood, these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society-the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination.
302
303Man's instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unreVOlutionary, almost counter-revolutionary. This fearful perversion of fundamental values bore within itself the seed of destruction. With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power. "Reasons of State," masked as the "interests of the Revolution and of the People," became the sole criterion of action, even of feeling. Violence, the tragic inevitability of revolutionary upheavals, became an established custom, a habit, and was presently enthroned as the most powerful and
304"ideal" institution.
305
306Did not Zinoviev himself canonize Dzerzhinsky, the head of the bloody Tcheka, as the "saint of the Revolution"? Were not the greatest public honours paid by the State to Uritsky. the founder and sadistic chief of the Petrograd Tcheka?
307
308This perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party:
309
310THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS.
311
312Similarly in the past the Inquisition and the Jesuits adopted this motto and subordinated to it all morality. It avenged itself upon the Jesuits as it did upon the Russian Revolution. In the wake of this slogan followed lying, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery, murder, open and secret. It should be of utmost interest to students of social psychology that two movements as widely separated in time and ideas as Jesuitism and Bolshevism reached exactly similar results in the evolution of the principle that the end justifies all means. The historic parallel, almost entirely ignored so far, contains a most important lesson for all coming revolutions and for the whole future of mankind.
313
314- ------------------------------------------------
315
316Emma Goldman was born into a Jewish family of changing fortunes in czarist Russia, on June 27, 1869. Her childhood seems to have served her as an object lesson in the brutalizing effects of capriciously exercised authority. In the remote village of Popelan, where Goldman’s parents ran a small government inn, young Emma’s sensibilities were steadily assaulted by the spectacle of wives and children being beaten, peasants whipped, pregnant girls ostracized, Jews outcast, and even the poorest peasant shaken down by an endless stream of corrupt petty officials.
317
318She was the middle child between two older half-sisters and three younger brothers. Her despotic father, whom she remembered as “the nightmare of my childhood,” evidently singled her out as the special object of his frequent rages, insuring that from the very beginning her development was, as she later summed it up, “largely in revolt.”
319
320She had four years of Jewish elementary schooling in her grandmother’s city of Koenigsberg, where she mastered German and excelled academically but failed in deportment. Her religious instructor gave her a public tongue-lashing instead of the recommendation that would have got her into the Gymnasium, thus effectively squelching the child’s academic ambitions. Then, at thirteen, she moved with her family to the St. Petersburg ghetto. It was 1882; Czar Alexander II had been assassinated less than a year before. Revolution was in the air; the teeming Russian capital, alive with the libertarian and egalitarian ideas the populists had been spreading for decades, was suddenly in a state of terror. That year brought one of the worst political repressions (and worst waves of pogroms) Russia had yet suffered. Emma managed to squeeze in only six months of school in St. Petersburg before the family’s poverty forced her to take a full-time factory job. But six months was long enough to fire the impressionable girl with the populist ideas being whispered everywhere.
321She began devouring the forbidden novels and tracts—of Chernechevsky and Turgenev—that were passing secretly from hand to hand; and she began to revere revolutionary women like young Vera Zasulich, who had shot the police chief of St. Petersburg, or Sophia Perovskaya, who had been martyred for conspiring against the czar. With such models before her, she soon began to question everything, rejecting for herself the restricted ghetto life of her family. When her father tried to marry her off at fifteen, she was ready to do anything to prevent it. She pleaded with him, protesting that she wanted to study and travel instead of marrying. Her father, in a characteristic rage, grabbed her French grammar and threw it into the fire. “Girls do not have to learn much,” he screamed; only how to “prepare minced fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children!”
322
323Her father’s threat precipitated her flight with a sister the following year to America, where their other sister had already settled. Emma Goldman arrived in New York in 1885, at the age of sixteen, full of golden images and dreams. Like so many other immigrants from Eastern Europe, she came seeking freedom and opportunity, only to find instead repression, squalor, and hard times. In Rochester, New York, where she settled with her sisters, ghetto and factory life seemed not much different from what she had left behind in the land of the czars. Her first job, making overcoats for ten hours a day, paid $2.50 a week; it was a statistic she would never stop citing. Before long, lonely and defeated, she married a fellow Russian immigrant named Jacob Kershner, and almost immediately the marriage fell apart.
324
325When Goldman learned of the political trial and conviction of eight Chicago anarchists—whose ideals were similar to those of the Russian populists she revered—it seemed to her that “free” America was not only as exploitative as czarist Russia but as repressive too. The Chicago anarchists had been convicted on the flimsiest evidence of throwing a bomb into a crowd of police at a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The explosion had crowned days of tension growing out of labor agitation for the eight-hour day—agitation led mainly by anarchists. In the ensuing panic, a nationwide anarchist hunt was launched, followed by the 1886 Chicago conspiracy trial, and eventually the hanging of four of the convicted anarchists in 1887. These events influenced a whole generation; yet young Goldman, raptly following the trial from Rochester, reading everything on anarchism she could lay her hands on, was more deeply affected than most. On that Black Friday the Haymarket martyrs were hanged—a day from which she would ever after date the beginning of her life—she underwent a profound conversion. Thereafter she was no longer content to sympathize with the revolution; she determined to become a revolutionary.
326
327I had a distinct sensation that something new and wonderful had been born in my soul [she wrote of that night in her memoirs]. A great ideal, a burning faith, a determination to dedicate myself to the memory of my martyred comrades, to make their cause my own.… My mind was made up. I would go to New York … [and] prepare myself for my new task. She divorced her husband and, at age twenty, went to New York to begin her radical life. Her only assets were a sewing machine with which to make her way, five dollars (borrowed), and a passion to join the revolutionary anarchists whose scathing tracts she had read so avidly in Rochester.
328
329In New York she quickly became the protégée of the movement’s veteran spokesman, Johann Most, editor of the German-language anarchist paper Freiheit. Under his tutelage, Goldman studied political theory and began to organize and speak, at first addressing only small groups of immigrant workers in German, Yiddish, Russian. Before her first New York winter was out, she was living in a commune with several other young Russian-born anarchist revolutionaries, including her first great love, Alexander Berkman, the “Sasha” of her memoirs, with whom her entire life would be meshed. And after only six months she set off on her first independent speaking tour. With the success of that tour, Goldman launched a career which would eventually make her one of the most charismatic and volatile speakers in the history of the stump. Returning to Rochester during the tour, she later recalled, “Something strange happened.… Words I had never heard myself utter before came pouring forth, faster and faster. They came with passionate intensity.… The audience had vanished, the hall itself had disappeared; I was conscious only of my own words, of my ecstatic song.” With that initial triumph, she abandoned Johann Most’s direction, and from then on she was no one’s protégée.
330
331Earning her living as a seamstress or a factory hand, Goldman plunged into the work of the movement. She was the leading organizer of women in the 1890 cloak-maker’s strike. Carrying the red flag, she led the anarchists in the 1891 May Day demonstrations, from which the socialists had tried to ban them. But organizing, leafletting, demonstrating were not enough for the passionately committed woman, impatient for revolution. Like other Russian anarchists in New York at the time, unaware of the differences between European and American traditions, she believed that if only the working masses could be aroused to action by some dazzling or polarizing event, the revolution against the capitalist masters might commence. All that was lacking was the right opportunity.
332
333For a while the little anarchist commune moved to New Haven to organize. When illness broke it up, Goldman, Berkman, and their artist comrade Fedya formed a commune of their own, where they lived as a ménage à trois. (“I believe in your freedom to love,” said the principled Berkman, giving Emma’s and Fedya’s love his blessing; jealousy, he maintained, deserved no place in an anarchist’s heart. And Goldman, who had nothing but contempt for the demeaning notion that a woman must belong to one man as a piece of property, admired Berkman all the more for his largeness of spirit.) Together the three lovers made a solemn pact: to dedicate themselves “to the Cause in some supreme deed; to die if necessary, or to continue to live and work for the ideal for which one of us might have to give his life.”
334
335Very soon their “supreme deed” presented itself. In Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892, a strike of steelworkers against the Carnegie Steel Corporation was suppressed by armed Pinkertons. A dozen died and hundreds were injured. When the three comrades learned of it, they decided it was time for their own political deed of violence. With the nation’s attention focused on the violence at Homestead, they thought it the perfect psychological moment for an attentat: a violent deed of propaganda, in the anarchist tradition, that would arouse the people against their capitalist oppressors. As their Russian idols had assassinated the czar, they would assassinate the man responsible for the bloodshed at Homestead, the chairman of the company, Henry Clay Frick. “Human life is indeed sacred and inviolate,” wrote Berkman. “But the killing of a tyrant, an enemy of the People, is in no way to be considered the taking of a life.”1 Goldman’s tasks were to raise the money for the gun and afterward to explain the deed to the world. Berkman was to pull the trigger, sacrificing his own life in the process. Desperate to get the necessary funds, Goldman even tried whoring on Fourteenth Street, but in the end she had to borrow the money. On July 23, 1892, Berkman invaded Frick’s Pittsburgh office, aimed at the tycoon’s head, and shot him twice before being knocked to the ground by onlookers and carried off by the police. Recording the event in his Memoirs, Berkman illuminates the doubt so often at the center of the conspirator’s consciousness. Frick’s face, he writes, is ashen grey, the black beard is streaked with red and blood is oozing from his neck. For an instant a strange feeling, as of shame, comes over me; but the next moment I am filled with anger at the sentiment, so unworthy of a revolutionist.2
336
337The fact that Frick recovered quickly—in time to direct the crushing of the union with the aid of the National Guard—rendered Berkman’s crime punishable by a maximum of seven years; but the charges against the anarchist were compounded, and he was sentenced to twenty-two years, of which he ultimately served fourteen. His act did little but confuse the issues in the strike and reawaken a nationwide fear of anarchism. The Homestead strikers instantly repudiated the deed; the rest of the country dismissed Berkman as a lunatic. Not that the American landscape hadn’t long been littered with violent deeds, not the least of which was the company violence at Homestead; but in the United States there was no precedent to make Berkman’s political attentat comprehensible to the public. Though Goldman applied her considerable powers of oratory to the task of explaining and defending their act, few people even understood their motives, much less approved their deed. Even Johann Most himself—long a leading proponent of the attentat, having at one time gone so far as to publish instructions in bomb-making—repudiated Berkman’s act, claiming that the American proletariat was not nearly ready for such a deed, and insinuating that Berkman may have intended to do no more than wound Frick. This charge so incensed the hot-tempered Goldman, who had counted on Most to join her in Berkman’s defense, that at a large meeting where Most was to speak, from the front row where she sat next to Fedya, she demanded that Most withdraw his slurs on Berkman. After he refused, mumbling something about a “hysterical woman,” she leaped to the stage, drew a long horsewhip from under her cloak, and subjected Most to a fierce public lashing. When she had finished, she snapped the whip in two across her knee, flung the pieces at Most’s feet, and stalked from the hall.
338The episode marked the beginning of a permanent rift in the U.S. anarchist movement, and of a new phase in Goldman’s career. Her demonic legend was launched. Her own trial and conviction the following year, for delivering a speech that allegedly incited the New York unemployed to riot (though no riot occurred), was, predictably, sensational news. To a reporter Goldman predicted her own one-year sentence, “Not because my offense deserves it, but because I am an anarchist.” When she emerged from prison a year later, she found herself a notorious celebrity. “Red Emma,” she was called, enemy of God, law, marriage, the State. There was no one else like her in America.
339
340Dedication to her vision kept Goldman traveling and speaking in the succeeding years, participating in each radical crisis as it came up, while her mounting reputation packed in the audiences. At a time when the lecture circuit was big business, “Red Emma,” with her legendary gifts of speech, was one of the star performers of the continent. Generous and loyal almost to a fault, she moved back and forth across the country collecting funds and supporters for every movement cause, large or small. Frequently she supported herself with odd jobs to avoid charging admission so that the poor she most wanted to reach could attend her meetings. In prison in 1894 she had mastered English in order to reach the American “natives”; now thousands of new people, many of whom went to her lectures to be scandalized and titillated, fell under the spell of her idealism—or, at the least, came away impressed by her integrity. The veteran civil libertarian Roger Baldwin, for example, describes the kind of response Goldman’s presence frequently inspired:
341When I was a youngster just out of Harvard, Emma Goldman came to town to lecture. I was asked to hear her. I was indignant at the suggestion that I could be interested in a woman firebrand reputed to be in favor of assassination, free love, revolution, and atheism; but curiosity got me there. It was the eye-opener of my life. Never before had I heard such social passion, such courageous exposure of basic evils, such electric power behind words, such a sweeping challenge to all values I had been taught to hold highest. From that day forth I was her admirer.3
342
343After two trips to Europe (1895 and 1899), during which she studied nursing and midwifery in Vienna, lectured in London, and attended clandestine anarchist meetings in Paris, she began to build an international reputation in revolutionary circles. Such celebrated European anarchists as Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and the veteran of the Paris Commune, Louise Michel, came to know and admire her.
344
345Then suddenly, in 1901, Goldman’s public organizing came to an abrupt halt. President William McKinley was assassinated by a young man, Leon Czolgosz, who claimed to be an anarchist. As the most notorious anarchist in America, whom Czolgosz even confessed to having met at a lecture, Goldman was immediately arrested as an accomplice. It was one of the many ironies of her life that while her complicity in the attempt on Frick’s life had gone unapprehended, she should be arrested in connection with an assassination of which she openly disapproved and at a time when, having reexamined individual acts of terror, she no longer even condoned such deeds. From jail she shocked the public by offering to nurse the dying McKinley. (“You were splendid, dear,” wrote Berkman from prison, learning of the offer. “How impossible such [an offer] would have been to us in the days of a decade ago! We should have considered it treason to the spirit of revolution; it would have outraged all our traditions even to admit the humanity of an official representative of capitalism.”4) But her expression of sympathy for the defenseless assassin Czolgosz brought on her such an avalanche of public wrath that long after she was set free for lack of any evidence against her, and long after Czolgosz had been electrocuted, she had to stay underground for her safety. The repression of anarchists that followed McKinley’s death was so extreme that it was several years before she could again appear in public under her own name. As the unknown E. G. Smith, she lived alternately by nursing, sewing, running a massage parlor, and managing a visiting troupe of Russian actors.
346
347Goldman returned to full public life in 1906 as the publisher of a new radical monthly, Mother Earth. Berkman, released from prison that same year, joined her as coeditor of the journal, and together with a coterie of friends they kept it running for twelve years, with only occasional lapses due to police interference. Van Wyck Brooks described “the tumultuous office of Mother Earth” as “one of the lively centers of thinking New York” at a time when Greenwich Village “swarmed with the movers and shakers who were expressing a new insurgent spirit.” The Goldman flat at 210 East Thirteenth Street was a place, said Big Bill Haywood, where one could always get a cup of coffee “black as the night, strong as the revolutionary ideal, sweet as love.”
348
349In Europe in 1895 Goldman had fallen under the spell of such writers as Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Hauptmann, Nietzsche. She wanted Mother Earth to be a forum for discussing their ideas and presenting “socially significant” art, as well as a platform for her own circle’s anarchist commentary. “My great faith in the wonder worker, the spoken word, is no more,” she wrote in 1910 as preface to her only published volume of essays, Anarchism and Other Essays. “The very fact that most people attend meetings only if aroused by newspaper sensations, or because they expect to be amused, is proof that they really have no inner urge to learn. It is altogether different with the written mode of human expression.” Her own book contained essays on anarchism, education, prisons, political violence, and five pieces on the oppression of women, always one of her major concerns. Besides the journal and her own book, her Mother Earth Publishing Association published Ibsen’s plays, poems of Oscar Wilde, anarchist classics by Kropotkin, Bakunin and Thoreau, books on sex and birth control, and Berkman’s revolutionary gem, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.
350
351Despite her swing to print, in the following years Goldman pursued her own characteristic mode, continuing to speak out against the system, both in regular Sunday-night lectures and discussions in ebullient New York, and on grand cross-country lecture tours, where she was regularly arrested. Wherever her intervention was needed, she showed up. After she took on as manager the dashing Dr. Ben L. Reitman, Chicago’s “King of the Hobos,” with whom she had fallen in love in 1908, she reached some of her largest audiences. On their 1910 tour, she reports speaking 120 times in thirty-seven cities in twenty-five states to 25,000 paying, and even more nonpaying, listeners.
352
353Wanting to change the world and reach audiences for whom anarchism was a new idea, sometimes she avoided arrest by such ruses as lecturing on the seemingly innocent topic, the modern drama. (Her drama lectures, which always turned on social problems, were published in 1914 as The Social Significance of the Modern Drama.) But, combative by nature, she also presented the most provocative topics in the most dangerous places, thus feeding her legend. She talked up free love to puritans, atheism to churchmen, revolution to reformers; she denounced the ballot to suffragists, patriotism to soldiers and patriots. “The more opposition I encountered,” she boasted, “the more I was in my element.” With her libertarian vision always hovering just before her eyes, she was impatient of compromise and intolerant of any hint of equivocation.
354
355Finally, in 1917, her habit of opposition went too far. For setting up No-Conscription Leagues and organizing antiwar rallies all over the East even after the United States had entered the war, she and Berkman were arrested and charged with “conspiracy” to obstruct the draft. Though they defended themselves admirably at their trial (“In the conduct of this case,” said the presiding judge, “the defendants have shown … an ability which might have been utilized for the great benefit of this country, had they seen fit to employ themselves in behalf of it rather than against it.”), they were convicted, fined, and imprisoned for the maximum two years. “For such people as would nullify our laws,” said the judge, recommending that they be deported when their sentences were up, “we have no place in our country.” The judge’s recommendation was followed. To render Goldman eligible for deportation, the government revoked her acquired citizenship by the device of stripping her long-missing former husband of his. J. Edgar Hoover himself directed her deportation hearing. In 1919, on the crest of one of the worst repressions in American history, Goldman, Berkman, and 247 other “Reds” were marched at dawn onto a retired army transport, the Buford, and deported under the 1918 Alien Exclusion Act to the newly created Soviet Union. As the “Red Ark” prepared to leave New York harbor, the fifty-year-old Goldman made a final statement to the American press: “I consider it an honor to be the first political agitator to be deported from the United States.” The story is reported that a watching congressman shouted, “Merry Christmas, Emma!” and Goldman, spinning around to confront him with her famous glower, raised her hand and thumbed her nose at him as her final gesture on American soil.
356
357The cargo of the Buford, after being rushed across Finland in sealed trains guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, were jubilantly welcomed in Soviet Russia. Unlike many another anarchist—as wary of the socialist State as of any capitalist one—Goldman fully expected to find in Russia the revolution of her dreams. Despite its being under a strong central authority, she was prepared to switch her enormous energies from opposing the institutions of society, as she had always done in the United States, to supporting them. But almost from the beginning, she found herself again in opposition. Her first impressions:
358
359Nothing was of moment compared with the supreme need of giving one’s all to safeguard the Revolution and its gains.… Yet I could not entirely free myself from an undercurrent of uneasiness one often feels when left alone in the dark.… The gagging of free speech at the session of the Petro-Soviet that we had attended, the discovery that better and more plentiful food was served Party members at the Smolny dining-room and many similar injustices had attracted my attention.
360
361Lenin himself assured her that the revolution was facing too many counterrevolutionary threats to allow of such a “bourgeois luxury” as free speech. Eager to get to work for the revolution, despite their uneasiness, Goldman and Berkman took the assignment of traveling over the vast country collecting documents for the revolutionary archives. But as they witnessed widespread privilege, forced labor, bureaucracy, and political persecution—particularly of anarchists—their travels became for them an experience of steady, agonizing disillusionment.
362
363In March 1921 a series of strikes erupted in Petrograd, supported by the sailors of Kronstadt, whom Trotsky himself had once called the “pride and glory of the Revolution.” Led by anarchists, the workers and sailors submitted to the government a list of demands, such as election to the Soviets, freedom of speech for left groups, and equalization of rations. Goldman and Berkman supported them. The government, refusing even to consider their grievances, and calling their strike a mutiny, moved an army on Kronstadt; in the ensuing battle, thousands of people were slaughtered. At that moment, Goldman and Berkman vowed to leave the country, even though, wrote Goldman, “the idea that I might want to leave Russia had never before entered my mind.” That she had stayed so long was ample evidence of her good will; but after Kronstadt she was convinced that “the triumph of the State meant the defeat of the Revolution.” The two anarchists applied for passports immediately, and when they came through in December of 1921, exactly two years after their deportation from the United States, they left Soviet Russia, “desolate and denuded of dreams.”
364
365- From Russia the pair went into an exile that would lead them on a succession of temporary visas all over Europe. Eventually, Berkman settled in France, and Goldman in England. They each earned a meager living by writing and lecturing, either unheeded or hated by almost the entire left for criticizing the Bolshevik regime. Though in her criticism Goldman always defended the revolution, while denouncing Bolshevik tyranny, she was airily accused of betraying the revolution. In his autobiography Bertrand Russell described her initial reception by London radicals in 1924:
366
367A dinner was given in her honor. When she rose to speak she was welcomed enthusiastically; but when she sat down there was dead silence. This was because almost the whole of her speech was against the Bolsheviks.5 She wrote a series of articles for the New York World and then a book, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923, 1924), on her Russian experiences; she was denounced for these publications by some of the very radicals who a decade later in face of the Moscow trials turned against not only Bolshevism but the revolution itself.
368
369Being an outcast among friends, however, was nothing new to Goldman. Almost alone among anarchists she had defended Czolgosz; almost alone among feminists she had exposed the illusions about woman’s suffrage; now almost alone among revolutionaries she denounced Bolshevism, without ever forsaking her revolutionary vision. “Censorship from comrades,” she once said, “had the same effect on me as police persecution; it made me surer of myself.” In exile she lost none of her tenacity or her willingness to stand “in revolt.”
370In 1925, in order to become a British subject and thereby obtain a valid passport, she married an old anarchist miner from Wales named James Colton. Goldman had long been an outspoken enemy of the institution of marriage, and though the ceremony was purely formal—she was careful to pay Colton for his fare to and from London and his lost days’ wages—it created a minor scandal. With her new passport she left on a tour of Canada; then, joining Berkman in the South of France, where she lived on funds donated by American friends, she settled down to write her astonishing autobiography, Living My Life.
371
372The book, published by Knopf in 1931, was well received, but the world it evoked was gone. The thirties had no patience with anarchist solutions to economic and social problems; by then all was centralism. In the early thirties, despite various government obstacles and censorship, Goldman traveled around Europe denouncing “Hitler and his gang,” watching with horror as one country after another gave way to state centralism and dictatorship, and anarchism appeared increasingly irrelevant. In 1934 her once-dangerous views seemed sufficiently benign for distinguished American friends to arrange a ninety-day lecture tour for her in the United States. Except for an angry and predictable boycott by the American Communist party, her return was relatively uneventful. Fifteen years after she had been sent into exile described by J. Edgar Hoover as one of the most dangerous women in America, whose “return to the community will result in undue harm,” her ideas of decentralization and libertarianism were in such eclipse that they no longer posed any threat; the choice had become fascism or communism. (In a recent introduction to the Catholic Worker, Dwight Macdonald writes: “anarchism [was] an eccentricity, almost a solipsism, in the Marxian Thirties,” adding that it has “become the norm of radical behavior in the Sixties.”) Goldman returned to France fearful that she was fighting a losing battle.
373
374When Berkman committed suicide in 1936, Goldman might have succumbed to despondency and old age but for the sudden outbreak of revolution and civil war in Spain. In response to a summons from the Spanish anarchists in control of Barcelona, she rushed to the barricades, once again daring to imagine that the revolution of her dreams was coming true. “The crushing weight that was pressing down on my heart since Sasha’s death left me as by magic,” she wrote in a letter, as she saw anarchist-organized farm and factory collectives, schools, utilities, and militia all operating on libertarian principles. At sixty-seven she threw herself back into active struggle, directing the Spanish anarchists’ press and propaganda effort in England, with the energy and spirit of youth.
375Watching the anarchists lose ground to Franco’s fascists on the one hand and to Stalinist-led communists on the other, seeing them make fatal compromises with the coalition Republican government for the sake of the war effort, forced her to ponder the same agonizing dilemmas she had earlier faced in Russia. Still, she refused to abandon her vision or admit defeat. Even after it became obvious that Franco was the victor she went to Canada to try to raise money for Spain.
376
377There, on February 17, 1940, the seventy-year-old Goldman suffered a stroke, and died three months later on May 14. Her body was shipped to Chicago for burial among the Haymarket martyrs to whose memory she had dedicated her life that Black Friday more than fifty years before. The monument raised to the martyred anarchists in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery—a monument before which Goldman had laid many wreaths and shed many tears—thereafter served to honor her, too.
378
379If Goldman seems, in Richard Drinnon’s phrase, “larger than life,”6 it is partly because she was always, with her fanatical courage, idealism, and energy, lunging into the action. It is hard to imagine someone of ordinary dimensions attacking authority on so many fronts at once, and with such persistence and ferocity as Emma Goldman. She was more an activist than a theoretician; her major contribution to anarchist theory was to insist on gender as a primary category of oppression. “She has warmed both hands at the fire of life,” wrote Frank Harris. Unlike so many other radicals who, in the pages of leftist journals, argued endlessly over the niceties of “correct” interpretation of events, she wanted to do something about them. Direct action—now. She was impatient with anyone less courageous than she, even people on her own side. She was supercritical of anyone, including radicals, workers, and women, who lived with less integrity than she demanded of herself. She was hot-tempered, stubborn, passionate; sufficiently provoked, she was given to violent tantrums and elitist tirades; when something caught her imagination she was all aflame, burning like a fuse to some climactic showdown. But she always had her eye on her ultimate ideal, and frequently the “action” she took was directed toward preventing violence or avoiding a losing confrontation with the powers, particularly if comrades other than she would be taking the rap. Prevented from speaking in an American town, she would gather her forces about her and fight back with a vengeance, frequently leaving in her wake a permanent branch of the Free Speech League (the forerunner and inspiration for the later American Civil Liberties Union). When the anarcho-syndicalist union the International Workers of the World (I.W.W.) was under brutal attack in the West by local vigilante bands who beat, jailed, and even lynched I.W.W. organizers, predictably Goldman went West. When the laws against disseminating birth-control information needed challenging, it was she who courted arrest by giving the first public instruction on the use of contraceptives—and after being tried and jailed, went right back to deliver the same lecture again and again in other communities. And even after her deportation to Russia, where she was honored with one of the rare audiences with Lenin himself, she audaciously took advantage of the interview to protest to him about the treatment of anarchists and the general abridgment of free speech under the Bolshevik regime.
380
381But Goldman did more than, in the words of Floyd Dell, “hold before our eyes the ideal of freedom … [and] taunt us with our moral cowardice.” She was an indefatigable organizer struggling to bring about fundamental change. “Revolution is but thought carried into action,” she wrote in the essay “Anarchism,” and in that sense she was constantly trying to make the revolution by inventing new ways to carry her thought into action. She derided those she called “philosophical anarchists” precisely because they did not attempt to carry out their ideas, however consonant with her own.
382
383In reading over nowadays her clear, simple lectures advocating fundamental change or a new spirit, one wonders why some of them should have created such an uproar. True, each of them carries at its heart at least one stick of pure dynamite. (From “The Social Importance of the Modern School,” for example: “[School] is for the child what the prison is for the convict and the barracks for the soldier—a place where everything is being used to break the will of the child, and then to pound, knead, and shape it into a being utterly foreign to itself.” From “The Traffic in Women”: “Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men.”) But still, one guesses they could have been written by other iconoclasts of the time without creating so much of a stir. They are provocative but not particularly original. The best are reasonable, concrete arguments for a new consciousness, demanding a reconsideration. The worst harangues are strident and rhetorical, but do not advocate violence or stir people to wanton acts of rebellion or riot. Yet as often as not, Goldman was arrested or run out of town for delivering them, sometimes, as one policeman told her, “just on general principles,” because “you’re Emma Goldman.” Even the Socialist party at one time found it expedient to forbid its members to debate her publicly. Part of the fearful effect of her speeches must have stemmed from their having been composed and delivered by her: it was always feared that Red Emma would indeed carry “thought into action”; and almost all of her essays could be footnoted with reports of their sensational consequences, reports that might be considerably more shocking than the essays themselves. Many such stories—from false arrest to near-riot (riot often averted by Goldman’s quick-witted mastery of the mob) to outright assault—fill the two fat volumes of Goldman’s much-trimmed autobiography, and still there are more.To give the reader some impression of Goldman’s style of politics and her running battle with authority, I have included in this anthology several sections from her rich autobiography, Living My Life. A number of essays from Anarchism and Other Essays, as well as the conclusion to My Disillusionment in Russia, are included because they represent Goldman’s fullest statements on their subjects. But most of the selections in this volume have never before been available in book form, and four them, taken from drafts of speeches in the Emma Goldman Papers of the New York Public Library’s Manuscript Division and slightly edited, have never before been published.
384
385As to Goldman’s thought and preoccupations, the essays, magazine pieces, pamphlets and speeches (including, besides propaganda speeches, a trial defense speech and an address to her comrades in the Spanish Civil War) collected here speak for themselves. I have divided the writings into four sections, presenting Goldman’s views on (1) the political and economic organization of society; (2) social institutions; (3) violence, both individual and institutional; and (4) the two revolutions in which she was involved, the Russian and the Spanish. But there is really no dividing her thought, as it is all illuminated by her single vision.
386To these pieces I would like to add an account of one more speech with the Goldman touch, hardly her least effective, though certainly her shortest. She delivered it on September 11, 1917, at a mass New York rally for Berkman, then fighting extradition from New York to California on a trumped-up murder charge. It was at a time when Goldman herself was out on bail pending a Supreme Court review of her antidraft conspiracy conviction, and her bail was subject to revocation.
387
388She arrived at the auditorium ready to speak in Berkman’s behalf just in time to be told by a federal marshal that unless she promised not to speak he would lock the audience out of the hall. Ordinarily, Goldman would simply have disregarded such an ultimatum, but feeling the urgency of this particular rally, she reluctantly gave the marshal her promise, then took a seat in the auditorium.
389When the preliminaries were over and several speeches had been delivered, the time came for Goldman’s speech. As the chairman began explaining her regrettable absence, out onto the stage strode Red Emma, a large handkerchief stuffed in her mouth. There she stood facing her audience without a word, as she had promised. It brought down the house.
390
391The writings collected here span the genres, decades, and continents, but they reflect a single awareness. From the time Goldman burst onto the New York radical scene at twenty, all energy and anticipation, until she died fighting at seventy, what changed was the context, not the content, of her struggle. Beginning with her earliest credo, “What I Believe” (1908), published originally in the New York World for a large and hostile American audience, and ending with another credo, “Was My Life Worth Living?” (1934), published in Harper’s Magazine toward the end of her life for a large American audience of a different generation and bent, one can see the unity in her activities and sympathies. Through all of them one can sense the discrepancy between Emma Goldman the demon of the legend and Emma Goldman the idealistic revolutionary who from the age of twenty wished for nothing less than to free the world. Between the two personae is a courageous if egotistical, a dedicated if cantankerous woman, a veritable “mountain of integrity” as the novelist Rebecca West described her, an unmovable visionary, but one whose tongue and passion no one could tame.
392
393Alix Kates Shulman
394New York City 1971
395
3961 Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, New York, Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1912, p. 7.
3972 Ibid., p. 35.
3983 New York Herald Tribune (Oct. 25, 1931), as quoted by Joseph Ishill in Emma Goldman: A Challenging Rebel, Berkeley Heights, N.J., Oriole Press, 1957, pp. 22–23.
3994 Berkman, op. cit., p. 413.
4005 The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914–1944, New York, Bantam, 1969, p. 168.
4016 See Drinnon’s pioneer biography of Goldman, Rebel in Paradise, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1961.
402
403- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
404
405Murray Bookchin
406Listen, Marxist!
4071969
408Published: as a brochure by Anarchos for the SDS conference in 1969.
409Transcription: Jonas Holmgren
410
411All the old crap of the thirties is coming back again—the shit about the "class line," the "role of the working class," the "trained cadres," the "vanguard party," and the "proletarian dictatorship." It's all back again, and in a more vulgarized form than ever. The Progressive Labor Party is not the only example, it is merely the worst. One smells the same shit in various offshoots of SDS, and in the Marxist and Socialist clubs on campuses, not to speak of the Trotskyist groups, the International Socialist Clubs, and Youth Against War and Fascism.
412
413In the thirties, at least it was understandable. The United States was paralyzed by a chronic economic crisis, the deepest and longest in its history. The only living forces that seemed to be battering at the walls of capitalism were the great organizing drives of the CIO, with their dramatic sit-down strikes, their radical militancy, and their bloody clashes with the police. The political atmosphere throughout the entire world was charged by the electricity of the Spanish Civil War, the last of the classical workers' revolutions, when every radical sect in the American left could identify with its own militia columns in Madrid and Barcelona. That was thirty years ago. It was a time when anyone who cried out "Make love, not war" would have been regarded as a freak; the cry then was "Make jobs, not war"—the cry of an age burdened by scarcity, when the achievement of socialism entailed "sacrifices" and a "transition period" to an economy of material abundance. To an eighteen-year-old kid in 1937 the very concept of cybernation would have seemed like the wildest science fiction, a fantasy comparable to visions of space travel. That eighteen-year-old kid has now reached fifty years of age, and his roots are planted in an era so remote as to differ qualitatively from the realities of the present period in the United States. Capitalism itself has changed since then, taking on increasingly statified forms that could be anticipated only dimly thirty years ago. And now we are being asked to go back to the "class line," the "strategies," the "cadres" and the organizational forms of that distant period in almost blatant disregard of the new issues and possibilities that have emerged.
414
415When the hell are we finally going to create a movement that looks to the future instead of to the past? When will we begin to learn from what is being born instead of what is dying? Marx, to his lasting credit, tried to do that in his own day; he tried to evoke a futuristic spirit in the revolutionary movement of the 1840s and 1850s. "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living," he wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
416
417"And just when they seem to be engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the revolution of 1848 knew nothing better than to parody, in turn, 1789 and the tradition of 1793 to 1795. ... The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past. ... In order to arrive at its content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase."[1]
418
419Is the problem any different today, as we approach the twenty-first century? Once again the dead are walking in our midst—ironically, draped in the name of Marx, the man who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century. So the revolution of our own day can do nothing better than parody, in turn, the October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war of 1918-1920, with its "class line," its Bolshevik Party, its "proletarian dictatorship," its puritanical morality, and even its slogan, "soviet power." The complete, all-sided revolution of our own day that can finally resolve the historic "social question," born of scarcity, domination and hierarchy, follows the tradition of the partial, the incomplete, the one-sided revolutions of the past, which merely changed the form of the "social question," replacing one system of domination and hierarchy by another. At a time when bourgeois society itself is in the process of disintegrating all the social classes that once gave it stability, we hear the hollow demands for a "class line." At a time when all the political institutions of hierarchical society are entering a period of profound decay, we hear the hollow demands for a "political party" and a "workers' state." At a time when hierarchy as such is being brought into question, we hear the hollow demands for "cadres," "vanguards" and "leaders." At a time when centralization and the state have been brought to the most explosive point of historical negativity, we hear the hollow demands for a "centralized movement" and a "proletarian dictatorship."
420
421This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to find a haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchy as substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitter evidence of how little many revolutionaries are capable of "revolutionizing themselves and things," much less of revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted conservatism of the PLP[1*] "revolutionaries" is almost painfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchy replace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; the discipline of the Movement replaces the discipline of bourgeois society; the authoritarian code of political obedience replaces the state; the credo of "proletarian morality" replaces the mores of puritanism and the work ethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappears in new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraits of Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little "Red Book" and other sacred litanies.
422
423The majority of the people who remain in the PLP today deserve it. If they can live with a movement that cynically dubs its own slogans into photographs of DRUM pickets;[2*] if they can read a magazine that asks whether Marcuse is a "copout or cop"; if they can accept a "discipline" that reduces them to poker-faced, programmed automata; if they can use the most disgusting techniques (techniques borrowed from the cesspool of bourgeois business operations and parliamentarianism) to manipulate other organizations; if they can parasitize virtually every action and situation merely to promote the growth of their party—even if this means defeat for the action itself—then they are beneath contempt. For these people to call themselves reds and describe attacks upon them as red-baiting is a form of McCarthyism in reverse. To rephrase Trotsky's juicy description of Stalinism, they are the syphilis of the radical youth movement today. And for syphilis there is only one treatment—an antibiotic, not an argument.
424
425Our concern here is with those honest revolutionaries who have turned to Marxism, Leninism or Trotskyism because they earnestly seek a coherent social outlook and an effective strategy of revolution. We are also concerned with those who are awed by the theoretical repertory of Marxist ideology and are disposed to flirt with it in the absence of more systematic alternatives. To these people we address ourselves as brothers and sisters and ask for a serious discussion and a comprehensive re-evaluation. We believe that Marxism has ceased to be applicable to our time not because it is too visionary or revolutionary, but because it is not visionary or revolutionary enough. We believe it was born of an era of scarcity and presented a brilliant critique of that era, specifically of industrial capitalism, and that a new era is in birth which Marxism does not adequately encompass and whose outlines it only partially and one-sidedly anticipated. We argue that the problem is not to "abandon" Marxism or to "annul" it, but to transcend it dialectically, just as Marx transcended Hegelian philosophy, Ricardian economics, and Blanquist tactics and modes of organization. We shall argue that in a more advanced stage of capitalism than Marx dealt with a century ago, and in a more advanced stage of technological development than Marx could have clearly anticipated, a new critique is necessary, which in turn yields new modes of struggle, of organization, of propaganda and of lifestyle. Call these new modes whatever you will, even "Marxism" if you wish. We have chosen to call this new approach post-scarcity anarchism, for a number of compelling reasons which will become evident in the pages that follow.
426
427
428The Historical Limits of Marxism
429The idea that a man whose greatest theoretical contributions were made between 1840 and 1880 could "foresee" the entire dialectic of capitalism is, on the face of it, utterly preposterous. If we can still learn much from Marx's insights, we can learn even more from the unavoidable errors of a man who was limited by an era of material scarcity and a technology that barely involved the use of electric power. We can learn how different our own era is from that of all past history, how qualitatively new are the potentialities that confront us, how unique are the issues, analyses and praxis that stand before us if we are to make a revolution and not another historical abortion.
430
431The problem is not that Marxism is a "method" which must be reapplied to "new situations" or that "neo-Marxism" has to be developed to overcome the limitations of "classical Marxism." The attempt to rescue the Marxian pedigree by emphasizing the method over the system or by adding "neo" to a sacred word is sheer mystification if all the practical conclusions of the system flatly contradict these efforts.[3*] Yet this is precisely the state of affairs in Marxian exegesis today. Marxists lean on the fact that the system provides a brilliant interpretation of the past while willfully ignoring its utterly misleading features in dealing with the present and future. They cite the coherence that historical materialism and the class analysis give to the interpretation of history, the economic insights of Capital provides into the development of industrial capitalism, and the brilliance of Marx's analysis of earlier revolutions and the tactical conclusions he established, without once recognizing that qualitatively new problems have arisen which never existed in his day. Is it conceivable that historical problems and methods of class analysis based entirely on unavoidable scarcity can be transplanted into a new era of potential abundance? Is it conceivable that an economic analysis focused primarily on a "freely competitive" system of industrial capitalism can be transferred to a managed system of capitalism, where state and monopolies combine to manipulate economic life? Is it conceivable that a strategic and tactical repertory formulated in a period when coal and steel constituted the basis of industrial technology can be transferred to an age based on radically new sources of energy, on electronics, on cybernation?
432
433As a result of this transfer, a theoretical corpus which was liberating a century ago is turned into a straitjacket today. We are asked to focus on the working class as the "agent" of revolutionary change at a time when capitalism visibly antagonizes and produces revolutionaries among virtually all strata of society, particularly the young. We are asked to guide our tactical methods by the vision of a "chronic economic crisis" despite the fact that no such crisis has been in the offing for thirty years.[4*] We are asked to accept a "proletarian dictatorship"—a long "transitional period" whose function is not merely the suppression of counter-revolutionaries but above all the development of a technology of abundance—at a time when a technology of abundance is at hand. We are asked to orient our "strategies" and "tactics" around poverty and material immiseration at a time when revolutionary sentiment is being generated by the banality of life under conditions of material abundance. We are asked to establish political parties, centralized organizations, "revolutionary" hierarchies and elites, and a new state at a time when political institutions as such are decaying and when centralization, elitism and the state are being brought into question on a scale that has never occurred before in the history of hierarchical society.
434
435We are asked, in short, to return to the past, to diminish instead of grow, to force the throbbing reality of our times, with its hopes and promises, into the deadening preconceptions of an outlived age. We are asked to operate with principles that have been transcended not only theoretically but by the very development of society itself. History has not stood still since Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky died, nor has it followed the simplistic direction which was charted out by thinkers—however brilliant—whose minds were still rooted in the nineteenth century or in the opening years of the twentieth. We have seen capitalism itself perform many of the tasks (including the development of a technology of abundance) which were regarded as socialist; we have seen it "nationalize" property, merging the economy with the state wherever necessary. We have seen the working class neutralized as the "agent of revolutionary change," albeit still struggling within a bourgeois framework for more wages, shorter hours and "fringe" benefits. The class struggle in the classical sense has not disappeared; it has suffered a more deadening fate by being co-opted into capitalism. The revolutionary struggle within the advanced capitalist countries has shifted to a historically new terrain: it has become a struggle between a generation of youth that has known no chronic economic crisis and the culture, values and institutions of an older, conservative generation whose perspective on life has been shaped by scarcity, guilt, renunciation, the work ethic and the pursuit of material security. Our enemies are not only the visibly entrenched bourgeoisie and the state apparatus but also an outlook which finds its support among liberals, social democrats, the minions of a corrupt mass media, the "revolutionary" parties of the past, and, painful as it may be to the acolytes of Marxism, the worker dominated by the factory hierarchy, by the industrial routine, and by the work ethic. The point is that the divisions now cut across virtually all the traditional class lines and they raise a spectrum of problems that none of the Marxists, leaning on analogies with scarcity societies, could foresee.
436
437
438The Myth of the Proletariat
439Let us cast aside all the ideological debris of the past and cut to the theoretical roots of the problem. For our age, Marx's greatest contribution to revolutionary thought is his dialectic of social development. Marx laid bare the great movement from primitive communism through private property to communism in its higher form—a communal society resting on a liberatory technology. In this movement, according to Marx, man passes on from the domination of man by nature, to the domination of man by man, and finally to the domination of nature by man[5*] and from social domination as such. Within this larger dialectic, Marx examines the dialectic of capitalism itself—a social system which constitutes the last historical "stage" in the domination of man by man. Here, Marx makes not only profound contributions to contemporary revolutionary thought (particularly in his brilliant analysis of the commodity relationship) but also exhibits those limitations of time and place that play so confining a role in our own time.
440
441The most serious of these limitations emerges from Marx's attempt to explain the transition from capitalism to socialism, from a class society to a classless society. It is vitally important to emphasize that this explanation was reasoned out almost entirely by analogy with the transition of feudalism to capitalism—that is, from one class society to another class society, from one system of property to another. Accordingly, Marx points out that just as the bourgeoisie developed within feudalism as a result of the split between town and country (more precisely, between crafts and agriculture), so the modern proletariat developed within capitalism as a result of the advance of industrial technology. Both classes, we are told, develop social interests of their own—indeed, revolutionary social interests that throw them against the old society in which they were spawned. If the bourgeoisie gained control over economic life long before it overthrew feudal society, the proletariat, in turn, gains its own revolutionary power by the fact that it is "disciplined, united, organized" by the factory system.[6*] In both cases, the development of the productive forces becomes incompatible with the traditional system of social relations. "The integument is burst asunder." The old society is replaced by the new. The critical question we face is this: can we explain the transition from a class society to a classless society by means of the same dialectic that accounts for the transition of one class society to another? This is not a textbook problem that involves the juggling of logical abstractions but a very real and concrete issue for our time. There are profound differences between the development of the bourgeoisie under feudalism and the development of the proletariat under capitalism which Marx either failed to anticipate or never faced clearly. The bourgeoisie controlled economic life long before it took state power; it had become the dominant class materially, culturally and ideologically before it asserted its dominance politically. The proletariat does not control economic life. Despite its indispensable role in the industrial process, the industrial working class is not even a majority of the population, and its strategic economic position is being eroded by cybernation and other technological advances.[7*] Hence it requires an act of high consciousness for the proletariat to use its power to achieve a social revolution. Until now, the achievement of this consciousness has been blocked by the fact that the factory milieu is one of the most well-entrenched arenas of the work ethic, of hierarchical systems of management, of obedience to leaders, and in recent times of production committed to superfluous commodities and armaments. The factory serves not only to "discipline," "unite," and "organize" the workers, but also to do so in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion. In the factory, capitalistic production not only renews the social relations of capitalism with each working day, as Marx observed, it also renews the psyche, values and ideology of capitalism.
442
443Marx sensed this fact sufficiently to look for reasons more compelling than the mere fact of exploitation or conflicts over wages and hours to propel the proletariat into revolutionary action. In his general theory of capitalist accumulation he tried to delineate the harsh, objective laws that force the proletariat to assume a revolutionary role. Accordingly he developed his famous theory of immiseration: competition between capitalists compels them to undercut each others' prices, which in turn leads to a continual reduction of wages and the absolute impoverishment of the workers. The proletariat is compelled to revolt because with the process of competition and the centralization of capital there "grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation."[8*]
444
445But capitalism has not stood still since Marx's day. Writing in the middle years of the nineteenth century, Marx could not be expected to grasp the full consequences of his insights into the centralization of capital and the development of technology. He could not be expected to foresee that capitalism would develop not only from mercantilism into the dominant industrial form of his day—from state-aided trading monopolies into highly competitive industrial units—but further, that with the centralization of capital, capitalism returns to its mercantilist origins on a higher level of development and reassumes the state-aided monopolistic form. The economy tends to merge with the state and capitalism begins to "plan" its development instead of leaving it exclusively to the interplay of competition and market forces. To be sure, the system does not abolish the traditional class struggle, but manages to contain it, using its immense technological resources to assimilate the most strategic sections of the working class.
446
447Thus the full thrust of the immiseration theory is blunted and in the United States the traditional class struggle fails to develop into the class war. It remains entirely within bourgeois dimensions. Marxism, in fact, becomes ideology. It is assimilated by the most advanced forms of the state capitalist movement—notably Russia. By an incredible irony of history, Marxian "socialism" turns out to be in large part the very state capitalism that Marx failed to anticipate in the dialectic of capitalism.[9*] The proletariat, instead of developing into a revolutionary class within the womb of capitalism, turns out to be an organ within the body of bourgeois society.
448
449The question we must ask at this late date in history is whether a social revolution that seeks to achieve a classless society can emerge from a conflict between traditional classes in a class society, or whether such a social revolution can only emerge from the decomposition of the traditional classes, indeed from the emergence of an entirely new "class" whose very essence is that it is a non-class, a growing stratum of revolutionaries. In trying to answer this question, we can learn more by returning to the broader dialectic which Marx developed for human society as a whole than from the model he borrowed from the passage of feudal into capitalist society. Just as primitive kinship clans began to differentiate into classes, so in our own day there is a tendency for classes to decompose into entirely new subcultures which bear a resemblance to non-capitalist forms of relationships. These are not strictly economic groups any more; in fact, they reflect the tendency of the social development to transcend the economic categories of scarcity society. They constitute, in effect, a crude, ambiguous cultural preformation of the movement of scarcity into post-scarcity society.
450
451The process of class decomposition must be understood in all its dimensions. The word "process" must be emphasized here: the traditional classes do not disappear, nor for that matter does the class struggle. Only a social revolution could remove the prevailing class structure and the conflicts it engenders. The point is the traditional class struggle ceases to have revolutionary implications; it reveals itself as the physiology of the prevailing society, not as the labor pains of birth. In fact the traditional class struggle stabilizes capitalist society by "correcting" its abuses (in wages, hours, inflation, employment, etc.). The unions in capitalist society constitute themselves into a counter-"monopoly" to the industrial monopolies and are incorporated into the neo-mercantile statified economy as an estate. Within this estate there are lesser or greater conflicts, but taken as a whole the unions strengthen the system and serve to perpetuate it.
452
453To reinforce this class structure by babbling about the "role of the working class," to reinforce the traditional class struggle by imputing a "revolutionary" content to it, to infect the new revolutionary movement of our time with "workerists" is reactionary to the core. How often do the Marxian doctrinaires have to be reminded that the history of the class struggle is the history of a disease, of the wounds opened by the famous "social question," of man's one-sided development in trying to gain control over nature by dominating his fellow man? If the byproduct of this disease has been technological advance, the main products have been repression, a horrible shedding of human blood, and a terrifying distortion of the human psyche.
454
455As the disease approaches its end, as the wounds begin to heal in their deepest recesses, the process now unfolds toward wholeness; the revolutionary implications of the traditional class struggle lose their meaning as theoretical constructs and as social reality. The process of decomposition embraces not only the traditional class structure but also the patriarchal family, authoritarian modes of upbringing, the influence of religion, the institutions of the state, and the mores built around toil, renunciation, guilt and repressed sexuality. The process of disintegration, in short, now becomes generalized and cuts across virtually all the traditional classes, values and institutions. It creates entirely new issues, modes of struggle and forms of organization and calls for an entirely new approach to theory and praxis.
456
457What does this mean concretely? Let us contrast two approaches, the Marxian and the revolutionary. The Marxian doctrinaire would have us approach the worker—or better, "enter" the factory—and proselytize him in "preference" to anyone else. The purpose?—to make the worker "class conscious." To cite the most neanderthal examples from the old left, one cuts one's hair, grooms oneself in conventional sports clothing, abandons pot for cigarettes and beer, dances conventionally, affects "rough" mannerisms, and develops a humorless, deadpan and pompous mien.[10*]
458
459One becomes, in short, what the worker is at his most caricaturized worst: not a "petty bourgeois degenerate," to be sure, but a bourgeois degenerate. One becomes an imitation of the worker insofar as the worker is an imitation of his masters. Beneath this metamorphosis of the student into the "worker" lies a vicious cynicism. One tries to use the discipline inculcated by the factory milieu to discipline the worker to the party milieu. One tries to use the worker's respect for the industrial hierarchy to wed the worker to the party hierarchy. This disgusting process, which if successful could lead only to the substitution of one hierarchy for another, is achieved by pretending to be concerned with the worker's economic day-to-day demands. Even Marxian theory is degraded to accord with this debased image of the worker. (See almost any copy of Challenge - the National Enquirer of the left. Nothing bores the worker more than this kind of literature.) In the end, the worker is shrewd enough to know that he will get better results in the day-to-day class struggle through his union bureaucracy than through a Marxian party bureaucracy. The forties revealed this so dramatically that within a year or two, with hardly any protest from the rank-and-file, unions succeeded in kicking out by the thousands "Marxians" who had done spade-work in the labor movement for more than a decade, even rising to the top leadership of the old CIO internationals.
460
461The worker becomes a revolutionary not by becoming more of a worker but by undoing his "workerness." And in this he is not alone; the same applies to the farmer, the student, the clerk, the soldier, the bureaucrat, the professional—and the Marxist. The worker is no less a "bourgeois" than the farmer, student, clerk, soldier, bureaucrat, professional—and Marxist. His "workerness" is the disease he is suffering from, the social affliction telescoped to individual dimensions. Lenin understood this in What Is to Be Done? but he smuggled in the old hierarchy under a red flag and some revolutionary verbiage. The worker begins to become a revolutionary when he undoes his "workerness," when he comes to detest his class status here and now, when he begins to shed exactly those features which the Marxists most prize in him—his work ethic, his character-structure derived from industrial discipline, his respect for hierarchy, his obedience to leaders, his consumerism, his vestiges of puritanism. In this sense, the worker becomes a revolutionary to the degree that he sheds his class status and achieves an un-class consciousness. He degenerates—and he degenerates magnificently. What he is shedding are precisely those class shackles that bind him to all systems of domination. He abandons those class interests that enslave him to consumerism, suburbia, and a bookkeeping conception of life.[11*]
462
463The most promising development in the factories today is the emergence of young workers who smoke pot, fuck off on their jobs, drift into and out of factories, grow long or longish hair, demand more leisure time rather than more pay, steal, harass all authority figures, go on wildcats, and turn on their fellow workers. Even more promising is the emergence of this human type in trade schools and high schools, the reservoir of the industrial working class to come. To the degree that workers, vocational students and high school students link their lifestyles to various aspects of the anarchic youth culture, to that degree will the proletariat be transformed from a force for the conservation of the established order into a force for revolution.
464
465A qualitatively new situation emerges when man is faced with a transformation from a repressive class society, based on material scarcity, into a liberatory classless society, based on material abundance. From the decomposing traditional class structure a new human type is created in ever-increasing numbers: the revolutionary. This revolutionary begins to challenge not only the economic and political premises of hierarchical society, but hierarchy as such. He not only raises the need for social revolution but also tries to live in a revolutionary manner to the degree that this is possible in the existing society.[12*] He not only attacks the forms created by the legacy of domination, but also improvises new forms of liberation which take their poetry from the future.
466
467This preparation for the future, this experimentation with liberatory post-scarcity forms of social relations, may be illusory if the future involves a substitution of one class society by another; it is indispensable, however, if the future involves a classless society built on the ruins of a class society. What, then, will be the "agent" of revolutionary change? It will be literally the great majority of society, drawn from all the different traditional classes and fused into a common revolutionary force by the decomposition of the institutions, social forms, values and lifestyles of the prevailing class structure. Typically, its most advanced elements are the youth—a generation that has known no chronic economic crisis and that is becoming less and less oriented toward the myth of material security so widespread among the generation of the thirties.
468
469If it is true that a social revolution cannot be achieved without the active or passive support of the workers, it is no less true that it cannot be achieved without the active or passive support of the farmers, technicians and professionals. Above all, a social revolution cannot be achieved without the support of the youth, from which the ruling class recruits its armed forces. If the ruling class retains its armed might, the revolution is lost no matter how many workers rally to its support. This has been vividly demonstrated not only by Spain in the thirties but by Hungary in the fifties and Czechoslovakia in the sixties. The revolution of today—by its very nature, indeed, by its pursuit of wholeness—wins not only the soldier and the worker, but the very generation from which soldiers, workers, technicians, farmers, scientists, professionals and even bureaucrats have been recruited. Discarding the tactical handbooks of the past, the revolution of the future follows the path of least resistance, eating its way into the most susceptible areas of the population irrespective of their "class position." It is nourished by all the contradictions in bourgeois society, not simply by the contradictions of the 1860s and 1917. Hence it attracts all those who feel the burdens of exploitation, poverty, racism, imperialism and, yes, those whose lives are frustrated by consumerism, suburbia, the mass media, the family, school, the supermarket and the prevailing system of repressed sexuality. Here the form of the revolution becomes as total as its content-classless, propertyless, hierarchyless, and wholly liberating. To barge into this revolutionary development with the worn recipes of Marxism, to babble about a "class line" and the "role of the working class," amounts to a subversion of the present and the future by the past. To elaborate this deadening ideology by babbling about "cadres," a "vanguard party," "democratic centralism" and the "proletarian dictatorship" is sheer counterrevolution. It is to this matter of the "organizational question"—this vital contribution of Leninism to Marxism—that we must now direct some attention.
470
471
472The Myth of the Party
473Social revolutions are not made by parties, groups or cadres, they occur as a result of deep-seated historic forces and contradictions that activate large sections of the population. They occur not merely because the "masses" find the existing society intolerable (as Trotsky argued) but also because of the tension between the actual and the possible, between what-is and what-could-be. Abject misery alone does not produce revolutions; more often than not, it produces an aimless demoralization, or worse, a private, personalized struggle to survive.
474
475The Russian Revolution of 1917 weighs on the brain of the living like a nightmare because it was largely the product of "intolerable conditions," of a devastating imperialistic war. Whatever dreams it had were virtually destroyed by an even bloodier civil war, by famine, and by treachery. What emerged from the revolution were the ruins not of an old society but of whatever hopes existed to achieve a new one. The Russian Revolution failed miserably; it replaced czarism by state capitalism.[13*] The Bolsheviks were the tragic victims of their own ideology and paid with their lives in great numbers during the purges of the thirties. To attempt to acquire any unique wisdom from this scarcity revolution is ridiculous. What we can learn from the revolutions of the past is what all revolutions have in common and their profound limitations compared with the enormous possibilities that are now open to us. The most striking feature of the past revolutions is that they began spontaneously. Whether one chooses to examine the opening phases of the French Revolution of 1789, the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, the 1905 revolution in Russia, the overthrow of the czar in 1917, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, or the French general strike of 1968, the opening stages are generally the same: a period of ferment explodes spontaneously into a mass upsurge. Whether the upsurge is successful or not depends on its resoluteness and on whether the troops go over to the people.
476
477The "glorious party," when there is one, almost invariably lags behind the events. In February 1917 the Petrograd organization of the Bolsheviks opposed the calling of strikes precisely on the eve of the revolution which was destined to overthrow the czar. Fortunately, the workers ignored the Bolshevik "directives" and went on strike anyway. In the events which followed, no one was more surprised by the revolution than the "revolutionary" parties, including the Bolsheviks. As the Bolshevik leader Kayurov recalled:
478
479"Absolutely no guiding initiatives from the party were felt...the Petrograd committee had been arrested and the representative from the Central Committee, Comrade Shliapnikov, was unable to give any directives for the coming day."[3]
480
481Perhaps this was fortunate. Before the Petrograd committee was arrested, its evaluation of the situation and its own role had been so dismal that, had the workers followed its guidance, it is doubtful that the revolution would have occurred when it did.
482
483The same kind of story could be told of the upsurges which preceded 1917 and those which followed—to cite only the most recent, the student uprising and general strike in France during May-June 1968. There is a convenient tendency to forget that close to a dozen "tightly centralized" Bolshevik-type organizations existed in Paris at this time. It is rarely mentioned that virtually every one of these "vanguard" groups disdained the student uprising up to May 7, when the street fighting broke out in earnest. The Trotskyist Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire was a notable exception—and it merely coasted along, essentially following the initiatives of the March 22nd Movement.[14*] Up to May 7 all the Maoist groups criticized the student uprising as peripheral and unimportant; the Trotskyist Fédération des Étudiants Révolutionnaires regarded it as "adventuristic" and tried to get the students to leave the barricades on May 10; the Communist Party, of course, played a completely treacherous role. Far from leading the popular movement, the Maoists and Trotskyists were its captives throughout. Ironically, most of these Bolshevik groups used manipulative techniques shamelessly in the Sorbonne student assembly in an effort to "control" it, introducing a disruptive atmosphere that demoralized the entire body. Finally, to complete the irony, all of these Bolshevik groups were to babble about the need for "centralized leadership" when the popular movement collapsed—a movement that occurred despite their "directives" and often in opposition to them.
484
485Revolutions and uprisings worthy of any note not only have an initial phase that is magnificently anarchic but also tend spontaneously to create their own forms of revolutionary self-management. The Parisian sections of 1793-94 were the most remarkable forms of self-management to be created by any of the social revolutions in history.[15*] More familiar in form were the councils or "soviets" which the Petrograd workers established in 1905. Although less democratic than the sections, the councils were to reappear in a number of later revolutions. Still another form of revolutionary self-management were the factory committees which the anarchists established in the Spanish Revolution of 1936. Finally, the sections reappeared as student assemblies and action committees in the May-June uprising and general strike in Paris in 1968.[16*]
486
487At this point we must ask what role the "revolutionary" party plays in all these developments. In the beginning, as we have seen, it tends to have an inhibitory function, not a "vanguard" role. Where it exercises influence, it tends to slow down the flow of events, not "coordinate" the revolutionary forces. This is not accidental. The party is structured along hierarchical lines that reflect the very society it professes to oppose. Despite its theoretical pretensions, it is a bourgeois organism, a miniature state, with an apparatus and a cadre whose function it is to seize power, not dissolve power. Rooted in the prerevolutionary period, it assimilates all the forms, techniques and mentality of bureaucracy. Its membership is schooled in obedience and in the preconceptions of a rigid dogma and is taught to revere the leadership. The party's leadership, in turn, is schooled in habits born of command, authority, manipulation and egomania. This situation is worsened when the party participates in parliamentary elections. In election campaigns, the vanguard party models itself completely on existing bourgeois forms and even acquires the paraphernalia of the electoral party. The situation assumes truly critical proportions when the party acquires large presses, costly headquarters and a large inventory of centrally controlled periodicals, and develops a paid "apparatus"—in short, a bureaucracy with vested material interests.
488
489As the party expands, the distance between the leadership and the ranks invariably increases. Its leaders not only become "personages," they lose contact with the living situation below. The local groups, which know their own immediate situation better than any remote leader, are obliged to subordinate their insights to directives from above. The leadership, lacking any direct knowledge of local problems, responds sluggishly and prudently. Although it stakes out a claim to the "larger view," to greater "theoretical competence," the competence of the leadership tends to diminish as one ascends the hierarchy of command. The more one approaches the level where the real decisions are made, the more conservative is the nature of the decision-making process, the more bureaucratic and extraneous are the factors which come into play, the more considerations of prestige and retrenchment supplant creativity, imagination, and a disinterested dedication to revolutionary goals.
490
491The party becomes less efficient from a revolutionary point of view the more it seeks efficiency by means of hierarchy, cadres and centralization. Although everyone marches in step, the orders are usually wrong, especially when events begin to move rapidly and take unexpected turns—as they do in all revolutions. The party is efficient in only one respect—in molding society in its own hierarchical image if the revolution is successful. It recreates bureaucracy, centralization and the state. It fosters the bureaucracy, centralization and the state. It fosters the very social conditions which justify this kind of society. Hence, instead of "withering away," the state controlled by the "glorious party" preserves the very conditions which "necessitate" the existence of a state—and a party to "guard" it.
492
493On the other hand, this kind of party is extremely vulnerable in periods of repression. The bourgeoisie has only to grab its leadership to destroy virtually the entire movement. With its leaders in prison or in hiding, the party becomes paralyzed; the obedient membership has no one to obey and tends to flounder. Demoralization sets in rapidly. The party decomposes not only because of the repressive atmosphere but also because of its poverty of inner resources.
494
495The foregoing account is not a series of hypothetical inferences, it is a composite sketch of all the mass Marxian parties of the past century—the Social Democrats, the Communists, and the Trotskyist party of Ceylon (the only mass party of its kind). To claim that these parties failed to take their Marxian principles seriously merely conceals another question: why did this failure happen in the first place? The fact is, these parties were co-opted into bourgeois society because they were structured along bourgeois lines. The germ of treachery existed in them from birth.
496
497The Bolshevik Party was spared this fate between 1904 and 1917 for only one reason: it was an illegal organization during most of the years leading up to the revolution. The party was continually being shattered and reconstituted, with the result that until it took power it never really hardened into a fully centralized, bureaucratic, hierarchical machine. Moreover, it was riddled by factions; the intensely factional atmosphere persisted throughout 1917 into the civil war. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik leadership was ordinarily extremely conservative, a trait that Lenin had to fight throughout 1917—first in his efforts to reorient the Central Committee against the provisional government (the famous conflict over the "April Theses"), later in driving the Central Committee toward insurrection in October. In both cases he threatened to resign from the Central Committee and bring his views to "the lower ranks of the party."
498
499In 1918, factional disputes over the issue of the Brest-Litovsk treaty became so serious that the Bolsheviks nearly split into two warring communist parties. Oppositional Bolshevik groups like the Democratic Centralists and the Workers' Opposition waged bitter struggles within the party throughout 1919 and 1920, not to speak of oppositional movements that developed within the Red Army over Trotsky's propensity for centralization. The complete centralization of the Bolshevik Party—the achievement of "Leninist unity," as it was to be called later—did not occur until 1921, when Lenin succeeded in persuading the Tenth Party Congress to ban factions. By this time, most of the White Guards had been crushed and the foreign interventionists had withdrawn their troops from Russia.
500
501It cannot be stressed too strongly that the Bolsheviks tended to centralize their party to the degree that they became isolated from the working class. This relationship has rarely been investigated in latter-day Leninist circles, although Lenin was honest enough to admit it. The story of the Russian Revolution is not merely the story of the Bolshevik Party and its supporters. Beneath the veneer of official events described by Soviet historians there was another, more basic, development—the spontaneous movement of the workers and revolutionary peasants, which later clashed sharply with the bureaucratic policies of the Bolsheviks. With the overthrow of the czar in February 1917, workers in virtually all the factories of Russia spontaneously established factory committees, staking out an increasing claim on industrial operations. In June 1917 an all-Russian conference of factory committees was held in Petrograd which called for the "organization of thorough control by labor over production and distribution." The demands of this conference are rarely mentioned in Leninist accounts of the Russian Revolution, despite the fact that the conference aligned itself with the Bolsheviks. Trotsky, who describes the factory committees as "the most direct and indubitable representation of the proletariat in the whole country," deals with them peripherally in his massive three-volume history of the revolution. Yet so important were these spontaneous organisms of self-management that Lenin, despairing of winning the Soviets in the summer of 1917, was prepared to jettison the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" for "All Power to the Factory Committees." This demand would have catapulted the Bolsheviks into a completely anarcho-syndicalist position, although it is doubtful that they would have remained there very long.
502
503With the October Revolution, all the factory committees seized control of the plants, ousting the bourgeoisie and completely taking control of industry. In accepting the concept of workers' control, Lenin's famous decree of November 14, 1917, merely acknowledged an accomplished fact; the Bolsheviks dared not oppose the workers at this early date. But they began to whittle down the power of the factory committees. In January 1918, a scant two months after "decreeing" workers' control, Lenin began to advocate that the administration of the factories be placed under trade union control. The story that the Bolsheviks "patiently" experimented with workers' control, only to find it "inefficient" and "chaotic," is a myth. Their "patience" did not last more than a few weeks. Not only did Lenin oppose direct workers' control within a matter of weeks after the decree of November 14, even union control came to an end shortly after it had been established. By the summer of 1918, almost all of Russian industry had been placed under bourgeois forms of management. As Lenin put it, the "revolution demands ... precisely in the interests of socialism that the masses unquestionably obey the single will of the leaders of the labor process."[17*] Thereafter, workers' control was denounced not only as "inefficient," "chaotic" and "impractical," but also as "petty bourgeois"!
504
505The Left Communist Osinsky bitterly attacked all of these spurious claims and warned the party: "Socialism and socialist organization must be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all; something else will be set up—state capitalism."[4] In the "interests of socialism" the Bolshevik party elbowed the proletariat out of every domain it had conquered by its own efforts and initiative. The party did not coordinate the revolution or even lead it; it dominated it. First workers' control and later union control were replaced by an elaborate hierarchy as monstrous as any structure that existed in pre-revolutionary times. As later years were to demonstrate, Osinsky's prophecy became reality.
506
507The problem of "who is to prevail"—the Bolsheviks or the Russian "masses"—was by no means limited to the factories. The issue reappeared in the countryside as well as the cities. A sweeping peasant war had buoyed up the movement of the workers. Contrary to official Leninist accounts, the agrarian upsurge was by no means limited to a redistribution of the land into private plots. In the Ukraine, peasants influenced by the anarchist militias of Nestor Makhno and guided by the communist maxim "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs," established a multitude of rural communes. Elsewhere, in the north and in Soviet Asia, several thousand of these organisms were established, partly on the initiative of the Left Social Revolutionaries and in large measure as a result of traditional collectivist impulses which stemmed from the Russian village, the mir. It matters little whether these communes were numerous or embraced large numbers of peasants; the point is that they were authentic popular organisms, the nuclei of a moral and social spirit that ranged far above the dehumanizing values of bourgeois society.
508
509The Bolsheviks frowned upon these organisms from the very beginning and eventually condemned them. To Lenin, the preferred, the more "socialist," form of agricultural enterprise was represented by the state farm—an agricultural factory in which the state owned the land and farming equipment, appointing managers who hired peasants on a wage basis. One sees in these attitudes toward workers' control and agricultural communes the essentially bourgeois spirit and mentality that permeated the Bolshevik Party—a spirit and mentality that emanated not only from its theories, but also from its corporate mode of organization. In December 1918 Lenin launched an attack against the communes on the pretext that peasants were being "forced" to enter them. Actually, little if any coercion was used to organize these communistic forms of self-management. As Robert G. Wesson, who studied the Soviet communes in detail, concludes: "Those who went into communes must have done so largely of their own volition."[5] The communes were not suppressed but their growth was discouraged until Stalin merged the entire development into the forced collectivization drives of the late twenties and early thirties.
510
511By 1920 the Bolsheviks had isolated themselves from the Russian working class and peasantry. Taken together, the elimination of workers' control, the suppression of the Makhnovtsy, the restrictive political atmosphere in the country, the inflated bureaucracy and the crushing material poverty inherited from the civil war years generated a deep hostility toward Bolshevik rule. With the end of hostilities, a movement surged up from the depths of Russian society for a "third revolution"—not to restore the past, as the Bolsheviks claimed, but to realize the very goals of freedom, economic as well as political, that had rallied the masses around the Bolshevik program of 1917. The new movement found its most conscious form in the Petrograd proletariat and among the Kronstadt sailors. It also found expression in the party: the growth of anti-centralist and anarcho-syndicalist tendencies among the Bolsheviks reached a point where a bloc of oppositional groups, oriented toward these issues, gained 124 seats at a Moscow provincial conference as against 154 for supporters of the Central Committee.
512
513On March 2, 1921, the "red sailors" of Kronstadt rose in open rebellion, raising the banner of a "Third Revolution of the Toilers." The Kronstadt program centered around demands for free elections to the Soviets, freedom of speech and press for the anarchists and the left socialist parties, free trade unions, and the liberation of all prisoners who belonged to socialist parties. The most shameless stories were fabricated by the Bolsheviks to account for this uprising, acknowledged in later years as brazen lies. The revolt was characterized as a "White Guard plot" despite the fact that the great majority of Communist Party members in Kronstadt joined the sailors—precisely as Communists—in denouncing the party leaders as betrayers of the October Revolution. As Robert Vincent Daniels observes in his study of Bolshevik oppositional movements:
514
515"Ordinary Communists were indeed so unreliable...that the government did not depend upon them either in the assault on Kronstadt itself or in keeping order in Petrograd, where Kronstadt's hopes for support chiefly rested. The main body of troops employed were Chekists and officer cadets from Red Army training schools. The final assault on Kronstadt was led by the top officialdom of the Communist Party—a large group of delegates to the Tenth Party Congress was rushed from Moscow for this purpose."[6]
516
517So weak was the regime internally that the elite had to do its own dirty work.
518
519Even more significant than the Kronstadt revolt was the strike movement that developed among the Petrograd workers, a movement that sparked the uprising of the sailors. Leninist histories do not recount this critically important development. The first strikes broke out in the Troubotchny factory on February 23, 1921. Within a matter of days the movement swept one factory after another, until by February 28 the famous Putilov works—the "crucible of the Revolution"—went on strike. Not only were economic demands raised, the workers raised distinctly political ones, anticipating all the demands that were to be raised by the Kronstadt sailors a few days later. On February 24, the Bolsheviks declared a "state of siege" in Petrograd and arrested the strike leaders, suppressing the workers' demonstrations with officer cadets. The fact is, the Bolsheviks did not merely suppress a "sailors' mutiny"; they crushed the working class itself. It was at this point that Lenin demanded the banning of factions in the Russian Communist Party. Centralization of the party was now complete—and the way was paved for Stalin.
520
521We have discussed these events in detail because they lead to a conclusion that the latest crop of Marxist-Leninists tend to avoid: the Bolshevik Party reached its maximum degree of centralization in Lenin's day not to achieve a revolution or suppress a White Guard counterrevolution, but to effect a counterrevolution of its own against the very social forces it professed to represent. Factions were prohibited and a monolithic party created not to prevent a "capitalist restoration" but to contain a mass movement of workers for soviet democracy and social freedom. The Lenin of 1921 stood opposed to the Lenin of 1917.
522
523Thereafter, Lenin simply floundered. This man who above all sought to anchor the problems of his party in social contradictions found himself literally playing an organizational "numbers game" in a last-ditch attempt to arrest the very bureaucratization he had himself created. There is nothing more pathetic and tragic than Lenin's last years. Paralyzed by a simplistic body of Marxist formulas, he can think of no better countermeasures than organizational ones. He proposes the formation of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection to correct bureaucratic deformations in the party and state—and this body falls under Stalin's control and becomes highly bureaucratic in its own right. Lenin then suggests that the size of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection be reduced and that it be merged with the Control Commission. He advocates enlarging the Central Committee. Thus it rolls along: this body to be enlarged, that one to be merged with another, still a third to be modified or abolished. The strange ballet of organizational forms continues up to his very death, as though the problem could be resolved by organizational means. As Mosche Lewin, an obvious admirer of Lenin, admits, the Bolshevik leader "approached the problems of government more like a chief executive of a strictly 'elitist' turn of mind. He did not apply methods of social analysis to the government and was content to consider it purely in terms of organizational methods."[7]
524
525If it is true that in the bourgeois revolutions the "phrase went beyond the content," in the Bolshevik revolution the forms replaced the content. The Soviets replaced the workers and their factory committees, the party replaced the Soviets, the Central Committee replaced the Party, and the Political Bureau replaced the Central Committee. In short, means replaced ends. This incredible substitution of form for content is one of the most characteristic traits of Marxism-Leninism. In France during the May-June events, all the Bolshevik organizations were prepared to destroy the Sorbonne student assembly in order to increase their influence and membership. Their principal concern was not the revolution or the authentic social forms created by the students, but the growth of their own parties.
526
527Only one force could have arrested the growth of bureaucracy in Russia: a social force. Had the Russian proletariat and peasantry succeeded in increasing the domain of self-management through the development of viable factory committees, rural communes and free Soviets, the history of the country might have taken a dramatically different turn. There can be no question that the failure of socialist revolutions in Europe after the First World War led to the isolation of the revolution in Russia. The material poverty of Russia, coupled with the pressure of the surrounding capitalist world, clearly militated against the development of a socialist or a consistently libertarian society. But by no means was it ordained that Russia had to develop along state capitalist lines; contrary to Lenin's and Trotsky's initial expectations, the revolution was defeated by internal forces, not by invasion of armies from abroad. Had the movement from below restored the initial achievements of the revolution in 1917, a multifaceted social structure might have developed, based on workers' control of industry, on a freely developing peasant economy in agriculture, and on a living interplay of ideas, programs and political movements. At the very least, Russia would not have been imprisoned in totalitarian chains and Stalinism would not have poisoned the world revolutionary movement, paving the way for fascism and the Second World War.
528
529The development of the Bolshevik Party, however, precluded this development—Lenin's or Trotsky's "good intentions" notwithstanding. By destroying the power of the factory committees in industry and by crushing the Makhnovtsy, the Petrograd workers and the Kronstadt sailors, the Bolsheviks virtually guaranteed the triumph of the Russian bureaucracy over Russian society. The centralized party—a completely bourgeois institution—became the refuge of counterrevolution in its most sinister form. This was covert counterrevolution that draped itself in the red flag and the terminology of Marx. Ultimately, what the Bolsheviks suppressed in 1921 was not an "ideology" or a "White Guard conspiracy," but an elemental struggle of the Russian people to free themselves of their shackles and take control of their own destiny.[18*] For Russia, this meant the nightmare of Stalinist dictatorship; for the generation of the thirties it meant the horror of fascism and the treachery of the Communist parties in Europe and the United States.
530
531
532The Two Traditions
533It would be incredibly naive to suppose that Leninism was the product of a single man. The disease lies much deeper, not only in the limitations of Marxian theory but in the limitations of the social era that produced Marxism. If this is not clearly understood, we will remain as blind to the dialectic of events today as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky were in their own day. For us this blindness will be all the more reprehensible because behind us lies a wealth of experience that these men lacked in developing their theories.
534
535Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were centralists—not only politically, but socially and economically. They never denied this fact and their writings are studded with glowing encomiums to political, organizational and economic centralization. As early as March 1850, in the famous "Address of the Central Council to the Communist League," they call upon the workers to strive not only for "the single and indivisible German republic, but also strive in it for the most decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state authority." Lest the demand be taken lightly, it is repeated continually in the same paragraph, which concludes: "As in France in 1793, so today in Germany the carrying through of the strictest centralization is the task of the really revolutionary party."
536
537The same theme reappears continually in later years. With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, for example, Marx writes to Engels:
538
539"The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralization of state power will be useful for the centralization of the German working class."[8]
540
541Marx and Engels, however, were not centralists because they believed in the virtues of centralism per se. Quite the contrary: both Marxism and anarchism have always agreed that a liberated, communist society entails sweeping decentralization, the dissolution of bureaucracy, the abolition of the state, and the breakup of the large cities." Abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible," notes Engels in Anti-Dühring. "It has become a direct necessity...the present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put to an end only by the fusion of town and country. ..." To Engels this involves a "uniform distribution of the population over the whole country"[9]—in short, the physical decentralization of the cities.
542
543The origins of Marxian centralism are in problems arising from the formation of the national state. Until well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, Germany and Italy were divided into a multitude of independent duchies, principalities and kingdoms. The consolidation of these geographic units into unified nations, Marx and Engels believed, was a sine qua non for the development of modern industry and capitalism. Their praise of centralism was engendered not by any centralistic mystique but by the events of the period in which they lived—the development of technology, trade, a unified working class, and the national state. Their concern on this score, in short, is with the emergence of capitalism, with the tasks of the bourgeois revolution in an era of unavoidable material scarcity. Marx's approach to a "proletarian revolution," on the other hand, is markedly different. He enthusiastically praises the Paris Commune as a "model to all the industrial centers of France." "This regime," he writes, "once established in Paris and the secondary centers, the old centralized government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers." (Emphasis added.) The unity of the nation, to be sure, would not disappear, and a central government would exist during the transition to communism, but its functions would be limited.
544
545Our object is not to bandy about quotations from Marx and Engels but to emphasize how key tenets of Marxism—which are accepted so uncritically today—were in fact the product of an era that has long been transcended by the development of capitalism in the United States and Western Europe. In his day Marx was occupied not only with the problems of the "proletarian revolution" but also with the problems of the bourgeois revolution, particularly in Germany, Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe. He dealt with the problems of transition from capitalism to socialism in capitalist countries which had not advanced much beyond the coal-steel technology of the Industrial Revolution, and with the problems of transition from feudalism to capitalism in countries which had scarcely advanced much beyond handicrafts and the guild system. To state these concerns broadly, Marx was occupied above all with the preconditions of freedom (technological development, national unification, material abundance) rather than with the conditions of freedom (decentralization, the formation of communities, the human scale, direct democracy). His theories were still anchored in the realm of survival, not the realm of life.
546
547Once this is grasped it is possible to place Marx's theoretical legacy in meaningful perspective—to separate its rich contributions from its historically limited, indeed paralyzing, shackles on our own time. The Marxian dialectic, the many seminal insights provided by historical materialism, the superb critique of the commodity relationship, many elements of the economic theories, the theory of alienation, and above all the notion that freedom has material preconditions—these are lasting contributions to revolutionary thought.
548
549By the same token, Marx's emphasis on the industrial proletariat as the "agent" of revolutionary change, his "class analysis" in explaining the transition from a class to a classless society, his concept of the proletarian dictatorship, his emphasis on centralism, his theory of capitalist development (which tends to jumble state capitalism with socialism), his advocacy of political action through electoral parties—these and many related concepts are false in the context of our time and were misleading, as we shall see, even in his own day. They emerge from the limitations of his vision—more properly, from the limitations of his time. They make sense only if one remembers that Marx regarded capitalism as historically progressive, as an indispensable stage to the development of socialism, and they have practical applicability only to a time when Germany in particular was confronted by bourgeois-democratic tasks and national unification. (We are not trying to say that Marx was correct in holding this approach, merely that the approach makes sense when viewed in its time and place.) Just as the Russian Revolution included a subterranean movement of the "masses" which conflicted with Bolshevism, so there is a subterranean movement in history which conflicts with all systems of authority. This movement has entered into our time under the name of "anarchism," although it has never been encompassed by a single ideology or body of sacred texts. Anarchism is a libidinal movement of humanity against coercion in any form, reaching back in time to the very emergence of propertied society, class rule and the state. From this period onward, the oppressed have resisted all forms that seek to imprison the spontaneous development of social order. Anarchism has surged to the foreground of the social arena in periods of major transition from one historical era to another. The decline of the ancient and feudal world witnessed the upsurge of mass movements, in some cases wildly Dionysian in character, that demanded an end to all systems of authority, privilege and coercion.
550
551The anarchic movements of the past failed largely because material scarcity, a function of the low level of technology, vitiated an organic harmonization of human interests. Any society that could promise little more materially than equality of poverty invariably engendered deep-seated tendencies to restore a new system of privilege. In the absence of a technology that could appreciably reduce the working day, the need to work vitiated social institutions based on self-management. The Girondins of the French Revolution shrewdly recognized that they could use the working day against revolutionary Paris. To exclude radical elements from the sections, they tried to enact legislation which would end all assembly meetings before 10 p.m., the hour when Parisian workers returned from their jobs. Indeed, it was not only the manipulative techniques and the treachery of the "vanguard" organizations that brought the anarchic phases of past revolutions to an end, it was also the material limits of past eras. The "masses" were always compelled to return to a lifetime of toil and rarely were they free to establish organs of self-management that could last beyond the revolution.
552
553Anarchists such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, however, were by no means wrong in criticizing Marx for his emphasis on centralism and his elitist notions of organization. Was centralism absolutely necessary for technological advances in the past? Was the nation-state indispensable to the expansion of commerce? Did the workers' movement benefit by the emergence of highly centralized economic enterprises and the "indivisible" state? We tend to accept these tenets of Marxism too uncritically, largely because capitalism developed within a centralized political arena. The anarchists of the last century warned that Marx's centralistic approach, insofar as it affected the events of the time, would so strengthen the bourgeoisie and the state apparatus that the overthrow of capitalism would be extremely difficult. The revolutionary party, by duplicating these centralistic, hierarchical features, would reproduce hierarchy and centralism in the post-revolutionary society.
554
555Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta were not so naive as to believe that anarchism could be established overnight. In imputing this notion to Bakunin, Marx and Engels willfully distorted the Russian anarchist's views. Nor did the anarchists of the last century believe that the abolition of the state involved "laying down arms" immediately after the revolution, to use Marx's obscurantist choice of terms, thoughtlessly repeated by Lenin in State and Revolution. Indeed, much that passes for "Marxism" in State and Revolution is pure anarchism—for example, the substitution of revolutionary militias for professional armed bodies and the substitution of organs of self-management for parliamentary bodies. What is authentically Marxist in Lenin's pamphlet is the demand for "strict centralism," the acceptance of a "new" bureaucracy, and the identification of soviets with a state.
556
557The anarchists of the last century were deeply preoccupied with the question of achieving industrialization without crushing the revolutionary spirit of the "masses" and rearing new obstacles to emancipation. They feared that centralization would reinforce the ability of the bourgeoisie to resist the revolution and instill in the workers a sense of obedience. They tried to rescue all those pre-capitalist communal forms (such as the Russian mir and the Spanish pueblo) which might provide a springboard to a free society, not only in a structural sense but also a spiritual one. Hence they emphasized the need for decentralization even under capitalism. In contrast to the Marxian parties, their organizations gave considerable attention to what they called "integral education"—the development of the whole man—to counteract the debasing and banalizing influence of bourgeois society. The anarchists tried to live by the values of the future to the extent that this was possible under capitalism. They believed in direct action to foster the initiative of the "masses," to preserve the spirit of revolt, to encourage spontaneity. They tried to develop organizations based on mutual aid and brotherhood, in which control would be exercised from below upward, not downward from above.
558
559We must pause here to examine the nature of anarchist organizational forms in some detail, if only because the subject has been obscured by an appalling amount of rubbish. Anarchists, or at least anarcho-communists, accept the need for organization.[19*] It should be as absurd to have to repeat this point as to argue over whether Marx accepted the need for social revolution.
560
561The real question at issue here is not organization versus non-organization, but rather what kind of organization the anarcho-communists try to establish. What the different kinds of anarcho-communist organizations have in common is organic developments from below, not bodies engineered into existence from above. They are social movements, combining a creative revolutionary lifestyle with a creative revolutionary theory, not political parties whose mode of life is indistinguishable from the surrounding bourgeois environment and whose ideology is reduced to rigid "tried and tested programs." As much as is humanly possible, they try to reflect the liberated society they seek to achieve, not slavishly duplicate the prevailing system of hierarchy, class and authority. They are built around intimate groups of brothers and sisters—affinity groups—whose ability to act in common is based on initiative, on convictions freely arrived at, and on a deep personal involvement, not around a bureaucratic apparatus fleshed out by a docile membership and manipulated from above by a handful of all-knowing leaders.
562
563The anarcho-communists do not deny the need for coordination between groups, for discipline, for meticulous planning, and for unity in action. But they believe that coordination, discipline, planning, and unity in action must be achieved voluntarily, by means of a self-discipline nourished by conviction and understanding, not by coercion and a mindless, unquestioning obedience to orders from above. They seek to achieve the effectiveness imputed to centralism by means of voluntarism and insight, not by establishing a hierarchical, centralized structure. Depending upon needs or circumstances, affinity groups can achieve this effectiveness through assemblies, action committees, and local, regional or national conferences. But they vigorously oppose the establishment of an organizational structure that becomes an end in itself, of committees that linger on after their practical tasks have been completed, of a "leadership" that reduces the "revolutionary" to a mindless robot.
564
565These conclusions are not the result of flighty "individualist" impulses; quite to the contrary, they emerge from an exacting study of past revolutions, of the impact centralized parties have had on the revolutionary process, and of the nature of social change in an era of potential material abundance. Anarcho-communists seek to preserve and extend the anarchic phase that opens all the great social revolutions. Even more than Marxists, they recognize that revolutions are produced by deep historical processes. No central committee "makes" a social revolution; at best it can stage a coup d'état, replacing one hierarchy by another—or worse, arrest a revolutionary process if it exercises any widespread influence. A central committee is an organ for acquiring power, for recreating power, for gathering to itself what the "masses" have achieved by their own revolutionary efforts. One must be blind to all that has happened over the past two centuries not to recognize these essential facts.
566
567In the past, Marxists could make an intelligible (although invalid) claim for the need for a centralized party, because the anarchic phase of the revolution was nullified by material scarcity. Economically, the "masses" were always compelled to return to a daily life of toil. The revolution closed at ten o'clock, quite aside from the reactionary intentions of the Girondins of 1793; it was arrested by the low level of technology. Today even this excuse has been removed by the development of a post-scarcity technology, notably in the U.S. and Western Europe. A point has now been reached where the "masses" can begin, almost overnight, to expand drastically the "realm of freedom" in the Marxian sense—to acquire the leisure time needed to achieve the highest degree of self-management.
568
569What the May-June events in France demonstrated was not the need for a Bolshevik-type party but the need for greater consciousness among the "masses." Paris demonstrated that an organization is needed to propagate ideas systematically—and not ideas alone, but ideas which promote the concept of self-management. What the French "masses" lacked was not a central committee or a Lenin to "organize" or "command" them, but the conviction that they could have operated the factories instead of merely occupying them. It is noteworthy that not a single Bolshevik-type party in France raised the demand of self-management. The demand was raised only by the anarchists and the Situationists.
570
571There is a need for a revolutionary organization—but its function must always be kept clearly in mind. Its first task is propaganda, to "patiently explain," as Lenin put it. In a revolutionary situation, the revolutionary organization presents the most advanced demands: it is prepared at every turn of events to formulate—in the most concrete fashion—the immediate task that should be performed to advance the revolutionary process. It provides the boldest elements in action and in the decision-making organs of the revolution.
572
573In what way, then, do anarcho-communist groups differ from the Bolshevik type of party? Certainly not on such issues as the need for organization, planning, coordination, propaganda in all its forms or the need for a social program. Fundamentally, they differ from the Bolshevik type of party in their belief that genuine revolutionaries must function within the framework of the forms created by the revolution, not within the forms created by the party. What this means is that their commitment is to the revolutionary organs of self-management, not to the revolutionary "organization"; to the social forms, not the political forms. Anarcho-communists seek to persuade the factory committees, assemblies or Soviets to make themselves into genuine organs of popular self-management, not to dominate them, manipulate them, or hitch them to an all-knowing political party. Anarcho-communists do not seek to rear a state structure over these popular revolutionary organs but, on the contrary, to dissolve all the organizational forms developed in the prerevolutionary period (including their own) into these genuine revolutionary organs.
574
575These differences are decisive. Despite their rhetoric and slogans, the Russian Bolsheviks never believed in the soviets; they regarded them as instruments of the Bolshevik Party, an attitude which the French Trotskyists faithfully duplicated in their relations with the Sorbonne students' assembly, the French Maoists with the French labor unions, and the Old Left groups with SDS. By 1921, the Soviets were virtually dead, and all decisions were made by the Bolshevik Central Committee and Political Bureau. Not only do anarcho-communists seek to prevent Marxist parties from repeating this; they also wish to prevent their own organization from playing a similar role. Accordingly, they try to prevent bureaucracy, hierarchy and elites from emerging in their midst. No less important, they attempt to remake themselves; to root out from their own personalities those authoritarian traits and elitist propensities that are assimilated in hierarchical society almost from birth. The concern of the anarchist movement with lifestyle is not merely a preoccupation with its own integrity, but with the integrity of the revolution itself.[20*]
576
577In the midst of all the confusing ideological crosscurrents of our time, one question must always remain in the foreground: what the hell are we trying to make a revolution for? Are we trying to make a revolution to recreate hierarchy, dangling a shadowy dream of future freedom before the eyes of humanity? Is it to promote further technological advance, to create an even greater abundance of goods than exists today? It is to "get even" with the bourgeoisie? Is it to bring PL to power? Or the Communist Party? Or the Socialist Workers Party? Is it to emancipate abstractions such as "The Proletariat," "The People," "History," "Society"?
578
579Or is it finally to dissolve hierarchy, class rule and coercion—to make it possible for each individual to gain control of his everyday life? Is it to make each moment as marvelous as it could be and the life span of each individual an utterly fulfilling experience? If the true purpose of revolution is to bring the neanderthal men of PL to power, it is not worth making. We need hardly argue the inane questions of whether individual development can be severed from social and communal development; obviously the two go together. The basis for a whole human being is a rounded society; the basis for a free human being is a free society.
580
581These issues aside, we are still faced with the question that Marx raised in 1850: when will we begin to take our poetry from the future instead of the past? The dead must be permitted to bury the dead. Marxism is dead because it was rooted in an era of material scarcity, limited in its possibilities by material want. The most important social message of Marxism is that freedom has material preconditions—we must survive in order to live. With the development of a technology that could not have been conceived by the wildest science fiction of Marx's day, the possibility of a post-scarcity society now lies before us. All the institutions of propertied society—class rule, hierarchy, the patriarchal family, bureaucracy, the city, the state—have been exhausted. Today, decentralization is not only desirable as a means of restoring the human scale, it is necessary to recreate a viable ecology, to preserve life on this planet from destructive pollutants and soil erosion, to preserve a breathable atmosphere and the balance of nature. The promotion of spontaneity is necessary if the social revolution is to place each individual in control of his everyday life.
582
583The old forms of struggle do not totally disappear with the decomposition of class society, but they are being transcended by the issues of a classless society. There can be no social revolution without winning the workers, hence they must have our active solidarity in every struggle they wage against exploitation. We fight against social crimes wherever they appear—and industrial exploitation is a profound social crime. But so are racism, the denial of the right to self-determination, imperialism and poverty profound social crimes—and for that matter so are pollution, rampant urbanization, the malignant socialization of the young, and sexual repression. As for the problem of winning the working class to the revolution, we must bear in mind that a precondition for the existence of the bourgeoisie is the development of the proletariat. Capitalism as a social system presupposes the existence of both classes and is perpetuated by the development of both classes. We begin to undermine the premises of class rule to the degree that we foster the declassifying of the non-bourgeois classes, at least institutionally, psychologically and culturally.
584
585For the first time in history, the anarchic phase that opened all the great revolutions of the past can be preserved as a permanent condition by the advanced technology of our time. The anarchic institutions of that phase—the assemblies, the factory committees, the action committees—can be stabilized as the elements of a liberated society, as the elements of a new system of self-management. Will we build a movement that can defend them? Can we create an organization of affinity groups that is capable of dissolving into these revolutionary institutions? Or will we build a hierarchical, centralized, bureaucratic party that will try to dominate them, supplant them, and finally destroy them?
586
587Listen, Marxist: The organization we try to build is the kind of society our revolution will create. Either we will shed the past—in ourselves as well as in our groups—or there will simply be no future to win.
588
589New York May 1969
590
591
592[Appendix]
593A Note on Affinity Groups
594The term "affinity group" is the English translation of the Spanish grupo de afinidad, which was the name of an organizational form devised in pre-Franco days as the basis of the redoubtable Federación Anarquista Ibérica, the Iberian Anarchist Federation. (The FAI consisted of the most idealistic militants in the CNT, the immense anarcho-syndicalist labor union.) A slavish imitation of the FAI's forms of organization and methods would be neither possible nor desirable. The Spanish anarchists of the thirties were faced with entirely different social problems from those which confront American anarchists today. The affinity group form, however, has features that apply to any social situation, and these have often been intuitively adopted by American radicals, who call the resulting organizations "collectives," communes" or "families."
595
596The affinity group could easily be regarded as a new type of extended family, in which kinship ties are replaced by deeply empathetic human relationships—relationships nourished by common revolutionary ideas and practice. Long before the word "tribe" gained popularity in the American counterculture, the Spanish anarchists called their congresses asambleas de las tribus—assemblies of the tribes. Each affinity group is deliberately kept small to allow for the greatest degree of intimacy between those who compose it. Autonomous, communal and directly democratic, the group combines revolutionary theory with revolutionary lifestyle in its everyday behavior. It creates a free space in which revolutionaries can remake themselves individually, and also as social beings.
597
598Affinity groups are intended to function as catalysts within the popular movement, not as "vanguards"; they provide initiative and consciousness, not a "general staff" and a source of "command." The groups proliferate on a molecular level and they have their own "Brownian movement." Whether they link together or separate is determined by living situations, not by bureaucratic fiat from a distant center. Under conditions of political repression, affinity groups are highly resistant to police infiltration. Owing to the intimacy of the relationships between the participants, the groups are often difficult to penetrate and, even if penetration occurs, there is no centralized apparatus to provide the infiltrator with an overview of the movement as a whole. Even under such demanding conditions, affinity groups can still retain contact with each other through their periodicals and literature.
599
600During periods of heightened activity, on the other hand, nothing prevents affinity groups from working together closely on any scale required by a living situation. They can easily federate by means of local, regional or national assemblies to formulate common policies and they can create temporary action committees (like those of the French students and workers in 1968) to coordinate specific tasks. Affinity groups, however, are always rooted in the popular movement. Their loyalties belong to the social forms created by the revolutionary people, not to an impersonal bureaucracy. As a result of their autonomy and localism, the groups can retain a sensitive appreciation of new possibilities. Intensely experimental and variegated in lifestyles, they act as a stimulus on each other as well as on the popular movement. Each group tries to acquire the resources needed to function largely on its own. Each group seeks a rounded body of knowledge and experience in order to overcome the social and psychological limitations imposed by bourgeois society on individual development. Each group, as a nucleus of consciousness and experience, tries to advance the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the people to a point where the group can finally disappear into the organic social forms created by the revolution.
601
602
603Further reading:
604A Discussion on "Listen, Marxist!"
605
606
607Remarks:
608[1] Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 318.
609
610[2] V. I. Lenin, The Threatening Catastrophe and How to Fight It, The Little Lenin Library, vol. 11 (International Publishers; New York, 1932), p. 37.
611
612[3] Quoted in Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (Simon & Schuster; New York, 1932), vol. 1, p. 144.
613
614[4] V. V. Osinsky, "On the Building of Socialism," Kommunist, no. 2, April 1918, quoted in R. V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution (Harvard University Press; Cambridge, 1960), pp. 85-86.
615
616[5] Robert G. Wesson, Soviet Communes (Rutgers University Press; New Brunswick, N.J., 1963), p. 110.
617
618[6] R. V. Daniels, op. cit., p. 145.
619
620[7] Mosche Lewin, Lenin's Last Struggle (Pantheon; New York, 1968), p. 122.
621
622[8] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (International Publishers; New York, 1942), p. 292.
623
624[9] Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring) (International Publishers; New York, 1939) p. 323.
625
626
627Footnotes:
628[1*] These lines were written when the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) exercised a great deal of influence in SDS. Although the PLP has now lost most of its influence in the student movement, the organization still provides a good example of the mentality and values prevalent in the Old Left. The above characterization is equally valid for most Marxist-Leninist groups, hence this passage and other references to the PLP have not been substantially altered.
629
630[2*] The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, part of the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
631
632[3*] Marxism is above all a theory of praxis, or to place this relationship in its correct perspective, a praxis of theory. This is the very meaning of Marx's transformation of dialectics, which took it from the subjective dimension (to which the Young Hegelians still tried to confine Hegel's outlook) into the objective, from philosophical critique into social action. If theory and praxis become divorced, Marxism is not killed, it commits suicide. This is its most admirable and noble feature. The attempts of the cretins who follow in Marx's wake to keep the system alive with a patchwork of emendations, exegesis, and half-assed "scholarship" a la Maurice Dobb and George Novack are degrading insults to Marx's name and a disgusting pollution of everything he stood for.
633
634[4*] In fact Marxists do very little talking about the "chronic [economic] crisis of capitalism" these days—despite the fact that this concept forms the focal point of Marx's economic theories.
635
636[5*] For ecological reasons, we do not accept the notion of the "domination of nature by man" in the simplistic sense that was passed on by Marx a century ago. For a discussion of this problem, see "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought."
637
638[6*] It is ironic that Marxists who talk about the "economic power" of the proletariat are actually echoing the position of the anarcho-syndicalists, a position that Marx bitterly opposed. Marx was not concerned with the "economic power" of the proletariat but with its political power; notably the fact that it would become the majority of the population. He was convinced that the industrial workers would be driven to revolution primarily by material destitution which would follow from the tendency of capitalist accumulation; that, organized by the factory system and disciplined by industrial routine, they would be able to constitute trade unions and, above all, political parties, which in some countries would be obliged to use insurrectionary methods and in others (England, the United States, and in later years Engels added France) might well come to power in elections and legislate socialism into existence. Characteristically, many Marxists have been as dishonest with their Marx and Engels as the Progressive Labor Party has been with the readers of Challenge, leaving important observations untranslated or grossly distorting Marx's meaning.
639
640[7*] This is as good a place as any to dispose of the notion that anyone is a "proletarian" who has nothing to sell but his labor power. It is true that Marx defined the proletariat in these terms, but he also worked out a historical dialectic in the development of the proletariat. The proletariat developed out of a propertyless exploited class, reaching its most advanced form in the industrial proletariat, which corresponded to the most advanced form of capital. In the later years of his life, Marx came to despise the Parisian workers, who were engaged preponderantly in the production of luxury goods, citing "our German workers"—the most robot-like in Europe—as the "model" proletariat of the world.
641
642[8*] The attempt to describe Marx's immiseration theory in international terms instead of national (as Marx did) is sheer subterfuge. In the first place, this theoretical legerdemain simply tries to sidestep the question of why immiseration has not occurred within the industrial strongholds of capitalism, the only areas which form a technologically adequate point of departure for a classless society. If we are to pin our hopes on the colonial world as "the proletariat," this position conceals a very real danger: genocide. America and her recent ally Russia have all the technical means to bomb the underdeveloped world into submission. A threat lurks on the historical horizon—the development of the United States into a truly fascist imperium of the nazi type. It is sheer rubbish to say that this country is a "paper tiger." It is a thermonuclear tiger and the American ruling class, lacking any cultural restraints, is capable of being even more vicious than the German.
643
644[9*] Lenin sensed this and described "socialism" as "nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people. "[2] This is an extraordinary statement if one thinks out its implications, and a mouthful of contradictions.
645
646[10*] On this score, the Old Left projects its own neanderthal image on the American worker. Actually this image more closely approximates the character of the union bureaucrat or the Stalinist commissar.
647
648[11*] The worker, in this sense, begins to approximate the socially transitional human types who have provided history with its most revolutionary elements. Generally, the "proletariat" has been most revolutionary in transitional periods, when it was least "proletarianized" psychically by the industrial system. The great focuses of the classical workers' revolutions were Petrograd and Barcelona, where the workers had been directly uprooted from a peasant background, and Paris, where they were still anchored in crafts or came directly from a craft background. These workers had the greatest difficulty in acclimating themselves to industrial domination and became a continual source of social and revolutionary unrest. By contrast, the stable hereditary working class tended to be surprisingly non-revolutionary. Even in the case of the German workers who were cited by Marx and Engels as models for the European proletariat, the majority did not support the Spartacists in 1919. They returned large majorities of official Social Democrats to the Congress of Workers' Councils, and to the Reichstag in later years, and rallied consistently behind the Social Democratic Party right up to 1933.
649
650[12*] This revolutionary lifestyle may develop in the factories as well as on the streets, in schools as well as in crash-pads, in the suburbs as well as on the Bay Area-East Side axis. Its essence is defiance, and a personal "propaganda of the deed" that erodes all the mores, institutions and shibboleths of domination. As society begins to approach the threshold of the revolutionary period, the factories, schools and neighborhoods become the actual arena of revolutionary "play"—a "play" that has a very serious core. Strikes become a chronic condition and are called for their own sake to break the veneer of routine, to defy the society on an almost hourly basis, to shatter the mood of bourgeois normality. This new mood of the workers, students and neighborhood people is a vital precursor to the actual moment of revolutionary transformation. Its most conscious expression is the demand for "self-management"; the worker refuses to be a "managed" being, a class being. This process was most evident in Spain, on the eve of the 1936 revolution, when workers in almost every city and town called strikes "for the hell of it"—to express their independence, their sense of awakening, their break with the social order and with bourgeois conditions of life. It was also an essential feature of the 1968 general strike in France.
651
652[13*] A fact which Trotsky never understood. He never followed through the consequences of his own concept of "combined development" to its logical conclusions. He saw (quite correctly) that czarist Russia, the latecomer in the European bourgeois development, necessarily acquired the most advanced industrial and class forms instead of recapitulating the entire bourgeois development from its beginnings. He neglected to consider that Russia, torn by tremendous internal upheaval, might even run ahead of the capitalist development elsewhere in Europe. Hypnotized by the formula "nationalized property equals socialism," he failed to recognize that monopoly capitalism itself tends to amalgamate with the state by its own inner dialectic. The Bolsheviks, having cleared away the traditional forms of bourgeois social organization (which still act as a rein on the state capitalist development in Europe and America), inadvertently prepared the ground for a "pure" state capitalist development in which the state finally becomes the ruling class. Lacking support from a technologically advanced Europe, the Russian Revolution became an internal counterrevolution; Soviet Russia became a form of state capitalism that does not "benefit the whole people." Lenin's analogy between "socialism" and state capitalism became a terrifying reality under Stalin. Despite its humanistic core, Marxism failed to comprehend how much its concept of "socialism" approximates a later stage of capitalism itself—the return to mercantile forms on a higher industrial level. The failure to understand this development led to devastating theoretical confusion in the contemporary revolutionary movement, as witness the splits among the Trotskyists over this question.
653
654[14*] The March 22nd Movement functioned as a catalytic agent in the events, not as a leadership. It did not command; it instigated, leaving a free play to the events. This free play, which allowed the students to push ahead on their own momentum, was indispensable to the dialectic of the uprising, for without it there would have been no barricades on May 10, which in turn triggered off the general strike of the workers.
655
656[15*] See "The Forms of Freedom" [New York, January 1968].
657
658[16*] With a sublime arrogance that is attributable partly to ignorance, a number of Marxist groups were to dub virtually all of the above forms of self-management as "Soviets." The attempt to bring all of these different forms under a single rubric is not only misleading but willfully obscurantist. The actual Soviets were the least democratic of the revolutionary forms and the Bolsheviks shrewdly used them to transfer the power to their own party. The Soviets were not based on face-to-face democracy, like the Parisian sections or the student assemblies of 1968. Nor were they based on economic self-management, like the Spanish anarchist factory committees. The Soviets actually formed a workers' parliament, hierarchically organized, which drew its representation from factories and later from military units and peasant villages.
659
660[17*] V. I. Lenin, "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government," in Selected Works, vol. 7 (International Publishers; New York, 1943), p. 342. In this harsh article, published in April 1918, Lenin completely abandoned the libertarian perspective he had advanced the year before in State and Revolution. The main themes of the article are the needs for "discipline," for authoritarian control over the factories, and for the institution of the Taylor system (a system Lenin had denounced before the revolution as enslaving men to the machine). The article was written during a comparatively peaceful period of Bolshevik rule some two months after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and a month before the revolt of the Czech Legion in the Urals—the revolt that started the civil war on a wide scale and opened the period of direct Allied intervention in Russia. Finally, the article was written nearly a year before the defeat of the German revolution. It would be difficult to account for the "Immediate Tasks" merely in terms of the Russian civil war and the failure of the European revolution.
661
662[18*] In interpreting this elemental movement of the Russian workers and peasants as a series of "White Guard conspiracies," "acts of kulak resistance," and "plots of international capital," the Bolsheviks reached an incredible theoretical low and deceived no one but themselves. A spiritual erosion developed within the party that paved the way for the politics of the secret police, for character assassination, and finally for the Moscow trials and the annihilation of the Old Bolshevik cadre. One sees the return of this odious mentality in PL articles like "Marcuse: Cop-out or Cop?"—the theme of which is to establish Marcuse as an agent of the CIA. (See Progressive Labor, February 1969.) The article has a caption under a photograph of demonstrating Parisians which reads: "Marcuse got to Paris too late to stop the May action." Opponents of the PLP are invariably described by this rag as "redbaiters" and as "anti-worker." If the American left does not repudiate this police approach and character assassination it will pay bitterly in the years to come.
663
664[19*] The term "anarchist" is a generic word like the term "socialist," and there are probably as many different kinds of anarchists as there are socialists. In both cases, the spectrum ranges from individuals whose views derive from an extension of liberalism (the "individualist anarchists," the social-democrats) to revolutionary communists (the anarcho-communists, the revolutionary Marxists, Leninists and Trotskyists).
665
666[20*] It is this goal, we may add, that motivates anarchist dadaism, the anarchist flipout that produces the creases of consternation on the wooden faces of PLP types. The anarchist flipout attempts to shatter the internal values inherited from hierarchical society, to explode the rigidities instilled by the bourgeois socialization process. In short, it is an attempt to break down the superego that exercises such a paralyzing effect upon spontaneity, imagination and sensibility and to restore a sense of desire, possibility and the marvelous—of revolution as a liberating, joyous festival.
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