Cover: via https://autonomies.org/2019/12/the-lost-images-of-anarchist-barcelona/
Ben Debney || Apparently back in the day there was a comradely dialogue between Errico Maltesta, the Italian platformist anarchist, and Pierre Monatte, the French syndicalist anarchist. I haven’t read it personally, I should.
I guess one of the reasons I didn’t was being too busy reading histories of the Spanish Revolution.* For me the issue was settled by the historical record of the CNT-FAI. The CNT was the labour confederation based on anarchist principles, and the FAI was the political grouping for the apocryphal true believers. They didn’t actually work at cross-purposes; it wasn’t a case of either-or.
Quite the contrary: despite being based on differing organisational strategies, these two arms of the arm of the class struggle were able to cooperate, because they were both loyal to the principle that ‘the emancipation of the working class will be carried out by the workers themselves. What was and is really remarkable and unique about this, to my reading, was the implicit appreciation and awareness of multiple strategies and purposes–and multiple modes of organising to that end. Platformism and syndicalism worked in a symbiotic unity.
The FAI was organised as what in electoral terms would be considered a rather large and influential political party, and yet it was by all reports quite a complex network of geographic federations of “affinity groups” or small cells where close relationships could guard against infiltration. If memory serves, the FAI was set up as an internal defense against Trotskyist entryism; most if not all members of the FAI were also members of the CNT.
The CNT was organised on the basis of industrial unions, controlled by the base by votes at mass meetings, and confederated into councils at the local level, and regional and national levels across Spain (read Murray Bookchin’s The Spanish Anarchists for by far the best take). The differing approach of syndicalism** here was the practical education of class struggle: the art of listening and hearing grievance, the art of building trust for them to be expresperased, having a plan to channel them constructively.
In Revolutionary Syndicalism in France, Jeremy Jennings describes the theoretical contributions of trailblazers like Fernand Pelloutier and Emile Pouget.*** Their concept of the emerging revolutionary class struggle was predicated on using the workers’ unions, not just as the spontaneous combinations of “holy shit we had better stick together if this raging entitled psycho isn’t going to bulldoze the lot of us chasing the gold dragon,” but as “practical schools of socialism.”
The Pelloutiers and Pougets of French syndicalism envisaged class struggle as more than simply power struggles over reconfiguring the rate and conditions of exploitation. For the French syndicalists, the struggle to defend rights and advance interests was also a form of “revolutionary gymnastics” that would build the self-confidence, self-awareness, self-efficacy and self-belief of workers as individuals, and united as a class in solidarity.
The problem here, which they did spend some time fretting over, was tendencies towards recouperation; if socialist politicians didn’t try to capture the unions and turn them to vassals of a political sect, the bosses would try to wedge the public against the unions and workers against one another. Respectable unionists would purge extremists from the fringes of the left in the name of sensible, pragmatic dialogue further towards the political centre.
Neither Pelloutier or Pouget really satisfactorily answered this question. Indeed, Pouget’s superb The Party of Labour makes a point of recouperating the middle-class habit of recouperating opposition to characterise revolutionary syndicalism in electoral terms. What’s not to love about a nice “electoralists can get bent” using other vocabulary. If we think about it though, the Spanish anarchists figured it out using the CNT as the forum for the ‘revolutionary gymnastics,’ and the FAI as the forum for reflecting on them, if not meditating on how to proceed further. They could obviously take these reflections back into the class struggle as part of the “practical school of socialism.”
The organisational nous of the CNT-FAI has yet to be topped. They just needed to not lose the war; they were set up to fail. Stephen Roberts said: “I contend that we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do”; so too is everyone on the planet bar none a perfect anarchist when it comes to everyone else’s system of government. Maybe the lesson of the Spanish Revolution is the way national cliques all stab each other in the back except when they’re ganging up on anarchists.
In the face of this, the syndicalists of the CNT and the platformists of the FAI developed their respective strategies to great success (again maybe a bit more in terms of the abolition of constraint and the commodity-form than tackling the recouperation and the reaction). At the core was a notable cultural tolerance of ambiguity, in accepting that others might favour alternate strategies to effecting the abolition of constraint through the self-activity of a politically autonomous working class that were not actually working at cross-purposes.
This is a world part from the vulgar leftism of individual solutions to collective problems. The platformist-syndicalist symbiosis of the CNT FAI stands as a paradigm example of not fucking up, not just for the 57 varieties of leninism, or for the hollowed-out shell of an enlightenment liberalism embodying everything it claims to oppose. For sincere fighters for the class struggle struggling in the first instance to escape their recouperative embrace, it offers a constructive way forward, and a perfect example of what anarchists can achieve when we trust our own judgment and work together.
*I read The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain when I was 20, that’s how much of a raging nerd I am. Books are a lot more forgiving than being around the respectable middle class, have you noticed? The histories of the collectives, Gaston Leval and José Peirats and the like, were mind-blowing. The abolition of constraint and economic democracy in action and working a treat. Inexplicably somehow the respectable middle class didn’t want me for a sunbeam. I will forever be condemneds to the shadows for want of answers. They still don’t *shrugs*
** The english “syndicalism” translates as anarcosindicalismo in spanish, and vice versa. There’s some linguistic disjuncture; spanish uses “syndicate,” english uses “union.” Spanish needs another adjective to distinguish itself from business union bystanders like the UGT; english doesn’t. Using “anarcho-syndicalism” in english creates WAY more problems than it solves. It’s also stupid because anarchism spread like wildfire amongst the impoverished peasants of late 19th century Spain. It doesn’t vibe like it did now that we’re all safe and snug and blissfully cocooned away in a nice meaningful addiction to dopamine.
*** Their writings are really worth chasing up and reading: at one point, I had the Kate Sharpley Library translate Sabotage so I could print it as a pamphlet; I couldn’t even believe they did that. Anarchists are fucking amazing, the KSL have been showing everyone how it’s done longtime. Sabotage should be up on the Anarchist Library, or Libcom, or both heh
Discover more from Class Autonomy
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
