Mike MacNair suggests that I take an "ideological" date for the start of the civil war. Instead of May 1918, he prefers December 1917. Yet either date confirms my argument, namely that Leninist's should come clean and admit that workers' democracy and revolution do not go together. He lets the cat out of the bag when he talks about the Bolsheviks holding "the reins of power" -- I thought in a "workers' state" the workers were meant to hold power? And no matter the date picked, the fact is that the Bolsheviks gerrymandered and disbanded soviets in the spring of 1918. What does Mike have to say about that? Nothing. Worse, sounding like a Leftist Kissinger he argues that the Russia workers should not be allowed to vote Menshevik or SR. So much for workers' democracy.
He states it would be "unlikely" that the anarchists could "defend themselves against the White terror," ignoring the fact that the Makhnovists did just that. Then he smears the Makhnovists, comparing them to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge ("as the architects of a policy of destruction of the cities"). What nonsense. The Makhnovists were not anti-city. For example, when the Makhnovists liberated towns the first thing there did was to encourage the workers' to organise their own class organisations (free soviets and unions). In contrast, the Bolsheviks banned such bodies and imposed "Revolutionary Committees."
Moving on, Joe Wills yet again distorts the anarchist position on trade unions. He talks of "red" unions and that this "has historically proven to be self-isolating, sectarian disaster." Yet I made no comments on building "red" unions. He states that "Marxists seek not to reject reformist unions, but transform them into organs of revolution." Yet this has historically failed. If he wants to repeat history rather than learn from it, that is his business but please do not inflict assumptions onto us anarchists! He then contrasts "an organised, democratic workers' party to guide the struggle" to "autonomous 'direct action' by unelected cliques and individuals." Really, another straw man argument! Direct action means any form of immediate struggle by workers, such as the strike or occupation. Is he really arguing that rank and file trade unionists are an "unelected clique" who should not make their own decisions (i.e. be autonomous)?
Wills comments on Bakunin and Kropotkin are just puerile and an attempt to hide weak arguments rather than address the issue (i.e., he attacks the failings of individual anarchists rather than anarchism). He then tries to raise a serious point by mentioning "the anarchists who led the botched 1872-73 uprising in Spain that was crushed . . . due to the rebels' lack of centralised coordination." I had addressed this issue in my original letter which was chopped in half ("But this seems ironic, as he uses an example of lack of federation to refute federalism"). Suffice to say he confuses centralism with co-ordination, a common Marxist failing. It seems he cannot tell the difference between bottom-up and top-down decision making. Wills states that "the anarchists, in seeming violation of their own ideology, did not rely on the direct administration of the people, but set up ruling juntas in all the regions they took." There is no contradiction as "junta" is Spanish for "council." As long as the workers' council is made up of elected, mandated and recallable delegates then the people do govern themselves.
Wills then turns to the Makhnovists, noting that they were not "exempt from using authoritarian means." No one said that a revolution was easy and so we would expect the difficult circumstances of civil war to result in some arbitrary decisions. Yet the differences between the Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks are clear. While Makhno sometimes violated libertarian principles in the heat of war, the Bolsheviks turned the "dictatorship of the party" into a key ideological principle. While the Makhnovists tried their best to encourage soviet democracy and freedom of speech, the Bolsheviks crushed both. Which shows the failure of Bolshevism cannot be put down to purely objective factors like the civil war, the politics of Marxism played their part. Wills summarises that "anarchism has never succeeded in surviving for any length of time in an 'intact' anarchist form" yet compared to Marxism, the anarchist record of "betrayal of principle" is far less than for "power-hungry reds." The empirical record is clear, so why do "scientific" socialists seem so keen to ignore it?
Wills argues that Lenin thought that "civil war following the revolution is by no means inevitable." Yet Lenin stated in late 1917 that "not a single great revolution . . . has escaped civil war." The so-called "workers' state" was meant to defend the revolution, was it not? Yet it was this very state which destroyed workers' democracy in Russia. Feel free to blame the civil war on this, if you like, but logic is against you. If Marxism cannot handle the inevitable without "degenerating" then it should be avoided.
Finally, he states that "the central contradiction of anarchism" is that "the working class can achieve anything, but they cannot exercise democratic control and accountability over their leaders." Firstly, why should the working class delegate its power to a handful of "leaders" (i.e. the Bolshevik central committee)? Can we not make our own decisions? Secondly, in Russia the workers did try to "exercise democratic control and accountability over their leaders." Their "leaders" simply disbanded the soviets, and subsequent worker protest, by force. This was to be expected, as the state centralises power into the hands of the few and disempowers the many. That is why anarchists are anti-state.
Wills asserts that "anarchism's absolute hostility to any form of state is misplaced and a barrier to achieving revolution." Yet this hostility has been proven to be valid, every state has been an instrument of minority class rule over the masses. The Marxist state was no exception -- as anarchists had correctly predicted!
Yours,
Iain McKay