Introduction

Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard

Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!

Otto Von Bismarck

This book is about two currents of ideas, anarchism and Marxism. It examines their complex interrelationship and mutual borrowings in history, theory and practice and it probes the limits and possibilities of co-operation by looking at the institutional and social contexts in which both heretical and orthodox expressions of these movements have operated. In presenting this collection, we have not attempted to fix the ideological content of either of these two currents but to show instead how this content has itself been shaped by a process of engagement, theoretical debate and political activity. To begin with definitions is to restart the long and wearisome tradition of demarcating difference and establishing doctrinal purity. This tradition has dominated in the past and its historical significance can hardly be underestimated, and we discuss it by way of introduction in order to contextualise the aims of the collection. But its practical effect has been to establish exclusive boundaries and to encourage a view that a politics of black and red is impossible, impractical or dangerous. The essays in this book suggest that such a politics might well be problematic, but that it nevertheless provides a welcome counter to sectarianism.

To turn, then, to the context: the history of European revolutionary socialism is usually told as a story of factionalism and dispute, and the politics of black and red – black being the colour of anarchism, and red of communism – is usually understood as dysfunctional and oppositional. The antagonism at the core of the relationship is often traced back to 1871 when the collapse of the First International appeared to mark the neat division of socialism into Bakuninist and Marxist currents. Suggestions that the significant marker was earlier, in the 1840s, when Proudhon refused collaboration with Marx, tend to reinforce the importance of this later split: 1871 cemented the formation of an ideological divide that Marx and Proudhon's mutual suspicion presaged. Criticisms of Max Stirner, voiced since the 1890s – sometime after Marx and Engels sketched their critique of 'Saint Max' in The German Ideology – similarly bolstered the view that the political disputes that divided Marxists and anarchists were grounded in very different, perhaps irreconcilable, philosophical traditions, always latent in the socialist movement.

A second influential story of the relationship is the account promoted by Lenin and it consists of the view that the differences between Marxists and anarchists have been overstated: both groups of socialists are committed to the realisation of a common end, they disagree only about the means of transformation. In the 1970s this case was advanced by the historian Eric Hobsbawm. The rejection of anarchism, he argued, had a number of dimensions, but its leading idea was that '[t]here is no difference between the ultimate objects of Marxists and anarchists, i.e. a libertarian communism in which exploitation, classes and the state will have ceased to exist'. Hobsbawm attempted to explain the apparent tension between this theoretical accord and the actual history of the revolutionary socialist movement by showing how revolutionary Marxists – Marx, Engels and Lenin – combined a rejection of anarchist thought with benevolence towards anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. The agreement on ends reflected the shared practical experience of revolution, but it was also consistent with a firm denial of anarchist means to that end, and the theory that supported those means. His explanation implied a clear separation of ideas from practice in the development of ideology. Although Hobsbawm acknowledged the imprecision of 'doctrinal, ideological and programmatic distinctions' in rank-and-file movements, contrary to contemporary treatments of ideological formation, he failed to see how the ideas of 'ideologists and political leaders', of both Marxist and anarchist varieties, were also shaped by political engagements and events – not just theory. The result was to reinforce the principle of theoretical division whilst providing a positive account of Leninism that, for anarchists, was unpersuasive.

Hobsbawm's elaboration of the apparent dovetailing of Marxist and anarchist positions points to a line of division that many anarchists have wanted to highlight – a third account of difference. This turns on the relationship between the means and ends of revolutionary struggle and the anarchist rejection of the idea that the transition from capitalism to socialism requires a period of transition in which state power is captured and used as an instrument of change, before 'withering away'. For anarchists, the adoption of such means necessarily compromises the ends of the revolution and it points to a model of socialist organisation that most have rejected. Although he passed over the theoretical grounds of the anarchist complaints, Hobsbawm pinpointed precisely the nature of the concern: Marxists not only accepted the 'withering away' thesis they also adopted a 'firm belief in the superiority of centralization to decentralization or federalism and (especially in the Leninist version), to a belief in the indispensability of leadership, organization and discipline and the inadequacy of any movement based on mere "spontaneity"'. From an apparent agreement about the ends of the revolution, Hobsbawm identified a combined package of ideas that was antithetical to anarchist thought and which, in parts and in whole, many self-identifying Marxists also rejected.

A fourth story of the relationship between Marxism and anarchism relates to the relative significance of these two currents of thought. One version of this story focuses on practical activity, the other on emergence and re-emergence, dominance and subservience. As to the first, the place of Marxism as the dominant current within socialism is sometimes assumed without qualification. Indeed, such has been the dominance of Marxism that recent histories of the Left simply conflate socialism with Marxism and ignore the anarchists completely. Others assign anarchism little more than a footnote in a wider narrative of Marxist infighting and factionalism. A second version of the poor relation thesis centres on the assessment of the relative intellectual merits of Marxist and anarchist ideas. Anarchism fares badly here, too. The blunt claim of Murray Bookchin's essay 'The Communalist Project' is that anarchism 'is simply not a social theory'.

Its foremost theorists celebrate its seeming openness to eclecticism and the liberatory effects of 'paradox' or even 'contradiction,' to use Proudhonian hyperbole. Accordingly, and without prejudice to the earnestness of many anarchistic practices, a case can made that many of the ideas of social and economic reconstruction that in the past have been advanced in the name of 'anarchy' were often drawn from Marxism.

Bookchin's evaluation is not untypical. As Graeber and Grubacic note, anarchism's most distinctive contribution to socialism is often identified with revolutionary commitment. It is the passionate, idealistic heart to Marxism's sober and realistic head. In a discussion of 'small-a anarchists' they note: 'Marxism ... has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice ... where Marxism has produced brilliant theories of praxis, it's mostly been anarchists who have been working on the praxis itself.' Although there is now talk of an 'anarchist turn' in radical political theory, it is not yet clear that anarchism's relationship to Marxism has fundamentally altered. Nor is it clear which Marxism the new Left today are turning from or which anarchism is it moving towards. The danger of 'turns' is that they reinforce existing, often caricatured, assumptions of difference and ossify identity. The reality is that the terms of debate have evolved and resist easy pigeon-holing, as the chapters in this volume testify.

The imbalance between Marxism and anarchism is also sometimes expressed through the language of emergence and re-emergence. In this discourse, anarchism is treated as a somewhat juvenile expression of intermittent protest. The year 1968 is often referred to as a moment of rebirth for anarchism and the new Left. Likewise, 1999 is a marker for the appearance of a new anarchistic 'movement of movements' and the reappearance of anarchism, now galvanised by the struggle for global justice. At the height of the Paris évènements, Daniel Cohn-Bendit identified both the continuities and the important critical interchanges that these movements actually represented. His unusual formulation of 'Leftism' was based on an understanding of socialism as a continuous theoretical dispute which gave equal weight to opposing views: 'Marx against Proudhon, Bakunin against Marx, Makhno against Bolshevism', and what Cohn-Bendit called the student workers' movement against the 'transformation and development of the Russian Revolution into a bureaucratic counter-revolution, sustained and defended by Communist Parties throughout the world'. Moreover, Cohn- Bendit's approach pointed to a process of political development based on continuous constructive critique: if Leftism was new, it borrowed from anarchism – anarchism had not re-emerged, it was merely that new groups were only just discovering it. Yet Cohn-Bendit's dialogic approach did not predominate and the sense that anarchism follows a phoenix-like existence, albeit with a shorter life-cycle, is still powerful.

The dominance of Marxism over anarchism might be explained in a number of ways. The tendency to read a utopian prehistory back into scientific socialism and to tie revolutionary socialism tightly to the rise of an urban, industrialised working-class movement has undoubtedly played a role in sealing Marxism's good reputation. The sense that anarchism was attractive to predominantly rural populations – though itself contestable – has encouraged a view that it was irrelevant to the modern world and attractive only to an uneducated and therefore theoretically unsophisticated audience. The inspiration that Marxism has provided for a range of socialist regimes and political parties also helps explain why anarchism has often been seen as Marxism's poor relation. The working assumption of Donald Sassoon's seminal study of European socialism was that the only socialist organisations to alter the trajectory of European society were the 'traditional socialist parties' (Communist and Social Democratic) which emerged from 1889. This blotted all sorts of revolutionary organisations out of socialist history, especially the anarchists, even though, as Tony Judt noted, the fringe groups that fell under Sassoon's radar nevertheless exerted a significant (albeit unwelcome in his view) influence on socialist thought. Moreover, as recent research has confirmed, other mass movements – notably the syndicalist – occupied a pivotal place in many parts of the world.

The approach to socialism that measures success in terms of a competitive struggle for power in the state naturally disadvantages anarchism, particularly since no anarchist ideology is likely to find the statist patrons that have sustained and nurtured nationalist, Marxist, religious and other ideological movements. The subordination of anarchism to Marxism in accounts of socialism also owes something to the way in which political 'success' and 'defeat' are estimated and understood. The defeat of the anarchist revolution in Spain in 1939 is sometimes interpreted as a symbol of the collapse of anarchism, both in theory and practice. For Hobsbawm it provided further proof of the ideological bankruptcy of anarchism and the 'failure' of the revolution itself, evidence of the inadequacy of anarchism as a practical goal. George Woodcock's view was not much different. In Anarchism, Woodcock argued that the 'actual anarchist movement ... stemmed from the organization and inspiration activities of Michael Bakunin in the 1860s' and that it 'ceased to have any real relevance in the modern world' after the Spanish defeat. The inability of the anarchists to stand up to Hitler, Stalin, Franco and Mussolini – practically alone – is judged as a weakness of ideology rather than of material capability. Admittedly, in the aftermath of 1968 Woodcock suggested that this had been an overly pessimistic judgement. However, its implication, which he accepted, was that anarchism was a mere tendency, a current of thought that was likely to receive only sporadic expression for it lacked institutional longevity.

Accounts of the relationship between anarchism and Marxism have helped to define and delimit the focus of critical study: anarchism is linked only to its nineteenth-century 'fathers' and Marxism tied tightly to Bolshevism, opening the way to charting Marxism's rise through the Soviet regime and its satellites and the emergence of the composite doctrine, Marxism–Leninism, at the cost of say, Trotskyism, autonomism or other currents of ultra-Left dissent. Interest in party-political success and the analysis of practical activity in the state only extends this bias. Following the logic of this approach it is easy to see why the collapse of the Berlin Wall was widely treated as the beginning of the end for European Marxism and the dawn of 'a new anarchism'. Impressions such as these are today widely contested. Notions of 'the old Left' resonate in our imagination, while those who discover the antecedents of 'the new Left' find that these antecedents are often the same groups and people that populated 'the old Left' but who were marginalised or forgotten: the dissenters and heretics, but also often the acolytes or (self-appointed) vanguard. This book ought to help give more shape to this ideological morphology, but so much more remains to be done.

This reading of history leads to a similar delimitation in anarchist historical analysis. The twin claims that anarcho-syndicalism was the most important current in the anarchist movement and that it had its origins in Bakunin and his heirs, and can only be traced back to him, is one example. An important consequence of the argument is that Proudhon's influence, which was particularly strong in France, Spain, Switzerland and Russia, long before Marx sought his collaboration and for a good period after, is bypassed. As a result, the republicanism of Pí-y-Margall, the pluralism of G.D.H. Cole and Harold Laski, Tolstoy's anarchism or the French tradition of 'personalisme' and pluralist syndicalism to give a few examples, appear anomalous in socialist traditions, and the currents of thought they developed and of which they were a part are stripped of integral aspects of their substance in efforts to force them into one or other 'tradition' of socialist thinking.

Reviewing these traditional accounts of anarchism and Marxism here helps illuminate the subterranean trends in socialist thinking that have always given the lie to that easy dichotomy and helps us understand the complexity of the lines of division. Continual reference to the 'anarchist core' of contemporary activist movements, illuminated and developed at length by David Graeber elsewhere, belies the explosion of alternative socialist groups in the post-cold war period that are neither red nor black but draw on the politics of both. Autonomists, Council Communists, open Marxists, the Zapatistas, primitivists, nowtopians and post-anarchists all share space with longer-established groups of anarchists and Marxists, Trotskyists and Leninists, sometimes within the fuzzy intellectual plurality of the Climate Camps and the horizontalism of the wider protest movements, often in specific labour struggles or revolutionary moments. The relationships between the groups that make up this contemporary kaleidoscope are by no means clear or uncontested. Few of their members are perhaps aware of, and probably more are indifferent to, the equally messy history of the movements which preceded their own. Yet the leading contention of this book is that they have something to gain from re-engaging with and reflecting on the past, on the complexity of socialist history and on the problems which previous generations of activists encountered. The drive to action and the mythological but 'tainted history' shared by anarchists and Marxists have ignited a desire for novelty and ingenuity, and a flourishing of revolutionary vitality. An understanding of the processes of ideological formation or ossification, of the ways in which ideas translate into and are transformed by practice, helps reveal the contestability of claims made about both traditions – about both the permanence of the past or the shape of the future. There is much to be gained from opening up this rich seam.